Documentary on bootleggers of Narragansett Bay being filmed locally

NEWPORT — Three city residents are making a documentary to be called “The Bootlegger,” which will examine the life and times of Newport’s most notorious rum runner from the 1920s, Charlie Travers.

“He is such an intriguing, layered character,” said Paul Madden, the writer and director of the film.

The documentary producers are John and Patricia Cahill Taft, who operate the tour boats Rumrunner II and Madeleine in Newport Harbor through their business, Classic Cruises of Newport. The Tafts are partners with the family of the late Don Glassie in Yankee Development Corp., which operates hotels like The Jailhouse Inn.

John Taft’s purchase of Rumrunner II, a 58-foot motorboat from the Roaring Twenties, in 1992 in Albany, New York, ignited his fascination with rum runners in general and with a violent incident that helped spur the repeal of Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933. Now the boat will have a starring role in “The Bootlegger.”

Travers and three crewmen were in a 50-foot speedboat known as The Black Duck on Dec. 29, 1929, just after 2 a.m. when a Coast Guard patrol boat tied to a buoy between Fort Adams and Fort Wetherill in Jamestown was waiting for them in a dense fog.

Patrol boat commander Alexander C. Cornell, a zealous “rum chaser,” was determined to catch them, regardless of the costs.

When The Black Duck came into sight about 50 feet away, a three-second blast from a machine gun into The Black Duck’s pilot house killed three of the rum runners. Travers was hit in the thumb, which he lost.

The boat was carrying more than 300 sacks of smuggled liquor, the Coast Guard announced at the time. No weapons were found. The burlap sacks contained liquor bottles and padding, so they could be thrown into a waiting dory or passed hand-to-hand in a human chain in shallow waters to shore, John Taft explained.

Leo Dutilly, an Army serviceman stationed at Fort Adams, worked on the side as a mechanic for rum-runner boats, including The Black Duck. He was on ambulance duty at the fort when The Black Duck was attacked. He and another serviceman responded to the wharves, carried the bodies of the dead men off the boat and brought them to the morgue.

Dutilly was in his 90s when he was interviewed by Madden and the Tafts in the late 1990s, and they still have the footage in a fascinating film clip they made that can be viewed at black-duck.org.

“We started working on this over 20 years ago when Leo was still alive and we were planning a feature film,” Madden said. “Now it’s a major intro-piece for our documentary.”

The Black Duck had two 300-horsepower motors manufactured for World War I planes that were never built, Taft said.

“Nothing could catch that goddamn thing,” Dutilly said in the interview.

A Black Duck crew member would regularly deliver smuggled liquor to the Bellevue Avenue mansions, according to Dutilly.

“Forty dollars a quart – that’s what the millionaires paid,” Dutilly said. That was a lot of money in 1929, since $40 had the purchasing power of $533 in today’s dollars, according to one online inflation calculator.

Dutilly talks about his involvement in the rum-running industry.

“If the Army ever found out, I’d still be in jail, I guess,” he said.

“The illegal liquor business was bigger than the federal budget at the time,” Madden said.

Large ships from Canada, the French islands of Miquelon and Saint Pierre off the coast of Newfoundland, and the Caribbean transported large liquor shipments to the 12-mile line called “Rum Row” off the coast because the Coast Guard did not have jurisdiction beyond that distance from shore.

Smaller boats would load up at night. Rum runners bought waterfront properties and had distributors. The Prohibition era is when organized crime really started and violent crime increased, Taft said.

Travers was not prosecuted for any crime after the attack on his boat and was released by the Coast Guard. People like the Rev. Roy Magoun, then director of the Seamen’s Church Institute in Newport, advocated for Travers and people like him and condemned the Coast Guard actions.

Many of the rum runners were of Portuguese heritage, like Travers, John Taft said. Many had been New Bedford fishermen in the cod fisheries, which suffered a decline in those years.

Travers met his wife, Mildred, while she was working as a telephone operator. People at that time talked to telephone operators when they were making calls.

“It was the equivalent of meeting online today,” Madden said with a smile.

“We have amazing characters,” John Taft said. “They almost tell their own stories.”

A Coast Guard inquiry and inquest exonerated Cornell, the patrol boat commander, but the public, especially in New England, favored Travers.

The nation was polarized then between the camps of “wets” who wanted to end Prohibition and “drys” who wanted to keep it, and New England was overwhelmingly “wet,” Taft said.

After Prohibition ended, Travers and his wife continued working in the illegal liquor business, running a distillery on their farm in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

“We have old farms in Jamestown where we can shoot those scenes,” Madden said. “We’ll shoot the on-the-water scenes in the fall.”

The illegal distillery led to Travers’ arrest in 1936, and he served time in the Danbury, Connecticut, penitentiary. He was released to serve in the Navy when World War II broke out and manpower was needed.

Travers lived into his 90s after a long career that will be summarized in the documentary’s epilogue.

Madden was making films in Miami and the Tafts were developing Art Deco hotels in Miami Beach when they first met in the 1980s.

Madden started the former Beechwood Theater Co. that worked with University of Rhode Island drama classes to put on Victorian shows in the Astors’ Beechwood mansion on Bellevue Avenue before the mansion was sold.

After years of researching the history behind Travers and his times, the documentary partners say this important piece of American maritime and sociopolitical history now will be told with modern filmmaking technology.