Word: rum
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Rum fleets are beginning to be a regular feature of those harbors in the United States which have a dense enough hinterland to make bootlegging and liquor running highly lucrative. Scranton, Philadelphia, and Trenton are supplied by the fleet which lies off Highland, New Jersey. New York is fed from the sea by a fleet anchored off Sandy Hook and in the neighboring waters. San Francisco gets its Mexican, Canadian, and Japanese liquors from the armada plying outside the Golden Gate. Boston and the lesser New England ports are infested with smugglers from the Bahamas and the West Indies...
This fleet is said to be terrorized by a rum pirate called the Gray Ghost, a big steel trawler, which raids the rum ships and steals their cargoes. Being engaged in illicit trade themselves they are afraid to appeal to the United States or to the British Government, whose flag they usually fly for protection...
...Rum Fleet, numbering some 15 vessels, lies seven or eight miles off the Jersey Coast and waits for bootlegger launches to come and carry its liquor to New York or Jersey. The crews of the rum ships do not trust the bootleggers; they are armed with .45 caliber automatics. The reason for this state of continual naval preparedness was divulged by the skipper of the Tuscarora, as trim a whiskey-running schooner as ever dumped her weekly 2,000 cases in a bootleg lighter. In a press interview the skipper pointed out that bootleggers, angry at the high prices charged...
Highlands, New Jersey, was once a sleepy fishing village the Gopher it is the center of the rum landing industry. The shipyards are crowded, Prairie of the Jersey marshes. Now new boats slip down the ways every day, and ship builders are at such a premium that skippers and their crews have to do their own repairing. Under cover of darkness or fog, dozens of swift motorboats ply between Highlands and the Bahama rum fleet anchored off the coast in " rum...
...acts in some measure as an effective prohibition law. The smugglers buy the spirits in Germany at one crown a liter and sell it to Scandinavian countries at six crowns or more. The perplexed police are biting their nails with anger at the baffling tactics employed by the smart rum-runners...