That was as naïve as counting on enforcement of Prohibition in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. There, the Bronfman interests kept Canadian officials happy by paying export taxes and keeping a large number of people productively employed. When the Saskatchewan government considered confining the export houses to the province’s large cities, citizens of the farm town of Carnduff, population six hundred, petitioned legislators to let them keep their boozorium, which they deemed essential to the local economy. For Windsor, which now seemed welded to Detroit by the same river that had previously been a dividing line, Prohibition was the equivalent of a land rush. One glance at the bustling export docks could help a government official sense the weight of the money flowing into the local, provincial, and federal treasuries (“Rum running has provided a tidy bit toward Canada’s favorable balance of trade,” said the Financial Post). The same prospect provided an even more thrilling sensation for those who had mastered the distribution of Canadian liquor to U.S. customers. Imagine the math: if you could ring up nearly $400,000 a month in profits out on the prairies, what could you do if you set up operations in the heavily populated East?
IN 1923, explaining how growing quantities of liquor were being smuggled into the United States from Canada, Roy Haynes said, “You cannot keep liquor from dripping through a dotted line.” By then, the Canada-U.S. border from one end to the other was so wet it’s a wonder it didn’t bleed off the maps. In the West, the British Columbia government cashed in by charging each of the export houses a hefty annual license fee. Large, whiskey-laden freighters originating in the United Kingdom began to dock at the piers in Victoria, even though the cargo would never alight on Canadian land. At the eastern end, fishermen who had long extracted their earnings from the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine turned to a vastly more lucrative trade. All along the 3,987-mile land border in between, this new, bottled crop enriched people on both sides of the line. A few years after Prohibition ended, a young man from Norwich, Vermont, gave an interviewer from the Federal Writers’ Project a succinct explanation of why he had abandoned the stonecutting trade for the bootlegging life: “Work?” he asked. “Me work? Only suckers work.”
Only suckers and those who harbored dreams quite a bit larger than escape from the granite quarries. For instance, Sam Bronfman. In 1922 he was thirty-three years old, less than five feet six inches tall, with a receding chin, thinning hair, and a fortune among the largest in all of western Canada. He’d already had a liveried chauffeur for ten years, a Cadillac that turned heads as it cruised the streets of Winnipeg, and a temper that could peel paint. He believed that “you were somebody if you had money,” his son Edgar said years later, “and if you had a lot of money you were more of a somebody.” This would have explained his answer when he was asked what he believed was the greatest invention in the history of the world: “interest.”
Bronfman’s decision to transfer his base of operations from Winnipeg to Montreal, and his market from the upper Midwest to the rich, thick belt that ran from New York to Chicago, was inevitable. He would later acknowledge that he was slow to exploit the bejeweled cornucopia that was Detroit and the rich opportunities strung along the Eastern Seaboard, from Boston south. In time the delivery of liquor by rail into Windsor and by ship to Boston, New York, and other East Coast cities would make the Bronfmans wealthy beyond even Sam’s dreams. But first he had to develop a source of supply more reliable than the thousand-gallon redwood vats of his Saskatchewan boozoriums.
“MY HUSBAND WAS the most wonderful man in the whole world.” Those were the opening words of a privately published memoir that Saidye Rosner Bronfman wrote several years after Sam’s death in 1971. She truly believed it. The memoir, titled My Sam, recalls her long marriage to a man who loved to serenade her (“Baby Face” was his favorite song), surrounded her with servants (“If you want another maid,” he told her, “get another maid”), and forbade her to make gefilte fish (all that chopping, he said, reminded him of how hard his “dear little mother” had labored). They had married in 1922, when he was thirty-three and she was twenty-six, and though the wedding had been nice enough, there wasn’t really a honeymoon, unless you consider nearly two years lived on the road a honeymoon. Back and forth across Canada and the United States they traveled, visiting “Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary, Regina, Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit,” Saidye wrote, “packing and unpacking, always living out of a suitcase.” And her version of a stationmaster’s call didn’t even include Ottawa and Los Angeles and Louisville, all of them stops on the same ceaseless tour. The Bronfmans went to Ottawa for a family wedding; to Los Angeles to visit Sam’s widowed sister Jean, who was living there with her two young children (Jean’s husband was the Bronfman brother-in-law who had been blown away by the shotgun blast in Bienfait); and finally to Louisville, ostensibly to attend the Kentucky Derby.
It was a convenient reason, but a false one. The visit to Kentucky, like the couple’s expeditions to so many other places, was a business trip. In this specific case, the business was the Greenbrier Distillery, about fifty miles from Louisville. This was what Sam had been looking for all those months he had been scouring the continent: a permanently idled distillery he could purchase cheaply, then dismantle, ship north, and reassemble on Canadian soil. The Bronfmans found the perfect spot for it in the Montreal suburb of Ville LaSalle, on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Every day for two years, Sam, Harry, and Allan would visit the site to watch their future take form in the rising bulk of the reborn distillery.
Sam called this daily ritual his “hour of devotion.” But in 1926 he and Allan made a trip that qualified as a pilgrimage. They sailed that year to Great Britain to meet with the men who controlled the Scotch whiskey industry. The Bronfmans had been buying from the Scots since 1920, importing thousands upon thousands of barrels, blending it with their own production, and marketing it as “highland whiskey.” Now they had a bigger idea: they wanted to create a partnership on the western side of the Atlantic, with both parties sharing in the profits bottled up in the famous brand names the Bronfmans wanted to import.
In London the dour, careful men on the other side of the table had reason to listen. The year before, the Distillers Company Limited, a combination of several family firms that had been in existence since 1877, had finally brought into its fold the five leading brands in the British whiskey industry: Johnnie Walker, Dewar’s, White Horse, Haig & Haig, and Black & White. Upon completing what became known as the “Big Amalgamation,” the DCL, by this point the world’s largest liquor company, controlled virtually all of Scotland’s distilling facilities, the most prominent brands, and several of the UK’s leading gin producers as well, including Tanqueray and Gordon’s. Operating the way any healthy cartel would, it had quickly established a schedule of protocols—price fixing, brand allocation, quality control—governing sale to the illicit American market. In their internal documents, the Scots referred to the United States only as “the scheduled area,” while otherwise maintaining the pretense that the whiskey they were shipping across the Atlantic was intended for Canada, Bermuda, or the British islands of the Caribbean.
The top officers of Distillers Company Limited had known the Bronfmans to be reliable trading partners who were quick with payment for the malt they’d been importing for their simulated “highland whiskey.” They approved of the quality of the Bronfman product (from their suite at the Savoy, Sam and Allan had sent over samples for the Scots to taste), and they had chosen either to be complimented or to remain indifferent when Sam had made the audacious decision, in 1924, to call the Bronfman family business Distillers Corporation Limited. Sam was not the only audacious Bronfman: “There was no special reason for the name,” Allan blandly told an interviewer four decades later.
The original DCL tempered its eagerness to enter into a Bronfman partnership with Scottish prudence. After further meetings in Edinburgh, the Scots sent Sam and Allan home with an equivocal response. Less than a month later the firm’s chairman, William Henry Ros
s, arrived in Montreal with his deputy Thomas Herd to do some research. Although the DCL was nearly as old as the sixty-four-year-old Ross, it was he who had turned it into a formidable trust. Six feet five, full-bearded, and blade thin (Fortune said he looked like George Bernard Shaw as painted by El Greco), Ross was austere in manner but exceptionally adroit in extracting agreement from the disagreeable. “No man but William Ross could have made a Dewar and a Walker sit down at the same table together,” said one of the whiskey barons.
The report Ross and Herd later delivered to their fellow DCL directors—“an investigation as to the position of the Scotch Whisky trade in Canada”—was a monument to the compelling force of self-interest. They found the Bronfmans’ Ville LaSalle distillery more than adequate, its location near railroad facilities auspicious, the records of the business in excellent order, and “the statements made by the Brothers Bronfman when in London and Scotland to be strictly accurate.” But because part of their mission was “to enquire into the general character and respectability” of their potential partners, the Scotsmen expanded their investigative efforts in Montreal. “We had to set about our enquiries very judiciously,” they wrote, “but were met at the outset with the fact that the Jews to which the Bronfmans belong are not generally regarded with favour in Canada.” Their informants “admitted that the Brothers Bronfman were honest hard-working men who could be relied upon to fulfil any financial obligations undertaken by them, but notwithstanding this fact they advised us to have no dealings with any of the Jews.” Ross and Herd cited two reasons for not going into a direct partnership with the Bronfmans: one they summarized as “race,” and the other they characterized as “the class of business with which they were associated”—namely, bootlegging.
Funny thing, though: all the other Canadian distillers, the two wrote, also happened to be “doing their utmost to develop this particular outlet.” Because that made it impossible for DCL to take a position in the Canadian market with clean hands in any case, maybe it made sense to work out something with the Bronfmans, but . . . not with the Bronfmans. The solution Ross and Herd proposed was a separate DCL-controlled holding company formed specifically to enter into a partnership with Sam and his brothers, “thus removing all direct touch with the Bronfmans.” The summary was brilliant: “The Bronfmans would expect to be represented on the board of the Holding Company,” wrote Ross and Herd, “but as this would be a private company and not a Trading concern their connection with same, even if known, should not affect the business prejudicially.
Besides, the Scots added, the Bronfmans “possess considerable political influence and have a good outlet for their distillery products.” In 1926 a liquor cartel couldn’t ask for more in a North American partner. For the next five years, while the British market for whiskey and gin dropped more than 6 percent annually, and even as a worldwide depression bared its teeth, the directors of DCL paid their shareholders of its common stock a dividend yielding 20 percent annually.
NEARLY FORTY YEARS after Sam Bronfman’s deal with the Scots and his subsequent purchase of the old Canadian firm of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons,* he sat down with two reporters working on a profile for Fortune. He had long been one of the wealthiest men in North America, a celebrated industrialist, philanthropist, and civic leader. He had been named a Companion of the Order of Canada, counted the prime minister of Israel among his friends, had met the queen of England. Discussing the rise of the Bronfmans, he said, “This operation from the beginning was one man. You’ve probably gathered that.”
Certainly the vast global operation that the House of Seagram would become was the creation of the brilliant, driven, and explosive “Mr. Sam,” as he was known to employees and other sycophants. But during the Fortune interview, he had chosen to forget how, at least in the early days, he had depended on his brothers. Each had played a critical role in Sam’s rise. The brothers who were most visible were Harry, with whom Sam probably had the most in common, and Allan, a lawyer whose negotiating skills put him at the center of much of Sam’s deal making.
Yet in the Prohibition years the eldest Bronfman, Abe, might have been the irreplaceable one. While Harry ran the operation at the Montreal distillery and Allan traveled with Sam to London, Edinburgh, and New York, Abe toiled in less worldly places. Early on this put him in St. John, New Brunswick, presiding over the cars and trucks ferrying liquor across the border to Vermont. Soon, first from St. John and later from Halifax, and then the North Atlantic island of St. Pierre, Abe would direct a complex logistical operation: loading Bronfman product into the holds of schooners bound for points south or onto trains headed for Detroit; filing bills of lading with Canadian customs officials indicating that the cargo was on its way to Cuba; submitting to those same officials stacks of falsified landing certificates that had been procured by a Bronfman agent in Havana and mailed back to Canada; and collecting great stacks of money. Some of that money would find its way to the Bank of Montreal, which was willing to accept it for deposit because, an internal document said, the unnamed depositor in question—“a liquor exporting concern whose product finds a market in the U.S.A.”—had managed to “prevent their name or the name of this bank being connected with remittances from United States sources.” Abe was good at this sort of thing: no fingerprints, no foul.
It was never clear exactly how much cash the Bronfman-owned Canadian Distributing Company and Atlantic Import Company brought in during those early years. Testifying before a Royal Commission examining the liquor export business in 1927, Abe said he could not produce the companies’ ledgers. “They were in the way,” Abe told the inquiry in sworn testimony. “I had no further use for them, and I burnt them up.” Abe’s associate in Nova Scotia, a Bronfman brother-in-law named Barney Aaron, was less forthright with the commission member who was curious about some outgoing shipments that had been cleared for Lima, Peru. How, the commissioner wondered, would a boat get to Lima, which is inland from the port city of Callao? Aaron demurred at first, pointing out, “I am not a navigator.” Then he became more helpful. “Lima,” he explained, “may have been built before the ocean was near the shore there.”
Sam Bronfman was more careful than Abe or Barney during those hearings. He saved his candor for the Fortune interview, nearly four decades later. Even though “I have no proof,” he said, he couldn’t help but suspect that a certain quantity of the liquor the family had put on those boats had somehow ended up in the United States.
* The coarseness increased commensurately with his fortune. Biographer Nicholas Faith said a characteristic Bronfman insult would have him calling someone “a cocksucking son of a cocksucking cocksucker.”
* In Saul Bellow’s Herzog, the protagonist remembers his father, a small-time Montreal bootlegger, at the kitchen table in their dingy flat, labels and paste pot at the ready: “Well, children, what shall it be—White Horse, Johnnie Walker?” Then, Herzog recalls, “We’d all call out our favorites” and get to work.
* In 1992, when Sam’s son Edgar was asked why anyone would have sold a Canadian distillery in 1928, he replied, “Goyim.”
Chapter 11
The Great Whiskey Way
O
N THE FIRST dry day of the era that would not be so dry after all, Baltimoreans could watch the 4,125-ton cargo ship Lake Ellerslie depart the city’s harbor on a liquor-laden voyage down the Atlantic coast. They probably paid little attention to its destination. No one knew that within a few years, if not months, it would be easy enough to get a drink in Baltimore. But back on that January Saturday in 1920, onlookers watching the big freighter steam out of the harbor could only contemplate the irrevocable void the ship was leaving behind—a void precisely the size of the 34,667 cases and 1,860 barrels in its capacious hold. Observers quick with a pencil could have calculated that this ran to something in the area of 438,000 bottles’ worth of whiskey and wine, now drained from Baltimore forever.
The parade of ships sailing into Nassau harbor on the island of New Providence
in the Bahamas had begun several months before the Lake Ellerslie arrived in the new dawn of Prohibition. Along Bay Street, boys rolled heavy barrels from the docks, dodging wooden-wheeled horse carts burdened with precarious stacks of liquor cases. The motley collection of stables, houses, chandleries, and shanties near the waterfront had been drafted into service as warehouses. It was not long before the steamships and the sailing vessels began arriving all day and all night, leaving mountainous accumulations of off-loaded goods on the rickety pier, hundreds upon countless hundreds of cases from each boat. Because there weren’t enough able-bodied men to serve as stevedores, the Bahamian policemen who tried to keep order on the increasingly unruly waterfront soon had to contend with a new form of traffic: the startling spectacle of island women walking from the harbor quays toward the warehouses with graceful purpose, wooden cases poised on their heads.
Bahamian drinking habits had not changed. The liquor that was pouring in from everywhere—Scotch from Glasgow, gin from Liverpool, rum from Jamaica, 60,000 bottles of Hill & Hill Kentucky Straight Bourbon directly from the distillery in Owensboro—was going out just as fast. Up to this point Nassau had been the somnolent terminal for a desultory trade in sponges, sisal, and turtles; now it became a boomtown, the ideal way station and staging area for a vast traffic in liquor. In 1918 Scotch exporters had sent 914 gallons of their product to the Bahamas; two years into Prohibition the Bahama-bound export had soared to 386,000 gallons. Outbound traffic leapt proportionately. Accounting for all sources, a U.S. Coast Guard historian estimated that at the peak of the trade ten million quarts of liquor passed through the Bahamas in a single year. The liquor shipped out of Nassau, an alarmed federal prosecutor in New York said in 1921, was “spreading like a fan up the Atlantic Coast,” as thousands of cases filled the holds and crowded the decks of hundreds of northbound ships, often as not serving as sleeping pallets for their crews.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 21