River of Whiskey: the True Story Prohibition, Detroit Rum-Runners, and Purple Gang

Seventy-five cars loaded with whiskey crossed the frozen Detroit River in a single morning - in broad daylight, in plain view, and no one stopped them.For thirteen years, the busiest smuggling front on earth was not Chicago and not the Atlantic Rum Row. It was a mile of moving water between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan - and through it flowed three-quarters of the liquor that kept dry America drinking. River of Whiskey follows a single bottle of Canadian whisky on its journey from a licensed Walkerville distillery to an American glass - and finds, strung along its route, an entire hidden industry: the export docks that papered its departure with customs forms claiming the cargo was bound for Cuba; the rum-runners who carried it across in eleven minutes; the Purple Gang, who seized the wholesale trade at gunpoint and held it for a decade; the police precincts that sold raid schedules like subscriptions; and the millions of ordinary customers whose quarters financed all of it. Drawing on court records, congressional testimony, coroner's files, and the newspaper archives of two countries, Frank Calloway reconstructs the Prohibition era's greatest supply chain - not as jazz-age nostalgia, but as the true story of what happens when the law withdraws from a market it cannot kill. Inside: - The legal loophole that let Canadian distilleries supply American crime - without breaking a single Canadian law - The winter ice road: cars, sleds, and skaters hauling whiskey across a frozen international border - How four brothers from Detroit's east side built the Purple Gang - and the massacre that destroyed it - The minister with a revolver who committed the corridor's first killing - and walked free - Roy Olmstead, the Seattle cop turned bootlegger whose case rewrote the Fourth Amendment - The radio broadcaster murdered hours after voters recalled Detroit's mayor >Every scene is documented. No dialogue is invented. Where the record is silent, the book says so - and where the legend has outrun the truth, you'll learn the difference. For readers of Daniel Okrent's Last Call, Erik Larson, and anyone who suspects the real story of Prohibition was never about the drinking - it was about the money.