The Coast Guard put a boarding party on his schooner — a lieutenant, a bosun and thirteen seamen — and Bill McCoy set sail and ran off with them.
He had been anchored where he was entitled to be, outside the three-mile limit, doing what was legal where he sat. The cutter Seneca had orders to take him anyway. So when her men came over the rail he simply made way and left with the boarding party still standing on his deck, and only hove to, by his own account, because they asked him to.
Then the Seneca began putting four-inch shells across his bow, and that ended it.
He was not sorry, and he did not pretend to be. Asked at his hearing what defence he intended to offer, he gave the only one he ever gave:
“I have no tale of woe to tell you. I was outside the three-mile limit, selling whisky, and good whisky, to anyone and everyone who wanted to buy.”
That was November 1923, and it is the sentence that tells you everything about the man.
William Frederick McCoy was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1877, and he was a boatbuilder before he was anything else — he and his brother Ben ran a yard in Florida, building and running motor launches for winter people with money. He was six foot two, weathered, with a voice that carried, and the deep crow’s-feet that come from years of looking at bright water. He had spent his whole life around boats and none of it around crime.
Then Prohibition arrived, and a man with a boat and a knowledge of the Bahamas found himself sitting on an opportunity.
What he built was unusual, and the unusual part was not the smuggling. It was the terms. He never paid a cent to organized crime, to politicians, or to police. He never hijacked another man’s cargo and never had his own taken. And he sold his liquor exactly as it came out of the case — uncut, unwatered, undoctored — in a market where cutting the goods was standard practice and where a customer had no way to check.
He called himself an honest lawbreaker, and by his own lights he wasn’t being cute about it. Selling liquor in Nassau was legal. What the buyer did after the sale was the buyer’s affair. It is the same argument Cleo Lythgoe made about her own wholesale house, and the two of them held one another in high regard for the rest of their lives.
The idea he is best remembered for was simple enough that its simplicity is the point.
American law reached three miles out. So he anchored at three miles and one, and let the customers come to him.
He was not the only man to work it out, and calling him the inventor of Rum Row overstates it. What he did was make it work — reliably, repeatedly, and at a scale that turned a trick into an industry. Within a couple of years the line off New Jersey and New York held schooners and yachts, square-riggers out of Scandinavia, converted tugs and submarine chasers, and anything else with a hold that would take cases. In my own fiction I’ve described it as a roaring, boisterous, sinful-and-glad-of-it marine Main Street, and that isn’t much of an exaggeration. Sightseers took boats out in the evening to look at it. Some of them brought jazz bands.
Bottles wrapped into hams. used with permission, The Mariners’ Museum and Park, Newport News, Virginia.
He solved the packing problem too. Wooden cases were heavy, bulky, and made a noise when you moved them fast in the dark. So he had six bottles stacked in a pyramid, padded against breakage, and sewn into burlap — a bundle a man could throw, shaped roughly like a ham, which is what everyone ended up calling them. They stacked tighter, they carried quieter, and a contact boat could be loaded in a fraction of the time.
He also loved a boat, and there was one he loved beyond reason.
Arethusa on rum run. Used with permission, The Mariners’ Museum and Park, Newport News, Virginia.
She was a Gloucester fishing schooner called the Arethusa, and after he re-engined her she could carry five thousand cases. He registered her under British flag and renamed her Tomoka — same hull, two names, which is why she turns up in the record twice and confuses people to this day.
What he said about watching her come into harbor under full sail was that she came up the water “like a great lady entering a room.”
Nothing else he ever said sounds remotely like that.
The phrase attached to him is the real McCoy, and the story everyone tells is that it came from his uncut liquor — that if you bought from Bill McCoy you got the genuine article, and the expression grew from there.
I’ve gone looking for that, more than once, and I can’t stand it up.
The trouble is that the phrase was already in circulation before he ever loaded a case. There’s a Scottish version — the real Mackay — attested in the previous century and tied up with a whisky house. There’s a nineteenth-century engineer named Elijah McCoy whose patented lubricators buyers apparently asked for by name. There’s a boxer. Any of them may be the source; possibly none of them are; and nobody has produced a first use that settles it.
What can be said is that by the 1920s the expression existed, Bill McCoy sold genuinely unadulterated liquor, and the two found each other. He fit the phrase so well that people assumed he had made it.
There is something almost funny in that, and something a little sad. The most scrupulously genuine man in the entire trade — the one who wouldn’t water a bottle or pay a bribe — is remembered by a name that wasn’t originally his.
He pleaded guilty rather than drag it out, and served nine months in a New Jersey jail under conditions that would not now be described as harsh. He was let out during the day on his own recognizance, provided he was back by nine. On at least one evening he attended a prizefight in ringside seats, in the company of the warden.
Then he got out, and he stopped.
That is the part I find remarkable. The trade was still running, the money was still there, and Bill McCoy went back to Florida and into real estate and boats and never returned to it. He had handled a fortune and did not end up with one. Van de Water, who interviewed him at length in 1931, came away with the impression of a man who talked far more about the thrill of it than the money — and who was, by then, comparatively poor and entirely unbothered.
He died in Florida in 1948, at seventy-one.
The men who stayed in mostly didn’t manage that. Which is the thing I keep circling in the fiction — not the running and not the shooting, but the handful of people who got in, made their money, saw the shape of what was coming, and walked out while walking out was still available. That is its own kind of nerve, and it belongs with all the other stories about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America in years when the rules changed underneath them.
McCoy sails through the Rum Runners’ Chronicles the way he sailed through the actual trade — cheerfully, on his own terms, and out again before it cost him.
Edith Duffy is not so lucky, and that’s rather the point of her. Red Sky at Night puts her twelve miles off Miami in 1932, when the Row is nearly finished and the easy money is gone. It’s a free novella, and it’s yours if you’d like it — download your copy.