CHAPTER
11
They loaded the liquor in fast cars with bumped-up suspension and bulled their way across the border, sometimes fleeing through a hail of gunfire. They hid the booze in barns or cached it in the woods. They concealed the bottles under the back seat and sat the kids on top. They wired logs together and floated loads of booze downriver on the Kootenay or the Columbia; they loaded up horses and pointed them toward home across the border. It wasn’t the heavy-duty smuggling of Victoria and Puget Sound or Vancouver and Seattle, but communities just north of the line from the Fraser Valley to Fernie sent liquor to the border towns and cities of Washington, Idaho and Montana. There was money to be made from Prohibition, and the locals had no intention of missing out.
Spokane lies just 112 miles (180 kilometres) south of the British Columbia border and was connected to the province in the Prohibition era by a railroad and a skein of highways and rough back roads. Spokane resident Butch Fahey ran a roadhouse on the outskirts of Spokane. Though serving alcohol was illegal, Fahey had little trouble with lawmen, who were more concerned with catching rum-runners than penalizing rum-servers. Faced with paying an exorbitant price for smuggled liquor, though, he decided to take a shot at the rougher side of the business to get his booze for half the price. Including bribes and other costs, it would cost him $32 to $36 for a case of liquor that he could sell for $70.
For almost a decade, Fahey ran liquor across the border, though his wife frequently beseeched him to get out of the trade. He found it competitive but fair. “Every man hauled for himself and himself only. There was no organized racket running the smuggling in our area. On several occasions a guy tried to move in and be a big shot, but, in true western fashion, his ambitions were always curtailed.”
Fahey made his first trip with a one-armed driver through snow and ice on narrow twisting roads, discovering the hard way that car problems were often the nemesis of the rum-runner. Three tires blew out along the way because he had neglected to check whether the car they were using had newfangled heavy-tread tires rather than old ones with thinner treads. From then on, he checked and double-checked the cars he used. A blowout when outrunning the revenuers, a blown gasket or a malfunctioning fuel pump could mean great delay, the loss of a cargo or even the loss of liberty.
Most of Fahey’s trips were made at night. He and a driver would head north across the border, buying liquor from the warehouse in Fernie or Greenwood. The next night, they headed south again, crossing the border on rough roads and narrow tracks, always watching out for the Prohibition agents. Once they got the liquor across the border, they often cached it in a barn of a friendly—and well-paid—farmer until it was safe to run it by night into the roadhouse at Spokane.
Fahey and his driver were forever seeking new routes along isolated roads where they could be fairly sure the border patrol and federal agents would never venture. One Canadian back road led them to a railroad trestle over the Kettle River. “To cross it in a car was a hazardous adventure, requiring the utmost alertness on the part of the driver. A single miscalculation with an automobile meant a drop into the churning river far below.” But the men at Canadian customs and the railway office were ready to help out. When Fahey arrived, they loaded the liquor onto the handcar they used on the tracks and then very carefully drove the car across the bridge. It was a simple matter to push the loaded handcar to the other side, then unload it into the car and and drive away.
Everyone knew that Fahey was trafficking in smuggled liquor. On one occasion, police chiefs and sheriffs’ officers at a convention in Spokane dropped by the roadhouse for a drink and were offered the hospitality of the house. To be successful, Fahey and his fellow rum-runners needed to pay bribes. Customs officials and Prohibition agents were paid to look the other way or to avoid a certain place at a designated time.
Fahey didn’t always run his rum by car. Sometimes he used the railroad through northern Montana, with the liquor hidden under coal. But this was more complex, with more payoffs to more people. Sometimes, even payoffs, luck and skill were not enough. On one run, he arrived at a bridge to discover three border-patrol officials with drawn guns waiting at the far end of the bridge. Knowing a jail term awaited if he stopped, he decided to run the blockade:
I ducked down in the front seat, holding the steering wheel in a straight line and passed at terrific speed. Bullets tore out my windshield and all the other glass, including the rear view window. I had to raise myself in my seat to make the right angle turn onto the main highway. At the speed I was travelling, and in the short time I had after sitting up straight, I had to have full command of the wheel to negotiate the turn. With the greatest of luck, I made it and came out of the affair without a scratch.
He was convinced the agents had shot to kill since they could readily have disabled the car by shooting out the radiator. Fahey never carried a gun: “When they are shooting at you, sometimes blasting the windshield in front of your face, you might if you had a gun, do something on the spur of the moment that you’d repent your remaining days.”
After some eight years in the business, Fahey’s luck finally ran out. He was arrested, charged and sentenced to six months in jail and a $2,000 fine—the light punishment the result of brilliant arguments by his lawyer. When he came out, he discovered that the business had changed. Greedy smugglers had boosted the retail price too high, moonshine was becoming more popular than smuggled liquor, and gangs were taking over what running there was. He lamented, “There was no attempt at honesty any more. What had been a runner’s private adventure with, usually, no harm to anyone but himself had turned into a dirty racket that soon after financed the wholesale smuggling of narcotics.” It was the end, to him, of the golden age of rum-running.
Many others ran liquor across the land border in the first decade of Prohibition. Some reports suggest that even the Doukhobors, the communal religious community around Grand Forks that did not use alcohol, helped out with rum-running. According to one account, a small plane would fly from Spokane to a Doukhobor farm just across the border, where the liquor was cached. The plane would load up at the farm and carry the liquor back to the United States. If the plane was damaged on arrival or simply needed repair before it took back to the air, a First World War veteran and small-plane owner in Spokane would receive a message and fly to the Doukhobor landing strip with spare parts and mechanic’s savvy, though he refused to get involved in the actual smuggling.
A railroad ran from Rexford, Montana, to the coalfields near Fernie—a fine route for booze. Some men rode the train to get their own private supply of liquor from the main liquor-supply warehouse in Fernie; others were more enterprising. “One day we were going down to a place they call Four-Mile just out of Fernie,” Fernie pioneer Jim Constanza told local historian Gary Montgomery, “and we saw the two cars at the crossing and this train was there and these guys were loading sacks of booze into the coal car.”
According to his daughter, Fernie resident Oliver Abbey built flat-bottomed boats for smugglers who would load up on the Canadian side, then ride the Kootenay River south. The first load was lost when the boat hit rocks, but many more successful trips followed. Another local recounted that smugglers loaded a boat with whisky and “turned it loose and met it on the other side of the line. And they’d take wire and tie two logs together and load the whiskey on and let them go. They bootlegged every which way you could imagine.” One man bought a plane to run booze; others loaded liquor into Indian wagons, topped it with tents and then sent the wagons across the line via an obscure route. Studebakers, Hudson cars and Model T Fords could all be modified to take loads of liquor south. Of course, if the smugglers were caught, their cars were confiscated. The police chief or another agent would get the car or it was sold at auction.
Fernie resident Tyler Lindberg described the trade out of Fernie to Montgomery. “The road down to the States was just a ditch. They’d get stuck, bust a drive shaft, bust an axle, my father’d take the horses out. They’d unload the whiskey and nobody’d know a thing about it . . . The cops were comin’ around all the time; they didn’t know where it went.” Sometimes the smugglers would hide on one side of a curve and wait for the Prohibition agents; when the agents’ car appeared, they would jump out and push it over the bank.
The end of Prohibition in 1933 was preceded by major enforcement initiatives by the “dry agents.” In 1932, smugglers were pushed west by energetic pursuit. They were no safer in Montana. Historian Gary Wilson recounts that customs officers stopped one smuggling convoy of eight men—four Montanans and four Canadians—in eight cars, with 4,000 quarts (3,800 litres) of scotch, bourbon, rye and beer coming south from Canadian points.
On the north side of the border, reports of gunfire were rare indeed. But violence occurred in one celebrated case because rum-runners were transporting liquor across a provincial border. In 1918, Alberta outlawed the importation of liquor, while British Columbia still made its export legal. Emilio Picariello, a Fernie and Alberta businessman, was not impressed; he had been sending liquor into Alberta from Fernie for several years, and he had no intention of letting the law stop him. He ran liquor across the provincial border despite all attempts of the Alberta Provincial Police (APP) to stop him. Occasionally, they’d catch a car loaded with sacks of liquor, but often the cars got through.
In September of 1922, the APP got word that Picariello was coming through. The police stopped him when he crossed the border, so he honked to warn his son, Steve, that there was trouble and then blocked the road with his car so Steve could hustle back to British Columbia. Constable Steve Lawson tried to stop Steve Picariello, firing in the air and then at the car, slightly wounding the smuggler. But Lawson’s car got a flat tire, and the younger Picariello was able to retreat back to British Columbia.
Emilio Picariello also headed home. On his way, he and Lawson and other APP members confronted each other, with taunts and threats shouted from both sides. When Picariello learned his son had been shot—though he did not know how seriously he was wounded—he went back to challenge Lawson, taking with him Florence Lassandro, a young woman who was married to a confederate. The two men soon came to blows, and either Picariello or Lassandro, depending on which version you believe, shot and killed Lawson.
Picariello and Lassandro were arrested, tried and convicted. Although there was considerable doubt as to Lassandro’s role, both were hanged. Lassandro was the last woman to be hanged in Canada.