The Venetian and the Rum Runner - L.A. Witt Page 0,47
his bloody eye. As predicted, the cops shouted at them for being idiots, confiscated the flare gun, and eventually left. When the coast was clear, a blue-tinted lantern on the stern of a yacht signaled that it was safe for the liquor-laden boat to dock.
As they refined their means of communication, they continued to come up with wilder plans to sneak liquor past the Coast Guard…not to mention relieve some other crews of their cargo. Such as the night Danny and Tommy had gone aboard a large boat used by some other rum runners. They’d hidden in the cargo hold for hours, waiting for the right moment. That moment came when the boat was intercepted by the Coast Guard on its way back from the merchant ships.
The lads had learned that this particular crew frequently carried a decoy payload—a few crates of cheaper liquor that they’d allow the Coast Guard to “find” and confiscate. They’d bribe the Coasties to let them go, and they’d be on their way with their freedom and the better liquor. On that particular night, while that cargo was being confiscated, Bernard and Liam had quietly rowed a small boat up beside the stern of the larger one. They’d quickly started transferring as much of the good liquor as they could from one boat to the other. Conveniently, the Coasties had been so loud and hostile, threatening to arrest the entire crew, that they’d kept everyone distracted while the lads quietly offloaded Caribbean rum into their tiny vessel.
By the time the unsuspecting crew had at last bribed the Coasties into only taking the decoy payload and accepting a hefty bribe not to arrest them, the little boat had all it could carry, and it disappeared into the night with Danny and Tommy aboard. Once they’d gone ashore, they met up with Mathew, Paddy, and Francis—who had by then changed out of their stolen Coast Guard uniforms and loaded the “confiscated” alcohol onto a truck.
The best nights were those that yielded the most alcohol, and thus the most money, but Danny had to admit that some of his favorite runs hadn’t been the most lucrative. Like the time they’d discovered one of the seaside restaurants in Greenport had a back room speakeasy with trap doors and chutes so that in the event of a raid, they could jettison their liquor. He and his men had found the chutes beneath the pier, and they’d carefully positioned a couple of small boats laden with straw, pillows, and anything else they could find to cushion the decks. Then two of the lads had gone into the speakeasy and warned the proprietor of an impending raid by law enforcement. By the time the proprietor realized there was no raid, he’d already sent every bottle of alcohol down the chutes…right into the padded boats of Danny’s crew.
Unsurprisingly, some of the bottles had broken, and the speakeasy hadn’t had as much liquor to begin with as the men had hoped, so the night was relatively disappointing in terms of payout. Still, Danny had enjoyed the ingenuity that had gone into the operation, and the whole thing had been exhilarating. The twenty-five-dollar bonus shared between them didn’t hurt either.
They stole boats, cars, and trucks. They posed as police, Coast Guard, middlemen, buyers from other families, fishermen, delivery drivers. Paranoia was running hot among rum runners and bootleggers alike now—nobody trusted nobody, which made the jobs more challenging as time went on, but more entertaining too. The crew even hijacked a few shipments meant for the Pulvirenti family, just to keep up appearances that the gang wasn’t behind the rampant thefts.
As far as they knew, no one had caught on that a Pulvirenti-backed crew of Irish petty thieves had made off with enough liquor to quench the thirst of half of Manhattan.
It helped that, at Carmine’s insistence, the crew didn’t draw attention to the money they were making hand over fist. He’d warned them against flashy clothes, cars, and homes, and in fact for the time being, the crew mostly stashed the money or sent it home to families in Ireland. They stayed in their tenements, kept wearing the clothes of young men working in the Lower East Side, and only indulged in less conspicuous luxuries to celebrate their newfound wealth, like a shared bottle of expensive brandy or thicker blankets for their beds.
Tommy and Mathew had bribed their tenement super to quietly improve the plumbing and electricity in their ramshackle building, warning him against