Smuggler Nation (41 page)

McCoy saw himself as simply continuing an old American tradition. Frederick F. Van de Water’s biography of McCoy is written in the rumrunner’s first-person voice:

If I wished to defend myself, I have precedent right out of American history for my rum running enterprises. Americans, since the beginning of this nation, have always kicked holes in the laws they resented. The Stamp Act was law, wasn’t it? Men who broke it are called “patriots” today. Sometimes I wonder what the rum runners will be called a century from now. The Boston Tea Party wasn’t exactly a legal expedition, either. The Fugitive Slave Act was once as much law of the land as Volstead’s legislation. I went to jail for the crime of conspiracy. Well, lots of our best ancestors conspired to break the Fugitive Slave Law, too, and established the underground railway to get runaway Negroes safely into Canada.

He continued:

There was a man in Massachusetts who might stand as the patron saint of rumrunners. He owned or chartered fast ships, ran liquor up from the West Indies and slipped it ashore when the customs men weren’t looking.… In the eye of the law as it stood at the time he was a bigger crook than I, for he resisted the government on other counts as well. He helped overthrow the constituted authority of those days, this original rumrunner. His name was John Hancock, and you can see it still, first of the signatures of patriots to the Declaration of Independence.
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The U.S. Coast Guard Service was given the daunting task of disrupting the ferrying of illicit cargoes from Rum Row to shore. Although the Coast Guard never managed to entirely shut Rum Row down, it did disperse and transform it. And this also transformed the Coast Guard. As one former officer describes it, during Prohibition the service changed from “a small organization, known chiefly to the mariner, to a well-known service of mature size.”
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Prohibition ultimately failed, he acknowledges:

But many good things for the Coast Guard came out of these 14 years of rum warfare. The Service was greatly expanded, and while it became
reduced at the end of the period, it remained larger and more important than it had been previously.… Much of the experience gained by its personnel was immensely valuable. Its
esprit de corps
was immeasurably enhanced and that enhancement has persisted down through the years. Intelligence became highly developed and has remained so. Standardization of communications procedures in line with those of the Navy was a strong plus factor in World War II.
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Rumrunners were also the first smugglers to take full advantage of the radio age, developing increasingly complex radio codes to coordinate their operations. This presented a new challenge to the Coast Guard, but it also helped to further stimulate the development of code-breaking expertise—which would later be put to good use in deciphering enemy communications during World War II. Some of the early pioneers of U.S. cryptography, most notably Elizabeth Smith Friedman, got their start helping the Coast Guard intercept and unravel encrypted rumrunner codes during the Prohibition years.
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Rumrunners and Coast Guardsmen were intimately familiar with each other, often coming from the same background. As one former Coast Guardsman, Harold Waters, recounts in his memoir about the Prohibition years: “Rummies were pretty much like us, ex-fishermen, ex–merchant seamen. Many had served in the armed forces of their respective countries. Nor was it unusual for a rummy to change sides, to decide on running with the hounds rather than the hares, especially after too many close calls from Coast Guard bullets. Ex-rummies invariably turned out to be good Coast Guardsmen.”
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Waters also notes that Coast Guardsmen were not averse to heavy drinking: “None of us regarded ourselves as crusaders dedicated to the total destruction of the Demon Rum. Most of us were, on the other hand, on remarkably good terms with the Demon, having frolicked with him the Seven Seas over. Rather, we were to regard rum-chasing in the light of a sport, as a glorified sort of cops and robbers game.”
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Waters even recounts an episode in which Coast Guardsmen stole and smuggled aboard a large amount of alcohol during a reconnaissance stop at St. Pierre and then went to extreme lengths to try to hide the supply from their outraged commanding officer.

At first, smugglers ferrying in their supplies from Rum Row operated relatively unimpeded, with little to fear from the Coast Guard.
The early 1920s was the heyday of Rum Row—an open, freewheeling market with little risk, low violence, and high rewards. An infusion of almost $14 million in new funding in 1924, however, allowed the Coast Guard to significantly beef up its fleet and hire nearly five thousand additional officers and men. By mid-decade, the Coast Guard operated a fleet of 20 converted Navy destroyers, 16 cutters, 204 patrol boats, and 103 picket boats.
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Hundreds of seized smuggler vessels were also turned into Coast Guard boats (many others were sold at public auction, often bought back by the original owners
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).

Moreover, the three-mile limit was pushed out to about twelve miles by treaty agreement with Britain, forcing smugglers to travel a greater distance to deliver their cargoes to shore and giving the Coast Guard more time and space to chase down suspected vessels. The government proclaimed that “a state of war—a war of patient attrition—virtually exists on the seas off New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and portions of Massachusetts.”
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The Coast Guard’s new destroyer force was based at New London, described by one former Coast Guardsman as “the biggest concentration of anti-smuggling ships in the history of the United States, and for very understandable reasons. It was the greatest smuggling area in the United States, handy to New York, Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, and smaller ports in between.”
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As the enforcement-evasion battles along the eastern seaboard escalated, the smaller independent operators who once defined Rum Row were increasingly pushed out. As one former Coast Guard officer recalls, “New measures brought about new counter-measures.… In the earlier days, most contact boats had been fairly small craft, many operated by amateurs. Now the professionals, largely controlled by the syndicates, had taken over. The boats were larger, faster, and of greatly increased capacity. Sometimes they had to run as much as fifty miles to sea to get their loads.”
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In other words, intensified enforcement perversely and unintentionally helped to push the illicit trade into the hands of those criminal syndicates that had the greatest capacity to adapt and survive (including through greater use of violence). Sometimes they would even have new and faster smuggling boats built in the very same yards where the Coast Guard boats were built. For instance, Long Island’s Freeport Point Boatyard built fifteen vessels for the Coast Guard, but also thirty
vessels for smugglers. Several of these were forty-two-foot-long speedboats capable of carrying six hundred cases of alcohol each—equipped with 500-horsepower Packard Liberator engines and bulletproof gas tanks—made especially for the Bronx bootlegger and racketeer Dutch Schultz.
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Similarly, the Manhattan bootlegger William Vincent “Big Bill” Dwyer equipped his eighteen speedboats with surplus Army Liberty airplane engines. He became such a dominant force in rumrunning that he allegedly charged independent operators $2 per case—and those who failed to pay risked being hijacked by Dwyer’s men. Dwyer sometimes simply bribed rather than evaded the Coast Guard; one Coast Guard vessel reportedly assisted Dwyer in moving some seven hundred cases of Scotch and champagne.
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American mobsters came to dominate the ferrying of booze from Rum Row to shore and became increasingly involved in transatlantic shipping as well. “To cut our costs and increase efficiency, we chartered our own ships to bring the Scotch across the Atlantic,” Meyer Lansky noted decades later; “… By the middle twenties we were running the most efficient international shipping business in the world.” Lansky claimed this was a cost-cutting measure, complaining that “those fine upright men in Britain [Scotch whiskey distillers] kept squeezing us for higher prices.”
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Chases between the Coast Guard and rumrunners sometimes turned violent. In one particularly bloody confrontation off the New England coast, the fatalities on a smuggling vessel attempting to evade capture prompted outrage and protests on the streets of Boston. As an ex-Guardsman recounts, “Coast Guard recruiting posters on display in The Commons were ripped, slashed and burned by enraged mobs. Protest meetings were held around town, and we of the Coast Guard were vehemently denounced as legalized buccaneers and pirates of the worst possible sort.… Recruiting in the Boston area had to be suspended for a bit.”
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The Coast Guard was under pressure from Washington to show results—meaning more seizures, confiscations, arrests, and so on. This was especially important in the congressional budget approval process. As one commandant told a Coastguardsman on his ship, “The Drys have really been clamoring for more action lately. You know the sort of
pressure they can apply. They’ve really got us over the barrel on that big appropriations bill for new construction now pending. We’ve just got to have their help on this one.”
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The Coast Guard nevertheless readily acknowledged that they were interdicting only a very small percentage of the imported alcohol. And to the extent that focused crackdowns disrupted suppliers, even if only temporarily, the leading beneficiaries included domestic moonshiners. As Harold Waters recollects from his experience on a Coast Guard offensive off the Florida coast: “Oddly enough, one segment of the population was actually glad to see us. This was the moonshining fraternity from out of the Florida backwoods and everglades whose lethal varieties of fusel-oil-laden corn whisky could not normally compete with the choice liquors coming in by sea.”
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Waters points to the “unholy alliance of the Dry lobbies in Washington and Floridian moonshiners, who naturally wanted no letup in our anti-smuggling drive, especially now that they had gained a big slice of the local bootleg market for themselves.”
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The Canadian Leak

Even more important than Rum Row in the illicit alcohol import business, especially after the Coast Guard’s tighter policing of coastal smuggling, was the virtually wide-open Canadian border. And the single most important entry point was the mile-wide and eighteen-mile-long Detroit River between Ontario and Michigan, appropriately dubbed the “Detroit-Windsor Funnel.”
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Canadian distilleries shipped some nine hundred thousand cases of liquor to Windsor in the first seven months of Prohibition alone.
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Powerboats could ferry loads of whiskey and beer across the river in under five minutes. By 1920 applications for motorboat licenses in the Windsor area had skyrocketed. As historian Philip Mason documents, the trade developed an efficient division of labor: purchasers working the docks, river transporters, transporters to local warehouses, and distributors to markets across the Midwest.
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Detroit turned into a regional warehousing and distribution hub, with the liquor trade considered the city’s second largest employer after the auto industry. The
New York Times
named it America’s “Rum Capital.”
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According to a 1928 survey by the Detroit Board of Commerce, the illicit trade in alcohol employed some fifty thousand people and generated $215 million in sales per year.
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Key players included the notorious Purple Gang, which for a number of years was allegedly the lead supplier for Al Capone in Chicago.
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Detroit’s Henry Ford, one of the staunchest defenders of Prohibition (at one point even advocating deploying the army and navy to enforce it), apparently had no qualms about hiring the well-known local gangster-bootlegger Chester LaMare as his right-hand man to help suppress labor unionization. Ford, who was clearly bluffing when he declared that he would stop making cars if Prohibition was ever lifted, also raised eyebrows by serving bootleg beer at an event celebrating the release of his new V-8 model.
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