Early Life & Prohibition
Higgins was born in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York. Learning pickpocketing and petty theft as a child, by 1916, he had been arrested for assault twice but was put on probation. At the beginning of Prohibition he had formed a small-time gang which started to operate outside of Bay Ridge after taking control of "Big Bill" Bill Dwyer's bootlegging operations with partner Frank Costello in 1927, importing high quality Canadian liquor for Dwyer's high-society clientele.
By the mid-1920s, Higgins' rum-running operations included a fleet of taxis and loading trucks, as well as several planes and numerous speedboats which were used in smuggling alcohol into the United States from Canada (one of which, the Cigarette, was described as "the fastest rum-runner in New York waters"). Higgins, himself a flying enthusiast and licensed pilot, often used his planes for personal use. During a business trip in Baltimore, Higgins was a witness to a gang fight between rival bootleggers while visiting a local speakeasy and, while deciding to leave the premises, he was mistaken for one of the fighting bootleggers and shot in the leg by a local police officer.
Read more about this topic: Vannie Higgins
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or prohibition:
“Early rising is no pleasure; early drinking’s just the measure.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes—learning how to close the door on it when ordinary life intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it’s time to start writing again—that I’m not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.”
—Anne Tyler (b. 1941)
“Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)