Rum Rows & Rum Runners

There were no floodlights on the seaward side of the ship. Red cut his motor to half of nothing and curved in under the overhang of the stern, sidled up to the greasy plates as coyly as a clubman in a hotel lobby.

Double iron doors loomed high over us, forward a little from the slimy links of a chain cable. The speedboat scuffed the Montecito's ancient plates and the sea water slapped loosely at the bottom of the speedboat under our feet. The shadow of the big ex-cop rose over me. A coiled rope flicked against the dark, caught on something, and fell back into the boat. Red pulled it tight, made a turn around something on the engine cowling.

He said softly: "She rides as high as a steeplechaser. We gotta climb them plates."

I took the wheel and held the nose of the speedboat against the slippery hull, and Red reached for an iron ladder flat to the side of the ship, hauled himself up into the darkness, grunting, his big body braced at right angles, his sneakers slipping on the wet metal rungs.

After a while, something creaked up above and feeble yellow light trickled out into the foggy air. The outline of a heavy door showed, and Red's crouched head against the light.

I went up the ladder after him. It was hard work. It landed me panting in a sour, littered hold full of cases and barrels.Rats skittered out of sight in the dark corners. The big man put his lips to my ear: "From here we got an easy way to the boiler-room catwalk. They'll have steam up in one auxiliary, for hot water and the generators. That means one guy. I'll handle him. The crew doubles in brass upstairs. From the boiler room I'll show you a ventilator with no grating on it. Goes to the boat deck. Then it's all yours."

"You must have relatives on board," I said.

"Never you mind. A guy gets to know things when he's on the beach. Maybe I'm close to a bunch that's set to knock the tub over. Will you come back fast?"

                                                                           — Raymond Chandler, "The Man Who Liked Dogs"

As with so many things, when framing this scene of his early detective Carmady sneaking aboard a "gambling boat" anchored out in Santa Monica Bay, Raymond Chandler was writing from life. There were a number of such "gambling boats" that sat anchored in international waters, off the coast of Southern California during the 1930s.

I was reminded of both this story and its basis in fact earlier this week, when I heard the sad news that fellow Sleuthsayer, the great Paul D. Marks had passed away. In addition to being one hell of a writer, Paul was quite the student of history, including a stated obsession with Southern California's historic gambling boats. And a few months back, he wrote one of his best Sleuthsayers posts about them.

So, in honor of Paul, in today's post I'm going to riff on his wonderful piece about the gambling boats by harkening back even further—to the 1920s—and a similar enterprise of questionable legality: Prohibition-era rum runners, and the so-called "Rum Row."

Background

In 1919 the U.S. Congress passed the Volstead Act, ratifying and enforcing the 18th amendment to the Constitution, and for the next fourteen years the production, importation and distribution of alcoholic beverages was against the law. Not until the act's repeal in 1933 would Americans be able to buy a drink legally again.

Of course, this meant big money was out there for the taking, as long as you didn't have any qualms about breaking the law. "Prohibition," as it quickly became known, helped bankroll a massive expansion of organized crime syndicates in both the United States and a host of other countries.

Why?

Simple. Turns out most Americans liked to have a drink every now and then. And since it wasn't illegal to drink or to possess alcohol you had "bought before Prohibition," flouting the Volstead Act turned into something of a national pastime.

Americans taking the 18th Amendment about as seriously as you'd expect them to.

And with the Mafia and a host of other criminal gangs locking down the terrestrial trade in illicit hootch, that left sea-borne smuggling. And so-called "rum rows."

Rum Rows

A "rum row" was, quite simply, a line of ships anchored outside of U.S. territorial waters, holds full of liquor, waiting to do business with smugglers who would come out in smaller, faster boats, take on cargo, and run it in to shore. Rum rows sprung up almost overnight, on both coasts, and especially in the Caribbean. But for the purposes of this post, we'll focus on the Canadian liquor runs down the West Coast generally, and on the "Queen of Rum Row," a former timber schooner called the Malahat.

The Malahat

We have remarkable documentation of the Malahat's operations, both because the son of one of its captains wrote a book about his father's exploits, and because the engineer on one of the small boats buying booze from rum row ships including the Malahat recorded "home movies" of a number of his boat's runs on an early Kodak camera. AND one of HIS descendants (a grandson) digitized and uploaded whole portions of them to YouTube. Take a look. Fascinating! According to the grandson, his grandfather "had many, many great stories to tell us as kids of his colourful life rum running and other adventures on the coast."

According to author Jim Stone in My Dad, the Rum Runner, ships like the Malahat didn't have to be fast, and they didn't have much to fear from the likes of the Coast Guard. Unless there was criminal activity the Coast Guard left the rum rows alone in most of the spots where they congregated along the West Coast (The Farallon Islands, fifty miles off the Golden Gate, were supposedly a popular spot for the rum row ships to set up shop for months at a time). The speedboats, trawlers and other smaller craft used by local smugglers to load up at rum row were their preferred targets.

On a typical run south from her homeport in Vancouver, the Malahat would carry “200 cases of well-known brands of scotch whiskey, gin, champagne, and liqueurs, followed by 1,000 cases of Old Colonel Rye and Corn Hollow Bourbon.” It could often take months for her owners to sell off all of their stock and return to Canada for another load.

And they made money like they were printing it in their mom's basement.

And on that (bank) note, that's all for this go-round. More on rum rows and rum runners next time.

And lastly, God bless you, Paul Marks.

Remembering Miami 1980

The Chinese have a saying that runs along the lines of "May you live in exciting times." For a guy who was 12 years out of Vietnam and had joined federal law enforcement, for the adrenaline, 2-1/2 years after the SE Asian tour, Miami became a very exciting time.

It was late summer of 1980 and Miami was pretty much an open city. Castro had emptied his prisons and mental hospitals of those who could get someone to pick them up in boats at the Port of Mariel. Other Cuban citizens bribed their way out to join the flotilla headed to Florida. These people soon became known as the Marielitos. Some of the ones who made it to Miami ended up being held in the Orange Bowl stadium, but with the beginning of football season, they were moved to Liberty City, a tent city under an I-95 overpass inside Miami. (Think Scarface with Al Pacino as a rising drug lord in Miami.) The noise under the overpass from constant traffic was relentless and overwhelming. Plus, tent city residents had trouble finding a sponsor to get them out of the place, and those that did had trouble getting jobs because they didn't speak English. Faced with depression and a bleak future, some of them would do almost anything to survive. Like the song says, it's the lure of easy money.

Meanwhile, the go-fast boats were coming in with their loads from the Bahama banks, the Cocaine Cowboys were in full swing moving their product, mother ships were coming up from Colombia, airplanes were dropping their loads in the Florida swamps where drug crews waited to retrieve the illicit cargo, and dealers were taking grocery sacks of U.S. currency to local banks after their sales. In the beginning, dealers merely weighed their money until they got their own counting machines. If a van carrying a couple hundred pounds of marijuana got in a wreck on the Interstate, the driver and shotgun rider simply walked away and disappeared into the populace. Drug dealers were shot by rival organizations who left the drugs and cash behind to show it was just business, a territory thing, not a drug rip-off. After a while, all that left-behind money with no one to claim it became a temptation to some of the responding homicide cops. Some of that money got split up and disappeared. Later, some of the left-behind drugs also got split up and sold instead of going into evidence. Nobody was going to claim ownership of the drugs anyway was the theory. When the time came there wasn't enough drug homicides to respond to, some of the dirty cops created their own. Honest cops weren't sure who to trust. One of the honest cops came over to us and later testified to what he knew.

With all that drug money to spend, Miami underwent a building boom. Money talked and some got richer. Others got dead.

The Miami Regional Director sent one of his agent groups south on an interdiction program to the Caribbean. To replace his lost manpower, he drew from other offices for a "special." I went down to Miami on a "special" op, along with agents from Minneapolis, the Arizona border, the Texas border, New Orleans, and other offices. We took over the duties of those guys gone off to the Caribbean program. Our new group worked with the U.S. Coast Guard on the northbound mother ships laden with tons of pot. Some nights, we found ourselves off the Miami coast with Customs, hunting in wolf packs to catch the go-fast boats coming in from the Bahama banks. We ran our own go-fast boats seized from previous smugglers. We conducted surveillance on clandestine landing strips in the Keys. We escorted tons of seized pot up to the incinerators in Orlando just to get rid of the massive inventory in evidence. It's a heady time, just keep your automatic handy. Bullet proof vests weren't in vogue yet.

We ate our suppers in Cuban restaurants and did our laundry down in Miami's Calle Ocho, the Cuban district, hoping no one recognized us from some of our excursions in the city or out on the water. There's a Latin rhythm on the streets and Mambo clubs at night, with Cuban beauties escorted by macho males in high Cuban-heeled shoes. It's a style, a culture, a living on the edge. Easy money and quickly spent. Miami Vice isn't far off.

Eventually, someone in the main office got the bright idea to "sell" some of the massive pot inventory in a sting operation. A few hundred pounds (after the court case is done) was transferred to a rental truck parked inside a rented storage unit. Marijuana brokers who are unaware they are dealing with undercover agents, go out and solicited buyers for our product. The broker and the buyer show up at the storage unit, money changed hands, the pot load was taken and they leave. The broker goes his own way. He isn't bothered yet because we need him to bring in more buyers, but a few miles from the site, the latest buyers are stopped and arrested. Samples are taken from each pot bale for evidence in court and the remainder is driven back to the storage unit to be "sold" again. Naturally, the buying money is seized for court and forfeiture. The recent buyers? They're going away for a long vacation in the grey bar hotel.

Then comes the alleged time when an unmarked police car pulls up to the storage unit and two men get out. One shows a badge, identifies himself as a plain clothes cop to the undercover agents and then draws his gun. The other guy checks out the rental truck and prepares to drive away with the pot. The cop with the badge is getting ready to kill the undercover agents until they identify themselves. Then it becomes chaos and paranoia. Badge guy beats feet for his unmarked cop car, but is quickly surrounded. The other guy tries to drive off in the rental truck. Surveillance agents descend on the scene en masse. One agent allegedly steps up on the rental truck's foot board on the passenger side and empties his .45 into the rental truck driver. He then steps down and the truck crashes into a tree. That's the end of the "sale" program.

Like the Chinese said, "May you live in exciting times." Yeah, I think I did. Hard to imagine all that was almost four decades ago, and yet some scenes and faces are as vivid as if they were just last week.

So raise your glasses to those who were there in a time gone by.

A toast to the old days now faded into history.

Exciting times.

Bound for Valparaiso in a Rowboat

It's the end of the summer and I don't feel like tackling anything too heavy. So let's talk about smuggling illegal substances.  Better yet, let's sing about it.

I am sure you have heard of narcocorridos, the Mexican song genre that celebrates and heroizes people who smuggle drugs north across the U.S. border.  Well, that is not our subject for the day.

Instead we have a song from my friend Zeke Hoskin, discussing the true story of some earlier smugglers heading in a different direction.  You may remember Zeke from his occasional words of wisdom in our comment section.  He wanted you to know that he wrote most of the song on Canada Day, 1992, while waiting to cross the border.

That's his wife Flip Breskin on guitar, by the way.

Enjoy.

The First Cartel

Well, probably not the first, but back in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the main drug cartels were selling opium to Asia, and shipping the money home to Britain and the United States and the Netherlands. And I'm not talking about little dribs and drabs:  in the mid-1800's, the opium trade provided one-third of British colonial revenues, and those millions of pounds (trillions in today's money) were just what actually made it home to the Crown.
The East India Company was the major player in India, where the opium was grown and processed. It was a private British joint-stock venture that effectively ruled India from 1757-1858.  Raw opium was processed into the smokeable stuff for the China market (in Western Europe, people preferred drinkable laudanum) - chests weighing about 133 pounds each, which went for $1,000 dollars (about $25,000 in today's money.)  The East India Company established a trading post in Canton, China in 1699, but leased out the trading rights to the trading companies, or hongs, which took the opium from Canton and smuggled it into China (via rivers, etc.).  The major players were:

Jardine and Matheson

• Jardine, Matheson and Company, a/k/a The Honorable Company, was founded in 1832 in Canton with the partnership of William Jardine and James Matheson, both University of Edinburgh graduates. They were always the biggest trading company, or hong, and (having diversified heavily in the 20th century) are still going strong in Asia, even though they're incorporated out of Bermuda.  (Their official website is interesting: http://www.jardines.com/  NOTE: Jardine-Matheson was fictionalized - and I would say cleaned up to the point of unrecognizability - by James Clavell in Tai-Pan.)  
• Dent & Company, another British smuggler under Thomas Dent's leadership.
• The Dutch East India Company, about which I know tragically little.  
• And the Americans:  Russell & Company was the major player.  One of the senior officers was Warren Delano, grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  (In case you're wondering where some of the Roosevelt money came from...)  The other officer, Samuel Russell, was filthy rich and left a Russell Trust, which (among other things) is the original source of endowment funding for the Skull & Bones Society at Yale.  

Jardine-Matheson, Dent & Company, and Russell & Company all began - unofficially - as agents of the East India Company, and then for the British government.  They also took on more "official" jobs. James Matheson was the Danish consul for years, Thomas Dent the Sardinian consul, even though neither were from either country.  And they became hugely rich.

You see, up until the early 1800s, there was a major trade imbalance with China (and you thought that was a modern phenomenon!).  There were a lot of reasons:  China wasn't particularly interested in trade, they kept the British and other merchants hemmed into specific treaty ports and didn't let them into the rest of the country, 90% of their population was too poor to buy anything, and finally, the British didn't have much that they wanted.  Except silver.  So, for 130 years, China sold the West silk, porcelain, navigation equipment, firecrackers, and above all, tea.  And since in those days trade involved either hard goods or hard cash, the British were being drained of silver at an alarming rate. And then someone got the bright idea to sell them opium.

Charles Elliot 

The fact that opium was illegal in China didn't matter.  The British smuggled it in, as much as 1,400 tons of opium a year.  And, as the opium flowed in, the silver flowed out (in 1800's dollars, $21,000,000 a year; in today's terms, multiply that by about 25,000, making it $52.5 trillion a year), destabilizing the Chinese economy, not to mention creating a huge number of hopeless drug addicts.  Eventually even the Imperial Court - locked up in the Forbidden City in distant Beijing - launched a war on drugs. The Emperor sent an imperial commissioner Lin Zexu to Canton, where he seized 2.6 million pounds of opium and burned it.  (A lot of boats sailed and held themselves downwind of that fire...)

Now the British charge d'affaires in Canton was Brian Thornton's and my favorite 19th century British agent, Captain Charles Elliot, R.N.  He basically said that that opium (despite being illegal) was the property of the British crown and the Chinese needed to reimburse the merchants.  They wouldn't, Elliot seized Hong Kong for starters, and the war was on.

There aren't too many wars which have been fought for the specific purpose of requiring the losing nation to legalize drugs.  The Opium Wars were about the only ones I can think of.  And, in terms of size and wealth disparities, it was the equivalent of the Colombian government aligning with the Colombian drug cartels to declare war on the United States in order to legalize cocaine in the 1970s. And winning.  And, getting the following results:

Sir Robert Hart

• China had to open more treaty ports to foreigners.
• China had to give Britain Hong Kong permanently.
• China had to pay a $21,000,000 indemnity for all the costs of the war.  (In today's terms, $52 trillion.)
• China had to give the British the right to set, control, and collect its own tariffs.  NOTE:  The Imperial Maritime Customs Service was manned by British officers from 1854-1950.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Look, it takes a long, long time to extort $52 trillion from any country, much less the additional revenues that Britain consistently expected. Over time, besides collecting maritime trade taxes and managing domestic customs administration, the IMCS collected maritime trade taxes, managed domestic customs administration, postal administration, harbor and waterway management, weather reporting, and published monthly Returns of Trade.  The most famous Inspector-General was Sir Robert Hart, who held the post from 1863-1911.  
• All foreigners got the equivalent of diplomatic immunity (called extraterritoriality back then); the right to be tried only by its own consul (i.e., whichever Jardine-Matheson-Dent was there). What really stuck in the Chinese craw was that this was extended to any Chinese employees of foreigners, making them suddenly beyond Chinese law.
• China had to allow foreigners to travel freely into the Chinese interior and live in Beijing.
• China had to legalize opium.
• China had to legalize Christianity.  (You may wonder why China was upset about this.  I'll talk more about that, and the one and only Karl Gutzlaff, missionary and opium trader, in another post.)

Opium Den, unromanticized by Hollywood

Imagine the United States having to submit to Colombian rule.  Or any other...  Imagine having a foreign power in charge of our taxes and tariffs for almost a hundred years.  Imagine having our country carved up into "spheres of influence", until there's hardly anything officially Chinese left. And now wonder why the Chinese have viewed, and still view, the West with suspicion.  We think we have excellent reasons to distrust China.  I'd say that if we do, it's called revenge.

Crime Dairy

A joint Canadian-American task force brought down an international cheese smuggling ring of American smugglers and Canadian police. Readers who may remember the Great Hair Raid by Orlando authorities might be less familiar with a previous, rather cheesy take-down.

Return with us now to that nerve-curdling case…

Lt. Jack Colby said, "This case grates on me and we can't wait any longer for leads to mature. The time is ripe. We've got to stick that krafty Kolonel Karl KäseKopf in the cooler."

Deputy Chester Shire replied, "He's the big cheese, a sharpster, the cream of crime, the big Dutch cheese wheel, …"

"Don't butter me up," the lieutenant said with a sour expression, "and don't kid me. That really gets my goat."

"Sorry, sir, I guess I milk puns for all they're worth," he said sheepishly.

"KäseKopf lacks culture. He bets on the spread, wedging out the competition. He skims profits and demands a slice of the action. I want to see him fry. But though he shredded the prosecution, there're holes in his case."

"Right sir. What about Belle Paese?"

"Any way you slice it, she's cut from the same mold, but cheese is no cottage industry. Mae Tag and Harvey T. teamed with rebel Kurds in Jarlesberg who smuggle through Port Salut."

"All the way from Monterey, Jack."

"Krafty devils. We can't afford a mild response but I don't want any cheesecake shooting."

"I've got an idea, sir. Let me run it past your eyes…"

"Did you say rennet pasteurize?"

"Er, no sir. But a case in point…"

"Casein… You're doing it again, Detective."

"Sorry sir. This smells off, whey off. I mean this lot stinks to high heaven. But what if we set a mouse trap?"

"Hmm, a trap for the Big Cheese? Yes, brick 'em, Danno! Let our men in bleu trap the rats, process the American head cheese, and let the wheels of justice shred their defense. Mmm, tasty. But I swear this case has aged me."

"You've simply matured, sir, although your complexion looks a bit waxy. It will be a breeze, a fait accompli."

"Did you say bries and feta?"

"You've been at this too long, sir."

"Right you are. After the derby, set up in the Stilton Hotel. KäseKopf… we'll chop that munster into pieces. For some reason, I'm hungry. Let's order lunch."

"I'll have the pickles, slim burger, cheese…"

"Limburger cheese?"

Fortunately the sting came off without a hiccup. Lt. Jack Colby and Detective Chester Shire arrested a smelly Karl KäseKopf. At they booked him into jail, the last words police photographer Fontina Tilsit heard the uncultured criminal say was…

"Cheeeeeese."