Guns, Gangsters and Rum-Runners

Prohibition and Bootlegging in 1920s Canada

Prohibition was an attempt to legally ban selling and drinking of alcohol.

Widespread in Canada, in most provinces drinking establishments closed and the sale of alcohol was banned with some exceptions.

Alcohol was still sold through the government for industrial, scientific, mechanical, artistic and medical uses. Distillers sold their products outside their own province with proper documentation.

Prohibition

Though seen as a patriotic duty to help win WWI, prohibition was also the result of years of effort by Temperance workers to close the bars and taverns, which were the sources of much drunkenness and misery in an age before social welfare.

The Temperance Movement

Bootlegging, the illegal sale of alcohol, exploded during the 1920s, as people sought ways to get their favourite brew.

The term bootlegging is thought to come from the common practice hiding flasks of alcohol in knee-high boots

The Beginning of Bootlegging

As demand in Canada and the US for alcohol grew, criminal gangs became involved in bootlegging.

By boat or tunnels, they would smuggle alcohol across the US border, a practice which often led to violent encounters with police.

Rum Running

A dramatic aspect of the prohibition era was rum running. By law, the US was under even stricter prohibition than was Canada from 1920 to 1933: the making, sale, and transportation of all beer, wines, and spirits were forbidden there

Rum Running

The Moose Jaw ConnectionMoose Jaw, Saskatchewan was known as “Little Chicago” for its maze of tunnels used for bootlegging, or the illegal sale of alcohol. It is rumoured that American gangster Al Capone visited often, using the town as a base of operations.

The Speakeasy

Speakeasies hid in plain sight among other types of businesses. Typically they were very plain on the outside, and were sometimes even located behind the storefront of a legitimate business. Patrons needed a secret password or knock to get in.

The Speakeasy

Speakeasies were in almost every community, serving up all the illegal alcohol their customers wanted. Some featured jazz bands and gambling as well.

Before Prohibition it would have been in extremely poor taste for a woman to be seen in a saloon, but women flocked to speakeasies in the 1920s.

Speakeasies

Rocco Perri was called "Canada's King of the Bootleggers" and "Canada's Al Capone." He was also one of the most fascinating characters in the colourful history of North American organized crime.

Rocco Perri-Canada’s Gangster

Perri was the head of the Calabrian mob in southern Ontario and his right-hand person, was his common-law wife, Bessie Starkman, the only Jewish woman in history to command an Italian mob.

The Calabrian Mob

Beginning in Hamilton, Ontario, Rocco laundered his liquor as turnips and sent boxcar loads south to New York and west to Chicago.

Selling liquor to the United States from Canada was perfectly legal here--but it took Rocco and Bessie Perri to send it on its way. Strangely although it was legal to manufacture and export the stuff, it was illegal to sell it in Ontario, so Rocco doubled his profits by "re-importing" some of it back into Ontario.

The Turnip Empire

In 1920, British Columbia votes to make alcohol available through the government. Manitoba and Saskatchewan follow a year later.

Ontario is 1927 and created the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, permitting the sale of liquor in the province though under heavy regulation.

The remaining provinces vote against prohibition by 1930, with the exception of P.E.I., which stays dry until 1948.

The Decline of Prohibition