“This Is Al Capone Revisited with a Vengeance”: The Internal Revenue Service’s Narcotics Traffickers Tax Program

This article examines the Nixon administration’s short-lived Narcotics Traffickers Tax Program (NTP), a punitive experiment that applied Prohibition-era tactics—using income tax laws and financial investigations against Al Capone—to drug kingpins. The NTP combined criminal prosecution with proactive civil asset seizures via an innovative interpretation of tax “jeopardy” statutes. The program failed due to bureaucratic conflict: IRS Commissioner Donald Alexander prioritized revenue collection and impartiality over drug enforcement, clashing with aggressive use of tax statutes favored by the program’s architect, Eugene Rossides. This resistance, compounded by the NTP’s practical failure to convict anything beyond mid- and street-level dealers already known to police, led to its demise by 1975. Yet the NTP’s legacy persisted as a forerunner to the IRS’s drug enforcement role and asset forfeiture in the 1980s, illuminating the contested, improvisational nature of federal drug enforcement in a pivotal decade.