Didn’t Eliot Ness Teach Us Anything? : Tobacco: Prohibition didn’t work; banning cigarettes won’t either, in a nation that refuses to believe the best evidence.

John Gotti, ranking crime boss of our federal prison system, must be kicking himself.

Hard.

A lifetime guest of the government’s notorious Marion, Ill., hostelry, the former Teflon Don is about to miss out on a crime spree that will send hundreds of capos and button men scurrying for a piece of the action. So juicy will this score become, its profits are liable to make loan-sharking, drugs, gambling and all-purpose racketeering look like side bets at a nickel craps game.

We are, all of us law-abiding, tax-paying John Q. Publics, about to witness the single greatest incentive for larceny and lawbreaking since Prohibition made crooks of nannies.

With gathering speed and measured deliberation, sundry branches, departments and bureaucrats in that warren of probity known as Washington, D.C., move closer and closer to banning the manufacture and sale of cigarettes.

It will not happen tomorrow or next week. And not even next year or the year after. But it will happen.

Sometime soon, with calls for nationwide smoking bans and nicotine’s regulation as a dangerous drug, Joe Camel, the Marlboro Man and Virginia Slim will toast the good times, take their last drags and walk off into the ozone-depleted sunset.

Find a bookie and bet on it.

That is, if all our smoke-filled, illegal betting dens haven’t yet experienced a mass exodus of their resident ne’er-do-wells eager to do with tobacco what Al Capone did with gin: make millions giving the public what it wants.

And despite the efforts of the Treasury Department’s storied Untouchables, enforcing the Volstead Act--keeping beer, wine and cocktails from Jazz Age Americans--proved that thousands of cops can’t catch millions of bottles. Sound familiar?

So why wouldn’t Gotti’s heirs, as well as scores of semi-legitimate entrepreneurs, purloin every truck, barge, dinghy and skiff for easy fortunes amid tempting odds?

Need they create a market? Not while a nation of suicidal, smoke-starved adults, teens and kids resists the best evidence to the contrary.

Must they encounter difficulties with production and retailing? Not while the real cost of a pack hovers at less than a buck and millions of potential salespeople are jobless or underemployed.

Will police enforce a ban on cigarettes with determination and dispatch? Who’s kidding whom?

But this is where we’re headed, just as sure as cigarettes killed Bogie and stopped Duke Wayne. Cold.

So go ahead, Washington. Take your best shot. Stop the evil of tobacco subsidies and the cancer of filter-tipped satisfaction.

Call them drugs, controlled substances or worse.

Make our beaches, parks and boulevards smoke-free.

With God and medicine on your side, how can you miss?

Just ask Eliot Ness.