Ingenious crooks tunnelled under the street to a liquor warehouse, then sucked rye from barrels with a 200 foot long hose
The big news in the Feb. 8, 1923 Vancouver Daily World was that the federal government had agreed to “widen” the entrance of the First Narrows to 1,200 feet wide by dredging to a depth of 55 feet.
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King George’s daughter, Princess Mary, had given birth to a son. A rich vein of silver had been discovered in a mine in Cobalt, Ont. A train had been halted by a “great snow drift” near Regina, and the stranded passengers had hopped on sleighs to complete their journey.
But the most intriguing story was near the bottom of the front page: “Siphon Liquor in Big Theft.”
“Digging a tunnel 150 feet long and three feet wide from a cellar of a house to the warehouse of the Stewart Distilling Company’s plant in Highlandtown (near Baltimore, Maryland), a band of liquor thieves, with the aid of a rubber hose as ‘pipe line’ and a suction cup, siphoned more than 100 barrels of whiskey valued at upwards of $145,000,” reported The Associated Press.
According to the online CPI inflation calculator, that would be the equivalent of $2,676,182 in 2025.
Whiskey was very much in demand in the U.S., which had adopted Prohibition in 1920. Banning alcohol only seemed to make it more popular, setting off a decade when bootleggers and speakeasies made a fortune.
Some bootleggers made their own questionable booze. Others imported it from Canada — Vancouver’s Reifel family were prominent rum runners.
A third option was to steal booze from warehouses owned by the companies that had made it, pre-Prohibition.
The Stewart Distilling Company had been in business since the 1890s and had branches in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. It had seven warehouses in Highlandtown, including three filled with its “Stewart Pure Rye.”
One of the empty warehouses had a hole in the floor and wasn’t being used. So the thieves decided to dig a tunnel from a house across the street to the warehouse. Then they dug a hole through an “18-inch thick brick wall” to another warehouse filled with whiskey barrels.
A story in the Baltimore Sun said the police quickly reached two conclusions about the thieves: that one of them “was familiar with the distillery” and that the tunnel “was dug under the supervision of an expert sapper — probably a man who, with the American army abroad, had gone on sapping expeditions during the war.”
Whoever planned the heist knew the warehouses well. A guard in a watchtower oversaw the complex, so they went underground, digging a diagonal tunnel from the house to the empty warehouse, which may have taken six weeks.
“He knew that in the (empty) warehouse there is a small place where the heavy wood floor had been torn up,” the Baltimore Sun reported. “He was sure that spot was not frequented by employees.”
According to police, five men “were seen going to and from the house.”
When the tunnellers reached the warehouse, they dug a hole into the adjacent warehouse. They then attached a 200-foot long hose to the whiskey barrels and siphoned their contents, using a “double action pump.”
The whiskey was poured into a tub in the basement of the house, then poured into five-gallon cans.
“During the night, a truck backed into a little yard and the booty was hauled away,” said the Baltimore Sun.
The police discovered the theft after getting a tip. They found an army coat and several pails of “muddy-hob-nailed service shoes” in the house, along with old army food.
The police arrested a 33-year-old woman in the case, and were looking for a man named Jansen who had rented the house.
Two days after the tunnel was discovered, the Baltimore Sun reported bottles of Stewart pure rye were being sold by bootleggers, with labels that looked legitimate.
The paper had been running a series featuring a bootlegger named “Bunny” who gave readers a behind-the-scenes look at the illicit alcohol trade.
Bunny had speculated the whiskey would be cut with water or alcohol to increase profits. It was.
Newspapers reports of the theft from the Stewart’s Distilling warehouses appeared to inspire another gang. Shortly after the siphoning/tunnelling story emerged, some crooks broke into a warehouse through the roof and stole another 21 cases of whiskey.
