The Real McCoy

On November 23rd, 1923, a tall, thin 45-year-old man stood on the deck of his cargo ship off the coast of New York waiting to be arrested. At the time he was the most wanted man in America. But he had never actually broken the law. Bill McCoy was a modest boat builder who had become a national symbol for defying the most unpopular legislation in American history.

This gentleman crook was the pioneer Rum Runner of the prohibition era. A man of innovation and maritime tradition, who fueled the Roaring Twenties by transporting liquor along the American Coastline and challenging the US Government to a War on Rum. McCoy was a new generation bootlegger who earned the name The Real McCoy because he always delivered undiluted alcohol. His Whisky, Gin and Rum were always uncut.

And his patrons loved him for it. The legend of the Real McCoy is that this was an honest man, a straight shooter, and if you bought booze from him you wouldn't die or go blind. He became a household name in less than a year and embarrassed US authorities by constantly beating them at their own game. People wouldn't obey the law.

That's what was unanticipated. It is amazing the number of people who happily defied the law. If you think about it, what laws could we conjure up where 80, 90 percent of the people who voted for it would then defy it. McCoy confounded the Coast Guard by exploiting legal loopholes that kept the speakeasies of New York filled with the demon rum.

The Coast Guard was not prepared for prohibition, they did not have the men, they did not have the resources; and as far as cutters and inshore craft to combat the amount of smuggling that was happening. The King of Rum Row transported over 2 million bottles to slake America's thirst. At this point, the Coast Guard had to catch Bill McCoy. By the summer of 1923, Bill McCoy was becoming the Government's primary target.

He forced the Coast Guard to look at ways that smuggling could be done. I think it was Bill McCoy who galvanized the modern day Coast Guard. McCoy's transformation from modest boat builder to Public Enemy is a legendary tale about a man who personified the tumultuous years of Prohibition in America. Bill McCoy was one of the most romantic figures in an era of iconic personalities that yet define our national character.

And that's why they called him the Real McCoy, and why his product was the Real McCoy. Bill McCoy was born in 1877 in Seneca Falls, New York. The son of a stonemason, he chose a life at sea over the footsteps of his father. He began his nautical adventure by entering the Philadelphia Maritime School at the age of 15, where he spent two years on the training ship USS Saratoga.

Crossing the Atlantic and learning the ropes, for what would become a life at sea. Well, in so far as he was other things such as a boat builder or even a clown I suppose at times, he finished first in his class. He was a leader and those things sort of fell in behind that. In his early Twenties, McCoy returned to the family home in Holly Hill, Florida.

He went into business with his older brother Ben, designing and building boats for wealthy customers like Andrew Carnegie. They also ran excursion boats and delivered cargo between Daytona and Palm Beach, Florida. By 1919 a 42-year-old Bill McCoy fell in love, and eloped with Twenty-year-old Maude Clock, the daughter of a prominent Daytona surgeon. Life was good for McCoy, but the winds of change were blowing in America.

And the US Government was headed down a rabbit hole. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, implemented as The National Prohibition Act, went into effect on January 16th 1920, and it prohibited the manufacture, distribution and sale of alcohol in the United States. This forbidden fruit legislation had been fomenting since the early 1800's, in reaction to the extreme poverty and domestic violence caused by an astonishing plague of alcoholism that was devastating American families. By the late 19th century, it was estimated that 20 gallons of hard alcohol were being consumed per year for every man, woman and child in the United States.

This was eight times the level of alcohol consumption occurring today. There's a huge temperance movement that's mostly directed inside native stock Protestant America. Very moralistic. Very much arguing that men must change their habits to behave well and take care of their families.

As a result, there were many organizations advocating Prohibition. But the primary forces at work were the Women's Temperance Union, The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan. These organizations inadvertently became strange bedfellows in a common struggle to maintain political control of America and enforce Protestant values on an increasingly diverse society. Protestant women took Direct Action by protesting in front of saloons and ushering their neighbors toward salvation.

The great success of the Women's Uprising in the latter 19th century, evolved into the Women's suffrage movement. And a powerful political force was born. The Anti-Saloon League became the nations first political action group. They mobilized the conservative, religious base and paid thousands of professional lobbyists for several decades to influence the Temperance vote on the local, state and national level.

The Anti-Saloon League itself is an exceptionally sophisticated in fact it's a pioneering organization. And what they do is take this quite large kind of diffuse, and I would argue, basically religiously motivated constituency and gives it very sharp political focus. The Anti-Saloon League had the conviction that through moral reform, they could achieve social transformation. But the massive influx of Catholic immigrants to America's cities was shifting the population base from rural to urban and Protestant to Catholic.

Immigration begins to transform the country. And the people who arrived most notably are the Irish and the Germans. Both of them bring with them drinking cultures from Europe that are not like the drinking culture that had developed in America. Protestants don't like the way these immigrants are behaving.

The Ku Klux Klan responded to the wave of immigrants by attacking their drinking cultures. With over 4 million registered members, the Klan latched onto Nationalism as America entered the 20th century. Since woman didn't yet have the right to vote in this country, the vast membership of the Ku Klux Klan represented 15% of America's voting populace. And their position of intolerance toward immigrants became a powerful force for Prohibition.

Similar to the red and blue state divisions of today, Prohibition became law in 31 rural states. And by 1919, the issue was then presented before Congress by the first-term Republican from Minnesota, Andrew Volstead. This collection of political factions also utilized the First World War as an ideological instrument. They lobbied that grain was for bread, not for drink.

And created a schism that made the use of alcohol appear unpatriotic. Prohibition is a symbol of the Protestant desire to have control of America and the upper class desire to have control of all these unruly poor people. It was the "Wets" versus the "Drys," but for the majority of Americans, it was forced sobriety. Many considered this social change through legislation, a new form of tyranny.

Millions of lives had been changed. And American society was in turmoil. Like the world around him, Bill McCoy's life was about to turn upside down. It began when the sluggish economy of 1920 forced the McCoy brothers into a financial corner.

Wealthy clients commissioning new yachts were scarce. To make matters worse, Bill's beloved parents both died; and his wife Maude left him after only six months of marriage. But Bill McCoy, ever the optimist, came up with a new plan for business and adventure. The first opportunity was when, a man that he knew came along in a car that he didn't know.

And the man was dressed up in a way that he had never seen him before. And this immediately intrigued him. How had this man come into all this money so suddenly. And the local fellow was very glad to tell him exactly how he did it.

And he said he had done this by transporting liquor. And Bill thought, well if this rather shiftless person can do this, I bet I could do this a lot better. Because I'm a hard worker and I know how to run boats! Now although he was a 'tea-totaller' himself, Bill thought that the prohibition law was ridiculous.

And so he had no compunctions about breaking it. Furthermore, he knew that because the law was there, it would make whatever he did more profitable. Since the McCoy brothers had great experience in transporting cargo by sea and they saw little enforcement of this law from local authorities, the fun loving McCoy convinced his conservative brother Ben that it would be a timely adventure. Things were changing enough in his life, so that when he had an opportunity to make money in a different way, or a slightly different way and still use boats - he was open to that.

So Bill traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts with $20,000 dollars. He purchased the Henry L. Marshall, a 90-foot fishing schooner that needed a lot of work. Bill didn't know it at the time, but this would be the boat that would change America forever.

During the 5 months it took to refit the Marshall, Bill stumbled across something unexpected - the love of his life. She was 114 feet long and weighed over 60 tons. Her name was Arethusa and she transfixed Bill at first sight. She was the symbol of maritime elegance.

But she was way out of his league and Bill simply couldn't afford her. So, he went back to the Henry L. Marshall and with the conviction that only true love can inspire, Bill invigorated his plan to make a fortune at rum running and return later to buy the Arethusa. They set sail for the Bahamas on board the Marshall, to find a load of liquor and begin their fateful quest.

But there was yet another lady in McCoy's life. And she would create an encounter of a different sort. Back in Washington, D.C. Mabel Walker Willebrandt was appointed Assistant Attorney General in charge of prohibition enforcement.

She was a woman in a man's world. And at a time when women didn't yet have the right to vote in America, having a female Assistant Attorney General was unusual and many people in government underestimated her. This tenacious, intelligent, Harvard graduate was one of the most powerful women in America. And she would stop at nothing to uphold the law.

Initially, she saw a lot of internal problems with corruption and the 'Old-Boy' Network. When these seizures and captures took place the justice department would drop the ball; and sometimes they were being bribed and sometimes cases weren't coming to trial. Mabel encountered wide spread corruption across every sector of law enforcement. Her ambition would be stifled by the "Good-Old-Boy" network that permeated Government at virtually every level.

So she cleaned house. And fired over 700 of her own agents and officers for bribery and corruption. She recruited a new breed of eager, young law enforcement agents who wanted to rise quickly through the ranks of government. And smash the corruption and greed of the previous generation.

In favor of a national baptism by law. It would be a rebirth of the Criminal Justice System in America. And one by one, these true believers would strive to convert the main stream. And slow this destructive flood of corruption.

These men were foot soldiers in an internal struggle to replace the inept with the industrious. They were more than just born again officers, their leadership would endeavor to destroy this American delirium. And they happily seized the opportunity to enforce the Prohibition law and reinvigorate the Criminal Justice System. But the Law Enforcement community wasn't the only dysfunctional sector of the Government at that time.

Well the Coast Guard has it's every day responsibilities as a life saving service and as a Custom's enforcement unit. They did not have enough resources available to combat rum-running and smuggling when prohibition was enacted. But, no one in the Government nor the Coast Guard saw rum-running coming. In 1920, the fledgling Coast Guard was less than five years old and it was ill equipped to enforce this new law within the US 3-mile jurisdiction.

Lacking in vessels, crew and strategy, the US Coast Guard was stuck in a quagmire of red tape, and was virtually powerless to enforce the law that was now on the books. And the government was blind to the fact that the rum war would be expensive, but since income tax in America at this time was relatively new, the loss of tax revenue from alcohol importers would reduce the US government's only source of income by over 50%. Not everyone in the Coast Guard accepted this situation. High-ranking officers resisted enforcement of the law and rebellious drinkers within the ranks protested the Prohibition law they were sworn to uphold.

The Coast Guard faced an uphill battle and it would take enormous political will to gain cooperation within the ranks and procure enough resources to combat the problem. The Coast Guard forced out many of the old school officers. And brought in a new breed of leader, who would uphold the law. With Law Enforcement and the Coast Guard on the mend, Mabel Walker Willebrandt would soon become Bill McCoy's chief nemesis.

Eight hundred miles South-East of Washington, D.C., Bill McCoy and his crew on the Henry L. Marshall sailed into Nassau. In 1920, the Bahamas were part of the British Empire. And since there was no Prohibition in Britain, Nassau was the ideal logistical and legal base for McCoy to operate.

McCoy's first opportunity to move some liquor came when a man offered to charter the Marshall and bring a load of Rye to Savannah, Georgia. In order to protect himself from US Authorities, McCoy paid the Nassau Harbor Master to register the Henry L. Marshall as a British vessel with duplicate transit papers. These papers stated that McCoy was moving liquor from one legal port to another and the US Coast Guard could not interfere.

With 1,500 cases of Rye on-board and the Union Jack proudly on-display, The Henry Marshall headed up the warm blue road of the Gulf Stream to Savannah, Georgia. The Real McCoy was now in uncharted waters and he was about to make a big mistake. In the early 20th century, the territorial waters of the United States extended from the shoreline to three miles off shore. Any vessel that entered US territorial waters was subject to the laws of the United States, including the Prohibition law.

At this point McCoy hadn't figured out that he should really stay outside the three-miles, as it was then, limit. And he took the Marshall inside, to the shallow water there. And was unloading it directly to very small boats. And a vessel came by in the mist there and he thought it was a government vessel, and he thought, oh my God, first trip and we've been nailed right away.

I'll never do this again and he didn't. Fortunately for him it was not a government vessel and he was able to escape. But he'd learned that lesson. McCoy had unloaded all 1,500 cases of Rye at Savannah.

And in two weeks time had earned $15,000 profit. Which was more money than he could make in 5 years as a boat builder. He also realized that as long as he stayed in international waters, he wouldn't actually break any laws. He quickly sailed back to Nassau where his charter client reloaded the Marshall with 3,000 more cases of Bourbon and they went to New York, where they arranged for small boats known as "Contact Boats" to go-through US territorial waters out to the Henry L.

Marshall. Then McCoy unloaded the liquor, in the relative safety of international waters. So that was the defining moment for the whole era, because it allowed an infinite supply of booze to come into the United States. Prior to that, there was a very finite amount of liquor in the United States in bonded warehouses and stuff that could be made in the back woods and stills.

On that voyage, the Henry L. Marshall became the first Rum Runner and Bill McCoy had just invented Rum Row. Now that event did not go unnoticed by other people who were interested in making money in this fashion. In a matter of months, dozens of McCoy imitators flocked to rum row to fuel the incredible growth of gin joints in Manhattan.

They created a floating world, an alternate society within sight of the metropolis of New York. McCoy recognized the opportunity and borrowed money from his Gangster clients to buy the Arethusa and eventually three other boats that would comprise McCoy's defiant armada. At this point I don't think the Gangsters had the reputation that they did later on and he could still compartmentalize a bit there and think that 'well this is just a loan, and loans come from bankers and bankers are whatever you know'. Later on he took much pains to deal with gangsters as little as possible, which is why all these myths of Capone and him, sitting on porches together and stuff, seemed to me, bogus.

Like the Henry L. Marshall, McCoy registered Arethusa as a British vessel and he renamed her Tomoka. But he always thought of her by her original name, Arethusa. For she was an aristocrat, a thoroughbred.

And she sailed straight into McCoy's heart. But managing a bootleg armada with dozens of crew-members wasn't an easy task. He started to buy his own booze and he bypassed the middle men and made arrangements directly with the buyers to meet him on rum row in their Contact Boats. He invented more efficient methods of packing liquor bottles to maximize each payload.

And he began making regular trips from Nassau to New York every month. Adding to the ever growing club of bootleggers on rum row. Well at the maximum amount, you know, they had about a hundred boats, it was like the Yale/Harvard regatta out there or something, you know, it was quite festive, eventually they'd bring jazz bands out to these various boats. And they were running the girls back and forth, and they had daily newspapers keeping up with what was going on and fruit and meals and the whole thing was out there.

Well in early prohibition days most of the people who were running liquor at sea were ex-mariners, ex-fishermen and some people have called prohibition the first fisherman subsidy program the governments ever had. There were hundreds of boats out there on Rum Row on any given day, there were very few that actually were doing it in such a way that they could maintain this business day after day, trip after trip. So, McCoy began to develop a reputation for reliability, because he would always be there and he would have good product because he would not cut the product. The phrase Rum Row was catching on and like Skid Row, the negative connotation of the name became a catch-all phrase for any collection of boats selling illegal liquor outside the US three mile limit.

Rum Row extended from New Jersey to the tip of Long Island and sometimes off cities like Miami, Savannah, Norfolk and Boston. It was a hodgepodge of people. Life was pretty good on the row. McCoy and the other rum runners developed new technology to fight the war on rum.

They built false bottoms in their contact boats to hide the liquor. They installed rheostats to dim the lights at night and they replaced their 50 Horse Power motors with 500 Horse Power Liberty aircraft engines, essentially inventing the speedboat, in order to outrun the Coast Guard. Now when you have the old work boat engines and the Coast Guard with their sterling engines, they're not much more an that, you sort of go chugging along, boomph boomph, like this like a couple of ducks chasing each other, then you put these liberties in here and VEERHOOOOOM! Since radio communication was still in its infancy, most of the Coast Guard vessels didn't have radios in those days.

Which made it even easier for the rum runners and normal, law abiding citizens who sometimes got into the act. There's all kinds of stories about good citizens, you know, finding this stuff. And they would bring it up on the beach when the Coast Guard wasn't around and they would plant these, the bottles in their gardens and to keep track of rye and gin and so forth, they would put like Peas for Gin, and Carrots or something for rye, the little things you use in the garden, then when guests would come to dinner or something, they'd go out, they'd say go out and dig up some carrots and they'd bring whatever it was in there. But back on Rum Row, Bill McCoy set the price for liquor.

Since his booze was always uncut, he got top dollar. And the deck of Arethusa looked like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as supply and demand on rum row was based on McCoy's published rates. So many boats came and went, McCoy never had time to even count the wads of money shoved into his hands or even track the His clients became his friends and at the end of every trip, the money always added up. There was honor among these seafaring brothers.

The news media grabbed hold of the story and they made heroes of the rum runners and embellished their stories of camaraderie and daring-do. The media cast Bill McCoy in a glamorous light and after only a short time at sea, the legend of The Real McCoy had become a national obsession. Bill McCoy had become bigger than the Coast Guard and something needed to be done. This was a time period when the federal government started collecting intelligence.

Prohibition was the beginning of the intelligence movement spying on the American people. The Coast Guard and federal authorities began inspecting boat yards. They wanted to find out how the rummies were making su. So they went undercover in Brooklyn, Mystic and Gloucester and began arresting boat builders for creating vessels that could out-run the Coast Guard.

The rum war became a technological battlefield. Now this is hard to imagine, but the criminals had more money than the U.S. Government. And they began to design and build new boats to run the blockades and embarrass the Coast Guard.

I'm sure that it was very discouraging to see a boat going 40 knots, 35 knots and not being able to apprehend them. The Coast Guard could maybe go 20 knots. Said, you got to be kidding me we can't fight this war. The news media made McCoy look like a hero and the Coast Guard look like the Keystone Cops.

Congress and President Coolidge recognized that the Coast Guard needed additional funds. So that they could combat the rum war. So they earmarked about, 14 million dollars to build additional cutters and to almost double the size of the Coast Guard. McCoy doubled the size of the Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard naturally tried to keep up with the technology, so they would get a government contract out and they would say lets have more horse power, lets talk to the sterling people we gotta have better engines. The rummies would walk over, they'd look up at what they were doing and say Okay, that's what we have to beat, and since they didn't have government contracts, they could just you know, take some cash out of the back of the car and lay it on the guy and say okay do a little bit of this a little more of that and the Coast Guard guy watches all this and he says, you know, 'Well, in six months maybe we'll have one that would've beat this guy six months ago.' So the rummies kept right on going and they forced the Coast Guard to adopt a new tactic. They started shooting at the contact boats. The Coast Guard was just trying to get their attention, because these guys driving the boats couldn't hear, they couldn't - these engines were so loud they couldn't hear the Coast Guard firing at them so at night they'd fire tracer bullets and they'd shoot over the bow and just try to get their attention.

And once in a while they've killed people. They killed people. Meanwhile a new visitor arrived in Nassau. U.S.

Customs Agent Pete Sullivan showed up looking to collect intelligence on Bill McCoy. But McCoy was hard to find among the growing crowd of Bootleggers, mobsters and nefarious characters who had descended on Nassau. Pete Sullivan, while down in Nassau, went to the Lutheran Hotel, which was the bootleggers head quarters, and he was fingered as being a federal agent. So his life was threatened and they were gonna kill h.

But it was McCoy who came to his rescue and said no, he's a friend of mine and he's on the square. McCoy put him in his room, let him sleep there for the night and put him on the ferry, the first ferry to Miami the next day. McCoy lived by a strict moral code. He had to save Pete Sullivan's life.

This is what makes McCoy different from other criminals of the time period. The other iconic criminals of the period were basically energized by a kind of pathology it seems to me. People such as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and then the big city syndicate people like Al Capone. McCoy was a cut from very different cloth.

He was not a psychotic. His impulses were positive. He was an innovator. Completely different than someone running around in a car shooting people.

McCoy certainly was not a violent man. Back in New York, the crew of the Henry L. Marshall was being arrested and the boat was impounded for selling illegal liquor. The problem began when the Captain of the Marshall went ashore.

He got drunk in a speakeasy and bragged about selling booze to one of Mabel Walker Willebrandt's undercover agents. The agent notified the Coast Guard and they captured the Marshall in international waters citing that the Marshall had illegal exchange with small contact boats from the U.S. And it was this exchange that placed the Marshall in violation of U.S. law.

The Coast Guard felt it had enough jurisdiction to go out and seize the Marshall. Even though the Marshall was in International waters. But the U.S. Government claimed that shore contact constituted an illegal act and the owners of the vessel, Bill and Ben McCoy, were indicted in New Jersey.

By the summer of 1923 Bill McCoy was becoming the governments primary target. He forced the Coast Guard to look at ways that smuggling could be done. And McCoy was the first case the Coast Guard had. The government had good reason to silence s legend.

He became the face of rum row. They found that if they could get McCoy they could pretty much turn things around because he was after all the symbolic leader. Just the same way that, and a few years later they created the idea of Public Enemy Number One, with Dillinger, and people like that. They would concentrate on one person because they figured if they could nail him, then they would get this great moral victory.

McCoy rose to the challenge and hired expensive lawyers to battle in the courts for the release of the Henry L. Marshall. Every bootlegger on rum row followed the news stories and they started moving farther off-shore. If the Marshall case held up in court, the loophole McCoy had invented would be closed and the government would be able to legally arrest them 12 or even 50 miles off-shore, regardless of their documents or country of registration.

Despite the mounting difficulty on Rum Row, the demand for liquor in New York increased. Instead of reducing liquor consumption, Prohibition caused the number of liquor establishments in New York City to double in the first year. Diverse groups of everyday business people, hardened criminals, blacks, whites, men and women all came together in a melting pot of self-indulgence known as the Speakeasy. Prohibition was probably the first time in American history where people were openly violating the law and it became fashionable to break the law.

It is amazing the number of people who happily defied the law. If you think about it, what laws could we conjure up where 80, 90 percent of the people who voted for it would then defy it. Emancipated young women known as Flappers moved to New York City and horrified their Suffragette mothers by finding jobs, renting their own apartments and personifying American independence. The 1920s is a tremendous decade of change and some people would say progress for women and woman's rights.

The ability to live as a single woman. But young women also don't have to belong to a fatherr a brother or a husband or a boyfriend, but to be on their own. The flapper comes out of this new sense of young women's independence. For most Americans, the 1920s was an exercise in survival.

Thousands of people died from contaminated alcohol. Crime skyrocketed and American society began to slide toward the Great Depression. But out of turmoil, opportunity was born. And enterprising criminal organizations found it easy to recruit foot soldiers who had nothing to lose in this time of chaos.

So the rum game became big business. And some heavy hitters moved in on rum row. This was the inception, you know, the beginning of organized crime. When things started escalating and piracy and hijackers became part of the norm, it kind of turned dark and dangerous.

The small operators began to be forced out by the big syndicates. But hijackers were only half the problem on Rum Row. By now the Coast Guard had finally received the assets they needed to fight the rum war. They implemented a picket line strategy using a combined fleet of destroyers, gun boats, 75 footers, 36 footers and harbor craft.

Hundreds of ships were used to disperse the rum fleet and impede their re-supply efforts in order to starve out rum row. Once the Coast Guard got the assets, and became organized, it was that point that the Coast Guard started becoming the Coast Guard we know today. These were honorable men, conducting a difficult and unpopular task. They shed their Keystone Cops image and cut off the rum fleet from their supply lines.

Forcing the contact boats to dump their cargo, rather than get caught with the goods. The tide was changing and hundreds of spotlights were searching for Bill McCoy. McCoy decided it was time to skip town for a while. They sailethe Arethusa to Halifax, Nova Scotia only to find that U.S.

and Canadian authorities had begun their dry diplomacy and McCoy's boat full of liquor wasn't welcome in Canadian waters. Their limited supply of provisions forced McCoy and his crew to sail to the neart friendly port. The French owned island of St. Pierre, off the coast of Newfoundland.

As soon as McCoy arrived he knew that St. Pierre would be the other end of the rum line. And now he had the French Islands which were very close, by the great circle route, to Scotland and the Scotch, and the wines of France, and all of that good stuff. And so he could just move from one end to the other, pausing in-between, off New York, and offload there.

With Nassau on one end and St. Pierre on the other. This was the high point of the rum game for Bill McCoy. He now had five boats making regular trips from Nassau to Rum Row to St.

Pierre and back to Rum Row. In August 1923, Captain Ryan of the Coast Guard cutter Manhattan spotted Arethusa just outside U.S. territorial waters. Since McCoy was already wanted in New Jersey in connection with the capture of the Henry L.

Marshall, Captain Ryan sent an undercover crew to apprehend McCoy. But they didn't know that McCoy had just recently purchased guns to protect himself from hijackers. And McCoy didn't like the look of these guys. The Coast Guard claimed he actually fired at them with the machine gun.

McCoy he always said that he thought that it was a hijacker. And the Coast Guard always claimed that McCoy damn well knew that they were the Coast Guard. But how this would be possible, you could make a case both sides, because they were not in uniform and it was like an unmarked cruiser you might say. But this was the thing that really cinched it.

McCoy was protecting himself from the hijackers, but it was the biggest mistake of his life. At this time they didn't have the terminology for public enemy number one, but, if they had, it would have been Bill McCoy. And I guess that the Department of Justice started working with the Department of State, which started working with the Department of Treasury to all kind of focus in and narrow in on Bill McCoy. At this point the Coast Guard had to catch Bill McCoy.

McCoy didn't know that he'd become the most significant law enforcement target in America. He also didn't know the U.S. Government had secretly negotiated a treaty with Great Britain. Allowing the U.S.

Coast Guard to arrest McCoy in international waters, even though Arethusa was flying the British flag. Following instructions from Mabel Walker Willebrandt to capture McCoy at all costs, the Captain of the Seneca steered his ship into international waters. And he stormed the Arethusa. Raise the anchor!

Get those sails up! Prepare to fire! Stand by... Before McCoy even noticed, Seneca had blocked the escape route....and fire!

Seneca pinned Bill McCoy in about six and a half miles off Sea Bright, New Jersey and sent a boarding party over. The Coast Guard sent Lieutenant Perkins. He was the boarding officer and the arresting officer of Bill McCoy. The lowest point of his life, I have to think, is when Lieutenant Perkins, ordered McCoy's crew to take down the sail.

And they looked at McCoy, and then they took down the sail because Perkins told them to. Yeah, it was the saddest day of Bill McCoy's life, his beloved Arethusa was under the command of the US Coast Guard. So, here's McCoy, he's taken by the second officer of a steamboat, in a row boat. On November 23rd, 1923, the Robin Hood era of Rum Row came to an end.

Prohibition would continue for another 10 years. But for Bill McCoy, the rum runng was over. This was a momentous event in the rum war. I think it was a feather in everyone's cap, to have gotten Bill McCoy.

Mabel and even the administration, they got their man. While awaiting trial, McCoy was visited by U.S. Custom's Agent Pete Sullivan, an unexpected friend who came to repay his debt to McCoy for saving his life back in Nassau the year before. fame to help his cause.

He took Bill on a tour of Washington, D.C. so that congressmen, federal agents, Judges and even Mabel Walker Willebrandt could shake hands with The Real McCoy. McCoy was this figure of fascination with the federal government, that they wanted to know who this Real McCoy was, this gentlemen rum runner. And so people were eager to be with Bill McCoy, he was a rock star.

He was a celebrity. Mabel Willebrandt offered McCoy a deal if he would plead guilty and cooperate with the Justice Department. He knew the politicians, and he knew the syndicate boys, and he knew the little guy down the road who picked the stuff up on the shore, everybody, the whole line from one end to the other. And he more than anybody could've really ratted all of that system out.

Bill McCoy was able to negotiate the charges being dropped against his brother Ben, in exchange for pleading guilty. But he refused to become a snitch. On March 25th, 1924, McCoy entered the Essex County Jail in New Jersey to serve a nine-month sentence. But life in jail was not very difficult for the famous McCoy.

There's evidence that he spent several nights in a boarding house down the street from the jail, with someone named Mrs. McCoy. And he was even spotted at Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn with the warden of his prison attending the Walker/Shade Prize fight. I don't think that warden Blue was even paid off to do that, I just thought he thought 'hey this is fun, lets do this.

I got Bill McCoy lets go to the fights!' But they were immediately spotted by the press. And the next day Bill McCoy and warden Blue ended up on the cover of the newspaper. Of course when that happened the politicians had a lot of fun with that. And the poor warden lost his job and they transferred McCoy down to another jail.

McCoy was going to be released early on good behavior, but after the Boxing Match incident, he had to stay in jail for the entire nine-month sentence. On Christmas day 1924, the nine-months was up and Bill McCoy finally got his life back. So the time comes and there's Ben. Faithful Ben picks him up and they drive down to Florida and they're back for New Year's Eve.

The McCoy brothers spent the rest of their lives living modestly together in the family house in Holly Hill. There is no evidence that Bill or Ben McCoy were ever involved in rum running after the prison term. And Bill always claimed that all the money he made running 170,000 cases of alcohol was spent on lawyers. So the McCoy brothers returned to the boat building business, dabbled in Florida real estate and eventually preserving several , important historical ships.

In the nine years after McCoy got out of prison, the Rum war continued to rage without him. The battle lines kept pushing further out to sea, but the government was never completely successful in stopping the rum runners. The political tides were shifting. The Great Depression shattered the nation's economy which was already strapped by the rum war.

Overzealous Coast Guard crews continued to kill rum runners, many of whom were unarmed local fishermen. And the carnage of the Valentines Day Massacre in Chicago all contributed to the perfect political storm known as "Repeal." On April 4th 1933, the 21st Amendment won the popular vote. Prohibition was repealed and the biggest party in American history overflowed into the streets. President Hoover described Prohibition as "The Noble Experiment." But it failed miserably and instead of helping American society it managed to add to the social problems it was designed to mitigate.

The unintended results of the Noble Experiment included increases in homelessness, corruption, alcoholism and death. The Volstead act is also credited for spawning the plague of organized crime in the United States. Besides Prohibition, no other constitutional amendment has ever been repealed. But there are many examples of special interest groups influencing public law in an attempt to be a wellspring of action.

But the Prohibition law is the perfect example of how destructive this theory can be. America is a pluralistic country and the values of large groups of the population have to be acknowledged. So an attempt by a substantial minority of the population to outlaw drinking isn't going to fly. Prohibition gets mocked in history, because it's associated with the rural, with the protestant, with the obsolete, with the fundamentalist.

But what we remember about it is that it was intolerant. Part of the lesson of prohibition is that inclusion is good. Mutual respect, mutual tolerance, acceptance of the preferences of others under controlled circumstances. The Prohibition era was a make or break environment for the careers of thousands of politicians, law enforcement agents, and military commanders.

Especially those who were somehow connected to the fame of Bill McCoy. Lieutenant Perkins, the arresting officer of Bill McCoy, later became Admiral Perkins. Pete Sullivan was promoted to Director of the US Customs Marine Patrol. BuMabel Walker Willebrandt, the pioneer of prohibition enforcement, was somehow forgotten.

Despite all her accomplishments against impossible odds, Mabel Willebrandt never received any public recognition from the government for her leadership in the war on rum. She remains to this day an unsung hero of law enforcement in America. She quietly left the Justice Department in 1928. And since she'd made enemies of the good-old-boy network in Washington, she had to make her own way and start a private law practice.

Ultimately becoming lawyer to the stars and taking a job with Amelia Earhardt. But what ever happened to Arethusa? The grand dame of the rum fleet was impounded after her capture and later auctioned by the U.S. government.

Bill McCoy never saw her afloat again, but he knew that she was in Nova Scotia, back in the fishing trade. Then one day unexpectedly, he received word that his true love had died. Arethusa had wrecked on Sambro Ledge near Halifax, Nova Scotia. So he went to her.

This was his one true love the Arethusa. And when she was gone, he did a very interesting thing, instead of taking that piece of the Arethusa home and putting it on his own mantle piece, he took it to the Gloucester Fisherman's Association, because he recognized that the most important thing about the Arethusa was that she was the queen of the Gloucester fishing fleet. And not his getaway car, and he gave her up to that tradition which he considered higher than himself. Arethusa had become an important part of American history, not for her participation in rum running but for who she was.

Arethusa was the symbol of maritime elegance. And by elegance, I mean the perfect example of form and function in a working craft. Everything on Arethusa worked and was beautiful. Her image lives on in some of the most prestigious institutions in America.

There's a model of her at the Mystic Seaport. Her ship's plans are on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution and that famous image of the Gloucester fisherman is actually the wheel of Arethusa with her first owner Clayton Morrissey. She's not just a frilly yacht in other words. That tradition of the great Gloucester fishing schooners and the whole industry that that represented and that kind of iconic American, ingenuity and forthrightness and all of those good things.

A few years after putting Arethusa to rest. Bill McCoy contracted food poisoning. As a remedy, the doctors prescribed a deadly combination of Bismuth and Arsenic. After three days of enduring this agonizing treatment, Bill McCoy died at the age of 71 aboard his boat in Stuart, Florida.

I think what McCoy gives us is an outlaw who is not a psychopath and who is actually a truly closer to the Robin Hood figure. So we were looking see in the early-thirties for positive heroes, who somehow were on the outside because so many people began to feel they were on the outside in the thirties. There's a strong strain in American culture, starts right with the revolution, does it not? That some how we are outlaws, but good guys.

It's a hard thing to maintain. So I think we can learn by looking at McCoy, a way to maintain a kind of integrity in hard times, when we don't necessarily agree with the establishment. And these were times when the government was not necessarily the moral exemplum's, you know that you could just simply say 'well, whatever, you know, the President says is okay'. The Prohibition Era was a challenging time for Americans.

It was a decade of social introspection. And Bill McCoy became an iconic moral barometer as complex and controversial as the era itself. His legacy as The Real McCoy will live on. McCoy never compromised his product, he never cut his booze.

In contrast to his competition, who often cut booze with all kinds of wicked chemicals, including turpentine or wood alcohol. And McCoy never did that. And that's why they called McCoy's product The Real McCoy.