When the 18th Amendment—and the Volstead Act that spelled out the details—went into effect in January of 1920, Reverend Billy Sunday said, “The reign of tears is over.  The slums will soon be a memory.  We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh.  Hell will be forever for rent.”^[1]  Unfortunately it didn’t work out that way.  If the great evangelist had lived to see the end of the decade, he would have had to eat every syllable.

Alcohol consumption did drop dramatically, at least in the beginning.  And the economy was booming—the prohibitionists took credit for that.  On the other hand, crime was skyrocketing and becoming organized. The country was swimming in bootleg liquor and hardly a day went by without a headline about police corruption.  Henry Joy, like most temperance activists, had assumed that when the 18th Amendment passed, Americans would just stop drinking. It never even occurred to him that people would ignore the law.  Then one day he found out his servants were making top quality wine and beer for everybody in the house except for himself and his wife.

Henry Joy inadvertently wound up with a front row seat for the war on booze. His vast estate fronted on Lake St. Clair north of Detroit.  On the opposite shore was Canada, only minutes away by high speed motor launch, and this waterway was destined to become a major midnight conduit for Canadian whiskey.  Joy found it hard to get used to the sight of federal agents blasting away at smugglers trying to land on his beach, but he put up with it. Then one day in December of 1926 a carload of agents showed up at his estate and without bothering to identify themselves, ransacked the boat house and seized eleven bottles of beer from the old watchman.  When they came back later, the old man didn’t answer fast enough so they broke down the door and roughed him up. Joy was outraged but there was more to come.  The next time the lawmen were in the neighborhood they spotted an armed man in a boat just off shore and