Cracking the Code

A bloody war

rages on America's streets

fought with secret code.

Capone and his outfit are

sending tens of thousands

of messages each year.

- Cracking the mob's codes is

the job of just one woman.

- If we hadn't found these code messages,

we might never have solved the case.

Her work will

help bring down Al Capone.

- She is the linchpin in this fight

against mob violence in America.

- Save countless lives.

- I am sitting here speaking to you

because she may have saved that ship.

And even stop

a Nazi invasion of America.

- Information received that Germany plans

direct attack on Panama Canal

with German planes.

Her job now is listening

out for spies.

These are the codes

that changed our world.

Bizarre markings, random letters,

and numbers, words that make no sense,

but cracking them unlocks military secrets,

decodes ancient civilizations,

and reveals enemies in our midst.

Now we uncover how they were decoded,

the genius minds that broke them,

and the secrets they revealed.

On January 17th, 1920,

after decades of campaigning

from religious and political groups.

- Alcohol is hindering the coming

of world peace because it is

befuddling the thinking of humanity.

America goes dry.

The National Prohibition Act heralds

a new era of sobriety in the U.S.

- Alcohol production across America shuts down.

Breweries, saloons, restaurants, anywhere,

and anywhere that you can

normally get a drink,

you just can't do it anymore.

- Distributing or selling alcohol is illegal,

but drinking it isn't.

- Anytime you make something illegal

that's in high demand,

criminals are gonna step in

and take control of that.

That is going to put a lot

of money in the pockets

of some very, very dangerous people.

- To quench America's thirst,

street gangs begin to organize themselves

into structured criminal mobs.

- Many of these gangs became very,

very powerful precisely because people

still wanted to drink.

- They're led by elaborately named mobsters,

Lucky Luciano, Bugs Moran, and Machine Gun Kelly.

But the most notorious mobster

of all is Al, "Scarface" Capone.

- Al Capone is going to build a criminal empire

that spans the country,

tens of thousands of speakeasies.

The profits of this enterprise are just incredible.

He's making about $100 million a year.

In modern terms, that would

be $1 billion a year.

- Like all criminal empires,

Capone's is built on the bodies of his enemies.

You don't become the mobster

of all mobsters by being a nice guy.

He's gonna have gangs of gunmen

taking out his rivals,

bonding establishments that refused

to pay their protection money

or buy his product.

They'll show up and just unleash

a hail of machine gunfire

into the guy's car in the middle

of a street in the middle of the day.

- By 1926, more than 12,000 murders are

taking place every year across America.

And the homicide rate in large cities,

soars by 78% during Prohibition.

America is at war.

And this war is being waged

with one weapon above all others,

secret code.

Capone and his outfit are

sending tens of thousands

of messages each year.

It's a level of sophisticated encryption

that has never been seen before

outside of military conflict.

- These coded messages

allow the mobsters selling liquor

to communicate with the smugglers supplying it.

- And these codes and ciphers are

changing constantly to keep

the police on their toes.

- To win the war against the mob,

law enforcement must crack the codes.

If you can break the code,

if you can figure out

how your opponent is communicating,

you have a vital piece of information

that allow you to get the upper hand.

- But from the get-go,

it's the mobsters who have the upper hand

because not only is this war

being fought with secret codes,

the frontline is far

from the reach of the police...

at sea.

The illegal liquor fueling

the bloodshed is being brought

into the U.S. by boat from Canada

and Mexico via the West Coast

and the French and British territories

and Cuba off the East Coast.

What you have is a system

where freighters will pick up

large amounts of alcohol in foreign port,

and then they'll anchor in international waters

where the Coast Guard

cannot legally seize them.

We have motherships the size

of baseball fields that can

hold 100,000 crates of liquor

worth in today's terms, $8 million.

- High speed contact boats

manned by so-called rum-runners

meet the motherships and run

the liquor back to shore.

Some of them are

even armored to protect them.

This has become just

an incredible undertaking.

America's main line

of defense against the illegal smuggling

is the U.S. Coast Guard.

But it's no match for the mobsters.

- The U.S. Coast Guard had a problem,

ill-equipped, underfunded,

and not paid very well.

Rum-runners were speedy,

were well-armed, were well-staffed,

and could outrun, outgun,

outman the Coast Guard.

It doesn't have enough ships.

It doesn't have enough men.

It just doesn't have anywhere

near the power to make a real dent

in this massive well-funded,

well organized criminal enterprise.

- But it's not just speed

and manpower that helps

this vast illegal enterprise

stay one step ahead of the law.

It's coded messages sent

via radio using Morse code.

- There's a huge amount of alcohol

coming with boats and ships.

And the only way

for them to rendezvous is

to communicate with each other.

They communicate by radio.

You have to make sure

that those messages are so scrambled

that even once you got the Morse code

and you've written down the letters,

you don't know what

this thing is supposed to be saying.

And so the gangsters are paying

for great cryptography for ciphers

and codes that no one can break.

You have to break

the codes to stop them.

- This level of sophisticated encryption is

far beyond the capabilities

of the underfunded U.S. Coast Guard.

- The Coast Guard intelligence section

was literally one guy

and he was not a codebreaker.

- The Coast Guard doesn't stand a chance.

It needs another weapon.

- Enter the woman who will take

on the might of the mob,

armed with nothing more

than pencil and paper,

mother of two, Elizebeth Friedman.

To all appearances,

as far as anyone can tell,