time. The coast guard was responsible for patrolling American waters, trying to catch the nimble “rum-running” boats that flouted Prohibition law and smuggled bootleg liquor from sea to shore. It was a cat-and-mouse game that the mice were winning. From the start of Prohibition, the coast guard’s task had been laughably difficult—they owned just 203 slow small patrol boats to police five thousand miles of coastline—but recently the rumrunners had deployed shortwave radios
