The Bootlegger

“Cops?”

“Hijackers?”

Either way, they weren’t stopping.

The Prohibition officers started shooting their revolvers.

“Hijackers!” shouted the bootleggers.

“Hold on!” The driver stomped hard on the Buick’s four-wheel brakes. The car stopped abruptly. The Ford, equipped only with two-wheel brakes, skidded past, the officers shooting. The Buick’s occupants, convinced that the cops were hijackers, opened fire with automatic pistols, wounding the constable.

Ahead lay Patchogue, a fair-size town, with a lace mill, streetlamps, and a business district along the highway, which was renamed Main Street as it passed through. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union had called an emergency meeting to denounce the Suffolk County sheriff for failing to arrest the bootleggers who were racing across Long Island nightly. The meeting was ru

“Men!” bellowed the duck farmer. “If the sheriff won’t stop ’em, we will!”

He led a citizens’ posse into the street to ambush the bootleggers’ autos. The volunteer fire department stretched their hook and ladder across the highway.

The bootleggers, fearing more trouble in a larger, better-lit town, and still fifty long miles from the city, pulled their cars to the side of the road and sent a scout ahead. He reported that the fire department had blocked the highway and citizens were arming themselves with squirrel guns. The drivers turned to the boss — a former stickup man from Brooklyn who had put up the cash on behalf of associates there to buy the Haig & Haig from the fishermen — and hoped he had a plan.

His name was Steven Smith. But his men and the New York police called him Professor Smith, because he was always thinking and could usually be counted upon to come up with some way out of a fix like this one.

“Does the town have a church?” the Professor asked.

“A whole bunch,” said the scout.

Professor Smith chose one a distance from Main Street and sent two of his cousins to splash gasoline on the front steps and set it afire. Flames leaped to the steeple. When the fire department ran to put it out, and the citizens followed to watch, three Buicks, a Cadillac, and a Packard raced on toward New York with their Haig & Haig.

Hours later, the Brooklyn bootleggers finally felt close enough to New York to sigh in relief. Almost home. Less than a mile to the garage that the Professor had rented under the Fulton Street Elevated.

Marat Zolner had a five-ton Army truck that had been modified with a bigger motor and pneumatic tires. When fully loaded, it still wouldn’t top thirty-five miles an hour, but whoever chased it would have to contend with five armed men wearing blue uniforms in the Oldsmobile behind it.

“What’s taking them so long?” asked Zolner’s driver, a member of a once powerful, now rapidly fading West Side gang called the Gophers. The driver knew the tall, lean Marat Zolner only as Matt, who hired him often for high-paying jobs.

They had parked under the El and had been sitting there for hours. The driver was jumpy. Marat Zolner was patient, an icy presence in the shadows, unmoving, yet taut as a steel spring.

“They might have broken down. They might have run into cops. They might have run into someone who wanted to take it away from them.”

“Like us,” the driver snickered.

“Here they come.”

Five big town cars weighted down with heavy loads were pulling up, drivers blinking headlights for their garage to open its door, unaware that the man inside was tied up with a gag in his mouth. Zolner waved to his men in the Oldsmobile and they piled out with guns drawn.

The driver of the Cadillac stopped short. “This don’t look good.”

“Relax,” said Professor Smith. “It’s only cops.”

“I thought you paid them off.”

Suddenly, Smith didn’t like the look of this either. He said, “I did.”

“Looks like they want a raise.”

“I don’t think they’re cops,” he said too late. The sight of the uniforms had discouraged the bootleggers from pulling their guns. Now guns were pointed in their faces and pressed to their temples. Smith saw no way out. At best, even if they managed to win a gun battle in the street, the noise would attract the real cops. Even though they had already pocketed his payoff money, they would have no choice but to confiscate his Haig & Haig when a shoot-out woke up the neighborhood.

Smith raised his hands, signaling the others to give up. They were ordered out of the cars and frisked. Their guns were taken away. One of the bogus cops pointed at a five-ton truck parked across the street. “Load the truck.”

Again, Smith saw no way out of the fix. The booze was lost. But the hothead in the last Buick, the one who had shot at the Long Island constable’s Ford, grabbed for the nearest gun. He was a big man, and fast. He clamped a powerful hand around the phony cop’s wrist and squeezed so hard that the man cried out and dropped the gun into the Buick driver’s other hand. A hijacker stepped behind him, jammed a pistol against his spine, and pulled the trigger. The driver’s body muffled the shot, but it was still loud.

“Load the truck!”

Smith’s men rushed to obey before anyone else got shot or the cops came. In less than ten minutes all the cars had been emptied and the five-ton truck was rumbling away on groaning springs, trailed by an Oldsmobile full of exultant gunmen.

Marat Zolner and his driver took the truck across the Brooklyn Bridge, ditched three of the least reliable gunmen, and worked their way uptown, stopping twice to sell Haig & Haig to a speakeasy in the old Tenderloin and a chophouse whose owner was desperately trying to lure back the patrons he had lost to joints serving illegal liquor. The majority of Zolner’s haul was destined for popular speakeasies on 52nd and 53rd streets whose customers the newspapers had dubbed “the rich and fast.”

The sky was getting bright. It was nearly seven in the morning and people on the sidewalks were heading to work. A cop was waiting outside Tony’s.

Marat Zolner said, for the benefit of passersby, “Officer, we have a delivery for this establishment. Could you possibly direct traffic around the truck so we don’t jam up the street?”

He slipped the cop a fifty-dollar bill and the cop muttered, “Where you guys been? My shift’s almost over.”

With the cop overseeing the operation, Marat Zolner’s men passed ham after ham of Haig & Haig across the sidewalk and down to the speakeasy’s cellar entrance. Zolner carried a leather satchel with gold buckles to the heavy front door and knocked. A peephole opened.

“Joe sent me.”

The door swung open. “Hey, pal, how’s it going?”

“Long night. How about you?” He handed the bouncer ten dollars.

“We had one for the books. Park Avenue dame lost her pearls on the dance floor. Searched napkins, tablecloths, and floor sweepings. No dice.” He lowered his voice. “There’s a guy with the boss. I’d look out if I was you.”

Zolner pulled a bottle of Haig & Haig from his bag to thank the bouncer for the warning. Then he walked through the empty joint where a sleepy waiter was upending chairs onto tables and knocked on the owner’s office door. Tony himself opened it. He looked worried. “Come in,” he said. “Come in. How’d you make out?”

“Am I interrupting you?”

“No. No. Just talking to a fellow here who wants to meet you.”

Zolner said softly so only Tony could hear, “I know it’s not your fault.”