Trevor Cole - The Whisky King: The remarkable true story of Canada’s most infamous bootlegger and the undercover Mountie on his trail

I T WAS 1923. PROHIBITION HAD SHUT DOWN THE LEGAL trade in liquor across most of Canada and the United States. But the whisky still flowed, and the pipeline was made of boats.

Rocco Perri, at thirty-five years old the most powerful bootlegger in Ontario, had built up a makeshift fleet of as many as fifty vesselsschooners, cabin boats and pleasure craftthat plied Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Most of the men in these boats werent criminals. As a rule, Rocco employed men without records, and he insisted they carry no weapons. It meant less trouble, and less scrutiny from police. Many of the skippers were simply fishermen trying to scrape up some extra money, especially during the cold months of fall and winter. The risks were smallfew men would dare hijack a Perri boat and undermanned police forces rarely caught any rum-runner in the actand they seemed insignificant against the chance of making hundreds of dollars or more on every run.

That was probably the calculation a Port Dalhousie kid named John Gogo made when he convinced his Italian father, Sydney Gogo, to lease him his thirty-three-foot gasoline schooner, the Hattie C, for a year or two of hauling liquor. Twenty-four years old and solid muscle, John Gogo could easily handle loading and unloading a cargo of thirty or fifty cases of whisky by himself, although he usually brought along a Toronto friend of his, a bookkeeper named Fred VanWinkle, to lend a hand and act as galley cook for thirty-five dollars a week. Over the summer of 1923 theyd made about fifteen trips together for the Perri outfit, mostly ferrying loads of Corbys whisky from the government dock near Belleville, Ontario, across the lake to the American side. But in late September Rocco Perris common-law wife, Bessie Starkman, who handled the financial end of the business, ordered a big shipment for Toronto, and John Gogo got the call to head across the lake, pick up 210 cases of whisky from the Corby distillery, and bring it in the dead of night to the shores of Ashbridges Bay, in the citys east end. For a cargo that size he needed more help.

THE weather had been unsettled over the previous few days but Sunday, September 30 broke cool and clear. That morning John set off from Port Dalhousie with his fifty-four-year-old father, Sydney.

They headed first to Toronto to pick up VanWinkle and Sydneys brother, James Gogo, who lived with his wife in the citys Parkdale neighbourhood. A carpenter by trade and twenty years younger than Sydney, James hadnt had much to do with his brother over the years, but hed been pulled into this scheme because there hadnt been much work lately and his nephew John said there was money in it for him. James told his wife that he was going to spend the week helping his brother fix up his boat. There was no point in worrying her.

From Toronto the Hattie C made its way east along the lakes northern shore toward Prince Edward County. In the hold below, the four men had food for a week, at least two cases of empty bottles and, between the bunks, a heap of more than a hundred strong burlap bags. Bags were lighter and less bulky than wooden crates, allowing rum-runners to haul larger cargoes. Each bag would hold twenty-four bottles of whisky. And in a pinch, the men could dump the load over the gunwale and it would disappear.