Baltimore Prohibition by Michael T. Walsh

Author:Michael T. Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Amos Walter Wright Woodcock (left), Maryland native and director of the Prohibition Bureau, displaying the new insignia plate for the bureau. Also pictured are H.M. Lucious (middle), secretary of the Automobile Club of Maryland, and Ernest M. Smith (right), vice-president of the American Automobile Association. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Harris and Ewing Collection, LC-DIG-hec-35991.

Enforcing Baltimore’s waterways was an important strategy in attempting to disrupt bootleg channels out of the Chesapeake Bay. It was usually the assignment of the U.S. Coast Guard to enforce Prohibition in ports and waterways, although the Coast Guard did receive cooperation from other federal agencies.405 In particular, until the end of Prohibition arrived in 1933, the Baltimore/Norfolk waterway connection via the Chesapeake Bay was under constant surveillance—often by undercover agents of the Treasury and Justice Departments and the Coast Guard—for bootleg liquor shipments from one port to the other.406

The Chesapeake was full of rumrunners, and despite the efforts at enforcement in the area, the rumrunners were often successful in deploying and receiving their merchandise. For instance, the Baltimore Harbor patrol (the marine division of the Baltimore Police Department) searched the upper Patapsco River for five vessels shipping Scotch whiskey that originated in Nassau, Bahamas, in late August 1921. Despite coordinated efforts by Baltimore, Norfolk, Richmond and Washington Prohibition agents, the fast power boats were able to elude their potential captors by remaining in international waters for as long as possible and then slipping through the Virginia Capes in the early morning hours of August 24.407 In response to acts such as these, it was decided in 1922 that a new “Prohibition Navy,” a subset of the U.S. Coast Guard, would be formed under the direction of Lieutenant R.L. Jack. Four sub-chasers were sent to Spedden’s Shipyard in the Fell’s Point and Canton neighborhoods of Baltimore to be refashioned and redesigned to deter and capture rumrunning vessels. The recruiting headquarters for the “Prohibition Navy” would be based in Baltimore under Prohibition agent Elmer Kirwan.408

ORGANIZED CRIME

The gangster and bootlegger have been sensationalized in popular media and have come to be leading and recognizable symbols of the Roaring Twenties. Undoubtedly, organized bootlegging operations took place throughout the city and state. Yet Baltimore did not experience organized crime in the ways that cities such as Detroit and New York did. The reason for this is unclear, although it seems that the gangsters in those other cities, like New York City, were much more organized in their infrastructure and in their business methods.409 There was also little need to hide such crime organizations if there was an already tolerated “ubiquitous presence of alcohol” on a city’s streets.410 That could have been the case in Baltimore.

Nevertheless, even though the Thompson submachine gun (aka the “Tommy gun”) may not have ruled the streets of Baltimore and Maryland, there was certainly Prohibition-related crime throughout the city and state. One of the most common crimes committed during Prohibition were the repeated burglaries of still-functioning distilleries and government-bonded warehouses where alcohol was being stored for medicinal and industrial purposes.

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