Author: GOUTH, GEORGE
Title: Booze, Boats and Bad Times Wyandotte, a Sesquicentennial City, Recalling Wyandotte's Dark Days of Prohibition
Description: No Place: George Gouth, 2004. Second Revised Edition. Paperback. ISBN: 0998948675. B&W Illustrations; 8.5 X 5.5 X 0.6 inches; 95 pages; This is a 2d revised edition from 2008. Soft cover has white spine with black lettering. SIGNED AND INSCRIBED ON TITLE PAGE, DATED 5/30/2009. Covers have some shelf wear, rubbing, scuffing, bumping. Upper corner crease through page 15; some brown spotting inside front cover and on title page. Pages are clean and tight. Illustrated with b/w photographs. Laid in small clipping from a newspaper, unnamed. Wyandotte is a southwest suburb of Detroit [Downriver], sits on the Detroit River. When statewide Prohibition became law on May 1, 1918, Detroit became the first city in the nation with a population of over 250,000 to go dry. Detroit went from approximately 1,800 licensed saloons before state Prohibition in 1918 to a conservatively estimated 25,000 blind pigs by 1925. Detroit’s proximity to Ontario, Canada made it an opportune place for rumrunners and smugglers. By the mid-twenties an estimated 500,000 cases of Canadian whiskey were coming across the Detroit River every month. Despite this staggering figure, more whiskey and beer than that was actually being made in Detroit by an extensive alley brewing industry. Opium dens operated openly throughout Detroit. The illegal Detroit gambling industry, which included everything from alley crap games to fancy roadhouses, was actually making the Detroit underworld more money than the $250,000,000 a year alcohol rackets. Detroit was a wide open city. Literally anything legal or illegal could be easily purchased there. With the advent of National Prohibition at midnight January 16, 1920, the soon-to-be infamous Purple Gang and the men who would soon together create the traditional Detroit mafia began to claw their way to the top of the city’s underworld. While the future Purples were still in short pants shaking down hucksters and rolling drunks, local Mafia gangs were already well established on Detroit’s lower eastside." You may still see the Seagram's distillery across the river, in Windsor. ; Signed by Author. Very Good+ .

Keywords: 0998948675 9780998948676; Cultural History; Social History; Gangsters; Detroit History; Metro Detroit; Michigan Locations; Michigan Cities; Great Lakes History; Cultural History American History Geography Biography/Memoirs/Journals Food/Wine Business/Econ