rum-running

The LaMontagne business crumbled after the brothers were convicted of supplying champagne for a bachelor party at the Racquet & Tennis Club, but an even more precipitous collapse befell Sir Broderick Hartwell, “the rum-running Baronet,” who had promised British investors in his bootlegging operation a 20 percent return every sixty days but lost fifty-six thousand cases of liquor in a mutiny aboard one of his ships.

LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

In Detroit, rum-running traffic across the frozen Detroit River was so lucrative that some overly enthusiastic smugglers kept at it a little too late in the season.

LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

Within months the beefed up “Dry Navy” seized three British rum-running boats in international waters in the North Atlantic, and scores of smaller vessels were apprehended and impounded up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, along the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Great Lakes.

LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

One of the rum-running ships working the waters between Halifax and St. Pierre might have been named in honor of the Bronfman success: the Mazel Tov.

LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

A few years earlier, the four-hundred-horsepower Libertys had powered American military aircraft; now, converted to maritime use by the speedboat racer Gar Wood and other entrepreneurs, the Libertys that had been on the assembly lines when the war ended had become the sine qua non of the rum-running fleet.

LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

But by mid-decade the value of the goods afloat on American coastal waters had brought a vicious element into the rum-running business: nautical auxiliaries of the violent urban gangs.

LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

She quickly realizes that the show is a front for a rum-running operation.

Joseph Wallace's 'Diamond Ruby,' inspired by female ballplayer Jackie Mitchell Howard Frank Mosher 2010

It's rum-running days lasted just 2 years before freedom rang out across pubs and taverns country wide and the pleasure ship “Forgotten” had become just that. 10 years passed before a traveling salesman layed eyes on her and bought her up without a moments hesitation, selling his wife on a promise of a life on the sea.

The Good Ship - Forgotten 2010

Most of the impounded inshore boats, sold at government auction after the conclusion of legal proceedings, were simply repurchased by their original owners, who were usually the only bidders, as if by tacit agreement among the rum-running syndicates.

LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010

During one of the periodic crackdowns that the government bestirred itself to conduct, customs officials somehow managed to seize 366 rum-running boats; 365 of them were subsequently stolen from the government storage facility.

LAST CALL DANIEL OKRENT 2010