Thanks to its shared border with Canada, the Detroit River was notoriously hard to control. Historians estimate that up to 75 percent of the alcohol consumed in the United States during the Prohibition was transported by ordinary people (not just gangsters!) between Windsor, Canada, and Detroit. One of the more elaborate bootlegging devices was an cable tunnel that ferried submarine "torpedoes" filled with alcohol across the river. While customs guards focused on people smuggling alcohol under their clothes, this ingenious contraption quietly reeled in forty cases of liquor an hour.Via Popular Science, where there is a gallery on The Science of Prohibition, 1919-1933.
Don't tell the Mexican drug cartel about this or they will be stringing a cable under the Gulf of Mexico.
ReplyDeleteMy grandparents said they often drove from near Detroit, Michigan into Windsor, Ontario to buy gallon jugs of wine. Grandma wore long skirts to conceal bottles stashed under the car's front seat. Border agents never told her to raise her skirts.
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