Nucky Johnson

Enoch Lewis "Nucky" Johnson was the head of the political machine that ruled Atlantic City and the county government from the 1910s until his conviction and imprisonment in 1941. He was also a businessman, a crime boss, and the sheriff of Atlantic County, New Jersey. During the Roaring Twenties, when Atlantic City was at the height of its fame as a haven from Prohibition, he was in power. His organization's criminal wing engaged in prostitution and gambling in addition to bootlegging.

Boardwalk Empire created a fictitious version of Atlantic City's Prohibition era. Steve Buscemi played Nucky Thompson in the Martin Scorsese and Mark Wahlberg-produced five-season drama series. Terence Winter, the show's creator, decided to depict a fictitious version of Johnson in order to allow the writers some leeway with the facts and to keep things exciting. One notable distinction between the actual Johnson and the fictitious Thompson is that the former is not known to have personally murdered anybody, unlike the latter, and neither is there any proof that Johnson has ever given a death order.

Additionally, Thompson is represented as operating his distillery for bootlegging and actively competing with actual criminals for distribution on the East Coast, although Johnson really received a share of all illicit alcohol sold in Atlantic City but was never known to engage in competition or turf warfare. He is said to have "ruled his kingdom with a velvet hammer". After his wife passed away in 1912, Johnson did not remarry until 1941; in the play, Thompson married again in 1921. While Johnson was a Methodist and the son of two of the oldest families in Atlantic County, Thompson is an Irish Catholic.