BOOTLEG RING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 October 1938, Page 4

BOOTLEG RING

AMAZING ALLEGATIONS. CHARGES IN UNITED STATES. Nearly £400,000 in Federal taxes is stated to have been lost by the United States Government through the activities of an alleged ring to market bootleg, liquors. Sir New York policemen and six Federal investigators are included in Government indictments against 103 persons alleged to be linked in the ring. Chemists, doctors and dentists are others in the list of suspects, who are accused of manufacturing brandy, alcohol, and slivovitz, a plum brandy, from such articles as shoe blacking and dry-cleaning fluids. Large quantities of the illicit,products are said to have been sold to dishonest chemists, who used them in dispensing prescriptions. The ring is alleged to have distributed as much as 10,000 gallons of alcohol a week, and the men responsible for its operations, state Government officials, were the brothers Pellegrino, brothers of a former Tammany politician. Profit on the bootleg alcohol was very large. A five-gallon tin of taxpaid alcohol sells for £6 12s, of which half represents tax, but the ring offered its alcohol at £3 a tin. ' Not content with their profit, the members of the ring, it is asserted, were also in a position to blackmail the people who bought their products. Policemen and Federal agents, it is alleged, were used to afford protection to 14 garages used by the lorries of the combine that made the deliveries. In return for their services, they were given the names of the bigger customers on whom, according to the Government indictment, they staged raids soon after the deliveries were made. Just as the police were threatening to make arrests, another member of the gang would arrive on the scene and the raiding party would be bought off for sums ranging from £lO to £lOOO.