4: Scenes along the Gulf Coast

<< 3: Diplomatic Scenes in Southern Locales || 5: Epilogue >>

Alcohol trafficking along the U.S. Gulf Coast appeared rampant and organized. By the mid-twenties, gangsters and racketeers controlled most of the international liquor trade from importation to market. Thus, smuggling along the Gulf Coast indeed transformed into big business. Since no legal venue existed to market alcoholic beverages, a black market appeared, featuring a cast of shady underworld characters all attracted to the potential for high profits. Initially, these underworld groups cultivated alcohol markets along the Atlantic seaboard. While the Gulf Coast always displayed high levels of smuggling activity, the region took on more significance for the underworld syndicates by the mid-twenties. Federal government resources in the South lagged behind those available in the larger population center along the north Atlantic coast, which made it easier to land liquor along the southern coastline.[1]

    Louisiana and Mississippi served as appealing locations for landing foreign liquor destined for nationwide markets. Both states offered miles of rural coastlines as well as chains of archipelagoes that provided opportunities to smuggle liquor. Not only did federal prohibitions agents battle foreign rum smugglers, they contended with rampant moonshining from native populations not averse to distilling liquor on its own. Prohibition agents also encountered widespread law enforcement corruption at the local level. Five South Louisiana parishes did not record a single violation of the Volstead Act from 1925-27, while local police logged nearly 6,000 arrests for prostitution.[2] Indeed, federal sweeping of the southern coastline for distilled spirits proved just as arduous a task as in the Northeast.

    Coastal rumrunners operated brazenly all throughout the Gulf Coast. Numerous navigable lakes, bayous and rivers cut the Southern coastline from Texas to Pensacola, Florida. Moreover, the Gulf of Mexico’s “rum row” moved laterally to different positions off the coast line, unlike the famous Atlantic coast Rum Row, which was mostly stationary. This was particularly evident by 1925 when an escalating federal presence and publicity rove the Gulf Coast rumrunning fleet from anchorages off Louisiana’s Breton Island and the Chandeleur Islands to a new site below Timbalier Light, west of Bayou Lafourche (See Map 4).

During this period, Coast Guard patrols east of the Mississippi River met with little activity compared to a bevy of smuggling ships anchored west of the river near strategic positions from which speedy rum boats dashed in and out of the numerous tributaries.[3]

    The Mississippi Gulf Coast attracted hordes of rumrunners because of its relatively low population density, its strategic position to New Orleans and accessibility to northern markets by railroad and highways. In 1922, Gulfport, Mississippi authorities realized that a brisk rumrunning trade existed off the coastal shores of Harrison County after the bodies of two Mexican seaman washed ashore. Police later linked the two corpses to the William Tell, a notorious rumrunner. By 1923, Mississippi officials announced that liquor trafficking along the coast had “assumed unbelievable proportions.” Authorities estimated illicit coastal importations reaching the Mississippi shoreline at about 3,000 cases a month, valued at $360,000. A Gulfport police chief later commented that the federal government lack enforcement skill needed to track illegal liquor movements throughout the Mississippi sound. Furthermore, local police departments together with the county sheriff’s force were inadequate to effectively cover twenty-five miles of Harrison County coastline, and co-operative attacks by federal authorities in the area never developed.[4] Federal enforcement policy, however, was still in its infancy and ill-prepared for the onslaught of illicit trading in the early twenties. According to U.S. Customs Service director, the national smuggling rate skyrocketed 800 percent between 1920 and 1922. Between Havana and the mouth of the Mississippi River scores of boats ranging in sizes from large gasoline vessels to small steamships scoured the shores of the Gulf Coast making attempts to connect with their stateside contacts. The high smuggling activity along the Gulf Coast, particularly in New Orleans, prompted the Customs Service to conduct coastal surveys to determine how to block the burgeoning traffic, which also included narcotic and merchandise smuggling.[5]

    Many rumrunners anchored off the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts expanded their illicit trade to include various narcotics. In addition to alcohol, federal authorities seized escalating amounts of opium, morphine, heroin and cocaine. Small quantities entered the United States by lawful means; the narcotics were taxed and earmarked for medical purposes. Most of the illegal narcotics moved in the United States from Europe through the Caribbean. The larger Gulf rum ships typically obtained their loads from Belize and Honduras as well as Nassau, Bimini, and Havana, most of which passed through the New Orleans market. Lax regulations of these narcotics in Europe and Asia made them readily available there, and drug dealers conveniently co-opted the circumstance of widespread liquor smuggling to reach new drug users in the United States.[6]

    The sizeable volume of smuggling in Southern waters by 1925 prompted the leader of prohibition enforcement to move on a different tack. Secretary Andrews called for a sea offensive on rum ships operating in the Gulf of Mexico as part of a general campaign along all the U.S. land and sea borders. Part of this revamped enforcement included making New Orleans one of the Customs Service’s forty-eight designated entry ports, giving officers broader authority to admit or confiscate merchandise and to enforce navigation laws. New Orleans served as the Customs District 20, which encompassed all of Louisiana—except Cameron and Calcasieu Parishes—and the state of Mississippi above the thirty-first north latitude. Cameron and Calcasieu Parishes came under Customs’ Sabine, or District 21, jurisdiction with Port Arthur, Texas serving as the principal port site. This district additionally included Texas from the Sabine Pass, north along the Texas-Louisiana border to Shelby County, Texas and south to the Gulf of Mexico. District 21 police Lake Charles, and the Texas areas of Beaumont, Orange and Sabine. Customs additionally specified Mobile as its District 19 headquarters, which encompassed all of Alabama, including Mississippi south of the 31^st degree north latitude. Other Customs locales within the District 19 domain included: Birmingham, Alabama, and the Mississippi towns of Gulfport and Pascagoula.[7]

    Secretary Andrews also named New Orleans as the command site of the Prohibition Unit’s Tenth District and beefed-up the Coast Guard presence along the Gulf Coast. In addition to Louisiana, the Tenth District included Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas. Events preceding New Orleans’ selection as a hub-site stemmed directly from the fast developing underworld activity on the Gulf Coast. A Coast Guard base was also established in New Orleans coupled with a separate detachment at Grand Isle, Louisiana. Grand Isle later served as the mooring site of the Coast Guard’s swift vessel, Tallapoosa, which monitored vessel traffic moving along coastal Louisiana and through Bayou Barataria.[8] The Grand Isle-based Coast Guard detachment soon became noted for its intelligence tracking of liquor-laden ships moving in Bayou Barataria. Federal authorities faced a major obstacle, however, because the many canals and smaller bayous splintering off Bayou Barataria provided safe cover for rumrunners. Also, virtually no adequate road systems existed along these coast Louisiana areas, which further put police forces at a disadvantage.[9]

    Prohibition and Coast Guard officers’ policing of coastal Louisiana illustrated the harsh difficulties associated with sweeping an undefined and meandering delta coastline. Louisiana’s Bayou Lafourche area and other waterways on both sides of the Mississippi River provided a plethora of opportunities to move liquor inland from the Gulf of Mexico. A boat that passed through shallow bayous could go just about anywhere in South Louisiana. After taking on cargo around Timbalier Islands, rumrunners typically darted up Bayou Lafourche outrunning anything the government owned.

The lack of roads made land chases impossible and the non-navigable geography provided a rumrunner with sanctuary from federal patrols. With government agents in pursuit, a rumrunning skipper might unload his liquor-laden cargo into one of the many side canals and return—empty and innocent—back to the Gulf of Mexico only to tote back additional contraband that would be added to the liquor already hidden in the swampy underbrush. Also, large rumrunning schooners hauling between 200 and 1,000 cases of liquor often broached the Louisiana coast undetected. In many instances these slower and larger vessels masked themselves as fishing boats and freight carriers in the heavy inland waterways trade. The opportunities for hiding or running contraband, in fact, were virtually infinite and frustrating for prohibition enforcers.[10] (See Map 5).

    If a rumrunner elected not to come by Bayou Lafourche area, more stealthy opportunities existed to the west. A four-bayou system existed in Terrebonne Parish that the New Orleans Times Picayune claimed rumrunners used whenever more cautious inland encroachments were desired. The newspaper reported that no federal patrol could hope to apprehend a smuggler once a vessel made it into either Bayous Terrebonne, Little Caillou, Grand Caillou or Dularge, since these remote and swampy areas featured so many opportunities to hide (See Map 3 and Map 4 ).[11] Other routes included waterways by Fort Livingston, which required a rumrunner to keep a watchful eye out for the Grand Isle-based Coast Guard ship Tallapoosa. Also, the use of seaplanes eventually became a viable alternative for rumrunners. Liquor traffickers eventually began using seaplanes to move liquor from vessels anchored on the Gulf of Mexico to interior points along the Gulf Coast and the inland Mississippi River. One seaplane, reportedly, could transport a 2,000-pound load of distilled spirits after pulling along side a liquor-laden vessel. The use of these aircraft additionally confirmed to federal authorities the gathering of sophisticated liquor networks operating in the Gulf of Mexico since the presence of an air fleet represented a significant financial investment.[12]

    Federal clashes with southern traffickers escalated after the 1925 because of two prime factors. The surge in national enforcement that occurred in the wake of Secretary Andrews’ police reorganization stimulated movement by liquor smugglers to southern markets where the federal pressure was less intense than in Atlantic seaboard. Organized smuggling rings deployed faster and more maneuverable rumrunning boats along the Atlantic areas during the mid-to-later half of the twenties, while the slower, but larger, boats moved into the Gulf of Mexico, as was the case with the rumrunning vessel I’m Alone.[13] The second reason for this southward movement was that the federal government did not equally resupply manpower and equipment to both the North and South after reorganizing its enforcement attack. During a 1927 appearance before another subcommittee on liquor trafficking, Coast Guard Admiral Billiard later affirmed—albeit reluctantly—that the funding disparity between the two regions hampered marine patrols in the South. Billiard conceded that the Coast Guard did not know the full extent of smuggling volume along the Gulf Coast because “we have not the facilities on all coasts that we have in the north Atlantic area.” Prior to this concession, Billiard had announced proudly how Coast Guard forces ferreted out significant portions of the North Atlantic “rum row” fleet, thus greatly reducing the amount of smuggling along the U.S. coast. Billiard’s euphoria dampened significantly upon cross examination by a committee member who persuasively demonstrated that the U.S. success in the north Atlantic did not indicate anything but a movement of the rumrunning fleets from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico.[14] Thus, despite the counter-attack waged by the Customs Service and Coast Guard agencies, the organized maritime liquor trafficking trade in the South thrived.

    The Times Picayune described the Gulf Coast syndicates as “an actual and real, though more or less undefined organization of financiers and operating directors.”[15] By the mid-twenties, southern liquor groups anticipated the federal government enforcement efforts. In response, the liquor trafficking moved farther west along the Louisiana coast. Some illicit trading continued in the Breton Island area, but it existed mostly to divert prohibition agents away from the principal trading in the west. Very wet New Orleans, however, still served as the major artery of smuggling activity in Louisiana. Since the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment, law enforcement agents focused on the New Orleans area, raiding stills in the nearby marshes and arresting those who transported liquor.[16] As expected, federal authorities met with vehement opposition to prohibition in New Orleans and in southwest Louisiana. Natives residing in these areas featured high concentrations of Italians and non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, which not surprisingly resisted government reformers who ardently touted prohibition.[17] The Eighteenth Amendment prodded many of these New Orleans immigrants to develop highly refined information networks within the city to keep abreast of federal movements against liquor trafficking as well as prostitution and gambling operations.[18]

    Louisiana Prohibition Director O.D. Jackson scored some enforcement victories against the New Orleans underworld. Jackson understood that routine raids on local backyard stills and speakeasies did not pierce the armor of the city’s rumrunning syndicates, particularly those running alcohol in from Mexico and the Caribbean basin. In at least one instance in 1925, Jackson exposed the extent of underworld development in New Orleans, which included sophisticated communication systems of coded and cabled message directives orchestrating Gulf Coast alcohol smuggling.[19]

    In this particular case, Jackson enlisted the aid of an undercover agent to combat what was then called one of the largest liquor conspiracies ever exposed in the United States.[20] Undercover agent Patrick Needham posed as a disgruntled, underpaid prohibition agent who infiltrated a New Orleans underworld run by Alonzo Patterson, a powerful Louisiana liquor trafficker who controlled a vast network of bootleggers and corrupt government officials. Patterson eventually confided in Needham and allowed the St. Helena Parish native into the syndicate’s inner circle. Needham, in the meantime, gathered evidence on corrupt St. Bernard and Orleans Parish law enforcement officers while accepting payoffs from Patterson’s syndicate for protection from federal shakedowns. The amount of money at the immediate disposal of the syndicate was immense. One payoff included a $10,000 graft payment to Needham on the supposition that it would be given to Director Jackson.[21]

    Jackson’s probe culminated in thirty-four federal indictments, including many individuals holding high profile positions in Louisiana government and law enforcement. Among those indicted were: Walter L. Cohen, leader of the Republican Party in Louisiana and controller of the New Orleans Customs district; L.A. Meraux, sheriff of St. Bernard Parish, and Joseph Johnson, a New Orleans city police captain. Meanwhile, Treasury officials in Washington assessed the significance of the New Orleans case.

   

 New Orleans has been a hot bed of bootleggers for years, and the headquarters of gangs that apparently operated without restraint. The New Orleans bootleggers…were well organized, had plenty of money, found it easy to get supplies and dispose of them. Washington appears convinced that official collusion aided the New Orleans bootleggers, a defect in the government enforcement that has been present in other jurisdictions.[22]

   

    The impact of the Patterson case, however, reached far beyond the arrests of notable Louisiana characters. In this one operation, federal agents seized about 10,000 cases of liquor worth approximately $1 million in cash. Treasury officials learned later that the New Orleans liquor ring had imported its supplies from Havana and Belize, which allowed government agents to learn the location of rum storage areas while gathering intelligence on loading, transportation of illicit alcohol shipments to its destinations.[23]

   

    Washington-based prohibition officials regarded the triumph in New Orleans as a major blow to organized crime, and viewed the case as second in significance only to the outright blockade of the north Atlantic coast. Federal officials conceded that it had been “comparatively simple” to land liquor along the Gulf Coast. In the aftermath, Jackson received a promotion as the administrative head of the Prohibition Unit’s Tenth District. Jackson continued to work out of New Orleans until 1930 when the federal government again reshuffled its enforcement policy by dividing responsibility between the Treasury and Justice Departments.[24]

    Despite the federal government’s enforcement success in 1925, brisk smuggling along the Louisiana and Mississippi coast continued, and largely remained a federal responsibility. In May 1926, Louisiana legislators ignored President Calvin Coolidge’s order to “draft” state, parish and municipal officers into the federal prohibition force. State officials pointed toward a clause in the Louisiana constitution disallowing dual holding of state and federal offices. Lawmakers also applied the office restrictions to those employed within parish and municipal governments also.[25] Again, federal forces found themselves without local cooperation in enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment.

    The Louisiana legislature passed the Hood Law affirming statewide prohibition, but later softened its commitment in the wake of large scale smuggling and bootlegging. Political controversies erupted among legislative incumbents and those moving to amend the Volstead law. Lawmakers eventually offered a concurrent resolution petitioning Congress to amend the U.S. Constitution to permit wine and beer sales. This proposal had the support of U.S. Senator Edwin Broussard, who represented a predominant South Louisiana constituency, but not Senator Joseph E. Ransdell, who hailed from Lake Providence in the state’s northeastern delta region. Not surprisingly, Ransdell’s constituency comprised 40 percent of the state population that already lived in dry communities before the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment.[26] The political division on the alcohol issue clearly reflected the opposing attitudes that divided the Northern and Southern regions of Louisiana.

    Upon observing the large profits from foreign liquor trafficking, residents of many South Louisiana communities produced and marketed their own home brews and distilled liquor. Areas such as Leonville, Donaldsonville, Napoleonville, Opelousas, Arnaudville, and Pecaniere occasionally attracted notoriety and profits through the distillation and bootlegging their liquor (see Map 2). Heavily wooded underbrush concealed perhaps hundreds of illicit stills from federal “revenuers” in these areas. Economic depression characterized these rural, south Louisiana communities, while other areas in the United States basked in the prosperity of the roaring twenties. Not surprisingly, these Louisiana communities engaged in bootlegging for extra money. In some instances even local law enforcement officials protected this trade by advising local moonshiners of imminent federal raids.[27]

    Protection rendered by local authorities to bootleggers was quite prevalent in the southwest Louisiana parish of St. Landry. Sheriff Charles Thibodeaux and the deputy marshal of the Western Louisiana district Dudley Briley often colluded to send advance warnings of imminent raids to those boiling corn liquor in the brush along the Bayou Teche. Typically whenever Briley informed the St. Landry sheriff of a planned federal raid in the parish, Thibodeaux sent deputy sheriffs to pass the word along to moonshiners. The geographical remoteness of many St. Landry parish communities necessarily precluded the chance that any stranger went unnoticed anyway. In one case, Leonville residents often reacted to strange vehicles suspected of harboring federal officers by sounding off on deer hunting horns. The alarm alerted all moonshiners within earshot to vacate the woods. Federal agents seized stills, but logged no arrests to show for their efforts. The moonshiners, meanwhile, simply regrouped and rebuilt their stills.[28]

    Many who entered the illicit alcohol trade possessed limited financial resources, and moonshining provided them with a means to making quick money. As in other south Louisiana areas, economic hardship drove many families in St. Landry Parish into the moonshining and bootlegging trade. A moonshining venture required only enough capital to acquire materials to make a still and to procure a few pounds of sugar. Then, a moonshiner was in business. In some instances, dramatic material possessions appeared. Some families donned new clothes and shoes, while new and refurbished homes appeared amid backdrops of abject poverty. In most instances, the pressure to earn more income outweighed any conflict associated with the illegalities of alcohol trafficking.[29]

    Meanwhile, several moonshiners in the St. Landry areas of Opelousas and Leonville refined their liquor formulas so expertly they earned reputations for a high quality product even in markets outside the state. A former alcohol bootlegger from Mississippi recalled several areas in St. Landry Parish featured liquor of premium quality:    

When I wanted whiskey for my own use I went to Opelousas. There were three areas over there that had the best liquor. It was aged and those people put brand names on their bottles. The (illicit) production in that part of Louisiana was among the most wide open I remember being around.[30]

       St. Landry Parish’s reputations for spirit production, however, also attracted hordes of federal enforcement agents. Many local traffickers not only had to contend with federal raids, but also with “highjackers,” or groups of bandits who lurked along highways to steal a bootlegger’s liquor. Leonville resident Joseph Stout recalled that when this occurred “all you could do was go back into the house and forget about that load of whiskey. You couldn’t make a claim because it was already against the law.”[31] While a local pint of moonshine sold for about $1, certain St. Landry bootleggers could command up to $25 a gallon for their whiskey.[32] Not surprisingly, these prices attracted highway piracy.

    The federal government, meanwhile, did not limit its enforcement scope solely to one area. One of the state’s largest seizures of bootleg whiskey and whine occurred after federal authorities smashed a liquor ring near Crowley and Rayne in southwest Louisiana. Federal agents staged about fifty-five to sixty raids principally in Rayne and Crowley and along the Southern Pacific railroad between these two communities in Acadia Parish.[33] The captured drink amounted to about 1,000 gallons of whiskey and 10,000 to 15,000 gallons of wine, brandy, and beer and authorities logged approximately 75 to 100 arrests.[34] Other areas that drew federal attention included St. Mary, Iberia, St. Martin, and Assumption parishes, all ardently Catholic and pro-wet areas. As in St. Landry, many opponents of prohibition among the residential population also took advantage of opportunities to profit from the smuggling, moonshining and bootlegging trade. In effect, a local and organized underworld economy developed. Furthermore, national crime syndicates that participated principally in the Gulf Coast rum trade made connections with these rural coastal areas that opposed prohibition. As a result, a pervasive smuggling and bootlegging trade developed all across south Louisiana, which local authorities either encouraged or ceded exclusive enforcement responsibility to an ill-equipped federal government.

    Even high state officials appeared impervious to the illicit trade. Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who assumed office in 1928, rarely concerned himself with alcohol smuggling issues. Long once refused requests by Alabama authorities to extradite a man arrested on liquor trafficking charges. Long advised Alabama Governor B.M. Miller that he viewed liquor possession as a misdemeanor and therefore refused to execute the extradition warrant. In another instance, Long created a stir following a meeting in New Orleans with Atlanta Mayor James Lee Key. After key returned to Georgia, the mayor told an Atlanta church group that the Louisiana governor claimed that state authorities did not enforce prohibition laws. Long later denied Key’s allegation:    

I met Mayor key sometime ago in New Orleans, Long claimed. But I never told him that. I merely remarked that there were a lot of prohibition violators in Louisiana.[35]

       To this Mayor Key replied, “I asked the governor what Louisiana was doing to enforce Prohibition. (Long’s) reply was: ‘Not a damn thing’.”[36] Thus, the political and social controversies coupled with the economic opportunities precluded any serious threat to smuggling, bootlegging or moonshining in south Louisiana.

       By 1930 federal enforcement officials again termed smuggling conditions in New Orleans and along Gulf Coast as “highly unsatisfactory.” Federal officers did manage another successful raid in April 1931, which netted more than 100 arrests, but the case was equally portentous. An underworld group had developed a sophisticated radio communications system that used airplanes and speedboats to land distilled liquor at Pearl river, Mississippi and along Louisiana’s innumerable bayous. The New Orleans organizational development spanned the area from Vancouver, Canada to Belize, Central America, up to the Gulf Coast and into Chicago.[37] The investigation yielded evidence that millions of dollars of smuggled whiskey continued to land along the Gulf Coast, which defied federal efforts to arrest the trade. Authorities tracked the liquor from Vancouver and Belize to the Mississippi-Louisiana coasts where it was transferred to railroad cars consigned as lumber shipments. Federal agents believed that 100 ships at a time moved alcohol inland. By use of shortwave radio, local contacts navigated rumrunning ships through the federal enforcement posts. The federal government countered by using the wiretap to compile evidence and eventually seized eleven loaded rum boats and three rail cars laden with liquor along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The high level of organization and syndicate equipment evident in this case convinced federal authorities that Al Capone furnished much of the money needed to bring the alcoholic spirits to the Chicago and New York markets.[38]

    In November 1932, the Louisiana Legislature anticipated the inevitable in Washington by voting to repeal its state prohibition law. The vote, however, drew a legal challenge from many of Louisiana’s northern parishes, which legally blocked promulgation of the vote until national repeal occurred the following year. During the interim, the political situation reverted to local option. Southern parishes, meanwhile, gave local option little thought, although more than half of Louisiana’s sixty-four parishes operated under no-(liquor)license restrictions. Ironically, the political dynamics in Louisiana never really reflected any change from the pre-prohibitionary times. Dry parishes prosecuted alcohol violations and wet areas in the South and along the coastline resisted efforts to suppress alcoholic consumption.[39]

   

   

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   [1] Congress, House, Subcommittee of the Committee of the Ways and Means, Enforcement of Customs, Narcotic and Prohibition Laws, 69^th Cong., 2d. session, February 21, 1927, 444. Microfiche.

   [2] New York Times, March 4, 1932.

   [3] Times Picayune, June 14, 1925.

   [4] Interview with Gulfport Chief of Police published in the Times Picayune, April 17, 1923 and April 19, 1923.

   [5] A.W. Van Doren, director of the Customs Service Special Agency Division, Times Picayune, December 25, 1922; Times Picayune, December 29, 1923.

   [6] Times Picayune, May 26, 1923; Congress, House, Subcommittee of the Committee of the Ways and Means, Enforcement of Customs, Narcotic and Prohibition Laws, 69^th Cong., 2d. session, February 21, 1927, 444; annual report of the Commissioner of Prohibition, For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1928, (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1928), 12; A. Hyatt Verill, Smugglers and Smuggling, (New York: Duffield and Company, 1924), 213; also see Malcom F. Willoughby, Rum War at Sea, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1964), 118.

   [7] U.S. Treasury Department, Bureau of Customs, Customs Regulations of the United States, Prescribed for the Instruction and Guidance of Customs Officers, ed. of 1931, (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), 1-6.

   [8] Times Picayune, June 14, 1925

   [9] Ibid., December 6, 1924, June 14, 1925 and June 24, 1925.

   [10] Times Picayune, June 14, 1925.

   [11] It is not explicitly clear from the news source the location of this four-bayou system off the Louisiana coast. Terrebonne Parish, which abuts Lafourche Parish to the west, has a four-bayou system, each of which parallel one another as they twist and meander through the parish before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Terrebonne Parish officials contacted about this geographic reference believed that Bayous Terrebonne, Little Caillou, Grand Caillou, and Dularge are indeed the tributaries referred to by Times Picayune news store on June 14, 1925.

   [12] New York Times, May 29, 1925.

   [13] Sources of general note on Gulf Coast rumrunning are detailed in the Times Picayune, 1919-1933; U.S. State Department, I’m Alone Case, Arbitration Series No. 2, vole. 3, 35-7; also see Willoughby, Rum War at Sea, 117-30.

   [14] Congress, House, Subcommittee of the Committee of the Ways and Means, Enforcement of Customs, Narcotic and Prohibition Laws, 69^th Cong., 2d. session, February 21, 1927, 444. Microfiche; also see Willoughby, Rum War at Sea, 118.

   [15] Times Picayune, June 14, 1925.

   [16] Robert Hartsell Russell, “New Orleans and Nation-wide Prohibition as Reflected in the Times Picayune, 1918-1920,” (Masters Thesis, Louisiana State University, 1954), 9; William E. Leuchtenburg, The Peril of Prosperity, 1914-1932, 2d., (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 40-1; C.H. Gervais, The Rumrunners, A Prohibition Scrapbook, (Scarborough, Ontario: Firefly Books, 1980), 11.

   [17] Congress, House, Subcommittee of the Committee on Alcoholic Liquor Traffic, Survey of Alcoholic Liquor Traffic and the Enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, 68^th Cong., 2d. sess., February 19, 1925, 89-90; Times Picayune, May 4, 1923; William E. Leuchtenburg, The Peril of Prosperity, 1914-1932, 2d., (Chicago: The university Chicago Press, 1993), 40-1.

   [18] Times Picayune, June 14, 1925; New York Times, March 28, 1925 and September 13, 1925.

   [19] Joy Jackson, “Prohibition in New Orleans: The Unlikeliest Crusade,” Louisiana History, vol 19, (Winter, 1978), 273; New York Times, September 13, 1925 and March 28, 1925.

   [20] New York Times, September 13, 1925 and March 28, 1925; Jackson, “Prohibition in New Orleans,” 273-77, which contains oral history accounts from undercover agent Patrick Needham.

   [21] Ibid.

   [22] New York Times, August 8, 1925 and September 13, 1925.

   [23] Ibid., September 13, 1925.

   [24] Ibid., September 13, 1925.

   [25] New York Times, May 25, 1926.

   [26] Ibid., April 17, 1923; Correspondence, Edwin Broussard, Broussard papers; H.W. Rickey, “Prohibition Movement in the South,” (Master’s Thesis, Tulane University, 1924), 308; T. Harry Williams, Huey Long, (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 219

   [27] Oral taped interviews conducted in July 1994 with Elie Speyrer, Y.Z. Gauthier, Joseph Stout, and Rodney “Beb” Bergeron all residents of Leonville and Pecaniere during the Prohibition era. It must be critically noted that these interviewees recalled memories that occurred during their teen-aged years.

   [28] Interviews with Speyrer, Gauthier, Stout and Bergeron.

   [29] Ibid.

   [30] Oral taped interview in August 1994 with Davis White of Amite County, Mississippi. White said he trafficked liquor in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama from 1929-1932 before being forced to quite because police pressure on his bootlegging exploits became too severe. White claimed he earned a weekly income of $350 during his three-year stint as a bootlegger.

   [31] Interview with Joseph Stout.

   [32] Interviews with Speyrer, Gauthier, Stout and Bergeron.

   [33] Acadia Parish abuts St. Landry Parish to the southwest.

   [34] Times Picayune, July 21, 1923.

   [35] New York Times, April 5, and October 1, 1931.

   [36] Ibid.

   [37] Ibid., March 4, 1931 and April 5, 1931.

   [38] Ibid., April 5, 1931.

   [39] Times Picayune, January 8, 1933; Rickey, “Prohibition Movement in the South,” 278.

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