Rum Runner’s Christmas & When Whiskey Fueled the Detroit River

100 years ago today, while families slept and dreamed of eggnog and wrapping paper, the Windsor-Detroit riverfront was anything but peaceful. It was Christmas week, 1925, and the frozen river had become the "Windsor-Detroit funnel"—the epicenter of a global black market for alcohol.

In a recent segment, Jon Liedtke joined Gene Valaitis on 610CKTB to discuss his article, Rumrunner’s Christmas: When a frozen Detroit River ran on Whiskey-fueled Studebakers.

It’s the story of how a frozen river, a legal loophole, souped-up vehicles, and Canadian whiskey kept the Roaring Twenties roaring in the United States, how Windsor was a silent co-founding partner of Las Vegas, and how "The Big Flip" occurred, switching Canada from the supplier of whiskey to the gatekeepers of American alcohol due to retaliatory tariffs & actions.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
One of our palace. Another voice on the show Good
Friend is John lid Key. He joins us this morning,
Good morning, John.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Good morning, Jean.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
I should mention that in addition to being a broadcaster,
you owned a newspaper. You're a journalist, you're a writer,
and you've just prepared a great column. It's a little
bit of Canadian history that I don't think many people
even know about. And the name of the story is
called the rum Runners. Christmas. Explain tell us about this

(00:28):
beautiful piece of Canadian history.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Well, let me set the scene. Okay, one hundred years ago. Today,
it's nineteen twenty five Christmas Week. Most people, you know,
some things stay the same. People are thinking about egnog,
about wrapping paper. But one hundred years ago, if you
were standing on the Windsor Detroit riverfront on our side
here in Canada, you weren't looking at a peaceful river.
You're looking at the Windsor Detroit Funnel, the absolute epicenter

(00:53):
of a global black market of alcohol. It's the Roaring twenties.
It's twenty degrees below zero Canada and the United States
of bambooze. Detroit is quite frankly the thirstiest city on
earth because of the demand just one mile away at
the shortest part of the river, and due to an
Ontario loophole, it's legal to produce alcohol in Ontario for warehousing,

(01:15):
delivery and export to the US, even though it's illegal
everywhere around us. The second that that alcohol hit the
river on the Canadian side illegal, The second that it
hit the US side of the river illegal over there.
The second that it hit the US land illegal in
the state and in the city and in the country.
So it's a mile wide river highway connecting both of

(01:37):
our downtowns, and at night it's a traffic jam of
vehicles that are on the ice and they're running without headlights,
all to avoid the police. And as you said, I
call this run runners Christmas. It's when the Detroit River frozen,
ran on whiskey fueled Stewda bakers. Families were sleeping, but
men were out there risking their lives to keep America's

(01:58):
fart holiday parties fueled.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Tell us about the whiskey six.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, so the whiskey sixes. These are not your standard cars,
and these were not your standard family grocery getters. These
were usually student bakers or Fords that were souped up
to have massive six or eight cylinder engines, giving them
their names Whiskey sixes Whiskey eights. And they needed that
raw torque because they had stripped out their backseats to

(02:25):
the cars and they were loaded down with hundreds of
cases of Canadian club rye whiskey. A normal car suspension
would snap, but these Whisky sixes were built to haul
freight at high speeds, and the driving conditions were terrifying.
The Detroit River is not a swimming pool. It is
a living, moving thing, and when it was frozen, the
current underneath carves out invisible air pockets where the ice

(02:48):
can be paper thin. And this actually leads to the
most chilling detail of it, the open door rule. It
didn't matter if it was minus thirty outside. You never
drove with your door shut. Divers would tie their doors
open with a rope because if you hit an air
pocket and the nose of your car started to dip,
you didn't have time to start fumbling for a door handle.

(03:09):
You threw yourself out of that moving vehicle onto the
ice in a split second, and when you felt that
sickening thud, you either prayed or found God.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Wow. Now, is it true that these whiskey six drivers
going on this very very dangerous ice of the Detroit River,
they were responsible for seventy five percent of all illegal
booze entering the US back in the roaring twenties.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
That's absolutely right, Gane, think about that, three out of
four drinks in the United States started right here in Windsor, Ontario.
In Canada, we kept their parties going, and again it
was just because of this legal loophole where it was
allowed to be produced, manufactured, and delivered, but it couldn't
be sold here. Once it left, it became.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
Contraband Now they made a lot of money, the people
in Windsor taking this stuff illegally into the United States.
So what did they do with all the money? I
seem to recall that they tried to make Windsor on
the other side of the river, sort of like the
Las Vegas North.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
So there was a lot of money that was made here,
and it helped to build up what modern Windsor came
to be. We're talking about community centers, we're talking about
religious institution, Gorgeous houses were built during the Prohibition era.
It really made Windsor what it is today. But it
didn't just stay here, and it wasn't just money. We

(04:36):
weren't just exporting our whiskey. We also exported the architecture
of the underground economy. I mean we're talking we perfected
cross border logistics, security, money laundering, sourcing, contact making. One
prime example of this as a guy whose name was
Mode Dalats and he's one of the original run running
kings of the Detroit River and he's on the US side,

(04:58):
but he couldn't have done anything without the booze that
he got from US here. And he decided to move
to Nevada, and he took everything he learned here and
brought it to Las Vegas. And this guy went on
to help build the desert in the Stardust, the Vegas
Convention Center, even the University of Nevada Las Vegas. And

(05:18):
if that's not enough, he was actually credited with inventing
the casino lounge concept itself. And you can look this
all up. It's a wild story. So when you look
at the lights of the Vegas Strip or the sphere today,
you're looking actually at the direct descendants of a glittering,
icy Detroit River and the logistics of cross border crime

(05:39):
Windsor was a silent co founder of Sin City.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
Wow, that's an incredible story. Now, the irony of this,
of course, now, because of the tariffs in the trade war,
Doug Ford took all US alcohol and wine products off
the shelves. And we just learned two days ago that
the company in Kentucky that makes Jim is going to
be closing down production for probably two to three months

(06:05):
because they can't sell the product. And most people don't
know this, but the LCBO is the greatest purchaser of
wine and liquor on earth. So it's kind of flipped
around the other way now it has.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
And I'll give you just a little bit of an
update here, not to step on your toes, but Jim
Deane has actually updated that and they said they're shutting
down their flagship distillery for the entire year next year now.
And this speaks to the power that we have here.
It's the irony of it all. Last one hundred years ago,
the US was the buzzkill trying to plug a bottle
that was open while we were popping corks. Today, though,

(06:42):
the rolls are flipped and we're not little mosquitos fighting
at a giant we're the gatekeepers of this. All the
US spirits industry is desperate to get their bourbon, all
of their products into Canada. But instead of now dodging
police on the ice, they've got to deal with the LCBO,
the SAQ Premiere, forward, other premiers, and of course their

(07:02):
own President, Donald Trump, who created all of this. And
so we saw this. US exports of booze dropped seventy
five percent over night when tariffs came into effect. We
went from being the smugglers to being the toughest bouncers
at the door, quite frankly. And it proves that this
one mile stretch of water is one of the most
consequential borders. For how is the most consequential border for

(07:24):
alcohol in North America, but also one of the most
consequential stretches of water on the entire planet. We traded
our whiskey sixes for boardroom tables.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
An incredible story. So what happened when prohibition broke and
everything was legal again? I guess a lot of people
run of a pretty well paying job.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, you know, people like in any industry that typically
transitions from illegal from illicit to licit.

Speaker 1 (07:52):
Illegal to legal.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
They found opportunities within that industry as well. In many
cases these were people who would go on to operating
on our side of the border logistics and other industries.
But we know that in nineteen twenty seven, when Ontario
ended prohibition, the LCBO system came into effect and that
just created more opportunities as well. We saw the introduction

(08:16):
the moving away from speakeasies to regulated bars and restaurants.
And it's a one hundred years but I mean, look
at the system we have today. You can walk into
a corner storage gene.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yeah, and it's all because of the Whiskey Sixers. I
love that satory. It's great.