First Place Writing: Prohibition in the harbor
"Apocalyptic Express" by Jamie Grant. Grand prize Rumors swirled. A shipment of Jamaican rum was headed for the harbor. Sal Canizzi didn’t much give a hoot. His real beef with prohibition was the unequal enforcement of its laws. Speakeasies serving working class and poor patrons got pinched often. Swank joints rarely if ever did. He knew this from his days on the Los Angeles Police Department. But bootleggers feared the Ku Klux Klan far more than the cops. Long Beach Klansmen kidnapped one of Sal’s high school classmates and forced him to down two ounces of Castor oil before tar-and-feathering him. And just the other day Sal overheard a known Klan leader in the Empire Theater say they were increasing their punishment of captured bootleggers — to flogging with a bullwhip. Sal served with Klansmen in the Marines and, he suspected, on LAPD. He summed up their “moral up-righteousness” in a word: c-r-o-c-k. Just recently a jury in Bakersfield convicted a pair of them of forcing a 15 year-old girl to publicly perform lewd acts. In San Pedro local Klansmen scalded the legs of a 13 year-old with coffee during a raid on the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World. His final…
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