THE RHODE ISLAND CENTURY

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In the Roaring Twenties the question here was: What Prohibition?

Of the many Rhode Islanders who made it big in bootlegging during Prohibition, no one was bigger than Danny Walsh.

A onetime Pawtucket hardware store clerk, Daniel L. Walsh started small, driving liquor for other bootleggers when Prohibition began in 1920. He soon went into the business himself, built a fleet of boats, cars, and planes and earned a reputation as one of the most daring rum-runners on the East Coast.

By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, 36-year-old Walsh had become one of the country's largest liquor dealers. A wealthy man who posed as a ''gentleman farmer,'' he raised prize horses on his farm in Charlestown.

On Feb. 2, 1933, Walsh went to dinner with six associates at the Bank Cafe in Pawtuxet Village. When it was over he waved good-bye outside the restaurant.

Walsh had $40,000 in his pockets. He was never seen or heard from again.

IF EVER THERE was a state that gleefully thumbed its nose at Prohibition, it was Rhode Island. Throughout the Roaring Twenties, Rhode Island was probably the most anti-Prohibition state in the union.

Rhode Islanders fought against it; the General Assembly never ratifed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which ushered in Prohibition. It was one of only two states not to ratify. (The other was Connecticut.)

Even after the ban on liquor became law, Rhode Island didn't give up. The Assembly ordered the state attorney general to challenge the law in court, which he did for years.

He lost.

Prohibition turned off the legal spigot, but liquor flowed as if Rhode Island were the stage for one of Jay Gatsby's parties, where the champagne was served in glasses larger than finger bowls.

From Westerly's tony Watch Hill summer colony to Woonsocket's gritty North End, it was happy hour. Callused-handed mill workers and those whose bejeweled fingers lifted nothing heavier than a dividend check joined in the hoisting.

Names plucked randomly from the Providence police arrest blotter for violating the liquor ban from a week in 1924 include representatives of just about every ethnic group: Silverman, Leahy, Glazer, Grossi, Filipe, Mitchell, Kelleher, Andre, Silvia, Jackson and Crowe.

With 400 miles of impossible-to-police coastline, Rhode Island became a haven for smugglers with speedy boats who brought top shelf liquor in from Canada or the Bahamas.

There was so much rum-running that Al Capone himself reportedly traveled to the state in 1928 in hopes of making a supply connection with local smugglers.

IT WAS EASY to see why Danny Walsh, born poor in the Cumberland mill village of Valley Falls, took up rum-running. A bootlegger who ducked arrest couldn't help but get rich. Quality alcohol, for instance, was selling wholesale in Rhode Island in the mid-1920s for $7 a gallon. That same gallon cost 66 cents in Canada, which never adopted Prohibition.

And it seemed like everybody was breaking the law.

''Those who craved their highballs and rickeys had no reason to despair. Speaks grew like toadstools after an August shower and the little sliding panel in the 'club' door became as the beacon guiding a sorely beset craft into harbor,'' was the way Prohibition was described by The Journal.

One popular speakeasy was at 24 Fountain St., within shouting distance of the city's police department. It was run by James Lavell, and was known for having the longest bar in Rhode Island. Providence police made more than a hundred booze busts every month, but the cops didn't bother Lavell, who also ran a brewery in Pawtucket.

When the final edition had been put to bed at The Providence Journal, shortly after midnight, ''a chosen few from The Journal'' retreated to the Dante Restaurant on Weybosset Street. Doors closed, jugs of wine and bottles of Scotch appeared on the tables and the proprietor turned up the phonograph, signaling a wee-hours fest of song and drink.

A few blocks away at the Dreyfus Hotel, a function room for ''private parties'' was tucked a floor below the main dining room. Cocktails ''came in a chilled cocoa pot and were served in cups.'' Favored Dreyfus guests were treated to roast venison dinners livened with Burgundy and cognac.

A haunt called Marconi's Roman Garden -- where Camille's is now -- on Bradford Street on Federal Hill was patronized by Prohibition agents. Wine cost $1 a bottle or 30 cents by the glass. Scotch, rye, and gin were delivered ''gratis by prohibition agents who, in return, ate all the Marconi food and drank all the Marconi wine they wanted, always in the cellar with other favored guests.''

In Newport, lawyers and politicians hung out at a speakeasy on West Broadway known as ''The Mission.'' A shot of whiskey cost 50 cents, a bottle of home-brewed beer cost 15. In 1924, its proprietor, Billy Goode, became the first Rhode Islander arrested for running a speakeasy. (Goode later ran a legal tavern in Newport for many years.) Newport's Jazz Age swells did their drinking at the Canfield House, where only the architecture was Victorian.

Drinkers flocked to Block Island, where the Yellow Kittens became a famous speakeasy -- at least until it was busted in 1925.

The 1920s gave Woonsocket its reputation as a city of hills, mills, and stills. From the cozy neighborhood speakeasy Hector Langlois ran at 7 Social Street to a huge distillery nestled in a shuttered textile mill, Woonsocket was known as a city that vigorously flouted Prohibition.

One of Woonsocket's more blatant bootleggers was Joseph E. Kelley, a onetime state representative. Kelley and two Connecticut men who were former federal Prohibition agents set up a huge distillery -- its vats held 6,000 gallons -- in the former Glenbrook Worsted Co. textile factory on Mason Street.

The distillery moved from Norwich, Conn. to Woonsocket because the owners believed the ''law enforcement and political climate'' would protect them from arrest. They bricked up the factory windows and made their moves at night. The distillery was ignored by Woonsocket police, but federal prohibition agents swooped in and closed it down, arresting Kelley and his partners shortly before St. Patrick's Day in 1928. Agents estimated the distillery had a capital investment of $200,000 and generated a profit of $25,000 a week.

For those who couldn't afford the imported Canadian ale of a fancy speakeasy, there were home recipes for various alcoholic beverages. By the mid-20s, there were reportedly more recipes for wine than for jonnycake, the quintessential Rhode Island May Breakfast treat.

Malt and hop stores sprouted all over the state. Beer was brewed discreetly in stone crocks down in cellars where it was warm, or hidden behind kitchen stoves. And inventive Rhode Islanders found novel uses for bathtubs and kettles.

THE YOUNG especially revolted against the straitjacket of Prohibition. The booze ban came as a backdrop to a time of rapid social change. The rural life built around the farm, the rhythm of the seasons and the small town, church, and family, was eclipsed by the satiny lights of the city -- big, anonymous, filled with temptation.

And there were the World War I veterans, fresh from Europe. Once they had seen Paris, the saying went, you couldn't keep them down on the farm.

Said Frederick Lewis Allen, famous chronicler of the '20s: ''Supposedly nice girls were smoking cigarettes -- openly and defiantly, if often rather awkwardly and self-consciously. They were drinking -- somewhat less openly but often all too efficaciously. There were stories of daughters of the most exemplary parents getting drunk -- 'blotto' -- as their companions cheerfully put it -- on the contents of the hip-flasks of the new prohibition regime, and going out joyriding with men at four o'clock in the morning.''

Speakeasies in Providence's Benefit Street neighborhood drew the young, educated, and alienated in the era when the young mimicked the characters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Willa Cather.

Bootlegger Danny Walsh made gobs of money quenching the thirst of the young. He owned the lush Charlestown horse farm. And he kept two apartments in Providence -- one on Ives Street near Brown University on the East Side, the other on Broad Street on the south side, near the headquarters of a large bootlegging syndicate.

In 1928, he was sued by the Internal Revenue Service for unpaid taxes. They charged that he owed $350,000 in taxes and penalties for 1924, which meant he earned at least $750,000 that year. The government settled for a much smaller amount.

Walsh's Charlestown neighbors considered him a hobby farmer ''who minded his business and caused no trouble.''

Years after his disappearance, a discovery cast new light on the company Walsh kept. Between September and December 1932, four of Walsh's associates went to the farm and dug a deep grave near an abandoned building. A white powder was dumped into the grave.

Several of Walsh's farm employees saw the grave and assumed the powder was quick lime, used to camouflage the odor of a rotting corpse.

WHY WERE Rhode Islanders so strong in their opposition to Prohibition, so reluctant to join the national crusade against the evils of alcohol?

In most states, Prohibition was embraced by people upset by the ''foreign'' cultures immigrants were bringing to the ever-growing cities. It was an attempt to impose order and the Victorian values of a rural, WASP society on an increasingly complex, disorderly urban country. It had strong anti-Roman Catholic overtones.

Rhode Island was the most Catholic state in the country. (It still is.) And it was the most urban. There was little organized sentiment in the state favoring Prohibition. Few members of the groups who pushed it elsewhere, such as Baptists and Christian evangelicals, lived in Rhode Island.

Prohibition began as a state-by-state movement; between 1906 and 1917, 26 states voted to become dry. It became a national movement because some Prohibition leaders were convinced that without a Constitutional Amendment, some northeastern states would never become dry.

On one issue, many wets agreed with the drys: Too many saloons were dens of excessive drinking and vices such as gambling and prostitution. And, in fact, there is evidence that in its early years, Prohibition cut alcohol consumption, perhaps by as much as 30 percent: Prohibition so raised liquor prices -- the cost of a beer increased by 600 percent, gin by 520 percent -- that many could no longer afford it.

A BLAST of machine gun bullets from a Coast Guard ship on a foggy December night off Jamestown in 1929 cemented Rhode Island public opinion against Prohibition.

Two nights before New Year's Eve, a rum-running boat known as the Black Duck refused the Coast Guard's order to stop. The guard fired on it and when the smoke cleared, three men were dead, one wounded. Five hundred cases of liquor were found beside the bodies aboard the 85-foot speedboat.

The public was angry about the violence -- and the Prohibition that fueled it. ''The deaths of these men must bring to us a little more clearly the horrible price we are paying in attempting to enforce laws which are fundamentally un-American and un-Christian,'' said the Rev. Roy W. Magoun, superintendent of the Seaman's Church Institute, in a sermon at St. George's Church, Newport, the day after the deaths.

Legislators scheduled a state referendum, which was held nine months later, in November 1930. The wet side crushed the drys, winning 172,545 votes for repeal of Prohibition to 48,540 for keeping it. Cities, notably Providence, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, and Newport, were strongholds of anti-Prohibition sentiment.

On Providence's Federal Hill, a bastion of Italian immigrants, the tally against Prohibition in one voting district was 2,005 to 3. Hopkinton was the only community in the state to support the dry side.

IT WASN'T JUST the lure of wealth that drove bootleggers. For someone like Danny Walsh, it was an entree to the Jazz Age society most people from humble Cumberland could experience only through the pages of the tabloid newspapers that appeared for the first time in the 1920s.

In federal court testimony after his disappearance, a Walsh associate told of meetings in New York hotel rooms, payoffs of $100,000 in cash, and conferences with members of the Big Seven, a syndicate that controlled liquor running operations along the Atlantic coast.

Several days after Danny Walsh disappeared, a $40,000 ransom was demanded for his return alive. Walsh's brother Joseph and several bootlegging associates traveled to Boston and paid the $40,000, but there was no sign of Danny.

A persistent rumor in the state's police and criminal community was that Danny Walsh ''was stuffed into a barrel of cement and put on a rum boat and his remains dumped into the sea off Block Island.''

For years, any time a suspicious corpse was found -- in the Massachusetts or Rhode Island woods -- or a skull turned up in a fishing net off Block Island, police checked it against Danny Walsh's dental records. A news story was written.

Walsh never turned up.

PROHIBITION was repealed in 1933. Rhode Island's Assembly was one of the first to support legalizing alcohol.

On Dec. 5, 1933, legal drinking was back. In a message to the nation, President Franklin Roosevelt pleaded for moderation.

All of Providence's hotels threw lavish, champagne-drenched parties, with the Biltmore opening a new bar -- the ''Baccante Room.''

There were traffic jams in downtown Providence and much honking of car horns. But city police said it was a calm night, considering it was the first time drinking had been legal in 13 years.

There were 17 arrests for drunkenness. Most were habitual offenders.