Willebrandt’s was one method of overcoming administrative inertia or legislative inaction. Gifford Pinchot, in Pennsylvania, devised a different one. After the fair-weather drys of the Pennsylvania legislature refused to fund his enforcement program, Pinchot turned toward the WCTU. State Chapter President Ella George of Beaver Falls accepted the governor’s challenge and persuaded the Pennsylvania WCTU to donate to his enforcement effort 60 percent of the money the legislature had denied him.
The virtuous governor Pinchot did not let this generosity go unremarked. He may have been an idealist, but he was not an ingrate. Apparently having learned a thing or two from his adversaries in the Penrose machine, or perhaps from the ASL, he thanked Mrs. George by granting her the right to pass on all political appointments in Beaver County.
* For a man who had been severely crippled at eighteen, this particular nickname was less counterintuitive than it might have appeared. According to one contemporary account, Upshaw possessed an uncanny ability to “move about without assistance when carried away while speaking by bursts of strong emotion and temper.”
* Stack was the star of the show, but over its four-year run The Untouchables featured a collection of actors that could have stocked two decades of Emmy broadcasts. At various times the cast included Peter Falk, Martin Landau, Lee Marvin, Carroll O’Connor, Jack Klugman, Harry Dean Stanton, Rip Torn, Ed Asner, Telly Savalas, Darryl Hickman, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, and Harry Guardino. As there were few roles for women in a show about Chicago mob wars, the high point for actresses was undoubtedly Barbara Stanwyck’s two appearances as Lieutenant Aggie Stewart.
* Willebrandt told Stone that her friend Edgar was “honest and informed” and “operated like an electric wire, with almost trigger response.”
Chapter 10
Leaks in the Dotted Line
A
S SAM BRONFMAN would remember it, the 120-mile trip by dogsled from Kenora to Lake of the Woods wasn’t a lot of fun. It was the winter of 1916 in the flat, lonely expanse of northwestern Ontario, long before the Trans-Canada Highway was built, and the twenty-seven-year-old Bronfman needed to get to his destination as quickly as possible. Even if the highway had existed then, he probably would not have driven. Bronfman hated to drive, and for the last forty-nine years of his life, after his marriage to the worshipful woman who would always refer to him as “My Sam,” he never once took the wheel of a car. Sam Bronfman paid people to do the driving for him.
In Bronfman’s telling, the epic journey from Kenora (six days out, six days back, nothing to eat along the way but the venison bagged by his guide) became the foundation myth of one of North America’s great fortunes. Under the peculiar division of federal and provincial powers in the Canadian constitution, a broken-backed form of Prohibition had settled over the Dominion four years before the bone-dry version reached the United States. Individual provinces could not stop the manufacture or the interprovincial shipment of alcoholic beverages—those were federal matters—but they could ban sales within their boundaries. By 1919 every English-speaking, Protestant-dominated province had voted itself dry (Quebec, of course, remained true to its cultural origins). This provided a loophole for savvy entrepreneurs: if you could ship the stuff from a wet place to a dry place and find a way to distribute it once it arrived, you could make some meaningful money.
That’s how young Sam Bronfman found himself on that dogsled in 1916, on his way to a distant lumber camp where he hoped to find the owner of a small Kenora hotel who had put up the place for sale. At least one other buyer was waiting for the hotel man to return to Kenora, and Bronfman didn’t wish to give another bidder a chance. Under local law, the hotel maintained a license allowing it to store liquor. Under federal law, Bronfman saw opportunity. Kenora’s greatest distinction up to that point in its history was its renaming. One gets a sense of the sort of place it had been from the town’s original name: until 1905 Kenora was known as Rat Portage. But now, in this westernmost town of any size in Ontario, whose prohibition laws were not yet as severe as Manitoba’s or Saskatchewan’s, Bronfman could establish a depot for liquor, ship it in from an operation he had purchased in Montreal, and then forward the goods into the prairie provinces. The hardship of the voyage to Lake of the Woods, aggravated by the limitations of his guide, demonstrated Bronfman’s commitment to his vision. “I could hardly face the return trip,” he said in the late 1960s. “All that son-of-a-bitch could shoot was deer. He never even found a rabbit, a bird, or even a bear.”
That was how Bronfman spoke all his life: directly, coarsely, and with his own interests trumping everyone else’s.* The third son of Yechiel and Mindel Bronfman—in chronology if not in affect—he became the dominant Bronfman of his generation, he said many years later, for the same reason “a horse win[s] a race. I just did.” He was two years old in 1891, when Yechiel and Mindel brought their family from Soroca, a small farming town in what is now Moldova, to the not dissimilar landscape of eastern Saskatchewan. Farming led to horse-trading, which led to other commercial ventures, and soon the Bronfmans had accumulated enough capital to start buying small hotels in small towns. “Hotel” was an overly grand term for most of them. In places like Emerson and Yorkton and Kenora and the other dusty communities that captured the Bronfman family’s interest, the hotel, close by the railroad station, offered minimal accommodations to the prairie travelers of those days. It had beds, it served meals, it probably had a pool table, and it definitely sold liquor.
The Kenora opportunity didn’t last long; in 1918 interprovincial alcohol sales were banned by Parliament. But even though Canadian law allowed the shipment of liquor only if its intended use was medicinal, you hardly needed to be at death’s door to merit a legal shot of brandy. The Bronfmans built up a very nice business with the cooperation of local physicians, who were rewarded with a two-dollar bonus for each liquor prescription fulfilled by a Bronfman-controlled outlet. Sam and his three brothers continued to do fine, even after the doctors upped their demands to three dollars per. The scale of the family business changed radically, however, when the status of liquor changed south of the border. That was why Sam and his older brother Harry would come to spend Christmas Day 1919 by the railroad siding in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, unloading five freight cars packed to their roofs with Scotch. Twenty-seven more cars followed soon thereafter, and for several days the brothers worked twenty-hour shifts as they filled their warehouse, and any other building they could get their hands on, with this new currency.
Years later, recounting the details to a would-be biographer, Sam quoted Tennyson, saying the family had seized “the skirts of happy chance.” That sounded a lot better than saying the Bronfmans had embarked on a fifteen-year period of cupidity and criminality, which they would eventually whitewash from memory through decades of audacious public relations and phenomenal business success.
IT WAS ALMOST fated that the Bronfman family would make its fortune from alcoholic beverages; in Yiddish, which was their mother tongue, bronfen is the word for “liquor.” The illegal trade in booze also happened to be a business that did not operate under the discriminatory codes of the day. As the Canadian journalist and historian James H. Gray pointed out in The Roar of the Twenties, at the time Sam, Harry, and their brothers Abe and Allan were getting into the liquor business, there had never been a Jewish CPA in all of Canada; there were no Jews in the nation’s insurance industry; strict quotas kept doors barely ajar in the medical schools; and throughout the western provinces, from Winnipeg all the way to Vancouver, the number of Jews working in the banking business was precisely one.
The same ethnic distinctions that divided the American public over the Prohibition issue—native-born Protestants against everybody else—played out in Canada as well. In the east, Anglophone Canada’s chronic suspicion of French-speaking Catholics was intensified by Quebec’s unwillingness to join the dry parade. In the west, Manitoba’s chief police official guessed that 95 percent of the province’s bootleggers were J
ewish. Archdeacon G. E. Lloyd, soon to become the Anglican bishop of Saskatchewan, held the Jews of the illegal liquor industry at arm’s length, warning them that because Canada had chosen to grant them “rights enjoyed by other white men, they must not defile the country by engaging in disreputable pursuits.” A Manitoba cleric named R. H. Glover went a giant step further, charging that “a group of American Jews, assisted and abetted by certain prostitute gentiles whose God is the dollar, have succeeded in debauching Canada from ocean to ocean.”
What was odd about Glover’s dark accusation was that he believed the debauching Jews were Americans. If there was any basis for this, it had to be the seismic shift, after January 16, 1920, from the tolerated wink-wink-nudge-nudge of Canada’s so-called medicinal liquor business, to the large-scale, cross-border smuggling trade the Bronfmans would soon dominate. Canadian prohibitionists, every bit as sunny as their American counterparts about domestic dryness, simply didn’t want to believe their countrymen would engage in forbidden behavior. Back when Ontario closed down its taverns and liquor stores, a Toronto dry activist cheerfully reported that the St. Charles Bar on Bay Street, where he had once counted 128 men in various stages of inebriation, had turned into a soft-drink parlor where men could spend their idle hours “sipping near beer and buttermilk.” But even the rosiest glasses could not misapprehend the scene developing on the prairie, where Sam Bronfman and his brothers had discovered liquid gold.
Soon the alchemy of desire led them to start manufacturing their own stock. In the very beginning of the Bronfmans’ cross-border business, the liquor flowed upstream, as American distillers disposed of much of their presumably valueless inventory by sending it to Canada. In the first year of U.S. Prohibition the Bronfmans imported some 300,000 gallons of whiskey from American distilleries, mixed it with raw alcohol and water, and began shipping a much larger quantity of seriously degraded product back across the border. When their supply of Old Crow and Sunny Brook and other American brands ran out, the Bronfmans began importing enormous quantities of pure neutral spirits from Scotland, diluting it, and adding appropriate coloring. (Caramel was a favorite; some other blenders used prune juice for color and creosote to add a smoky flavor.) Before the end of the year they were sending 26,600 cases—almost 64,000 gallons—of their goods back to the United States each month.
The Bronfman product was mixed, bottled, and stored in a series of export houses—in the local idiom, “boozoriums”—strung along Saskatchewan’s border with North Dakota, in towns like Gainsborough and Carievale and Bienfait. The Bulman Brothers printing company of Winnipeg provided labels. “Anybody could walk in and buy 1000 or 5000 labels any time they wanted to,” Sam would remember, and soon case upon case of bottles bearing either counterfeit brands or invented ones would emerge from the boozoriums, all dressed up for, say, the eighteen-mile trip from Estevan, Saskatchewan, to Noonan, North Dakota. Among the Bronfmans’ faux Scotches were unimaginative but likely brands such as Old Highland and Prince of Wales, as well as inventive, if improbable, ones like Glen Levitt.*
In the farming communities that housed the boozoriums, liquor export was a valued industry. Under provincial and federal statutes, the Bronfmans, their distributors, and their customers broke no laws as long as they paid appropriate taxes on their profits and appropriate customs duties on anything crossing the border. The difference in scale between their old “pure drug” business and the liquor business was easily measured. Settling a dispute with Canadian tax authorities in 1921, Sam and Harry agreed to pay $550 in income tax for 1918, $7,644 for 1919—and $113,694 for 1920. Even that last figure fails to give a sense of the size of the Bronfman enterprise. When Harry Bronfman said in 1922 that “the liquor business in Saskatchewan is controlled by me,” it was quite a business: based on Harry’s testimony in a trial that same year, the Winnipeg Tribune calculated the family’s profits at $391,000 each month.
For all the businesslike nature of the prairie smuggling racket, it was a racket nonetheless. The boozoriums were adorned with stout locks, iron bars, and assorted weaponry. The vehicles used to move the goods south were largely of a variety known in border towns as the “Whiskey 6,” sixcylinder Buicks or Studebakers, their backseats removed, their suspensions reinforced by heavy-duty springs. Many carried thick chains that could be attached to the rear bumper and dragged along the dirt roads, raising enough dust to allow escape—from honest cops doing their duty, from dishonest cops looking for an extortion opportunity, or from energetic hijackers. At the border Canadian officials required the southbound runners to present itemized manifests in order to compute the amount of export duty owed the Dominion government. The customs receipts handed back to the runners were invaluable to American border agents as well; they used them to determine the size of the bribes they were owed.
In 1969 Sam Bronfman’s son Edgar, who had succeeded his father as head of the family’s giant Seagram’s empire, wrote that during U.S. Prohibition, the company “sold its products only in the Dominion” of Canada. Two decades later, Edgar was no longer quite so sure. In his memoir, Good Spirits: The Making of a Businessman, he continued to insist that everything Sam had done during Prohibition was “perfectly legal,” but he did add a qualifier: it was “never clear,” he said, how much his father and uncles had had to do with bootleggers.
Nevertheless, the Bronfman liquor didn’t make it across the border by accident, and it didn’t find its way from North Dakota to the cities of the upper Midwest through transubstantiation. The Bronfmans were playing a game rough enough to have led to the murder, never solved, of Sam and Harry’s brother-in-law, Paul Matoff, who was killed by a blast from a 12-gauge shotgun as he sat in the family’s boozorium in Bienfait counting the money he had just collected from an American bootlegger. The North Dakota police did not arm themselves with machine guns capable of firing fifteen hundred rounds a minute in order to apprehend a few wheat farmers hoping to make an extra buck. The Bronfmans had representatives in the United States, at least one of whom—the salesman responsible for Chicago and Minneapolis—was bold enough to carry business cards declaring that he was an agent for the wholesale liquor operation of the Bronfman-controlled Yorkton Distributing Company, and advertising its six outlets “near [the] international boundary in Saskatchewan.” By 1923 the bootlegging business had enabled Sam to build such valuable connections in the United States that he was able to get prized tickets to the Dempsey-Firpo championship fight in New York. His benefactor was a bright young entrepreneur named Meyer Lansky.
ARTHUR J. TUTTLE was as straight as a judge could be. He’d been a prosecutor in Ingham County, Michigan, then U.S. attorney for Michigan’s Eastern District, before William Howard Taft appointed him to the federal bench. He made his judicial reputation handing down severe sentences to traffickers in prostitutes—“white slavers,” in the argot of the day—who were brought into his court for violating the Mann Act. He was devoted to his apple farm in the central Michigan town of Leslie, his hunting cabin in the state’s Upper Peninsula, his college fraternity, and the Republican Party.
Judge Tuttle was also devoted to the idea of Prohibition and believed deeply in its enforcement. Whether his court had either the authority or the means to play an effective role in enforcement was another matter. At the time the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, Tuttle was the lone federal judge in a district that encompassed Detroit and every other large city in the state except Grand Rapids. That was fine until the advent of the Volstead Act exploded the orderly calm of his marble-and-mahogany courtroom. In Prohibition’s first eighteen months, Tuttle’s caseload jumped more than threefold, the increase coming chiefly from proceedings initiated under the Volstead Act or customs laws—codes violated minute by minute on the Detroit River, just four blocks away from the judge’s chambers.
But August 1921, the nineteenth month of Prohibition, made the tripling of that first year and a half seem almost inconsequential, and Tuttle himself was partly responsible for it. The judge’s de
cisions generally were true both to the intent of the Volstead Act and to the body of laws that preceded it, but he came down against the former when the latter compelled him to do so. In that second Prohibition August, Tuttle enjoined the Collector of Customs and the Bureau of Internal Revenue from trying to stop bonded rail shipments originating at the Hiram Walker Distillery in Windsor from passing through the United States on their way to Mexico. That would have been a violation of an 1871 U.S.-Canada treaty, Tuttle determined, even if the federal actions were intended to address “the evils sought to be remedied” by the Volstead Act. For Canadian customs officials, a journalist soon wrote, it became “kind of a grand gesture to issue a bill of lading for Mexico and watch a two-seated boat rowed into the river.” By 1925 Hiram Walker was claiming annual shipment of one hundred thousand cases of Canadian whiskey to “Cuba.”
Of even greater moment than Tuttle’s ruling in the Hiram Walker case was a decision handed down that same month by an obscure Windsor police magistrate named W. E. Gundy. An Ontario brewery had sought to establish that even though shipping its product across the river to Detroit was a violation of U.S. law, U.S. law was not a matter of concern to Canadians. The court agreed, and the New York Herald marked this moment in international jurisprudence succinctly: “Magistrate Gundy expressed the opinion that the United States was big enough to take care of its own laws.”
The immediate result was a volcanic spasm of activity on the docks on the Canadian side of the river. The freelance transshipment of goods by enterprising Canadians (like that Windsor woman who had claimed to have been sipping her way through ten bottles a day) was now overtaken by industrial-scale operations. Just one day after Gundy’s decision was announced, the contents of seven hundred trucks were transferred to a fleet of small boats that immediately set out for the constitutionally dry shores of Michigan. Canadian authorities looked on impassively as what was soon dubbed the “Mosquito Fleet” scattered across the mile-wide river, an armada of skiffs and dinghies and motor launches “so heavily laden with beer and whiskey that their gunwales were washed by water.” The Detroit News noted that although federal prohibition agents in Michigan did not have a single boat of their own, at times in the preceding months they had made use of a vessel belonging to the Detroit police department. But “the police boat . . . had not been employed by them recently,” the News added, “as it had been hoped that the liquor traffic would die out naturally with the enforcement of prohibition in Ontario.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 20