Chapter 4

The Land of Legends

Up to the 1920s, commercial fishing was a mainstay for people living along Lake Ontario’s north shore east of Toronto. Unfortunately, the fishermen were vulnerable to bad weather and fluctuating prices, and these seemed to merge in the years following World War I.

The men were ill suited to move to the cities and take factory or labouring jobs. They had worked too hard for what little they had. To leave would mean losing their boats, their independence, and their way of life. For many, it would also mean leaving behind an area where their families had lived for generations.

In the twenties, many of these fishermen turned to rumrunning. Most worked as independents, scheduling their runs, competing with each other, and socializing together — an informal community knit by common purpose, mutual respect, and shared risks.

The independents were considered prized recruits. These men knew every rock shelf, sandbar, creek outlet, and cove on both coasts of Lake Ontario. Usually they owned their boats. A few captained boats owned by American bootleggers and, as enforcement tightened, many eventually became part of Hatch’s Navy, primarily because of better legal protection, guaranteed loads, and higher profits.

They also knew far more than coastlines. They knew what a lake storm could do to the waters in the area, making Main Duck Island a convenient lay-by. When storms tore across the lake, the veteran rumrunners would berth their boats and congregate at the island. There they would swap stories, trade information, play cards, and argue the merits of one boat over another.

Old King Cole

Today, along the eastern end of Lake Ontario, hard by the head of the St. Lawrence River, farms, tourist attractions, inexpensive motels, and B&Bs dot the Canadian shore. Laid back, sleepy, and definitely steeped in 18th and 19th century tradition, the towns lining the old Highway 2 along the shore never really seemed to grow.

Commercial fishing was a mainstay for many years, some 400 boats at its peak, but that’s fallen off now. Light industries have come and gone. Except for the lake freighters, water traffic is mostly pleasure boats and jet skis.

Historically, the area is Ontario’s Loyalist heartland. Many local people can trace their roots to the first Loyalist settlers — Upper Canada’s bulwark against Lower Canada’s feisty Francophones to the east, scheming Fenians from across the lake, and Bay Street capitalists who would conspire to rule them from Toronto down the lake.

Today, bird-watching is a popular activity in the area. Recently, a local newspaper reported sightings of 52 species during a club’s annual fall excursion to Main Duck Island. Except for an unmanned lighthouse, birds are about all Main Duck has to offer these days. During Prohibition years, however, Main Duck offered much more; it offered rumrunners a refuge on the waterway to wealth.

Several years before prohibition became law in the United States, a farmer named Claude Cole purchased Main Duck Island. Why he did so is unknown. Mostly scrub and rock, the land wasn’t much good for anything other than grazing animals. Cole kept a few of these, including a small herd of buffalo, which he permitted to roam freely over the island. Getting any of his animals to market would have been a chore, but perhaps Cole didn’t care. Perhaps he just enjoyed the idea of owning an entire island, and further, owning an island practically on the U.S. border. At any rate, Cole built himself two houses; a line of shanties along the lakeshore, which he rented to fishermen; and a small general store to provide fishing supplies.

The island had an excellent harbour, well protected from the east-end lake storms that could swing open the door to Davy Jones’ Locker for unwary fishermen quicker than a lake trout could jump at a bait. Main Duck was Cole’s fiefdom. The locals called him “King Cole,” and he didn’t mind a bit.

There was one other thing people would discover if they anchored at Main Duck. Even when Ontario had Prohibition, Cole would always sell you a drink. When Prohibition lifted in Ontario and instead threw its shroud over the U.S., Cole could sell you a case, even a thousand cases if you had the cash. Furthermore, if Cole didn’t happen to have the stocks, the dozens of Canadian rumrunners who stopped in at Main Duck could doubtless handle the order. Main Duck became the primary jumping-off point for the liquor trade, supplying drinkers in upstate New York and points south.

King Cole was rumrunning across the U.S. border almost from the day the Volstead Act was put into force.

The Weather Man

Main Duck was almost a second home to one very successful veteran rumrunner: Ben Kerr. Ben, it is said, should have been a meteorologist. People who had crewed for him swore he could predict weather with his nose. Before heading out on a run, he would load his cargo, lie alee in shelter and watch the waves as they rocked his boat, and then gaze into the night and sniff the air. Sometimes the waves would be choppy and the breeze stiff, possible indicators of an impending storm. Ben would ponder for a time, then order, “Weigh anchor,” start the big Packard engines that powered his boat, and race the dark, low-profile craft out of its haven and across the lake, sometimes making safe harbour just minutes ahead of a storm that only his nose knew was coming — this on nights when even the U.S. Coast Guard wouldn’t venture out of port. Ben was a rumrunner who the Coast Guard conceded would run his load inside the calm eye of a hurricane if the eye passed over his drop-off location.

Like the King, Ben started as an independent. By trade, he was a plumber, not that it mattered when Prohibition came along. He soon acquired a reputation as one of the most intrepid captains in Lake Ontario’s rumrunning history — he even ran rum across the big lake in winter. This made him particularly valuable to Hatch’s Navy, of which he was a member to the extent that he made his purchases through the Hatches and delivered their pre-sold loads for them. But, despite his work with the Hatches, he preferred to run alone and make his own deals.

To put Ben’s winter feats into perspective, one must only consider that unlike Lake Erie, Lake Ontario does not freeze entirely in the winter. However, it sometimes has a skin of shelf ice thick enough to carve away a wood boat’s hull. In open water, mini ice floes could hole a hull in the same manner as a monster berg did the Titanic. Then, towards shore was the ice build-up — the shallower the water, the higher the build-up. Worse still was icing on the boat itself. Each frigid wave left a sheen of water to ice over every rope, hatch cover, and deck it touched. Unless chopped away, this ice would build up and make a boat so top-heavy that the vessel could easily capsize. Ben, however, weathered it all.

In early Prohibition years, Ben’s primary boat was the Maritimas, which, at 42 feet, could carry 1200 cases of whisky. Ben sheathed the hull in tough, galvanized steel that would help plough the slush and shelf ice. He also made sure the Maritimas was well armed, equipping the boat with a semi-automatic shotgun, a Winchester rifle, and a handgun. These weapons, however, were not for use against the Coast Guard. Ben was among the first Lake runners to arm against hijackers. His weapons were for more than threat, and he kept them all loaded.

Ben Kerr was a canny operator. In 1923–24, the bottom fell out of the hard liquor demand in New York and neighbouring states due to the enormous success of rumrunning on the north Atlantic coast. Ben turned to running still-profitable beer across the lake, convenient because of access to breweries located at Prescott and Toronto. With hardly any enforcement on Lake Ontario during those years, Ben could run almost non-stop, night and day if he chose.

But 1924 would be the last easy season for Great Lakes rumrunners. By 1925, the Coast Guard had beefed up its interdiction capabilities. In May of that year, Ben Kerr was arrested. Though he could read the weather better than any rumrunner, he couldn’t read the combination of a shore patrol hiding, guns cocked in brush at the high waterline, and a Coast Guard cutter lurking 90 metres offshore, ready to close the trap.

Ben could chalk up his arrest to Mason McCune, who, overall, managed as many captures as his brothers. However, Mason’s implacable enforcement presence didn’t really begin to hang over Lake Ontario like a heavy fog until Ben’s arrest. Indeed, Mason had taken down a legend.

On the fateful night of the arrest, Ben, on the Maritimas, had to heave-to under fire from Mason. The renowned rumrunner was outgunned and outraced, but to his credit as a skipper, despite flying bullets and cannon shots, Ben had his crew hastily tossing evidence (i.e. bags of beer) over the side of the boat. Bullet-riddled, the Maritimas finally came to a stop, but even then, the crew continued to throw the beer overboard. An angry Mason then took out his revolver and fired shots in the air — everyone froze. His take was a paltry eight cases of beer, but that was all he needed. Another minute and those too would have been over the side, evidence gone.

On land, the receivers were nabbed. The shore patrol had also been on the march, thanks to customs collector Andy Wiedenmann. Wiedenmann had spotted the Maritimas’s unloading operation from a patrol car, and had coordinated the land-water seizures by radio. Ben, of course, was charged, but he skipped bail. After that, he was more cautious than a snail without a shell in sea gull country.

Mason’s name was blazoned as the man who’d nipped the nucleus of a huge rumrunning ring. Nonsense, of course, but it was great press for the Coast Guard. Mason knew better, and his record of captures in subsequent seasons proved that out.

Soon after his arrest, Ben switched back to running whisky instead of beer — just in time, too, because the seaboard boundary was extended from three miles to twelve, and hard liquor running on the Great Lakes became much more profitable.

In the fall of 1925, Ben took possession of a new boat, the Pollywog. By then, he had three boats operating across the lake to Oswego and Rochester. He also had a fine home, more than two dozen boathouses (which he rented out), several other boats, and a marina. Possessing all of this wealth and an outlaw status to boot, Ben certainly didn’t need the risk of running his boat, but he preferred to do it anyway. Fast as the wind, he and the Pollywog regularly made three or four runs weekly, whatever the season. It seems Ben was a man who treated rumrunning as a recreational activity — an extreme sport, if you will.

Ben’s preference to run the Pollywog in poor weather left him out of the clutches of the Coast Guard most times, but he still had some close calls. A zealous cutter captain once chased the Pollywog from Rochester, back across the Canadian line, and right into Hamilton harbour. Ben finally escaped by hiding the boat in one of his boathouses.

The Coast Guard knew the Pollywog so well that by 1928 they no longer bothered with warning shots. If they saw it, they immediately opened up on it with machine guns — one of the reasons men were reluctant to crew Ben’s boat. He scoffed at the marksmanship of Coast Guard gunners, even after they nearly shot off his head. Fleeing a cutter, he was nicked deeply enough in the chin to carry the scar for life.

To his end in late 1928, Ben Kerr remained convinced of his invincibility. Some said the weather and the water killed him; others said he was outgunned by hijackers. What’s known for sure is that he died out on the lake — washing up dead on the shore — while making his last run, like his first, from Main Duck Island straight into the heart of a winter storm. Ironically, he didn’t have to do it. But perhaps for Ben, simply riding the merry-go-round was more important than capturing the brass ring.

Gentleman Charlie Mills

Ben Kerr stood out among rumrunners because of his phenomenal streak of luck and his willingness to run the lake in winter, but the eastern Ontario region had an abundance of other “characters” as well. “Gentleman Charlie” Mills was one of these characters. He was also a striking contrast to Ben Kerr. While Ben would squeeze a dollar until it sweated, Charlie was a free spender and gambler. While Ben was close-mouthed and secretive, Charlie was everybody’s pal, often hanging out at Main Duck just for the company.

Charlie was successful at running rum until 1926, when he was outrun by a cutter. He received a whopping $10,000 fine and a year in jail. That should have put him out of business, but in late 1927, he was right back at it. Unfortunately for Charlie, the same bad luck that dogged his poker playing and crapshooting now struck him on the water. In the summer of 1928, he lost both of his boats to the Coast Guard.

Losing the second boat was too much for him. In pitch dark he was forced to beach the boat and leg it into the woods. As if that indignity wasn’t enough, the cutter stood offshore and sprayed the woods with machine-gun fire. Bullets kicked up dirt at Charlie’s heels and clipped off tree branches, scant inches over his head. Charlie was 50 at the time; too old, he decided, for sprinting through tangled underbrush in the middle of the night. This was his last run. Charlie turned to farming.

Merle McCune (the man who shot Leo Yolt) was responsible for finally convincing Charlie to get out of the rumrunning business. It was Merle’s machine-gun fire that raked the brush as Charlie hotfooted it away from his beached boat, both load and boat lost to the Coast Guard.

Gentleman Charlie wasn’t always dogged by bad luck. For example, despite several attempts, the relentless Frank Naphan never managed to arrest him. Naphan’s responsibility was enforcing Ontario’s liquor laws. That included shutting down short circuiting, which was how he initially got on Charlie’s trail.

Doing a tad of short circuiting when cross-lake business was slow, Charlie Mills once sold a load to a local bootlegger, Harry Yanover, near the town of Cressy in Prince Edward County. Yanover’s cars got stuck in the mud as they were trying to get to the loading point, where the liquor had been moved up from the beach by horse and wagon. He enlisted some local farmers to push the cars free. In the darkness and confusion, two good ol’ boys managed to spirit away six cases of whisky from the untended wagon and hide them in a barn.

That should have been the end of it, but one of the two bragged. Someone promptly stole the booze. Thus began a cycle. Another group stole it, then another. Then it was stolen back, then stolen again; call it musical whisky. Eventually, Naphan heard about the elusive illegal cache and tried to follow its trail.

High drama had come to the tiny village of Cressy. For two weeks, Naphan travelled from farm to farm, questioning and re-questioning his suspects, a list that included just about everybody in the area. When he was finished, he charged seven men, including Harry Yanover, with a variety of liquor violations, and obtained six convictions. Charlie Mills, as most rumrunners did, escaped the net. As for the liquor, unfortunately, each time a group stole the booty, a few bottles would be cracked open to celebrate. By the time Naphan wrapped up his investigation, the truly damning evidence was long gone. So was Charlie.

The Class Act

Another rumrunner well known at Main Duck was Bruce Lowery. A trustworthy man with a reputation for honesty and hard work, Bruce began as a commercial fisherman. At first one of the tenant fishermen on Main Duck, in 1925 he moved to nearby Amherst Island after King Cole raised the rent. When the bottom fell out of the fish market in 1926–27, Bruce still had to make a living. Inevitably, given the company he had been keeping (namely with a shifty character named Hedley Wellbanks), he turned to rumrunning.

Among the many unlikely people to be found running rum from eastern Ontario was veterinarian Hedley Wellbanks. Hedley’s claim to fame was threefold. First, before the Volstead Act came into force, Hedley roamed the village main streets and rural back roads of eastern Ontario selling horse liniment, which was mostly alcohol. In short, he was a bootlegger. When arrested, he was accused of having sold enough horse liniment to service every horse in Ontario. Second, he was responsible for introducing Bruce Lowery to rumrunning. And third, he did Bruce Lowery such a disservice that Bruce never again fully trusted a confederate.

Hedley ran his Corby’s whisky on an old slow tub named the Rosella. In Hedley’s employ in the summer of 1927, Bruce was captaining the Rosella in broad daylight when it was impounded in Canadian waters by a Coast Guard cutter. However, as Bruce’s court date neared, more than half a dozen witnesses were prepared to attest that the Americans had transgressed, especially after Hedley ferried these witnesses on an all-expenses-paid junket to Oswego, where he wined and dined them until the trial. Two were church ministers, pillars of respectability, making the verdict a done deal. Although Hedley had never been charged, he did own the boat, which gave him a vested interest in the trial’s outcome.

The good doctor won the case, but the Rosella was put up for auction. Vexation turned to anger when he was outbid by an American bulk fish buyer who wanted the boat for hauling large quantities of fish.

But Hedley was determined that justice would triumph. The Rosella was renamed by the new owner and put into service, periodically visiting eastern Ontario ports to take on fish. Hedley bided his time and finally got his chance. He got word the boat had put in for the night on the Canadian side of the border to await loading the next morning. Accompanied by a Canada Customs officer, Hedley took back his boat at gunpoint. Then began a diplomatic kerfuffle. The doctor and the customs officer were charged with theft.

The now notorious doctor’s defence was simple. He had stolen nothing. The boat was his because the Coast Guard had illegally seized it. As for the gun incident, he blamed it on the customs man who, he testified, had acted precipitously. Apparently, truthfulness was not a Hedley Wellbanks trait; however, he did win. The presiding judge branded the Coast Guard’s original seizure an “act of piracy.”

In the meantime, Bruce Lowery had spent a month in jail. Hedley had preferred to spend his money entertaining his witnesses rather than to post Bruce’s bail. Furthermore, at Hedley’s trial, Bruce was forced to give his real name. That he was now publicly known as a rumrunner cost him his fiancée, who dumped him. After all, she was a respectable woman.

The decision to get into rumrunning must have been a major career leap for Bruce. He was a devout Methodist and hardly ever drank — given his environment, a genuine straight arrow.

Though he came late to the rum trade and spent a month in jail at the outset, Bruce was fully committed to his new career and quickly made his mark. His seamanship and navigation skills were as uncanny as Ben Kerr’s ability to read weather. Also like Kerr, Bruce ran year-round. For a time, until he could afford his own boat, he worked for Charlie Mills, especially during winter.

As Bruce’s reputation spread, so did his number of runs. Stories are recounted of him having to be chipped from his iced-over boat, and of fishermen beating ice from his encased body with sticks while he thawed before a blazing fire in a shanty on Main Duck.

When Charlie Mills got out of the business, Bruce went to work for an American wholesaler based in Syracuse, New York, running a fine vessel called the Blackjack. Such was his success that he became something of a debonair man about town. In his view, “a captain should look as classy as his boat.” Others of the fraternity, working out of the Kingston and Bath areas, were of the same mind. They drank too much, caroused, and gambled, living as hard in port as they did on the water. By 1931, the lifestyle had taken its toll on many of them.

Bruce Lowery was a legend on Lake Ontario, but like most rumrunners, he eventually caught some bad breaks. Back-to-back Coast Guard captures just before the Volstead Act was repealed left him on hard times. He tried farming for a few years, but finally looked up the Hatches. They still knew a good man when they saw one. Bruce was given a job at the Gooderham and Worts distillery and worked there until his retirement many years later.

Wild Bill Sheldon

Renowned as a party animal, and for his stubbornness in the face of adversity, one member of Main Duck’s loose fraternity was part charming swashbuckler and part con man. He was large and loud, and loved to laugh at his own jokes. His bonhomie could take over a crowded room before he stepped through the doorway. And he loved to run rum. This man was “Wild Bill” Sheldon, most arrested rumrunner on the Great Lakes. In the early years, his good fortune prevailed by virtue of using aliases whenever he was arrested, and by being arrested in different jurisdictions. When he died, his funeral was delayed because authorities had great difficulty determining his real name.

Wild Bill’s first arrest came in 1925. Probably not the best seaman on the lake, Wild Bill managed to get his boat stuck in ice near Rochester. There he waited, unable to dump the evidence overboard because of the ice. Eventually, a shore patrol crossed over the ice on foot and arrested him. Bill must have felt profoundly frustrated watching the patrol pick its way towards him. On the other hand, the slow advance of the patrol meant he had lots of time to come up with a fake name. Putting aside the arrest — a minor setback to success in his scheme of things — as soon as he made bail, he got right back to running rum, only to be captured again before the summer was out, not once but twice.

He fared no better in 1926. While captaining a snappy pleasure boat that was wholly unsuited to the rum trade, he was arrested once again. In this case, the Coast Guard had to fire on the boat before Wild Bill would heave-to for boarding. The habitual rumrunner was given a six-month jail sentence.

His most flagrant act ended when he was captured in his boat, the Jim Lulu, hauling a load to Rochester. Always the opportunist, he took the load on a trip he had to make anyway because he had a court appearance there on a previous charge of rumrunning. Unfortunately for Wild Bill, the court was not impressed. The Jim Lulu, worth more than a Coast Guard picket boat (the smallest craft used by the Coast Guard), was impounded, presumably to be sold at public auction, as was the custom of the time. Usually, a public auction enabled rumrunners to buy their impounded boats back at a fraction the cost of a new boat. But this was not the case for Wild Bill. Probably an embarrassment for him to the day he died, Wild Bill’s boat was, instead, inducted into the Coast Guard fleet and, horror of horrors, successfully used to hunt down rumrunners.

Ultimately, it was Lake Ontario that finally put a stop to Wild Bill’s antics. In 1930, his boat was wrecked and he drowned during a winter storm. Still, fond memories of the big, blustery, dark-haired man with the huge grin and gold-capped teeth linger in any room where old timers tell of Lake Ontario’s “true independents.” His funeral was almost reminiscent of gangster funerals of the day, a grand gathering of civic leaders and villains, and, not incidentally, Belleville’s social event of the season.

The Nasty Boys

One gang of rumrunners on the Great Lakes was never bothered by hijackers. These were the Staud brothers, who ran liquor to supply their own bootleg outlets in the Rochester area. The four brothers ran several boats, and all became millionaires. By all accounts they were a colourful lot. Their bookkeeper, Karl “The Bishop” Staud, actually embezzled a million dollars from his brother, Midge, suggesting larceny could run thicker than blood. The excuse he gave Midge — that being a crook, he couldn’t help himself — was enough for Midge to spare him retribution, a logic only another crook would understand.

The Stauds were not nice people. Ed and George had honed their criminal bent while cattle rustling in Nevada. When things got too hot for them, they moved to Rochester, where their brothers Midge and Karl were already establishing liquor operations.

Soon after Prohibition began, the Stauds’ 50-foot cruiser, the Dorothy, became a regular Hatch customer. The speedy cruiser could carry 1000 cases of whisky and still outrun any cutter on Lake Ontario. Just outrunning the Coast Guard didn’t satisfy the brothers. On the off chance a cutter got close enough to shoot at the Dorothy, they armour-plated the stern and pilothouse.

It seems the Stauds thought Lake Ontario was an extension of the Wild West. The Dorothy became the first armed rum boat on the lake. Even at that, as the Coast Guard soon discovered, the Stauds went somewhat overboard. Whenever they made a run, they carried along a .50 calibre machine gun.

Inevitably, skirmishes would occur, almost as if the Stauds went out of their way to find them. In one month, there were two encounters with the Coast Guard. In the first, superior fire from the Dorothy drove off the cutter. In the second, the Dorothy outran the cutter, but not before the two vessels exchanged nearly 700 rounds of fire.

The Stauds also frowned on rumrunners who hauled liquor to the Rochester area for their competitors. While there is no evidence that they hijacked loads, they were so intimidating that other rumrunners tried to steer clear of them.

Judge Frank Cooper

Apart from incurring disfavour from the Stauds, Canadian rumrunners had another good reason for avoiding the Rochester run. This “reason” was perhaps the only friend the U.S. Coast Guard had in court: Judge Frank Cooper, whose jurisdiction included Rochester. If rumrunning had been a capital offence, Cooper would have been New York State’s “hanging judge.” So severe were his sentences that rumrunners demanded a premium for entering his jurisdiction. In one year, he assessed more total fines than all of the other judges combined in the state.

But the dedicated Judge Cooper and the intrepid McCunes were among the exceptions. More often than not, the men charged with enforcing the laws of Prohibition were not as competent as the men bent on breaking those laws. Among the many incidents that illustrated this fact was one that took place on Coast Guard-2372. On one occasion, this Coast Guard cutter, with a crew of two, was taken over by three rumrunners whom the crew had captured. The captain was assaulted with a beer bottle before the rumrunners went on their way, taking the cutter’s ammunition with them. The punch line was that the leader of the threesome was an ex-Guardsman.

In the same vein, as if to emphasize the dubious workability of the Volstead Act, in 1928 over-zealous U.S. liquor enforcement officers were audacious enough to raid the Pennsylvania State Sheriff’s annual banquet and try to arrest everyone for liquor offences. A brawl ensued, after which the sheriffs passed a motion to hold their next banquet in Ontario, where, by then, liquor could be legally consumed on public premises (provided that the provincial government received a fee for a licence). Prohibition still had five more years to run, but this event must certainly count as one small sign that things were somewhat askew.

When the millions of gallons of liquor that were run over the border are added up, the amount run across the eastern end of Lake Ontario was only a small fraction. Despite this, the “independents” rank among the most colourful and daring of the rumrunners, easily eclipsing the fledgling Bobby Unsers who were then tearing up the dusty prairie roads to slake the thirst of mid-Westerners.