Rum runners were relatively well behaved: author

“Behind every great fortune lies a crime,” Balzac observed, and the cynical epigram is a good place to begin a consideration of the Canadian Pacific Coast rum running fleet during America’s major experiment with alcohol prohibition from 1920 to 1933.

Criminal fortunes were made in the rum running trade, and some of Vancouver’s most stately mansions were originally built for smugglers and the businessmen who bankrolled them.

By the end of the American experiment with compulsory sobriety, 80 per cent of the alcoholic beverages produced in Canada were flowing south to serve American thirst.

Much of the booze came from new breweries and distilleries created to cash in on the illicit American market. Also, Canadian smugglers shipped imported European whiskeys and liqueurs south.

Courtenay-based maritime historian Rick James’s new book, Don’t Never Tell Nobody Nothin’ No How, has wonderful stories to tell about rum running on the Pacific coast.

James, the author of Ghost Ships of Royston and a frequent contributor to magazines like The Beaver and Western Mariner, tells these stories in competent, albeit undistinguished prose.

These stories include the picaresque life of Roy Olmstead, the affable Seattle police detective who changed sides and became one of the giants in the liquor trade on the Pacific coast, establishing shipping companies in Canada whose ships, on paper, were exporting booze to Mexico but in reality dropping off their intoxicating freight to small boats that ran the contraband in from the high seas to secluded American beaches.

James has stories to tell about the Reifel family, enterprising Vancouverites who made a fortune as liquor smugglers and transitioned seamlessly after prohibition was repealed to lives of respectability as prominent businessmen.

Perhaps the transition to legitimate business was easier for Canadian smugglers than it was for their more violent and mobbed up opposite numbers in the US. James portrays the mariners and businessmen investors in Canadian rum running enterprises on the Pacific coast as far less violent and mob connected than their American colleagues.

Whether or not readers are persuaded by this account of relative Canadian innocence, they are sure to enjoy this engaging slice of true crime history on the Pacific coast.

— PAT LAWSON Rick James is the author of Don’t Never Tell Nobody Nothin’ No How — The Real Story of West Coast Rum Running, an engaging slice of true crime history.