Dan's Papers November 25, 2011 by Dan's Papers

Dan’s Papers November 25, 2011 danshamptons.com Page 24

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(continued from page 19)

the morning, you could link it up with the half silver dollar held by the captain of the ship you were told to meet. If you had that match, you were who they would transfer off the boxes to. You’d bring it in in the dark. You’d have friends unload the boxes just before dawn and carry them off into the woods behind the town. There the bootleggers, the gangster types, would load the stuff up into their cars and trucks and drive off toward the city. The cars had panels that hid secret compartments under the floorboards. We’d count the money they gave us. And all we had to do after that was keep our mouths shut. “One morning, about 6 a.m., I was sitting up on a hill to watch the sunrise over the ocean. Down the other way I could see the bay and the village. And then I heard some popping sounds

out on the bay. Coming from the east was one of our speediest fishing boats—it had been outfitted with a huge engine— roaring toward me along the shore, followed by a Coast Guard cutter, guns blazing. The Cutter was slowly closing the gap. But aboard the fishing boat, the men were, one after another, throwing the boxes of hootch overboard. First one splash, then a few hundred yards on another splash. It woke me completely up. And what I did was make a mental note of where those splashes were in relation to the shoreline. “The two boats shot right past me, and as the fishing boat—captained by a guy who ain’t here anymore—got lighter and lighter, it went faster and faster. They were doing about 25 knots, but speeding up. Now I saw that the fishing boat

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was pulling away. He was gonna get away. “Later that afternoon, I was out there with my son and a big net and a rope and we were hauling those boxes up. Neat little profit in that. We broke one box open that night and invited over lots of friends. Nice party.” “Remember that gunfight out at Deep Hollow Ranch?” This was a second fishing boat captain. “It happened one night. Big time stuff. And people thought that bootlegging was just a small time operation. What we learned the next day was that one group of rumrunners wanted all the hootch in this huge barn. There were hundreds of boxes of it, and the men who had stored it there wanted to fend them off. I heard one person got killed before it was over. I think one of the Dickinson boys—I think it was Shank’s father—had been hired to be out there to guard the stuff, but there was nothing he could do.” “You know the story about Mayor Jimmy Walker and bootlegging here?” “Never heard that story.” “There used to be gambling on Star Island. There was this big casino out there, the Star Island Casino. They built it just down the way from the Montauk Yacht Club. The Casino was a big time gambling operation with dancing girls, crap tables, bands and a dance floor, bootleg liquor and back rooms and stuff. They only let in the gangsters and politicians from New York. But we all knew about it. “You know those stone guardhouses that are right at the entrance to Star Island Road where it begins at Westlake Drive? The casino is long gone, but the guardhouses are still there today. They used to have men in them with telephones. If the feds were seen driving up, they’d call down to the casino to get all the back rooms shut down and the gambling tables and liquor hidden away. They’d be just a nice, dry, law-abiding club by the time the feds got down there. “One day, the word went out to get everything out of sight fast. The Mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker, was in the club. Something would have to be done. He took off his jacket and pretended to be a waiter, towel over his arm and everything. So when the feds broke in, he was just one of the employees and they left him alone. Later, he snuck out the back and went down along the docks to the safety of the Yacht Club.” “There was the time that big moving van, I forget what the letters on the side said, came up the Old Montauk Highway in the middle of the night filled with hootch and heading for the city. Right out front of where Gurney’s Inn is now, it hit a soft spot in the gravel road and turned on its side. Everything inside broke open. What a mess. There were shards of glass on that road for years after that.” Here are two stories I was told about East Hampton. Downtown East Hampton was where people in Montauk went to go shopping with all their bootlegging money. “During that time, there was a pharmacy on the northeast corner of Newtown Lane and Main Street,” an old-timer told me. “It was run by a very proper, church-going local fellow named Emil Rowe. He told me this story long after it was over. One day at five, he closed for the day and walked home to his house on Osborne Lane. He and his wife had (continued on page 34)