Prosecutions
The most common use of the Mann Act was to prosecute men for having sex with underage females. It was also used to harass others who had drawn the authorities' wrath for "immoral" behavior.
The first person prosecuted under the act was African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. He had had an interracial affair with a white prostitute named Lucille Cameron, but she refused to cooperate with the prosecution; Johnson later married her. Less than a month later, he was re-arrested for having crossed a state line, before the Mann Act was passed, with Belle Schreiber, a prostitute who had left a brothel. She testified against him, and Johnson was convicted and sentenced to the maximum penalty of a year and a day in prison.
Pioneering sociologist William I. Thomas' academic career at the University of Chicago was irreversibly damaged after he was arrested under the act when caught in the company of one Mrs. Granger, the wife of an army officer with the American forces in France. Thomas was acquitted at trial.
Canadian author Elizabeth Smart described being arrested under the Mann Act in 1940 when crossing a state border with her lover, the British poet George Barker. In her book By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, she memorably intertwined the callous police interrogation under this law with quotations about love from the Song of Songs.
The 1948 Mann Act prosecution of Frank LaSalle for abducting Florence Sally Horner is believed to have been an inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov in writing his novel Lolita, whose protagonist Humbert Humbert seeks to escape watchful eyes and bind 13-year-old Dolores Haze more closely to him by taking the girl on a multistate road trip.
In the late 1950s, Kid Cann, an organized crime figure from Minneapolis, Minnesota, was prosecuted and convicted under the Mann Act after transporting a prostitute from Chicago to Minnesota. His conviction was later overturned on appeal. Even later, Kid Cann was prosecuted and convicted of offering a $25,000 bribe to a juror at his trial under the Mann Act.
As there is no federal U.S. law against polygamy as such, except in territories, the Mann Act has been used by federal officials wishing to penalize polygamy to prosecute various polygamist individuals known as Mormon fundamentalists. (All U.S. states have anti-polygamy laws; in recent years state authorities have sometimes targeted organized polygamists.) The twin communities of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah, Bountiful, British Columbia, and sites in Mexico are historic locations of several Mormon Fundamentalist sects.Mormon fundamentalist leaders and individuals have been charged under Mann when "wives" are transported across the Utah-Arizona state line or the U.S.–Canadian and U.S.–Mexican borders.
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