How smugglers used to transport booze

What does the following description sound like? Booze or drugs? It’s from an entry found at Wikipedia.com.

You fill in the blank:

“The production, importation, and distribution of [BLANK] were taken over by criminal gangs, which fought each other for market control in violent confrontations, including murder. Major gangsters became rich… Enforcement was difficult because the gangs became so rich they were often able to bribe underpaid and understaffed law-enforcement personnel and pay for expensive lawyers.”

Actually, it’s a Wikipedia entry discussing alcohol prohibition in the U.S., but it could easily describe the current drug trade on both sides of the border.

Smuggling booze across the border during the prohibition years – 1920 to ’33 – was almost as wild and wooly as the drug and human smuggling trades are today.

The Volstead Act, AKA, the 18th amendment (the only one to have ever been appealed) that went into effect Jan. 17, 1920, really gave the American mafia the push it needed to set it into orbit. Before alcohol smuggling made them millions, American gangsters weren’t nearly as rich, making their money primarily off of prostitution, loan sharking and gambling. With maybe a little extortion money thrown in for good measure. But once the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol became illegal, they started raking in money hand over fist.

The Volstead Act worked out so well, that American politicians jumped at the chance when they had the opportunity in the 1960s and ‘70s to criminalize the public consumption of a new generation of intoxicants, write a new brand of prohibition into law against certain drugs, including a weed (marijuana) that grows wild.

Border Smugglers

For readers of history, though, the wild-and-wooly days of border smuggling are nothing new. In fact, if you read about booze smuggling across the border in the 1920s and early ‘30s, it sounds a lot like today. In fact, the two – drugs and booze – often overlapped. Even back then.

In a book published 13 years ago, Run for the Border, its author, Steven W. Bender, writes this about that period: “The booze flowed across the border in those days like marijuana does today…A lot of it came through the border ports in automobiles. They had secret compartments (ed. note: some things never change) in the door panels, tanks under the rear seat and along the drive shaft. A regular passenger car could carry about a hundred and ten gallons. The trick for U.S. authorities was to rock the car and listen for a splashing sound.”

Another excerpt from Bender’s book, showing once again, that some things never change: “Rather than travel by car across the international border and risk confronting authorities, traffickers along the Texas border usually ferried the alcohol across the Rio Grande at a pre-arranged location away from the border authorities. Depending on the river depth, cars or horses might ford the river, or the booze would be brought across in gunnysacks…Violent confrontations were inevitable when authorities intervened in a trade that produced great profits.”

Great profits. Unless you get busted.