For Amy Kasuga Folk, the Southold Town Historian in Long Island, it pays to know the difference between the Prohibition terms rumrunning and bootlegging. As she explains in her book “Rumrunning in Suffolk County,” rumrunning is about boats bringing verboten liquor to shore from ships moored at sea, where the bootleggers pick it up and drive it to its destination. This teamwork, she writes, led to the rise of organized crime in the United States. Long Island, at one time known as Liquor Island with its extensive shoreline, became a focal point for figures like Dutch Schultz and Charles “Lucky” Luciano. The book covers the period of 1920 to 1933, year by year. A singular feature is a list of the hundreds of codes used by the smugglers from a notebook that a fisherman in Peconic Bay retrieved from the water.
“Rumrunning in Suffolk County: Tales From Liquor Island,” by Amy Kasuga Folk (History Press, $21.99).
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