Chicago, October 1932. The only ""beer"" allowed to be served during Prohibition is ""near-beer"" or ""Near-O""-- which is 0.5% alcohol, as opposed to real beer which is 4.0% alcohol. And so, a lot of legitimate beer producers wind up ""spiking"" the barrels of near-beer with pure alcohol, to get it up to strength. A northside brewer named Woody O'Mara wants to smash all his competition; he tells his girlfriend Amy Gratzner, a rather plain-looking 23-year-old secretary for rival brewer Franz Koenig, to blow the whistle on her boss. Herr Koenig is a kindly boss who refers to Amy as ""mein liebes Kind"" (my dear child). Ness and his men drop in on Franz Koenig; he claims all his beer is de-alcoholized, as prescribed by law. But when Ness gets through a false wall, he finds a truck loaded with beer barrels. Lee Hobson sticks a hydrometer in a barrel: 4.0%. Koenig says he was shipping the beer to a plant to be de-alcoholized, but can't answer Ness when he asks: where is it? Who ru