Montauk Historical Society exhibit tells story of bootlegging past

A look of puzzlement spread over Karen Langdon’s face when she saw the pair of shoes on display at the Montauk Historical Society.

The Montauk resident read a nearby note explaining these were “cow shoes” outfitted with hoofs instead of soles to disguise the tracks of bootleggers from prowling revenuers.

“Get out of here!” exclaimed Langdon, 64. “I love it.”

The shoes, part of an exhibition titled “How Dry We Weren’t, Rumrunning and Moonshine in Montauk,” are contained in a small compartment set within a wall-size map of eastern Long Island featuring artifacts from Prohibition days. Other boxes in the exhibit, on display through Labor Day, hold things like cards and chips from one of the four casinos that operated in the area and a half-full bottle of illegal whiskey that fell overboard and was recovered by a diver years later.

Plenty of other items from the Prohibition — the period from 1920 to 1933 when the manufacture and sale of alcohol was banned in the U.S. — can be found at the museum’s headquarters, the former mansion of entrepreneur Carl Fisher, an ardent anti-prohibitionist.

Fisher bought 10,000 acres of the East End community a century ago in a failed attempt to turn Montauk into the “Miami Beach of the North.” The exhibit explains how his inflow of money brought in new homeowners and vacationers helping turn the small fishing community into what one newspaper called “The Wettest Place in the Country.“

“Every village on Long Island thought it was the center of rum-running,” said Montauk Historical Society executive director Mia Certic. “Except in our case, it was true.”

Montauk was ideal for foreign vessels to sell their wares. At the start of Prohibition, U.S. territorial waters extended for only three miles. Being isolated, it also was a great spot for bootleggers to pick up booze without being seen, Certic said. Even if caught, the penalty usually was only a fine.

“The average salary for workers back then was about $15 a week,” said East Hampton historian Hugh King. “You could make $50 a night just helping smugglers unload their cargo.”

Everyone seemed to want in on the action. One of the displays is a filmed interview of an elderly man recounting how he sailed out to a liquor boat to buy some supplies when he was 15 years old. The ship’s officers asked who the captain was. The boy said he was. Where’s your crew, they asked. He pointed to his 12-year-old friend in the boat.

“He is,” he said.

“Montauk has always been something of a Wild West,” said museum visitor Langdon. “But I didn’t know about all this.”

Passwords, peepholes and cutouts

To give people a taste of the scene, the museum’s door has been transformed into a pretend speakeasy where customers whisper a password into a peephole — or, you just knock. During Prohibition, these were out-of-the-way saloons where people in the know went to get a drink, Certic said (some bars in the city charged customers a fee to see a “blind pig,” then served them alcohol for “free”).

Inside the foyer, a big-screen projector plays a film loop reflecting the cultural shift of the “Roaring Twenties” that ushered in the Jazz Age and those shocking “flappers” with their shimmery dresses and bobbed hair. Visitors can pick up a 1930s phone and listen to a mock conversation between a bootlegger and a rumrunner exchanging tips about the feds.

Other boxes inset within the Montauk map include a code book used by smugglers to signal others that the feds were on the way. A pile of silver dollars in another box showed how kids were bribed to keep quiet if they saw illegal activity.

“This is cool because it takes you back to those days and you can definitely feel the past,” said Jarrett Bauer, 38, a Montauk resident and founder of Montauk AI, an investment banking firm. “It helps you understand how much impact Prohibition had on America.”

Visitors can walk among nine life-size cutouts of local people and others who were famous during the era.

One is Helen Smith, a 24-year-old former taxi driver known as the “Queen of the Bootleggers.” Another is Romaine Q. Merrick, the chief Prohibition agent in the New York/New Jersey area and an Eliot Ness-type crusader. Merrick’s agents got tips from the Ku Klux Klan, who hated beer-drinking immigrants. Certic said the Klan also lent the agents their cars so they wouldn’t be recognized.

Cat-and-mouse games

The cow shoe trick was only one of many cat-and-mouse games at the time. Some rumrunners packed their haul in burlap bags filled with salt. If revenuers showed up, they pitched them overboard. Later, when the salt dissolved and the bottles floated to the surface, they rounded them up. Aboard ship, they disguised their haul under tons of fish. On land, they buried it in sand dunes. A Model A truck lent to the museum and parked outside is an example of the type of vehicle used to hide liquor under sacks of potatoes.

“One of the things we’re trying to make clear is how pervasive this was at that time,” Certic said. “It was an unpopular law, so generally there wasn’t any shame in breaking it.”

Probably the most well-known figure among the life-size cutouts is Carl Fisher, an Indiana native who made a fortune in 1913 in the auto industry, then turned to real estate. He developed Miami Beach, built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (home of the Indianapolis 500 automotive race) and helped develop the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first coast-to-coast road that started in Times Square and ended in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park. In his attempt to transform Montauk into a summer vacation mecca, Fisher built streets, a golf course, a polo field, an Olympic-size swimming pool and dynamited an inlet that turned Lake Montauk into a harbor.

His private Island Club on the lake became famous for its rip-roaring parties and free drinks (selling booze was illegal, Fisher knew, but giving it away wasn’t). The club was raided anyway.

According to legend, Jimmy Walker, then-mayor of New York City, was present at one. He escaped by taking off his jacket, putting a towel over his arm and pretending to be a waiter.

Excitement, and a dark element

Fisher’s reputation was one of the things that drew Bauer, the Montauk AI founder, to the exhibit. He said he knew about Fisher’s death as a penniless alcoholic, but was still impressed by his accomplishments

“He did so many things,” Bauer said. “I can’t get over the motor on that guy.”

That was the assessment of Marshall Prado, 79, of Montauk, who said he heard tales about Fisher from his father, who was the entrepreneur’s chauffeur.

“He was an alcoholic and a womanizer and a go-getter with lots of plans,” Prado said. “He was one of those guys with big dreams.”

Sure, it was an exciting era, said Dahlia Melnick, 22, a museum docent.

“But there was a dark element to it,” she noted.

The exhibit recounts an unconfirmed story of a federal agent who was shot and dumped in the bay as well as several documented incidents of people being severely beaten by rumrunners. This included an incident where five young men in Southampton bragged about stealing some illegal hooch from the mobster Dutch Schultz. They later were kidnapped by Schultz’s men. Three escaped, but two were tortured and branded with a red-hot potato masher before being released.

Richard White Jr., 84, remembered overhearing his father, a pharmacist, tell about the night he drove into an area occupied by smugglers. A car began following them, which signaled trouble. It turned around after he and his fellow passenger held up lighted matches to their faces so they wouldn’t be mistaken for lawmen or booze thieves, White said.

One of the boxes on the map wall contains an example of a bottle of “medicinal” alcohol (simply a bottle of whiskey) prescribed by doctors at the time, which often was just a pretext for a drink. White said his father never went along with this because he was afraid of losing his license.

But he did occasionally serve guests grain neutral spirits that he flavored with herbs and spices to taste like gin. Or, he would put in a few drops of iodine to make it look like whiskey, he said. He was a kid then, so he had no idea what it tasted like. “After about three or four sips it probably didn’t matter,” he said.

The bottom line is that, whether they wanted a drink or not, lots of Americans simply didn’t want the federal government telling them what to do, Certic said.

A book on display in the gift shop lists cocktail recipes from the era. Its preface maybe sums up the attitude of the times.

“Give me liberty,” it says. “Or, give me a drink.”