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Rum Row: The Floating Black Market That Outran the Law
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Bootleggers turned the Atlantic into a floating black market — and for years, the law couldn't touch them. This is the story of Rum Row, the mother ship strategy, and the Coast Guard war that couldn't stop it.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Picture a cargo ship sitting perfectly still, anchored twelve miles off the coast of New Jersey. No port.
January sixteenth, nineteen twenty. The Volstead Act takes effect.
Here's where the mother ship strategy comes in. The United States claimed jurisdiction over its territorial waters, which extended three miles from the coastline.
The government's response was a dramatic expansion of the Coast Guard. At the start of Prohibition, the service had roughly four thousand personnel.
The Broadway Mob's operation is worth examining closely because it illustrates the stratification at work inside Prohibition-era America. Luciano and his partners weren't selling rotgut.
The smuggling operations didn't exist in a vacuum. They created territory.
By the late nineteen twenties, Prohibition's political foundation was cracking. The wealthy bootleggers who had built fortunes on the illegal trade were, quietly, also building political influence.
The rum-running mother ship strategy is a precise illustration of Prohibition's central failure. It worked because the law created a market gap the law couldn't close.
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