The Beryl G, shown here in Victoria, was at the centre of the most sensational rum-running case on the West Coast. She was found adrift with her crew missing; eventually three men were sentenced to hang for their murders.
BC Archives B-06106
CHAPTER
12
Johnny Schnarr was off Cape Flattery when the engine of the small boat he was steering began to act up. Johnny was an ace mechanic and worked out the problem, filing and sandpapering the valve stem until the engine ran smoothly again. But he had a bigger problem: on his first trip on the rolling waves of the open ocean, he was seasick. A huge southeaster didn’t make him feel any better, and he was dismayed to discover that the boat would run out of oil and gas long before they completed the projected 10-day trip to San Francisco. They’d have to put into port.
Not a good idea, said Harry, the boat’s owner, since they were carrying a contraband supply of smuggled liquor and the bar at the mouth of the Columbia was a huge navigational problem. But they had no choice; somehow they got new supplies aboard and survived grounding on a sandbar. Out at sea once more, they needed another five or six days to reach their intended destination.
The trip was star-crossed. Soon Johnny and Harry were soaking wet, sitting on a beach, glimpsing through the dark night the surf pounding their shipwrecked Rose Marie to pieces and washing their sacks of whisky bottles out to sea. The two salvaged what they could of the liquor, cached it, then sold it to some fishermen who said they would collect it later and pay then. Two nervous nights later, the fishermen finally showed at a rendezvous, but still did not hand over any payment. The next day, while Johnny and Harry were still in hiding, the cache was hijacked. Then they were arrested as they tried to pick up some money that would enable them to get back to Victoria. Finally set free, they hightailed it back to Canada.
Unlucky though it was, Johnny Schnarr’s first venture into rum-running did not scare him out of the business. For two years, he worked running another man’s boat, then he struck out on his own. In time, he became one of the biggest and best independent liquor smugglers operating out of Victoria, running loads of whisky for himself or for the big boys who owned the liquor conglomerates. When he wanted money to buy or build a better boat, CEC was happy to lend him the funds. After all, he was one of their best runners.
US Customs and the Coast Guard could be a problem, but the biggest challenge was the sea. On one trip, a gale blew up as they were off Anacortes, in Juan de Fuca Strait. Water smashing onto the deck leaked into the ocean compartment, and the engine stalled. “We were immediately being driven towards a sheer rock wall that rose straight up out of the water,” recounted Schnarr. “I dropped the anchor right away, but I knew it wouldn’t hold for long against that wind.” Faced with abandoning the boat, Schnarr could only wait and hope as the wind pushed them closer to the cliffs. “The thunder of the waves beating against that wall was deafening. We were close enough that the boat was surrounded by a sea of greenish-white foam. Then suddenly the wind died as quickly as it had come up.” The boat and the men in her were safe. “Lucky, I guess,” wrote Schnarr, and that might have been his watchword for the rest of his rum-running life.
The Coast Guard and US Customs got bigger, faster boats, but so did Schnarr, who turned out to be an expert at building boats and using his skills to retrofit airplane engines to them when others were unable to do so. Blessed with excellent night vision, he frequently evaded Coast Guard and customs boats. On the one occasion when he let others run his boat, they came under machine-gun fire from the Coast Guard and ran the boat up onto the shore. That finished that particular boat, and he never delegated the captain’s job again.
If the men he was due to meet did not show, or if he felt delivery was unsafe, he stashed his liquor on one of the small islands in the San Juans, for pickup later. Aboard Miss Victoria and Miss Victoria II, Moonbeam, Kitnayakwa and Revuocnav (Vancouver backwards, to make the name harder to remember), Schnarr made hundreds of smuggling runs over more than 10 years. He once even delivered to a Coast Guard cutter when the captain took it out, off duty, for a personal load of booze. He made his trips mainly in winter when detection was more difficult in the long nights. He motored across the strait and up and down Puget Sound, hiding from pursuers in fog and dark. Thoroughly frustrated by his skills, US Customs posted a $25,000 reward for the capture of one of his boats.
Two days before the end of Prohibition, the king of Vancouver Island smugglers made his last run, 250 cases from Victoria to Seattle. Summing up, he said he had enjoyed his work, making some 400 runs, landing in 36 different spots along the Washington coastline and never missing rendezvous locations that he had often been shown only on a map. He landed liquor worth at least four million dollars, though at the end he had just $10,000 in the bank, a large sum for those times, but little enough for his risks. He had to have been lucky, he said, but through skill and good judgment, he also had made his own luck.
Hijacking and Murder
Many an account of the rum-running years makes them sound like fun and games—smugglers against police and customs agents, sailing by night and bribing by day. Let the eastern United States deal with the gangs, their violence and their involvement with prostitution and other crimes. On the West Coast, things were more civilized. At one point, West Coast rum-runners even got together to work out their business ethics, famously declaring that they would have absolutely nothing to do with the evil business of smuggling drugs. Even when US Customs got faster boats and guns with more firepower, death or even injury to someone from either side was rare.
However, there were exceptions. Some rum-runners were hijacked by those who brought their boats alongside with seemingly peaceful intentions but then pulled their guns and took the load. Vancouver rum-runner Charlie Boys was looking for his rendezvous point on shore in Puget Sound when he was overtaken by a bigger, faster boat. Three armed men boarded his boat, announced they were officers of the law and that Boys was under arrest; they relieved him of some $3,000 in cash. Boys was taken aboard the larger boat, delivered to shore and shoved into a car. Not long after, he was shoved out again, sans boat, sans liquor, sans cash, sans everything, hijacked and deceived.
The Beryl G, shown here in Victoria, was at the centre of the most sensational rum-running case on the West Coast. She was found adrift with her crew missing; eventually three men were sentenced to hang for their murders.
BC Archives B-06106
Other cases were less amusing. In September of 1924, the wooden freighter Beryl G disappeared at sea with 240 cases of whisky below decks. The next day, the lightkeeper at Turn Point Island at the northern end of Puget Sound saw the ship drifting with the tide. He and another man rowed out to the ship, but there was no one aboard. Dinner remained half-eaten on the galley table. Spatters of blood patterned the floor and the deck. The boat was a mess.
Beryl G’s captain, William Gillis, and his 18-year-old son, Bill, were nowhere to be found. No liquor remained in the Beryl G’s hold. Had hijackers taken the cargo and killed the crew? Rumours swirled around the docks at Victoria and Port Townsend. Informers, among them the rum-runner who had arranged for the ship to bring liquor to the United States, finally told all they knew. After many turnings and dead ends, the trail of rumour and names casually dropped into conversation led to four Americans with connections to liquor smuggling and sale.
Police finally broke one of the men, who confessed that though he had had little to do with the crime, he knew what had happened. On his evidence, the Canadian government was able to get the other three men extradited for trial. One was found in Seattle; another showed up in New Orleans, on the lam from the northwest. The third was discovered working the boats in New York City. All three were eventually extradited to Canada, though it took months to get the third back over the border. Meanwhile, two of the men, Harry Sowash and Owen Baker, went on trial in Victoria.
The witnesses disagreed over who had done what, but the outcome was clear. In the midst of hijacking the Beryl G and its cargo, the hijackers had shot the father and killed the son with a blunt object. The two bodies were handcuffed together and attached to a rope. One of the men slashed the bodies with a knife so that they would sink. Then he set the Beryl G adrift and towed the bodies out to sea with the hijackers’ boat, dropping the line once they were in deep water.
The bodies were never recovered, but the testimony was enough to convict Sowash and Baker. They were sentenced to death. The third man lost his battle against extradition and was also tried and sentenced to hang. Two were hanged on January 14, 1926; the last to go to trial had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
The Biggest Fish
And then there was the biggest fish of all. Roy Olmstead was just 33 years old when he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in the Seattle Police Force. Strong and intelligent, he seemed to have a fine policing career ahead of him—until he discovered how much money could be made rum-running by someone who could avoid the foolish mistakes and lack of organization he saw from amateurs engaged in the trade.
Olmstead promptly made a mistake of his own, running into a trap set by agents of the Prohibition Bureau. The agents captured 10 men, including another police officer, and about 100 cases of whisky, but Olmstead escaped. The agents had identified him, though, and he was ordered by his bosses to surrender. Tried and convicted, he was fined $500 and summarily tossed out of the police force.
No matter—rum-running seemed like a more profitable career than police work. Within a year or two, Olmstead was running more than 100 cases of liquor out of Victoria and into Seattle every day. He employed bookkeepers to keep track of shipments and money, warehousemen to look after liquor, drivers and mechanics for the cars and trucks, and lawyers to look after his interests and those of any employee who was caught. He owned a plethora of boats, trucks and cars.
Rum-running wasn’t Olmstead’s only business. He ran a radio and telephone company with his second wife, Elise, who read children’s stories over the air. Agents speculated, though no proof was found, that the stories included coded messages for the rum-running fleet.
Dry agents badly wanted to stop Olmstead. Late in 1924, they raided the Olmstead house. Surprisingly, they found not a drop of liquor in the house. They had used informants to get the information they needed about Olmstead, but it seemed that information was a two-way street. Olmstead later confessed that he had bribed large numbers of people, from police to customs inspectors to dry agents to warehouse and dock men, to keep his business running.
Agents did, however, find incriminating documents in the house and had pages of transcripts from a wiretap they had installed on Olmstead’s telephone. They charged Olmstead and 89 others with various violations of the National Prohibition Act and with conspiracy. It took a year for the case to come to court; meanwhile, 43 defendants had either disappeared or turned state’s evidence. Olmstead and 20 others were convicted, but Elise was acquitted. Olmstead was sentenced to four years in the penitentiary and fined $8,000, surely a small portion of the profits he had made. He appealed up to the US Supreme Court, arguing that use of wiretap evidence was unconstitutional. He lost. The king of the bootleggers was in jail. By the time he was released in 1931, Prohibition was on its way out.
In any case, Olmstead was no longer interested in rum-running. Converted to Christian Science while in jail, he now believed that liquor was destructive to man and society. He got a job as a furniture salesman and spent many of his non-working hours visiting jails. With his wife battling for him, he was granted a full presidential pardon in 1935, and the $8,000 in fines plus court costs were returned to him. Elise later divorced him, claiming desertion, and Olmstead spent the rest of his life working full time with Christian Science as a counsellor, Sunday-school teacher and prison visitor.
Rum Row
SS Quadra steamed out of Vancouver harbour one moonlit night in 1924. Originally built as a lighthouse tender for the Canadian government in 1891, her duties had included policing the fishing and sealing fleets off the northwest coast. But then she came down in the world: she sank after a collision with another ship and was refloated to work as an ore carrier. There was plenty of room below decks, though, for more profitable cargo, so workers for the Canadian Mexican Shipping Company loaded aboard 22,000 cases of liquor and a large quantity of beer, consigned, according to the ship’s manifest, for Ensenada, Mexico.
Quadra was barely into Juan de Fuca Strait when she hove to and waited for several launches that raced out from the opposite shore. Each captain presented half of a dollar bill with a liquor list written on it, which was matched with a half bill by the supercargo on Quadra. Identification duly made, each order was transferred from the larger ship to the smaller boat, and the boats made for the American shore. At Astoria, off the Oregon coast, the process was repeated.
Quadra was scheduled to make a similar stop off San Francisco, but a storm forced her to heave to for a week. She was also running out of liquor, so the captain took her up beside the five-masted wooden schooner Malahat, the queen of the liquor fleet, which often carried 50,000 cases of fine liquors. Somehow, she hit the Malahat. Busy stuffing mattresses into her side to keep her afloat as they drifted away, the crew failed to notice the approach of a Coast Guard cutter.
Once they noticed, some of the crew tried to slip away in a launch. The cutter’s crew fired a shot, and the launch stopped. Facing up to reality, Quadra’s crew went quietly. The ship was seized and taken into San Francisco harbour where the main crew members were arrested and charged with various offences. The company that owned the ship fought the charges, but the American government used delay as a weapon. Every day that Quadra was kept at the dock was a day not spent smuggling. By now in a sorry state, Quadra finally was sold at auction.
Such were the hazards of Rum Row. Though many rum-running stories are about small boats that took liquor from British Columbia along the coast, the real money was in the larger ships that steamed south with thousands of cases on board, standing off the coasts of Oregon and California beyond the territorial limit, while smaller American boats dashed to and fro.
These mother ships—Malahat, Coal Harbour, Stadacona, Mogul, Prince Albert, Hurry On, Lillehorn, Hurry Home and Quadra—lined up on Rum Row, each ship a floating warehouse of whisky, rum, champagne, gin and beer. The men aboard had backgrounds as varied as the ships they sailed on; what they had in common was their desire to make their wages. Sworn to drink nothing from the moment the ship left port, they were well looked after by the ship’s owners. If the ship was captured and the crew arrested, their bail or fines would be paid, as well as their wages for any time spent in jail.
Charles Hudson, marine superintendent for CEC, had no doubt that he was working for the good of Vancouver and Canada in his job. Vancouver, he told an interviewer years later, was in a depression in the early 1920s, and it was rum-running that helped reverse the downward spiral. “The tremendous moneys paid out to industry in Vancouver were never known by the average citizen. We spent a fabulous amount of money building boats; purchasing and overhauling engines; buying food and supplies for our ships; using the ship-yards for overhaul and in wages for the crew and fuel.” Many people, he said, thought of rum-running as a piratical trade, filled with shooting, killing, hijacking and boozing. But it was, in fact, a sane money-making proposition.
It was also filled with adventure. Hudson wouldn’t stay ashore and supervise; instead he signed on as captain of Coal Harbour. On her final trip, she was well outside territorial limits when the Coast Guard sent a shot across her bows and tried to arrest her. Hudson demurred, but the Coast Guard managed to get two men aboard, then seven, then finally a dozen. Outgunned, Hudson gave in, though loudly proclaiming the ship was more than 26 miles (42 kilometres) offshore, well beyond the legitimate patrol area for the US Coast Guard. A 1924 treaty specified that the United States would be permitted to arrest ships suspected of smuggling liquor only if the ship was within the distance it could reach from shore within one hour—an almost impossible rule to measure and enforce. The case went to court but was dismissed when the skipper of the Coast Guard cutter was found to have lied about Coal Harbour’s position. The skipper was also dismissed and later found guilty of perjury.
The Coast Guard would not be restrained long by legalities. Several ships were commandeered well outside the limit and then left at the dock in San Francisco while the legal arguments went on. Sometimes the seizure was upheld and the ship retained by the American government; sometimes it was not. But it mattered little, for as long as the ship was in the United States, it wasn’t out on the seas, running liquor into the country.
The End of Prohibition
By 1933, the American government had spent some $140 million trying to enforce the National Prohibition Act, with only about $65 million coming back in fines and judgments. Some 2,000 agents and investigators were trying to stop people from drinking and smuggling drink into the United States. But people continued to imbibe, and smuggling was an ever bigger and more organized business. The noble experiment had become an ignoble failure. In December 1933, Prohibition was repealed.
There were still some penalties to be paid by the big boys of the smuggling trade. Henry Reifel, for example, visited the United States in 1934 with his son. They were promptly charged with smuggling liquor into the United States during Prohibition and had to pay $200,000 in bail in order to go home. They forfeited the bail when they did not return for their arraignment in court. The case did not, in fact, ever come to trial, for the Reifels paid the American government half a million dollars in back taxes and fines.
In one last irony or insult, authorities were still concerned about liquor smuggling throughout the 1930s. But this time it was the smuggling of whisky, rum, champagne and beer into Canada from the United States, as legitimate brewers and distillers in the United States were able to price their products much lower than competing products made in Canada.
In the annals of West Coast smuggling, rum-running occupies a place of its own as a far larger enterprise than all the other smuggling that preceded it. It would not be matched in size and impact until BC bud came on the scene. Today, marijuana smuggling from British Columbia to the United States and drug smuggling into British Columbia make rum-running look like an amateur operation.