Maritime Smuggling on Long Island: From Pirates to Rumrunners

Join us online for a virtual illustrated lecture by historian, author and former Newsday reporter Bill Bleyer to discover why pirates like Captain Kidd were attracted to Long Island at the turn of the 18th century and how a visit by Kidd to Gardiners Island led to him dying on the gallows in London. And learn why Long Island was so attractive to bootleggers during Prohibition that the Atlantic Ocean off the South Shore became a crowded “Rum Row” that was frequented by bootleggers like William “The Real McCoy” McCoy who supplied gangsters like Al Capone and Dutch Schultz.

Bill Bleyer was a prizewinning staff writer for Newsday for 33 years specializing in history and maritime issues before retiring in 2014 to write books and freelance for the newspaper and magazines. He is co-author, with Harrison Hunt, of Long Island and the Civil War (The History Press, 2015). He is the author of Sagamore Hill: Theodore Roosevelt’s Summer White House (The History Press, 2016); Fire Island Lighthouse: Long Island’s Welcoming Beacon (The History Press, 2017), and Long Island and the Sea: A Maritime History, (The History Press 2019); and George Washington’s Long Island Spy Ring: A History and Tour Guide (The History Press, 2021). The Hofstra University graduate has taught economics and journalism there and history at Webb Institute, the naval architecture college in Glen Cove.

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Illustration from p. 161 of Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (1921). From Wikimedia Commons.