Rumrunners and Smugglers in New York City

By Ellen NicKenzie Lawson

“New York City, as the greatest liquor marker in the United States, is a great temptation for the rum runners,” wrote a Coast Guard Intelligence officer in the 8th year of Prohibition. Liquor to be smuggled ashore first was taken to Rum Row, an area of floating foreign liquor supply ships over 12 miles out off Long Island and Nantucket. Then American contact boats smuggled the liquor to shore.

Although smugglers had hundreds of miles of metropolitan waterfront to choose from, they preferred landing directly at docks on Manhattan’s twenty miles of shoreline, or in Brooklyn on the East River, or across the Hudson in Newark and Hoboken and, if necessary, farther up that river in Yonkers or Kingston. Smuggling directly to New York City saved smugglers the cost of trucking liquor from landings in eastern Long Island or south on the Jersey Shore. But smuggling directly into the Upper Bay was difficult: it was patrolled by Customs, the Marine Police, and the Coast Guard.

Lower and Upper New York Bays

Occasionally, foreign ships bypassed Rum Row and came directly to the Ambrose Lightship, in the lower bay, to unload liquor onto local speedboats and barges. At night, some turned off all their lights and slipped past patrol boats to reach the Upper Bay.

Encounters between authorities and smugglers in the Narrows, between the lower and upper bay, were often dramatic. One night, Customs and Prohibition agents were aboard a Coast Guard boat chasing a rumrunner with thirty-eight longshoremen aboard. It was forced to stop, but then a police boat emerged from the fog and began to shine its searchlight on the Coast Guard, long enough for the longshoremen to toss guns and liquor cases overboard: the boat had been a former rumrunner converted for Coast Guard use after it was first seized. It was an easy mistake: the Coast Guard had seized the boat earlier for rum running before converting it for their patrol fleet.

On another occasion, a guardsman with a rifle in his hands jumped from a Coast Guard patrol boat onto a rumrunner while calling loudly for machine-gun backup. He was bluffing and had no backup, but seventeen smugglers surrendered without a fight. After this, the Coast Guard boasted that Rum Row was disappearing due to better enforcement. Mindful of the heroic incident, one news editor drew a quite different conclusion: that Rum Row was disappearing because smugglers were now coming directly into the Upper Bay.

Rumrunners in New York harbor mingled among seagoing traffic in the largest port in the United States—ocean liners, merchant ships, mail packets, yachts, fishing trawlers, lumber, coal, and sugar barges, oil tankers, ferries, and speedboats. Usually, smugglers preferred the cover of darkness but at least one rum yacht, bound for the Bronx, successfully hid in broad daylight in the wake of an oil tanker headed for Astoria. One ship, reeking of liquor so much that it could allegedly be smelled across the harbor, was detected “zigzagging in a drunken fashion” with fifteen sailors aboard “helplessly intoxicated” and surrounded by five thousand cases of whiskey.

Gunshots could be heard during chases. In one instance, smugglers dodged in and out of traffic while passengers on a ferry watched until the rummies began firing at the Coast Guard. Then the passengers quickly dropped to the deck for protection. Another time, machine guns blazing and chasing a fast tug in the harbor, the Coast Guard deliberately discontinued firing “on account of the proximity of passing ferry boats between Staten Island and New York.”

Reputable ocean liners and steamers smuggled liquor. As liners slowed down to dock, passengers and crew passed liquor, purchased abroad, overboard to people in trailing speedboats. Belle Livingstone’s elegant night club on Park Avenue obtained its best wines from the captain of a French liner. Musicians, butchers, second cooks, and confectioners on a German liner were caught smuggling liquor to Manhattan. An undercover operation, directed from Washington by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon because local Customs officials were suspected of corruption, unmasked a smuggling ring of several crewmen on the Royal Mail Steamer Packet charged with smuggling fifty cases each of Scotch whiskey, French champagne, and morphine. The men received minimal sentences provided “they act as Missionaries to spread the word through the British merchant marine that similar violations will be prosecuted vigorously.”

Surf near Statue of Liberty in New York harbor
National Archives

The Statue of Liberty, in the harbor, a beacon of freedom was a constant reminder during Prohibition that Americans were not at liberty to drink alcohol for enjoyment. Large rumrunners seized by the Coast Guard were anchored near the statue. The Coast Guard photographed one rumrunning yacht, which served honorably as a hospital ship in World War I, with the statue in the background. This photo says it all about the craziness of lost personal liberty in New York City during Prohibition.

Guardsmen sitting in wicker chairs on deck of Surf after its seizure.
National Archives

Membership in one of Manhattan’s prestigious boating groups did not guarantee immunity, however. One yacht, flying the flag of the peerless New York Yacht Club, was inspected four times while anchored at 26th St. on the East River. Another yacht club member, Leland Ross, rescued in a storm after his captain was swept overboard and lost, had all his liquor seized (he insisted the bottles were for medicinal use). At Tebo’s Boat Basin in Brooklyn, the owner of a hosiery company in Manhattan, flying the New York Athletic Club flag, complained after his yacht was searched that membership in the old, highly respected club “should have been sufficient guarantee of her integrity.” M. M. Belding, a New York millionaire silk manufacturer wintering in Miami, was fired upon off the Florida coast for failure to stop. Fellow anglers sent telegrams of protest to Mellon. Belding sent one to President Coolidge. The Miami Herald editorialized that what had been predicted was coming true: Prohibition was bringing “about a state of affairs more dangerous than the conditions which the amendment hoped to cure.”

Stuyvesant Fish, descendant of an old Knickerbocker family, and member of the Yacht Club and Stock Exchange, sued Customs for unlawful search and won, momentarily inaugurating a rule that, pleasure yachts in New York’s harbor could no longer be searched without cause. This was the first case, ten years into Prohibition, in which a Customs or Coast Guard boat lost a civil suit because of illegal boarding. As F. J. Gorman, the latter’s Commander, remarked: “Precisely the same routine is gone through with day after day by the Coast Guard in the performance of its general boarding duties.” But most U.S. smugglers used vessels documented as “yachts.” So the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District moved swiftly to file an amended explanation for probable cause. Letting the ruling stand “would practically stop the Coast Guard and Customs from performing general boarding duties in enforcement of Customs’ laws.” Fish, having made his point, dropped the suit.

The Hudson River

Neither the Coast Guard nor Customs patrolled the upper Hudson. Little is known about Canadian liquor smuggled south by car or truck to New York City (although one enterprising Manhattan taxi owner began smuggling from Montreal, at first using taxis, then trucks, then boats). Authorities also knew that a company based on lower Broadway hired a captain from Hell’s Kitchen to take a barge through the New York State Barge Canal to Buffalo (the barge was to bring liquor across the Great Lakes and, perhaps, back through the canal to Albany, and thence down the Hudson).

Commercial aerial photographers captured an image off Sing Sing up the Hudson of two objects below the surface which looked like submarines. The Navy had none there and the implication was these were foreign submarines, possibly smuggling liquor.  

Newark and New Jersey, however, had a large smuggling syndicate in the lower Hudson, which, from the earliest days, used “British” ships to reputedly make millions in profit during Prohibition. This was the Kinder/Gertner gang, as it was known to the Coast Guard (probably part of the larger Zwillman-Reinfeld syndicate of northern New Jersey), which the Guard also discovered owned several “foreign” ships on Rum Row, including some operating off the southern coast, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Carolinas. One of the Kinder/ Gertner ships, captured up the River in Yonkers, yielded up a book with payoff records for agents, police, and politicians. Fourteen were convicted of smuggling, including the Kinder brothers and the mayor and chief of police of nearby Edgewater, New Jersey.

The East River & The Battery

The East River was home to many smuggling craft.The Dwyer-Costello syndicate maintained a fleet of more than one hundred smuggling boats and ships in a marina at 132 and Locust, near or under Hell Gate Bridge,  railroad bridge where waters from Long Island Sound meet the East River. At sunset (hence called the “Sunset Fleet”), these vessels would move down the rive, across the bay, into the Narrows and out into the Atlantic to Rum Row. They would try to return while it was still dark.

 Fulton Fish Market, then in lower Manhattan, was popular because it was closed at night, its docks and unloading facilities easily accessible. But serious searches at the Market required six-foot probes to test for liquor cases buried under tons of fish, as well as time-consuming, detailed, interior measurements of fishing boats, to compare with fishing licenses for hidden compartments and false bottoms.

Captured smugglers were booked at the Custom’s Barge Office, next to the ferry terminals at the bottom of Manhattan. But sailors were often drunk when they were arrested: they knew they could not be interrogated unless they were sober. This gave their employers time to send lawyers to have them quickly released on bail. Those lawyers affirmed that rum captains and rum sailors were their clients even when they had never met them. This was the first indication for Coast Guard and Customs officials that they were dealing with well-organized and well-funded syndicates. Once, rum sailors were arrested and, in anticipation of posted bail , dressed for a night on the town. Several were wanted men who entered the courtroom the following morning with bravado, singing sea shanties.

In Manhattan, public auctions of seized vessels were held in Dead Man’s Basin next to the Barge Office. Often boats were sold back to the same gangs, which used dummy purchasers as intermediaries. Profits from smuggling were more than enough to cover repurchase several times over. In one case, a ship was seized four times in one year, and bought back just as many times. There were good deals at these auctions: a forty-foot cabin cruiser, which cost $30,000 to build, sold for a mere $1,000. But the Coast Guard had first rights and acquired several hundred vessels this way, which often led to mix-ups at sea later.

After the first few years with frequent piracies on Rum Row, cash was not used there. Usually transfers were authorized by matching a torn playing card or a torn dollar bill, the supercargo having one portion and the master of the boat coming out from shore having the other.

Several hundred New Yorkers captained rum ships and speedboats. There is little information on them. But while they lived throughout the city, many bed down in Lower Manhattan near the Battery and Fulton Fish Market. One of the more colorful, Captain Browne-Willis--indicted eleven times for rumrunning before he jumped bail and disappeared—lodged at #2 Fulton Street. After the laws were tightened at the end of Prohibition, most captains likewise disappeared. Available information suggests they ran the gamut: from tough characters to polite and respectful ones, talkative or silent.

Hundreds, probably thousands, of sailors lived in New York City, too; most of them in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Many lodged at the Seaman’s Church Institute, 25 South Street, which began as a floating chapel off the Battery in the nineteenth century. Sailors who could not be induced to smuggle with good pay and easy liquor were sometimes tricked into service.

Many were Scandinavian-Americans. The crew of a mackerel schooner seized on the East Rivet included: Harry Anderson, Harry Thorsen, John Olsen, Pete Anderson, Charles Ioarsen from the Seaman’s Institute, Karl Carlsen, Leif Hanson, and Burger Nichelsen. Sailors on a rum speedboat seized off Sandy Hook, however, were a more mixed lot: Joseph Wilson, John Dykes, Henry Wolf, Hans Karlsen, B. L. Smith and J. J. Malloy; noted in arrest records as “a Jew in spite of his name.”

Supercargoes, who supervised the liquor on rum ships, were also mostly from New York City. Most escaped arrest because they carried cash to bribe their way free: One rum captain claimed his supercargo escaped when the seized ship landed at the Barge office using the $600 cash he carried. As he put it: “If the Coast Guard did not want him to escape, he could not have done so.”

Captains, sailors, cooks, and supercargoes were also paid off quickly, to avoid interrogations and arrests. If caught, most knew they would be quickly released and could go to sea again. Owners could also post bond and continue to use their vessels until a final judgment, which could take months or years. These owners also knew that if they had to forfeit a rumrunner, there was a good chance they could buy it back again at public auction.

In short, the entire system was discouraging. One Coast Guard officer expressed the feeling of police, describing a rum ship, whose captain, cook, first mate, and supercargo had been interrogated at length over use of a fake name, only to be released on bond while the case was pending in court. The rumrunner, in the meanwhile, returned to Canada for another load and soon hovered again outside the Narrows in the Lower Bay. “What is $7,500 [the bond] to that ring,” the officer queried his superiors. “I look upon the release [of the ship] as a betrayal of the forces of the Federal government.... I imagine our people feel that they have been jousting at windmills.”

 Ellen Lawson is the author of Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws: Prohibition and New York City.