On January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment took effect in the United States, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, use, or importation of alcoholic beverages. Many thought this action would bring peace and tranquility to the country, but that was not the case. Instead, the Prohibition experiment failed dismally in the United States, and nowhere worse than in Michigan. The state’s proximity to Canada, where large amounts of liquor were manufactured, made it a major center for the smuggling and sale of illegal alcohol. Although federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies attempted to stop the flow of liquor into Michigan, an astounding 75 percent of all illegal liquor brought into the United States was transported across the Detroit River from Canada. Philip P. Mason regales readers with stories of the bungled efforts by officials at every level to control the smuggling and sale of illegal alcohol. Most entertaining are the creative smuggling efforts undertaken by citizens from all walks of life—from the poor to the affluent, from upstanding citizens to organized criminals and gangsters. Using police and court records, newspaper accounts, and interviews with those who lived during the time, Mason has constructed a fascinating history of life in Michigan during Prohibition.

It was a whiskey-soaked age that was supposed to be dry. Prohibition may have been the law of the land, but hte Chesapeake Bay country was awash in a sea of illegal alcohol. The marshes were teeming with hidden stills, and bootleg liquor was smuggled throughout the waterways and the adjoining countryside by daring men in fast boats and faster cars. Chesapeake Rumrunners of the Roaring Twenties is a saga of people--watermen and steamer captains, mob raketeers and "legitimate" buisnessmen--all of them wanting part of the action. In the maze of Bay waters, boats played a key role in that action, many disguised as workboats but built for speed and the ability to out-maneuver the law. On the other side, Billy Sunday and an army of temerpance crusaders campaigned tirelessly to encourage Prohibition, while federal agents and Coast Guardsmen shared the impossible task of enforcing it.

Using police and court records, newspaper accounts and interviews, this work is a history of the prohibition era, when from 1920 to 1933 all alcoholic beveridges were banned. The book focuses on the Michigan-Ontario waterway, separating Canada and the US, which was used to illegally import liquor.

In 1920, the 18th Amendment made the production, transportation and sale of alcohol not merely illegal—it was unconstitutional. Yet no legislation could end the demand for alcohol. Enterprising rumrunners worked to meet that demand with cunning, courage, machineguns and speedboats powered by aircraft engines. They out-maneuvered the U.S. Coast Guard and risked their lives to deliver illicit liquor. Smugglers like Bill McCoy, the Bahama Queen, and the Gulf Stream Pirate, along with many others, ran operations along the U.S. coastline until Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Drawing on legal records, newspaper articles and Coast Guard files, this history describes how rumrunners battled the Dry Navy and corrupted U.S. law enforcement, in order to keep America wet.

""Roaring Twenties" America boasted famous firsts: women's right to vote under the Constitution's Nineteenth Amendment, jazz music, talking motion pictures, Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, Flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum cleaner. The decade opened, nonetheless, with a shock when Prohibition became the law of the land on Friday, January 16, 1920. American ingenuity promptly rose to its newest challenge. The law, riddled with loopholes, let the 1920s write a new chapter in the nation's saga of spirits. Men and women spoke knowingly of the speakeasy, the bootlegger, of rum-running, black ships, blind pigs, gin mills, and gallon stills. A new social event-the cocktail party staged in a private home-smashed the gender barrier that had long forbidden "ladies" from entering into the gentlemen-only barrooms and cafés. The drinks, savored in secret, were all the more delectable when the cocktail shaker went "underground." The danger of the illicit liquor trade was also memorialized in drinks like the "Original Gangster," the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre," the "Tommy Gun," and others. Crime rose, fortunes were amassed, and a slew of new cocktails were shaken, stirred, and poured in hideaways to brand the "roaring" 1920s as the era of "Alcohol and Al Capone.""--

New York City, 1924 Once their paths cross, their worlds will never be the same. Danny Moore and his crew only meant to rob the hotel suites of rich guests. He wasn’t supposed to find himself in gangster Ricky il Sacchi’s room. And il Sacchi wasn’t supposed to wind up dead. Now Danny has the attention of another notorious gangster. Carmine Battaglia is intrigued by the Irish thieves who would have made off with a huge score if not for il Sacchi’s death. They’re cunning, careful, and exactly what he needs for his rum running operation. But Danny’s already lost two brothers to the violence between New York’s Irish and Sicilian gangs, and he’s not about to sell his soul to Carmine. With a gangster’s blood on his hands, Danny needs protection, whether he likes it or not. And that’s to say nothing of the generous pay, which promises to pull him and his crew—not to mention their families—out of destitution. Working together brings Danny and Carmine to a détente, then to something so intense neither can ignore it. Something nearly enough to make them both forget the brutal tensions between their countrymen. But the death of Ricky il Sacchi hasn’t been forgotten. And someone is determined to make Danny bleed for it. The Venetian and the Rum Runner is a 144,000-word gay historical romantic suspense novel set during Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties. Enemies to lovers, class differences, and intrigue, all against a backdrop of gangs rising to power in 1920s New York. CW: graphic violence, PTSD