The bootlegging business wasn’t so good. By early March 1925, the Seattle cartel, which had been immune to problems with the Seattle police because its boss was a former police lieutenant, was coming under increasing scrutiny by a fanatical branch of the FBI, an organization that apparently was impervious to bribes. Liquor continued to flow from Canada across isolated beaches and bays into the hands of customers, but because of increased federal pressure the smugglers were asking for more money to deliver. Local law enforcement at the retail end, aware of the margins the bootleggers were making, had upped the price of protection. Aksel was paying Louhi nearly double what he’d been paying her when he started the business.
He was getting squeezed on the demand side as well. Some buyers reacted to the higher prices by driving to Portland, loading up their cars, and smuggling the liquor into the Bachelor Boys’ turf, putting the Boys into the role of customs agents. In addition, many people were becoming adept at making bootleg beer or whiskey themselves. Although nowhere near the quality of smuggled alcohol, it got people safely drunk at half the price. Ironically, the Bachelor Boys found themselves trying to shut down illegal stills, mostly through intimidation but sometimes through confrontation that ended in gunfire. These firefights were short. Still operators weren’t gangsters; they were farmers and loggers making money on the side. No one was killed in these fights, but Aksel got winged before Christmas and in February Heppu got a bullet that went through his right upper arm. It had exited without serious bleeding, the usual cause of death, but he was out of commission for over a month.
Just before April, Aksel was summoned to Nordland.
Louhi wasted no time. “Seattle gave notice that they’ll only sell me liquor I retail myself. They know about our deal and they also found out about some of my other wholesale deals.” She humphed. “Their margins are getting tight and they’re consolidating. In short, cutting out the middleman. That’s me and you.”
Aksel nodded his head. He knew it had been coming and he was more vulnerable than Louhi. Through her saloons, she was a major retailer in her own right and far more nuanced in the human end of the business, mainly political. One of the costliest lessons of his life was not having asked Louhi first about doing something illegal, like depositing under an assumed name.
“You’ve got three options,” Louhi said. “You go to work for the cartel, you go back to logging, or they’ll come gunning for you. You know the ship from Vancouver leaves in two days. If you don’t stop the order, the Seattle people will find out and assume you’re challenging them.”
“So, it’s war or working for wages,” Aksel said.
Aksel relayed the business news to the Bachelor Boys the next day. Louhi needed their decision in a week.
“That’s just before the shipment from Vancouver,” Jens said. “We’ve already paid half of it. That’s money we’ll never recoup.”
“That ship leaves Vancouver tomorrow,” Aksel said. “We don’t stop it and take the loss, Seattle will know and assume we’re still in business.”
“Are we going to let these bastards in Seattle push us around and steal our money?” Jens asked.
The discussion didn’t go on much longer after that. The other Bachelor Boys’ blood was up and so was their pride—three Finns and a Norwegian. When the vote was taken, it was four against one. By the next evening, the ship literally had sailed.
* * *
Its destination was a beach near the mouth of the Niawiakum River, just south of the marshlands of the estuary. Second-growth timber, already over thirty years old, came right down to the water.
The Bachelor Boys parked the trucks close to the beach. It was raining the soft misty rain that felt as though one had walked into an atomizer spray. Gray turned to black.
About midnight they heard the motor of a tug. As arranged, Yrjö signaled with a flashlight from a small promontory at the south edge of the beach. The tug was moving very slowly, pushing the barge, feeling its way down the bay, a man at the barge’s bow throwing a lead line.
Aksel smelled the tidal flats to their north and the marshland of the estuary, pungent in the cool mist. Then he saw a light wink twice and Yrjö signaled back. The sound of the motor rose as the captain brought the bow of the barge in to the left of Yrjö’s light. There was a soft sliding impact and the barge came to rest on the beach.
They went to work, shifting the load of gravel to uncover the hatches, then struggling from the barge to the beach, each man carrying two cases. Aksel knew that he should have set one of the boys back toward the road as security, but faced with the need to rapidly unload the cargo he didn’t—an understandable choice but a mistake.
They all saw the brilliant white flashes and heard the whip-crack sonic booms of the bullets before they heard the gunfire. They were on the ground, Aksel and Heppu going underwater, when the hammering air-pulsing sounds of rifles and Thompson submachine guns hit their ears. One crewman and Jens went down. The engine on the tug revved up and crewmen were scrambling to climb aboard as the captain backed the barge off the beach.
The Bachelor Boys, with no verbal command, formed a line perpendicular to the beach and parallel to the line of fire coming from the trees to take the attackers under fire without shooting each other. It saved their lives.
Jens screamed that he was hit but could still shoot and kept shooting. Aksel fired quick bursts from the Thompson and the other three coolly fired their Springfields, taking aim at the flashes of light. The ambushers’ fire slackened. Aksel shouted at Heppu and Kullervo to crawl forward with him. Yrjö, who was on the far end of the line, crawled in the direction of the road. Using the darkness as cover, he rose to a crouch and scrambled toward where he’d seen the flash that indicated the end of the ambushers’ line. He reached the tree line and slowly worked his way toward the flank of the ambushers’ line. He saw a face light when the man’s rifle went off. He fired his own, ejected and chambered, and fired again. There was no more firing. He stumbled on the body in the dark, put a bullet in the man’s head to make sure he wouldn’t come after him, and moved toward the next flashes.
Aksel knew what Yrjö was doing the instant he heard the two rifle shots. He loaded another drum and directed a short burst of fire just ahead of Yrjö’s advance. There were another two cracks and flashes from the right side and then silence. The gunfire from the left of the ambush was now sporadic. There was another single shot from the right side. Then the firing stopped completely. All they could hear were the muffled shouts of men running for their lives, never having expected such a disciplined reaction.
Yrjö signaled the letter Y for his name with his flashlight. Aksel, Kullervo, and Heppu joined him. They shouted for Jens, but there was no answer.
“You find him,” Aksel told Heppu. “We’ll cover.”
Heppu took the flashlight and, covering it down to a sliver with his hand, found Jens unconscious and bleeding badly from near the hip. He ripped Jens’s trousers down and got his belt right up in Jens’s crotch and then twisted it around his thigh using a stick to turn it as tight as he could. Aksel and Heppu joined them, and the three of them hauled Jens to the Ford and got him to a doctor in Willapa.
He lived but would walk with a considerable limp for the rest of his life.
Over the next week, they sold all of their inventory. Then Aksel took the other truck to Nordland where he asked Louhi to broker a peace.
“You killed two of them,” she said. “And you wounded two more. They won’t be in a peaceful mood.”
“How many were there?”
“Eight. They said there were twelve of you.” Louhi shook her head, smiling.
“Jens will never walk right again.”
Louhi took that in. “Do you quit?”
“We quit.”
“OK. Let’s keep them thinking there are twelve of you. The Seattle boys are mad but they’re not stupid. They’ll happily take over your turf without having to fight twelve damned good fighters for it.”
The Bachelor Boys were out of the bootlegging business.