by Chad Fraser
The event that would put an end to Spracklin’s short-lived reign of terror over the bootleggers and gin joints along the Detroit River came early on the morning of November 6, 1920. Predictably, Spracklin turned his attention back to the Chappell House, in his own backyard of Sandwich. The hotel was owned by a man called Beverly “Babe” Trumble, who, aside from being an old childhood rival of Spracklin’s, was flouting the OTA by selling liquor on the premises — and doing very little to hide the fact. What caught Spracklin’s eye that morning was the shadowy form of Ernie Deslippe, a Sandwich local, sitting on the sidewalk in front of the Chappell House with Trumble standing over him. As Spracklin and his squad got out of their cars and approached, according to Spracklin, Trumble muttered something about Deslippe being injured. And poor Deslippe was certainly in bad shape; aside from being drunk, his face was bloodied, suggesting that there had been a fight at the Chappell House that night. But before Spracklin could ask any more questions, Trumble disappeared into the hotel and locked the door behind him.
The pastor, seeing this as his chance to finally put an end to the illicit goings-on at the Chappell House, demanded that Trumble let him in. When Trumble failed to answer, Spracklin forced his way in through a ground-level window. It was then that things turned ugly. Once inside, Spracklin caught up with Trumble near the bar, where he allegedly pulled a gun on Spracklin and threatened him. According to Spracklin’s testimony at an inquest into the events two days later: “ ‘Babe’ Trumble pressed his gun against the pit of my stomach. ‘Damn you, Spracklin,’ he said, ‘I’m going to shoot you.’ I knew then that it was his life or mine.” Spracklin then pulled the trigger, striking Trumble in the abdomen. The innkeeper stumbled and fell. In the panic that followed, someone in the bar called a local doctor, who arrived moments later, but Trumble’s wound, a severe internal hemorrhage, was simply too serious. Twenty-five minutes after being shot by Spracklin, Beverly Trumble succumbed to his injuries. A terrified Spracklin had fled the hotel immediately after the shooting and turned himself in to Windsor police. The minister was said to be severely shaken when he arrived at police headquarters, and he had no idea that by this time Trumble was lying dead on the floor of the Chappell House.
The courtroom was packed when Spracklin’s trial opened over four months later, on February 21, 1921. The pastor and his lawyers seemed optimistic about the outcome, but they were far from cocky. Standing in their way was Trumble’s tough-minded widow, Lulu. She had been with her husband when he was shot, and had been stubbornly contradicting the pastor’s story from the beginning. Most troubling to the defence was that during her testimony she swore over and over that her husband had never even owned a revolver. Later in the trial, one of the witnesses even stated that he had seen Mrs. Trumble herself wielding a pistol at the time of the shooting. The February 23, 1921, Border Cities Star recorded the courtroom’s response to this interesting bit of testimony:
Spectators realized that a startling statement had been made and a number of persons applauded. Sir William Mulock [the judge] ordered Sheriff C.N. Anderson to have the persons responsible for the demonstration arrested and held in contempt of court. He expressed the opinion that if they were men they would stand up.
The Spracklin trial was rapidly becoming a circus. And Mrs. Trumble wasn’t helping. When she was recalled to the stand to be questioned about whether or not she was armed, she deadpanned, “If I had had a gun, there would certainly have been another murder.”
In the end, the jury was unable to bring itself to believe Lulu Trumble, and it took its members only fifty-nine minutes to unanimously acquit Spracklin on February 24, 1921: “I have made no plans for the future,” Spracklin told the Border Cities Star five minutes after the verdict had been read, “I am not sure what I shall do, now that I am finally free from this charge.”
One thing the “fighting parson” would never do again was prowl the Detroit River in search of rum-runners. His appointment as a provincial liquor license inspector had actually ended months earlier, in the days after the Chappell House shooting, when Attorney General Raney finally came to his senses and appointed a former police officer, W.J. Lannin of Stratford, to take over the fight against liquor trafficking on the border. The Border Cities Star, clearly lamenting the loss of Spracklin and his inspectors (and the wealth of stories they provided), glumly reported in its November 22, 1920 edition: “The border bids goodbye to the picturesque little band of freelancers who, under the leadership of Rev. J.O.L. Spracklin, waged such a spectacular warfare against the bootleggers and rum-runners who plied their trade across the Detroit River.”
And the changeover came not a moment too soon: further doubts about Spracklin’s competence seemed to surface almost daily through late 1920, and early 1921. The most glaring was a lawsuit levelled by Oscar E. Fleming of Windsor over a raid that Spracklin had carried out on Fleming’s yacht, the Kitty Wake, while Fleming’s son was hosting a party onboard. The Kitty Wake had just sailed from Windsor toward Lake St. Clair on the evening of September 17, 1920, when Spracklin and the Hallam brothers, cruising in the Panther II, spotted it and gave chase. According to Oscar Fleming Jr., his pursuer showed no running lights, even though it was dark, and followed at a distance. Finally, when the Kitty Wake dropped anchor between Belle Isle and Peche Island, the license inspectors drew alongside and clambered aboard. The younger Fleming tells what happened next in the testimony he gave during the suit, the opening of which was reported in the December 11, 1920, Border Cities Star: “Mr. Spracklin appeared in the cabin . . . with a flashlight in his left hand. His right hand was in his coat pocket. The pastor inquired who owned the pleasure boat and when informed it was the Fleming yacht, the minister, according to the witness, said that he would not have boarded had he known this.”
Still, the Fleming name didn’t stop Spracklin from searching the yacht anyway. The Hallams stood in the shadows, according to Fleming Jr., with their revolvers drawn. Spracklin found no booze, and even more troubling, he admitted during the proceedings that “. . . he intercepted every boat that came along, whether or not he suspected it had liquor on board.”
Chief Justice R.M. Meredith flatly and candidly condemned Spracklin’s behaviour during the proceedings (published in the March 10, 1921, Toronto Star), saying simply, “He showed unwisdom.” Later, Meredith questioned Spracklin’s very appointment as a license inspector by asking, “Why did he take a position for which he was not fitted?” The lawsuit drove the point home: extreme measures like arming the fanatical pastor were no solution to the bootlegging problem.
Photo courtesy of the Windsor Star.
Anti-liquor crusader Rev. J.O.L. Spracklin, who shot the owner of a Sandwich speakeasy, as he appeared at the time of his trial.
Middle Island’s Blind Pig
News of J.O.L. Spracklin’s demise would have been music to the ears of men like Joe Roscoe. Described by none other than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as “the reputed gambling king of Toledo,” Roscoe had a rap sheet that stretched back more than thirty years before the FBI finally caught up with him in January 1937. Like the stereotypical Hollywood gangster, Roscoe was also fond of aliases, and went under several, among them Vedo, Joseph Rosso, and Joseph Cole.
Dark rumours always seemed to surround Roscoe, whom the January 28, 1937, Toledo Blade baldly referred to as a “mysterious underworld character.” Most of them circulated around the gambling houses in Toledo. The Blade asserted that Roscoe held a 25 percent interest in one such house, which “has been raided rather less frequently than some of its competitors.”
But much of the public’s interest in Roscoe surrounded a certain Lake Erie island he was reported to be involved with. There, just inside Canadian waters, Roscoe was said to be involved in all sorts of illegal activity, from tax evasion to gambling and bootlegging. It was also there, perhaps, that the answer to how Roscoe managed to keep the police off his back in Toledo might be found. According to the January 28, 1937, Toledo Blade: “The gossips
today named some police department members who are said to have availed themselves of Mr. Roscoe’s generous invitations to relax in pleasant company far from prying eyes and lifted eyebrows.” The police officials were never named, though the same edition of the Blade also made note of the “certain amount of restlessness . . . evident in some quarters today as developments in the Roscoe case moved toward a climax in the searching limelight of a federal court.”
The island in question was Middle Island, located just three kilometres south of Pelee Island, mere metres from American waters. Only a little more than eighteen hectares, Middle Island is the southernmost point of land in Canada, and its questionable past, earned during the Prohibition years, continues to mystify to this day.
Much of what actually happened on Middle Island remains shrouded in mystery, but what is certain is that its convenient location made it irresistible to men like Roscoe. And he was far from the biggest fish to set foot on Middle’s sandy shores. The Purple Gang of Detroit, who rose from practically nothing to dominate the illegal liquor market in a city that at the time was the booming front line of liquor smuggling, were also rumoured to have a stake in the speakeasy that operated there. Even the king of all bootleggers himself, Al Capone, was thought to have paid at least a few visits. For many years, a rumour even circulated that Capone had hidden a large fortune in the walls of the club at Middle Island. But since the building now stands in ruins, and no bills have ever been found there, it’s probably safe to consign this to yet another in a long line of Capone myths.
During the 1920s, a club, complete with an airstrip, was opened on Middle, and rum-runners, in their modified speedboats, would often load up with whiskey before speeding off to deliver their spoils to the nearby Bass Islands, Kelleys Island, or even directly to the Ohio mainland — and collect their handsome profits. But this was no easy task, as the Coast Guard had by this time begun to arm their boats, and they weren’t shy about firing on suspected lawbreakers. On top of that, there was the risk of being hijacked by other rum-runners (the Purple Gang were pioneers of this brutal tactic on the Detroit River), and, like all other mariners, rum-runners always had to be wary of Lake Erie’s tricky weather, be it vicious storms or even ice, which is practically invisible in the dark during the winter and spring.
All of this contributed to what was fast becoming a wild game of cat and mouse between the Coast Guard and the rum-runners in the waters surrounding the Lake Erie islands that was rivaled perhaps only by the goings-on just to the north on the Detroit River. In his rare 1939 memoir about visiting his uncle on Pelee Island during the 1920s, simply titled Uncle Lawrence, British author Oliver Warner, who would later go on to write a biography of legendary naval commander Horatio Nelson, writes of a run to the Bass Islands with his uncle on a friend’s boat. They had just left the safety of Canadian waters when an American Coast Guard vessel set upon them. Instinctively, they began to throw the hooch over the side, when, at the last moment, their pursuer fixed his attention on another suspected rum-runner deemed to be a more valuable target. Warner writes:
We watched the chase into the distance, proceeding unmolested. “They’ll never catch Bill Ince,” said young Thompson [one of Warner’s companions that day], “unless he breaks down. The Mary Bella is the fastest boat on Erie. And if they do, he won’t have any stuff on board, not he. Just out for his health and a little fishing.”
But it wasn’t all about smuggling. Men like Roscoe were as keen as anyone to have a good time, and the Middle Island Club certainly reflected this. There was a full casino operating in the basement, complete with poker tables, a chuck-a-luck wheel, and even slot machines. And if the guests had a little too much fun and couldn’t find their way back to their boats, it was no problem — they could stay over in one of seven luxury rooms, each of which offered beautiful views of Lake Erie — and continue their little vacation from “dry” America the next day.
The federal case that put an end to Roscoe’s run of luck stemmed from the helping hand he gave to gangsters Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell, following their 1936 robbery of a mail train in Garrettsville, Ohio. Early in 1937, the FBI hauled Roscoe in and accused him of allowing the pair to hide out in his Adams Street apartment in Toledo. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for his role in the heist.
Still, Roscoe lived to a ripe old age of seventy-five. When his obituary appeared in the November 22, 1965, Toledo Blade, it pulled surprisingly few punches about his past:
During the middle 1930s, Mr. Roscoe owned Middle Island in Canadian waters, which was used as a base of operation in smuggling premium beers and liquors into this country . . . to avoid alcoholic beverage taxes.
Today, there is little evidence on Middle Island of its shady history. After the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933 (Ontario had already given up on Prohibition in 1927), the club was never as profitable as it was during its heyday, when the OTA and the Eighteenth Amendment conspired to make it a bootlegger’s dream. It soon fell into disrepair, and in the decades that followed, Middle Island remained largely uninhabited and was rarely visited, except by the odd curious boater.
Things remained this way until 1999, when the island was finally put on the auction block by its Cincinnati-based owners, and was successfully snapped up by the Nature Conservancy of Canada for a final price tag of US$1.3 million. With that, Canada’s southernmost point was returned to Canadian hands after nearly a century of American ownership. But even this wasn’t done without some behind-the-scenes intrigue. The federal government quietly donated CAD$300,000 to the Conservancy’s bid, which was enough to clinch the deal. It was necessary to keep the contribution quiet, however, so as to not tip off the other five bidders, all of whom were American, that the Canadian federal government had thrown its considerable financial might behind the Conservancy’s bid — thus driving up the price even further.
After it had won the day, the Nature Conservancy promptly turned Middle Island and its over thirty-five rare and endangered species over to the care of Point Pelee National Park, where it will remain protected for generations to come.
Notwithstanding its reputation as the black sheep of the Lake Erie island chain, most Canadians were happy to hear that this remote southern outpost had finally come home.
The Whiskey Ship
Like most professional rum-runners of the day, John Sylvester McQueen knew a thing or two about exploiting the loopholes in the Ontario Temperance Act. Born in Amherstburg, Ontario, the sixty-five-year-old McQueen was also quite familiar with the many risks of sailing on Lake Erie, particularly in October and November, when the weather is generally at its worst. By 1922, he’d been hauling cargo on the Great Lakes for years, and his boat, the thirty-eight-metre wooden steamer City of Dresden, had already had a lengthy career by the time he bought it in 1914. Launched in Walkerville, near Windsor (and, ironically, home of the Hiram Walker Distillery) in 1872, the old Dresden had ferried passengers and cargo between Windsor, Leamington, and Pelee Island, among other Lake Erie ports, in her early years before being sold to Post & Company of Sandusky, which used her to haul fish and various other types of cargo around the lake’s western basin.
Not long after she was launched, the Dresden suffered a mishap that ended up looking a lot like the one that would end up being her ultimate fate. On the afternoon of October 13, 1873, the Dresden was picking her way across the Detroit River on her way to Windsor when the steam barge Jenness, misjudging the Dresden’s course and speed, barreled headlong into her. For a short time, it looked as though the Jenness would doom the poor Dresden before she ever got her chance at Prohibition-era infamy. The October 15, 1873, Detroit Free Press tells the story:
Between 7 and 8 p.m. Monday evening as the prop. City of Dresden was crossing to the Canada side, the steam barge Jenness came down the river at full speed, and mistaking the position of the propeller [the Dresden], struck her head on a little abaft [or behind] of midship. The shock of the collision kee
led the propeller over on her beam ends, and the barge went tearing along her side for 30 or 40 ft., crushing deck beams, smashing planks and completely tearing off the bulwarks for 30 ft.
Photo courtesy of Parks Canada Agency — Fort Malden NHSC
The City of Dresden in her younger days, before she fell victim to the sandbars of Long Point.
In the confused moments that followed, it was thought that both boats would surely sink, but the Dresden displayed the toughness for which she would later become renowned. Even though, according to the Free Press, “some of the planks were splintered almost as fine as matches,” she was shortly repaired and was back in service by early the following year. Miraculously, no one on either boat was hurt.
After more than forty years of this type of punishment, then, it’s not hard to imagine what shape the City of Dresden was in when she found her way into the hands of the resourceful McQueen in 1914. (The Simcoe Reformer would later describe the boat as “condemned” when McQueen bought it, but it is not clear that things were quite that bad.) Still, McQueen managed to keep the old steamer in service, reinforcing her tattered hull and repairing her with all the spare parts his limited budget would allow. In the end, the Dresden wound up a bit of a mishmash, particularly in the engine room, where McQueen had installed a plethora of other refurbished and repurposed odds and ends, including a boiler and an engine from two different tugs. The end result was a serviceable vessel, stable enough to continue hauling cargo on the Great Lakes, though seriously underpowered.
