Early Life & Prohibition
Higgins was born in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York. Learning pickpocketing and petty theft as a child, by 1916, he had been arrested for assault twice but was put on probation. At the beginning of Prohibition he had formed a small-time gang which started to operate outside of Bay Ridge after taking control of "Big Bill" Bill Dwyer's bootlegging operations with partner Frank Costello in 1927, importing high quality Canadian liquor for Dwyer's high-society clientele.
By the mid-1920s, Higgins' rum-running operations included a fleet of taxis and loading trucks, as well as several planes and numerous speedboats which were used in smuggling alcohol into the United States from Canada (one of which, the Cigarette, was described as "the fastest rum-runner in New York waters"). Higgins, himself a flying enthusiast and licensed pilot, often used his planes for personal use. During a business trip in Baltimore, Higgins was a witness to a gang fight between rival bootleggers while visiting a local speakeasy and, while deciding to leave the premises, he was mistaken for one of the fighting bootleggers and shot in the leg by a local police officer.
Read more about this topic: Vannie Higgins
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or prohibition:
“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“During Prohibition days, when South Carolina was actively advertising the iodine content of its vegetables, the Hell Hole brand of ‘liquid corn’ was notorious with its waggish slogan: ‘Not a Goiter in a Gallon.’”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)