“Tunnels Under Ybor City Streets Lead to Historical Mystery” declared a headline from Fox 13 News in Tampa Bay on November 21, 2018. The article explained that recent construction had unearthed abandoned brick tunnels at least a century old. Some speculated that the tunnels “were used by the Mafia or by bootleggers during Prohibition,” but others argued that Prohibition-era public corruption “would have allowed organized crime to operate without the need of an elaborate tunnel system,” suggesting that the tunnels might have been used “for trafficking Chinese prostitutes from Cuba to the Port of Tampa and into Ybor City in the early 1900s.”
This recent “historical mystery” surfaced several weeks after the publication of Lisa Lindquist Dorr's new book, which maps the broader world of transnational smuggling that (possibly) encompassed Ybor City's enigmatic tunnels. Dorr adds to a burgeoning literature on Prohibition. In the past decade, the topic has been the subject of two major syntheses: Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010), and Lisa McGirr's The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (2015). A number of recent monographs have also focused on the transnational dimensions of Prohibition, including J. Anne Funderburg's Rumrunners: Liquor Smugglers on America's Coasts, 1920–1933 (2016), George T. Díaz's Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande (2015), and Stephen T. Moore's Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox of Prohibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland (2014). The book reviewed here, which Dorr began researching in 2006, extends this transnational approach to the American South, in particular to the coastal South's pivotal relationship with Havana.
The book features six interlinked chapters that each tackle a different facet of the Prohibition-era smuggling trade. Chapter 1 provides a general overview of Havana's “well-organized” (50) smuggling system, including customs fraud and “black ships.” Dorr explains that Havana served as a key transshipment hub for high-end European liquors seeking the US market, meaning that many “rumrunners” dealt primarily in whiskeys, cognacs, wines, and other Old World imports. Chapter 2 shifts from Havana-based smuggling to the US Coast Guard's interdiction efforts more broadly. As Dorr notes, “the Rum War became the Coast Guard's primary mission until 1933” (56). The book's excellent third chapter then returns to Havana, where Dorr narrates the antics of government contractor Henry Kime and his band of semi-authorized Prohibition enforcers, “an effort that was equal parts diplomacy, intelligence gathering, subterfuge, and frustration” (97).
In the fourth chapter, Dorr explores the links between the smuggling of alcohol and the trafficking of narcotics and migrants, with particular emphasis on the 1924 Immigration Act. The final two chapters focus largely on the American South, especially Florida, and discuss the region's complicated relationship with Prohibition, paying particular attention to enforcement, culture, race relations, and tourism. Dorr explains, “Prohibition, in short, helped the South become modern and accelerated the trend away from its rural, agricultural heritage toward a world of commercial leisure characterized by pleasure and consumption” (199).
Dorr's research, which relies largely on English-language sources (principally the US National Archives, the state archives of Florida and Alabama, and 20 English-language US newspapers), uncovers a wealth of rich source material and a colorful cast. More than a dozen historical characters seem torn from the pages of a spy novel, including Mary O'Kane, the “booze cop,” who went undercover working for one of the largest smugglers; Du Bouchet, the mysterious forger of clearance papers; and Captain Gelabert, who smuggled more than 30 women into the United States from Havana as “family members.”
Dorr has revived a lost world that echoes into the present, not only through “historical mysteries” like the tunnels of Ybor City, but also through contemporary debates around the smuggling of migrants and contraband more generally.
