Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
River of Whiskey: The True Story of Prohibition, the Detroit River Rum-Runners, and the Purple Gang

River of Whiskey: The True Story of Prohibition, the Detroit River Rum-Runners, and the Purple Gang

Calloway, Frank

Paperback

Canadian History20th Century United States HistoryTrue Crime

ISBN13: 9798181314641
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 12 2026
Pages: 210
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Seventy-five cars loaded with whiskey crossed the frozen Detroit River in a single morning - in broad daylight, in plain view, and no one stopped them.For thirteen years, the busiest smuggling front on earth was not Chicago and not the Atlantic Rum Row. It was a mile of moving water between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan - and through it flowed three-quarters of the liquor that kept dry America drinking.

River of Whiskey follows a single bottle of Canadian whisky on its journey from a licensed Walkerville distillery to an American glass - and finds, strung along its route, an entire hidden industry: the export docks that papered its departure with customs forms claiming the cargo was bound for Cuba; the rum-runners who carried it across in eleven minutes; the Purple Gang, who seized the wholesale trade at gunpoint and held it for a decade; the police precincts that sold raid schedules like subscriptions; and the millions of ordinary customers whose quarters financed all of it.

Drawing on court records, congressional testimony, coroner's files, and the newspaper archives of two countries, Frank Calloway reconstructs the Prohibition era's greatest supply chain - not as jazz-age nostalgia, but as the true story of what happens when the law withdraws from a market it cannot kill.

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