The Bootlegger

“What would happen,” he asked the Greenville dispatcher, “if flatcar 55461 had continued down the line with no record of its existence?”

“That would have caused great confusion and immediate consternation.”

Bell sent his men on a search for what competing railroad line the flatcar might have been transferred to. They picked up the trail nearby in Jersey City at the Weehawken junction. Number 55461 had been coupled to a New York Central freight train. The New York Central freight had headed north on the Central’s West Shore Division, which meandered four hundred twenty-five miles from Weehawken, New Jersey, to Buffalo, New York.

Isaac Bell sent detectives after the freight. But with a fair idea of Black Bird’s ultimate destination forming in his mind, Bell himself raced to the Delaware, Lackawa

The Buffalo yardmaster at the New York Central West Shore Division Terminal told Bell the freight train had already been broken up. Some of the cars had unloaded in Buffalo and some were dispersed to other railroads. “A boat, you say?”

“Under canvas.”

“Well, if it was a boat, go talk to the Buffalo Creek Railroad. They switch cars to the waterfront.”

Bell hitched a ride on a Buffalo Creek switching engine, a little 0-6-0, that pushed a string of empty hopper cars back to the waterfront, where giant bulk carriers from the Midwest were moored to grain elevator docks. The engineer dropped the last empty, and the little engine huffed a few hundred yards to the end of the line. The rails stopped beside a crane on the edge of Lake Erie.

“Dropped him right here.”

The engineer lit a cigarette. Bell climbed down beside the murky water and stared west.

“A boat,” said the engineer, “can go anywhere from here.”

“Detroit.”

“Anywhere. The Great Lakes are all co

“Detroit,” said Bell.

The ingredients for three of every four drinks consumed in America were smuggled across the Detroit River. Where else could Marat Zolner and his Black Bird be but Detroit? Bell was sure it was Detroit. But he was less sure why.

The Van Dorn Detective Agency had bloodied his nose in New York, taking his Long Island estate and his bottling plant in Lower Manhattan. Had Zolner fled to Detroit? Or did he already have New York in the bag, despite a bloody nose, and had gone to Detroit to expand his empire?

“Good luck,” a Canadian stevedore at the liquor export dock muttered as the long black whisky hauler rumbled into the dark. “You’ll need it when the Purple Gang hears you coming a mile away.”

He and his mates were placing bets. The new boat, which had taken on a full thousand cases of Canadian Club, made a hell of a racket. Who would catch it first? Customs picketboats? Or the hijackers? The hijackers were the favorites. Side bets were placed on the notoriously vicious River Gang. The smart money inclined toward the rival Purple Gang, dubbed “monstrous” by a newspaperman whose head was found soon after floating in Lake Erie.

Any whisky hauler with any brains at all used mufflers. And if the black boat’s noise didn’t cut its odds to near zero, it was nowhere as fast as it looked. The newcomers had overloaded it. Crossing a stretch of river where a whisky hauler’s only friends were speed and stealth, it rode low in the water, its engines laboring, at the pace of a steamer on a Sunday school outing.

The River Gang boss, “St. Louis Pete” Berelli, son of Sicilian immigrants, had grown up in a Jewish slum. Initiated as a boy into the neighborhood’s exceptionally violent street gang, Berelli had nothing against the Jews. Until he hauled whisky in Detroit and ran up against the Purple Gang. Their so-called Jewish Navy whisky hijackers made the gangsters back in St. Louis look like choirboys. There was absolutely no reason to club every man on his boat and throw their bodies into the river. And even less reason to tow him behind the boat by a rope tied around his ankles to drown him slowly.

He was half dead when the rope slackened. The boat had stopped. Frantically flapping his arms to hold his head above water, he heard a loud motorboat passing in the dark. His blood ran colder than the water. A veteran of whisky crossings — and a savage hijacker himself — St. Louis Pete knew what the Purples would do next. In about two seconds, he would be drowning again, but not so slowly.

In the cockpit of the Purple Gang’s speedboat, the Jewish Navy’s “Admiral Abe” Weintraub had lost interest in St. Louis Pete Berelli.

“Shut up… Listen!”

Weintraub thought he heard what sounded like a very big boat on a night run to Detroit. There it roared again, motors straining to move a heavy load.

“Get him!” he shouted at his driver, and they tore after it.

His boat was a powerful Gar Wood with monster Allison supercharged motors and a semi-displacement hull. Towing the River Gang boat they had just hijacked, and the Sicilian behind it, diminished its speed by very little. But, oddly, while they caught up close enough to see the red glare of the nightru

“Faster!” Admiral Abe yelled.

The driver, a loan shark enforcer by day, feared Admiral Abe as every sensible gangster did. He coaxed every bit he could out of his engines.

Suddenly, the red glare they were following disappeared. The Gar Wood was enveloped in a dark cloud of thick, choking smoke. They were coughing on the smoke when the boat they were chasing fell silent.

“Where’d he go?”

“Stop!”

The driver jerked back his throttles. The bow dropped into the water, and the Gar Wood slowed so quickly that the boat they were towing crashed into their stern with an impact that splintered mahogany and knocked all but Admiral Abe off their feet.

“Kill ’em!” he yelled, pulling a heavy Colt Navy automatic and shooting into the dark where he sensed a long black hull sliding alongside. A searchlight blazed, and in the half second before it blinded him, he saw a Lewis machine gun on a sturdy mount. It spat fire in short bursts that cut his men down even as they pulled pistols. The noise was deafening and then over.

The black boat slammed alongside. Fighting men swarmed aboard, scooped the fallen gangsters off the decks, and threw them in the river. A rifle barrel knocked Weintraub’s gun out of his hand. Men grabbed him. He fought. They beat him to the deck and hog-tied him, with his wrists behind his back and tight to his ankles.

“Who are you bastards?”

A tall, lean figure with his face masked smashed a blackjack against Weintraub’s mouth.

The searchlight went out.

Abe Weintraub spat blood and teeth. “I said, who are you bastards?”

“New partners.”

Weintraub spat another tooth. “I don’t need a partner.”

“Not your partner,” came the scornful reply, “your boss’s partner. Who is he?”

“We’re the Purple Gang,” Weintraub shot back. “Leave the booze and run while you can.”

They looped a line to the rope that tied his wrists to his ankles and threw him in the water. Weintraub held his breath, waiting for them to pull him out, waiting for the rope to jerk his wrists and drag him toward air. He waited until he could wait no more and had to breathe. He gulped for air but inhaled water.

They jerked his head out of the water. He gasped, coughed, gagged, and threw up. They dropped him back in the water. The second time they pulled his head back to air, the guy who had knocked his teeth out leaned over the side of the boat and addressed him conversationally. “There’s a drowned guy hanging off the boat you were towing. Any idea who he was?”