Fleishman moved with his wife into the Barlum Hotel and only then did she learn of the role her husband had been playing for more than two months. A few days later, they slipped from the hotel and headed back East in their Model A Ford.
On November 30, eighteen hoodlums were arrested, along with nineteen patrolmen. Two-score other patrolmen resigned. The cleanup was a newspaper sensation.
Pete Licavoli was among those sentenced to prison. The mob leader over the years had escaped conviction on charges ranging from sluggings to murders. But this time he pleaded guilty to bribing a Federal officer. He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to two years in Leavenworth prison.
While Fleishman was uncovering the evidence to convict Licavoli and the others in Detroit, another young agent—Chester A. Emerick—was making some interesting discoveries on the West Coast. A big, easy-going man, Emerick had developed sources which disclosed to him that much of the liquor bootlegged on the Pacific Coast was being shipped by a combine of Canadian liquor interests. Emerick learned that the Canadian liquor interests had formed the Pacific Forwarding Company of British Columbia to exploit the American liquor market. The company loaded its whiskey on ships at Vancouver for shipment ostensibly to Papeete, Tahiti. Once the liquor arrived in Tahiti, the Tahitian customs bond was cancelled and the shippers were not required to pay taxes on the liquor exported. Then the liquor was moved from Papeete to Rum Row off Southern California, off Long Beach and off the Washington coast. Rum Row was the nickname given by newspapers to the line of ships which stood at anchor in international waters, three miles offshore and just out of reach of U.S. maritime jurisdiction.
The Canadians did not merely bring the liquor to Rum Row. They had a well-organized force of salesmen operating in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, selling whiskey to bootleggers and guaranteeing delivery on a wholesale basis. The money collected by these salesmen was deposited in several banks along the Pacific Coast to the credit of the “Gulf Investment Company”—a company owned and controlled by the Canadian liquor interest. No one knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars in profit was realized by the Canadian conspiracy.
Emerick doggedly followed up the original leads obtained during prohibition and pressed for Federal action against the Canadian liquor dealers. In the spring of 1934—two years after the repeal of prohibition—two officers of the Canadian interests, Henry and George Reifel, arrived in Seattle. They were placed under arrest. The warrants had been issued secretly, and only four or five Customs officials knew of the action that had been taken. Service was obtained on warrants against the corporation which they represented, and a Federal action was brought in the District Court at Seattle, Washington. Before the case was concluded the Canadian interests had agreed to settle all liabilities by paying the U.S. government $3 million. This payment was accepted by the government and the case was closed.
There never were and perhaps there never will be again smuggling operations of such a magnitude as those which developed during the days of prohibition. Booze leaked across the borders from Canada and Mexico in streams. High-powered speedboats brought cases of liquor from supply ships riding at anchor in international waters. The Coast Guard and Customs were engaged at times in a shooting war with the rumrunners, and in the Detroit area alone, Customs had thirty speedboats engaged in around-the-clock blockade operations.
No authoritative study is available on how many ships and boats were engaged in rumrunning during the Twenties. But it was a formidable fleet, and there had been nothing quite like it since the blockade runners assembled their fleet to challenge the Union’s blockade of the South during the Civil War.
One of the largest hauls of bootleg alcohol made by Customs came in 1926 with the seizure of the freighter Cretan, which was found to be carrying more than 70,000 gallons of Belgian alcohol easily worth $4 million on the retail bootleg market.
The Cretan was purchased by a “front” man for a group of Philadelphia and New York racketeers. Early in 1926, the Cretan steamed to the Bay of Fundy, where it made a rendezvous with the British ship the Herald. The Herald’s cargo of alcohol, a total of seven hundred 100-gallon drums, was transferred to the hold of the Cretan. Then several tons of baled waste paper were piled on top of the drums to conceal them in case the ship was boarded by Coast Guard or Customs officers.