Original subtitles

I remember watching clips

of the John Gotti trial on television.

Gotti, the alleged Godfather,

intimidating witnesses

and running the nation's largest organized crime family.

And you realize, wait, this Mob thing is real.

That's a real guy.

That is the moment that I decided

I want to find out more.

This thing called organized crime:

What is it,

how did it originate,

and how did these guys actually make money?

The problem is the Mob hates evidence.

But there's some things they just can't do away with.

So now we're finding what they tried to hide.

Why was there a truck

at the bottom of the river?

It was something that definitely should not have been there.

This ship went down fully loaded

with cases of whiskey.

What happened to the men who were on board?

It was not an accident.

It didn't sink by an act of God.

He turned an American metropolis

into a bullet-scarred battleground.

These underwater discoveries

have clear ties to organized crime.

The ultimate question: Where did it all start?

How did a bunch of otherwise ragtag hoodlums

become a national organized criminal syndicate?

How did they become the Mob?

I've been scuba diving for over 40 years,

and it's the shipwrecks and the stories they have

which have fascinated me the most.

They're exciting, they're historic.

They are time capsules on the seafloor.

And of all the ones I dived, one really stuck with me.

It led me on a journey into the heart of the Mob.

Late 1990s, a good friend of mine

who's a boat captain like me,

he told me about a strange site he'd heard about far offshore.

So we decided to give this wreck a shot.

It was a treat to dive something

that we suspected nobody ever had been to before.

So we're excited.

As you get further and further down,

the sunlight just doesn't penetrate.

First thing we see is what looks like the top of an engine.

We were excited,

and as we looked around, we saw wooden walls,

which indicated an old shipwreck.

And we started to see numbers of bottles,

the necks just popping up out of the sand.

It wasn't until we went up to the surface

that we determined they were full of whiskey.

We looked at each other and said,

"Wow, this is really cool."

I drew a sketch of what we saw on the bottom.

I think intrinsically I knew it was valuable.

It had the structure of an old single-piston steam engine.

It had a really thick propeller shaft

and a big propeller blade.

This machinery was more powerful than was needed

for a boat this size,

so we looked at each other and said: Could this be a tugboat?

That would explain the size of the engine.

Tugboats under normal trade

would have been towing ships, towing barges.

They're the work boats that bring ships

in and out of New York City every day.

Why would a tugboat be carrying cases and cases of whiskey,

25 miles offshore?

For many years I puzzled over my find,

although I never really got the opportunity

to investigate it further.

Nowadays I teach marine archaeology

at Stockton University.

And it allowed me to have access to the university boat,

which has the necessary technology to scan a shipwreck,

to identify what that shipwreck could have been.

I'm a diver myself,

and part of my work involves mapping shipwrecks.

So any new shipwreck to me

is an exciting new adventure.

The first step was to scan the seafloor

to find evidence of whether the boat really was a tug.

We had one shot to do this given the cost,

$1,500 in fuel to get there.

I always love a good challenge.

Everybody was excited when we got to the site

and we started to deploy the equipment

to actually map the wreck.

First we have to find it.

Anything?

Where'd the wreck go?

There's nothing there.

There's nothing there right now.

We did not find it right away,

so we expanded our search area

and we did about a kilometer in both directions.

Let me know when you want me to end this line.

And after an hour, we still didn't have the wreck.

And now everybody was getting nervous; where'd it go?

Are you sure these are the right numbers?

I said, yeah, I mean, I know I've been there.

There's nothing.

I don't even see a seashell.

It was like I was hit in the face...

with a pie.

Where would a wreck go? How would it disappear?

So, what are we gonna do?

I understand the ocean giveth and taketh away,

so it probably covered the shipwreck over

with currents and sand.

My greatest fear was,

now I'm never gonna know what this shipwreck was.

And then I remembered the story

of a sunken tugboat named the Lizzie D.

The Lizzie D was found in 1977

by a couple of dive boat captains.

It was fully intact, upright on the bottom.

Cases and cases of whiskey bottles

came off of it at the time.

Were these two connected?

It would be a long shot.

The wreck site was 19 miles to the northwest,

but scanning this known tugboat might provide me with the clues

to help identify my missing wreck.

So we took a shot

and we decided we would head up to the Lizzie D.

Wow, that's a nice picture.

After four or five passes, we had collected enough data

to give a pretty full sonar image of the Lizzie D.

And it revealed some really exciting details.

The sides themselves are gone,

but the ribs of the boat, those are sticking up.

There was a large section of boiler that's intact.

The boiler was where the water

would be pumped through and heated with coal

to make steam to run the engine.

The engine was behind it.

Behind the engine was the propeller shaft,

then the propeller.

One of the key things that we saw on the stern

was a large tow bed.

This is where you attach a towline to haul a bigger ship.

It does confirm that this is a tugboat.

Then I compared my sketch

to the evidence from this scan.

I saw all the machinery parts in the same alignment

as the boat we dove in the late 1990s.

It had all the parts and the same general construction.

And the similarities convinced me

my missing wreck was a tugboat.

And there was more.

Both of them sank upright on the bottom.

That tells us that they sank in a way consistent with a ship

that would take on too much water

and was too heavy to stay afloat.

Tugboats usually operated around harbors.

But loaded down with heavy cargo, in open seas,

they'd have been pretty vulnerable to bad weather.

I needed information about tugboats lost at sea

and headed for the maritime archives in New York City.

I came across a book that shows the transcript of a letter

from one Agnes McCardle

to the assistant district attorney

for the United States in New York...

complaining about her missing brother

who was on a ship owned by a captain

who had a poor record of maintaining his ships.

His ship seems to have disappeared.

This captain also had another ship

that sank two years earlier.

It turned out to be the Lizzie D.

I was really struck by McCardle's words in the letter.

"On or about November 16th,

the rum-runner tug William P. Maloney was lost

with a cargo of liquor and her 12 men.

We have reason to believe we had a brother on board."

I thought, wow, did I finally have a name

for my missing shipwreck?

You had a captain who owned tugboats.

You had tugboats, similar construction,

both operating in the same area, a couple of years apart.

So, given the circumstances

and especially having this smoking gun

of a letter from Agnes McCardle,

we were almost certain the wreck that we dove many years ago

was the William P. Maloney.

Rum-running meant smuggling illegal alcohol,

and it was a pretty common term in New Jersey.

This was very early in the Prohibition era,

those years from 1920 to 1933

when alcohol was illegal in America.

I'd found a Prohibition era rum-runner,

and it made sense that smugglers were using tugboats.

Who's gonna notice two tugboats coming in and out of the city?

I should have been excited.

After so many years I'd finally identified my mystery shipwreck.

But instead, I was really haunted by Agnes' words.

"The families of the men are in want.

Please give your attention and save this sorrow."

These guys died trying to protect illegal alcohol

knowing that there was nobody coming to save them.

They just drowned, and nobody knew where they were.

The big question is, who paid these guys?

Who were the men behind the scenes?

How did I first get into Mob history?

Well, that's easy.

That started with growing up in the household

of an undercover narcotics cop.

We'd play cops and robbers with the other neighborhood kids,

except we literally had fingerprint sheets

and search warrants to fill out

that Dad would give us to play around with.

That just took it to a whole other level.

Anything that is unusual or steeped in mystery

seemed to draw me in.

What's exciting about finding a shipwreck

that is probably a rum-runner?

Well, for an organized crime researcher, this is great.

This is physical evidence

pointing to an otherwise mythological period

in American history called Prohibition.

My first question: Where were they heading?

These boats were leaving New York Harbor,

and the orientation of the wrecks and their position

indicate that they were making their way offshore to turn south

and, we think, to head to the next biggest place

for Prohibition:

Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Research showed me bootleggers were bringing liquor

into the most prime locations they could find,

one of which was Atlantic City.

Why? It's an island.

What was Atlantic City during the Prohibition period?

Sex, booze, debauchery.

Atlantic City was a place

where the general laws of vice didn't really apply.

So, were these ships part of a larger smuggling ring?

In researching through Coast Guard records,

I found the link between these missing tugboats

to something called the Bill Dwyer Syndicate.

What was that?

And who was Bill Dwyer?

Steve! Christian.

Christian, nice to meet you. Thanks for coming.

So, Steve, what I found,

this is one of the articles from 1926

relating to a giant indictment on a rum-running ring.

At the head of this ring, allegedly, was "Big Bill" Dwyer.

Irish American, entrepreneur.

This ring was directly connected to some up-and-coming mobsters.

I'm gonna show you who "Big Bill" Dwyer

had some relation in funding to.

That's Lucky Luciano,

creator of the infamous Five Families of New York.

Unbelievable.

The five Mafia families of New York

control organized crime in America even to this day.

Lucky Luciano named the oldest after himself,

now known as the Genovese family.

Prohibition and bootlegging was probably the real kick starter

of what we now call the Mob.

With Christian's information,

we now link our tugboats to Lucky Luciano.

And think about the enormity of that.

We now have the people behind the scenes

who pulled the strings, who were responsible,

who got away with it.

It kind of makes you mad, but at the same time,

their look at it is,

we're providing a need that everybody tells us they wanted.

It's just the government made it illegal through Prohibition.

Shipwrecked rum-running boats

are just another piece of proof that the bootlegging industry

had a lot of risk and a lot of reward.

But was the risk worth it?

During the mid 1920s

the risks of offshore rum-running greatly increased.

The Coast Guard was too involved.

There were too many hijackings from other gangsters.

Rum-runners, like any businessman,

want to look for not working hard but working smart.

That raises the question:

Where else could they bring booze in from?

So, they started to look at inland options.

That led me to look at other cities,

in particular Detroit,

and another underwater clue that explains the rise of the Mob.

I've lived in this area my entire life,

right on the United States border,

just a half a mile across the river from Detroit.

I've been a scuba diver and a diving instructor

for over 25 years.

I was a broke university student,

and it was the only place I could dive.

Because of wind and waves, the visibility is very limited,

so usually less than five feet

and sometimes as little as one foot of visibility.

So when you can only see this far in front of your face,

it's gonna limit the people

who are actually gonna want to do that dive.

There is a very strong current in the river,

and it can really drag you down the river quickly.

Yeah, it's an extremely dangerous environment,

to say the least.

I found that every single dive was an adventure.

You could find bottles and cars

and boats and shipwrecks and guns,

and it just hooked me,

and I've continued to do it till this day.

I was speaking with a local diver.

He said he had found a vehicle that was upside down,

laying in the middle of the Detroit River,

and it was something that definitely

should not have been there.

Since this was not something that was well known,

I wanted to follow up and see it for myself.

Now, remember, with only a foot of visibility in the river,

it's easier said than done.

I do a search pattern.

So, you just do a zigzag on the bottom of the water,

just going back and forth and just seeing what you could find.

I actually saw, coming out of the gloom,

wooden spokes for a vehicle.

That told me this vehicle was very early.

At that point I did not know anything more

about the history of it.

I didn't know what kind of vehicle it was,

but I really wanted to try and find out.

I dove a couple of more times,

and I used my underwater video camera

with a high-powered light

to really document and get this evidence together,

just so I could try to build a model

of what I was seeing underwater.

And what I saw was amazing.

The vehicle was upside down.

It was buried in the sediment,

so all I could really see was the bottom part of the wheels.

I could see the engine poking out,

but I really couldn't see anything more

of the topside of the vehicle.

There was a wooden floorboard and there was a truck bed,

so very quickly I determined that this was not a car at all.

It was actually a truck.

Lying close to the back was a heavy chain.

We also saw a crank handle on the front of the vehicle.

You would actually have to crank that motor to get it started.

So, the truck was old enough

not to have an electric starter motor.

But what kind of truck was it?

I visited a local museum that specializes in older vehicles

to compare our video and photo evidence

against some of the vehicles they had there.

There was a Model T truck

dating from the early part of the century.

The way that the leaf spring was underneath the axle,

it was very distinctive.

The leaf spring goes from side to side.

I looked at the front axle and wheel assembly

along with the leaf spring,

and it matched exactly what I had seen

at the bottom of the river.

I was very excited when I found out it was a Model T truck,

because knowing when the Model T was manufactured,

around 1910 to late 1920s,

it lined up perfectly with a vehicle

that would have been used during Prohibition.

So what was a Prohibition-era truck

doing upside down at the bottom of the river?

The vehicle's in a very distinctive location

because it is very close to the Hiram Walker Distillery.

They've been producing Canadian Club Whisky

and other brands for 150 years.

Many people were buying whiskey in Canada

and bringing it to the United States.

It's less than half a mile to the US border from here.

And during Prohibition,

the Hiram Walker Distillery really became a focal point.

So, now I wondered: Was my sunken truck

linked to what was happening there at the time?

I grew up in Windsor,

and, uh, and as a boy,

I heard stories about Prohibition.

And the stories were in my own family.

My saintly mother was also involved in it in a small way.

My mother was what was called a spotter,

sitting in a window, waiting for the police to arrive.

If you were in Detroit and looking across the river,

you actually saw a huge, big neon sign,

"Canadian Club."

It's almost like they were making fun of the Americans

that, hey, we're producing it, it's right here,

and there's really not a whole lot you're gonna do about it.

I mean, this is annoying as hell.

I've been researching Prohibition for years,

and I once spoke to an old Canadian customs inspector

from that era.

He would stand there at the export dock

and he would look at this guy's paper,

and it would say that these 25 cases of liquor

from Hiram Walker would be going to Venezuela.

And this guy would be sitting in an open boat.

There's no way that this boat

could go all the way down to South America.

There's no way.

I mean, it was ridiculous, it was stupid.

He would watch this guy cross the Detroit River,

right over to Detroit,

and he would be back an hour later

with another boatload, this time going to Cuba.

These boats would have passed

right by the location of my truck.

So, now I wondered what the smugglers did in the winter.

When the seasons are colder,

we definitely get the Detroit River freezing over

for a certain period of time.

What they would do is

they would have a car pulling a boat,

and the whisky would go into the boat,

these crates would go into the boat,

and they would, and the boats had skis underneath them.

You can see the boat and the little skids below it.

The night was lit up with these people

driving these cars across the ice.

Now I had an explanation

for the chain I'd found in the river.

It would have been used for towing a boat.

The Detroit River was really a highway

during the Prohibition.

Four-fifths of all the liquor

that went from Canada into the United States

went through this region right here.

This was the place in North America

where the liquor traffic was largest.

Detroit is a logistically

and geographically interesting place

for organized crime to operate.

It's so easy to cross the border here.

And who was running Detroit?

Well, it's a group called the Purple Gang.

The most vicious group of predominantly Jewish gangsters

in the Midwest in the 1920s.

The smuggling that went on here

interested other leading mobsters.

New York's Lucky Luciano

looked for easy ways to bring booze into the country.

What Luciano and his allies believed

is that the main goal is to make money.

Less fighting, more capital gain.

Does he want a war with the baddest guys in the Midwest,

or does he want to make an alliance?

They made an alliance.

So, where is this booze going?

Probably to every speakeasy in the Midwest

down to Buffalo, New York, to New Jersey and beyond.

And the trucks like Matt found

were just a small part of this national supply chain.

So, this might give you a clue

as to what happened to your vehicle.

That is an amazing picture.

You can see all the barrels sitting there

behind the vehicle as well.

That is just a great picture.

I believe that this vehicle

tried to cross the ice

and ended up falling through.

So many trucks and so many cars

were crossing the river,

and there were so many stories

of them literally crashing through the ice

because the ice was thinning.

It must have been terrifying.

You imagine being out in the dark, in the cold,

on the ice, and suddenly you are submerged in water.

It just would have been a terrifying situation.

The repercussions of that happening are nothing

to an empire that's growing into a national organization.

One vehicle, one driver sunk to the bottom

with one load of liquor?

It's almost inconsequential at this point.

The Mob had figured out how to use the Great Lakes region

between the US and Canada

to import booze on an industrial scale.

The next piece of the puzzle

was understanding how they sold it without getting caught.

I used to be a special agent

with the United States Secret Service for 10 years.

I worked at the White House,

and before that I was stationed right here in Chicago.

Being a federal law enforcement officer in Chicago,

the first thing you think of is the Mob.

I do know a lot about the criminal world,

the underworld, and the characters

that operate in that dark world.

One of my most fascinating investigations

started with just a name.

I went out on a day off, and I wanted to dive on a shipwreck.

A dive boat captain mentioned Rotarian,

a shipwreck he knew

about 10 miles offshore in Lake Michigan.

And there was some sort of

mysterious/shady/criminal undertone to this vessel,

and that's all I was told, and I don't like that.

Erik picks up the phone and says,

"Hey, I got something. Are you in or out?"

So of course you say yes.

The thing about the Rotarian story that really grabbed me

was all the mystery.

A lot of this stuff that we dive was, you know,

sunk in a storm or caught fire.

This was something a little more nefarious,

it added a little more intrigue for me.

The water was very, very hazy from the surface.

And right around 54 feet the visibility opened up.

We knew at that point that we had a wooden vessel.

One of the most surprising things that we found

were piles of bottles

hidden under, under the decking

and hidden under boards.

They were literally in the bilge of the ship

and very obviously slid under boards.

The bilge is simply to collect excess water,

and it's at the lowest point of the ship.

So, why would anybody place anything in a bilge?

And the answer is, you wouldn't.

They had been hidden.

What was going on here?

What was this ship?

As a wreck diver, you're only looking

at a small or segmented portion of the wreck,

so you don't get the whole perspective.

So once we got back aboard the vessel,

the first thing that we did was we prepped the ROV

and we put it in the water, and Ross piloted it over Rotarian.

It's in!

So our ROV has got a 1,000-foot depth range.

We can document the wreck in its entirety.

What Ross wanted to do with all the footage that he had

was to piece together tens of thousands of photographs

into one image.

We can recreate that 3D space

and we can look at the entire wreck at one time.

We were pretty shocked by what we saw.

Usually, if a shipwreck goes down,

there's going to be some semblance of a ship there.

But all that was on Rotarian

was basically the remnants of the shell that broke apart.

From the keel, it was basically filleted open.

The machinery is missing, which is very strange.

We did see something interesting, though.

We have a firebox.

We have the mount for a walking beam engine.

This was an engine typically used

to drive a sidewheel paddle steamer.

So, together with the wreck's size, shape,

I'm pretty confident we have a paddle steamer.

I searched the archives

for paddle steamers called Rotarian.

And there was really an absence of documents.

But I did come across some photographs

dating from the early 1920s.

And it was a passenger ship

that took people on pleasure cruises in Lake Erie

and in the upper lakes.

Looking for clues on the wreck, it's difficult.

There's just so little left.

More interesting is what we don't have.

There's no wheelhouse, there's no upper deck structure at all.

The Great Lakes are freshwater, and there's nothing in the water

that eats wood, compared to the ocean.

This wasn't stuff that deteriorated in the lake.

So, something else happened to this before it ended up here.

So, we find all this stuff,

and now it's time for Erik to go to work.

I went to Chicago Public Library

and started digging into their archives

in old newspapers from over 100 years ago.

Going through racks and racks and rolls and rolls

of microfilm.

The first article that I was able to discover

was written in August of 1929 in the Prohibition era.

And in that article there was a picture inside Rotarian.

And the headline was "Taxi Dancing."

Taxi dancing was a way for gentlemen to go to this ship

and pay females to dance with.

Whatever happens after that is left to the imagination.

And there was another revelation.

Rotarian was owned by the Cook County Democratic Party.

I mean, you can't make this stuff up.

What is the Democratic Party doing

owning a vessel with taxi dancing going on

during Prohibition?

Here is a boat that was basically

a floating brothel, gambling hall, bar.

How does that even happen?

In one of the articles, I notice that it had been moored

next to the private yacht of the mayor of Chicago,

William "Big Bill" Thompson.

It was an open secret that the mayor was in league

with the most powerful mobster in Chicago.

It seems like Al Capone's main political ally, or puppet,

was Mayor Thompson.

The only way to make things happen

was to have political strings pulled.

The underworld can't operate

without the upper world cooperating.

And in the Rotarian's case,

the politicians kept the heat off Capone's operations,

and in exchange got their illegal party boat.

So, the next mystery of it was how did the Rotarian

end up at the bottom of Lake Michigan?

Again there's something shady going on.

The full story of the Rotarian hasn't been told yet.

The fact Rotarian was a floating speakeasy

explains the bottles hidden on the wreck.

But not why so much of the ship was missing.

Dive deeper into the archives,

and we discovered another picture

of Rotarian half sunk in the Chicago River,

right where it had been moored.

In the article, they stated that there was a fire

in the pilothouse, or the wheelhouse.

And when asked why it started,

the police officer who was watching Rotarian

stated it was a ghost.

Right, well, the first thing is, right, ghosts don't start fires.

So, what happened?

There's a clue in the newspaper article dates:

1929 to 1930.

It's not difficult to pick out

the perhaps most prominent, brazen, violent act

of the Mob's history in the 1920s.

And that was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre,

which took place in Chicago in 1929.

Seven people murdered in a warehouse.

It was a battle over booze.

Allegedly, there was a booze shipment

that got hijacked or went missing.

Who was the prime culprit

suspected of arranging this murder?

Al Capone.

The massacre triggered a crackdown

from the federal government.

It got so bad that Lucky Luciano called a Mob summit meeting

in Atlantic City.

What Al's friends and colleagues told him,

"Al, we got to get the heat off of us.

Why don't you take a lesser rap somewhere else?

Spend maybe a year in prison,

let the press and the police kind of die down

with their interest in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

And that's basically what he did.

Capone's not around.

There's no more police protection,

they can't do the illegal activities they wanted to

in broad daylight anymore.

Somebody purposely set Rotarian on fire

because they didn't want the evidence of the Mob

being discovered.

It was an eyesore for not only the city of Chicago

but for the new mayor,

who vowed to clean up the city and all of the Mob post-Capone.

So the hulk that remained of Rotarian

was completely stripped of all the machinery

and any of the charred remains that were there were removed.

The bottles under the floorboards,

I don't think they'd even know to look for at the time.

The city decided that they were going to tow out

the vessel into the middle of Lake Michigan

and sink the vessel,

where Ross and I dived on it.

Just one month after the Rotarian's final sinking,

Al Capone gets jailed for tax evasion.

He was a coke addict, and he was very violent,

and he was just, he was a bad guy.

In 1933, Prohibition ends.

You might think that was a problem for the Mob,

but it wasn't.

The Mob used Prohibition as a giant stepping stone.

It was almost like an education.

It was school.

It taught them how to make the money,

like the rum-runners in New Jersey;

how to get things into the country

that aren't supposed to be here, like at Windsor, Detroit;

and it taught them how to corrupt politicians

as with the Rotarian.

Most of all, Prohibition taught them how to work with each other

because it was all about the green.

So they took the money they made, millions,

and they simply transitioned.

Like any corporation, they transitioned

to what supply and demand is dictating.

By then it was narcotics.

Prohibition's legacy is what we know as the American Mob today.