Cloak and Swagger

Easiest choice ever?

My great grandmother Crucifissa was a liquor-smuggling queenpin. I know I said noir is fiction, but this is true. I mention it because the FBI came by this morning. Apparently some analysis genius found that the descendents of successful lawbreakers are extremely likely to follow suit. Because of Nonna-fissa, two agents wanted to get to know me. I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. The family knew Crucifissa worked at a speakeasy during Prohibition. It was part of the lore - little widowed Nonna, slaving away during tough times to put her sons through Ivy League schools; the youngest, my grandfather, graduating in 1933, and Nonna finally retiring from the "restaurant."

Nobody imagined she owned the speakeasy and controlled her own supply. If they had, logic might have followed that she also owned a warehouse full of "produce" trucks and land on both the Canadian and American sides of the Niagara River. As it was, no one had a clue.

They way the agents tell it, it would have taken 50 typical motor boats, running 24/7 for every day of Prohibition, without ever losing a bottle or getting caught by the police boats, to explain the 10+million gallons of liquor the government could prove flowed in Western New York yet was not attributable to known smugglers. These seemed impossible figures because that’s what they were. The ever-escalating boat race between the smugglers and the law was a close one the entire time. One out of every four runs, a smuggler lost either his load, or his boat. Still, even small-time smugglers with big losses turned huge profits. That was the game. No small risk, plenty of losers, more winners, and lots, lots of money. The government had itself a missing pipeline.

The agents showed me a photograph of a scuttled barge being extracted from the Niagara river bed. It meant nothing familiar to me, but it was the reason the FBI had learned about Crucifissa’s existence and her invisible empire in the first place. The barge was two things - it was a pleasure boat painted with the name of a women’s temperance club and sunk by vandals on the day Prohibition was repealed, and it was full of liquor.

Fifty years too late to catch her, the government finally found their missing pipeline. It wasn’t 50 boats non-stop every day for 13 years. It was two. A tugboat and a barge, 3 or 4 times a year, year in and year out. Incredibly, the barge was never stopped, boarded or inspected. It’s almost if the temperance boat, supposedly carrying a load of hymn singing, tee-totaling, Christian women, was avoided and given the widest berth.

So tonight we drink to irony and the FBI. Without their informative visit, I might have been content to sell books all my life. But now? Well, I have my biological imperative and a sudden urge to use it. They have their empty file on me; and they've stated their intent to see me fill it. I did the only sporting thing I could do. I invited them to come back in 50 years when they’ve got something.

Cheers.