Chicago, the 3rd week of November 1932. Working on an anonymous tip, Eliot Ness and his men raid a warehouse; all the crates are filled with champagne bottles, it was a shipment for the New Year's celebrations. Ness has the landlord who owns the warehouse, Michel (french for Michael) Viton, arrested; but he's released. Birdie, a deaf-mute, takes Viton to his boss, Edmund Wald, a bottle manufacturer (he's also the one who tipped Ness, to get rid of the competition). Edmund Wald is secretly making champagne bottles; he also has a man in Indiana making a brew of spiced cider and sugar cane that can pass for champagne. Wald can get all the bogus champagne he needs for $2 a quart-bottle, and then he wants to sell it for $10 a bottle. Wald needs Viton for a capital investment: $100,000 to buy the bogus champagne, and $100,000 to have a bottle-corking machine smuggled in from Europe. Viton says they can steal the corking machine from the Industrial Museum; and Edmund will have to go to