    
Title: Vannie Higgins Description: Vannie Higgins (Charles "Vannie" Higgins, 1897-1931), shown in 1923, American bootlegger, and crime boss of Brooklyn, New York during Prohibition; Higgins, with the aid of fellow gangster Frank Costello (Francesco Castiglia; 1891-1973), took control of William "Big Bill" Dwyer's bootlegging operations in Brooklyn and Manhattan, implementing and increasing the supply of Canadian liquor by using fleets of taxis and trucks to deliver the illegal booze to customers, and employing airplanes and high-speed motor boats to smuggle Canadian whiskey into the country (Higgins himself was a licensed pilot); it was claimed in a wild theory that Higgins was involved in the mysterious death of flapper Starr Faithfull in 1931, but there is no evidence to support this notion; Higgins, who had running gun battles with rival bootleggers such as Dutch Schultz, was shot to death on the night of June 18, 1932, when leaving a Knights of Columbus clubhouse in Prospect Park, after having attended a performance that included a tap-dancing routine by his 7-year-old daughter; a passing car spraying submachine gun bullets at him, caused Higgins to shield his daughter with his body; fatally wounded, he died the next day refusing to identify his assailants; Higgins was loosely profiled by James Cagney in the role of Eddie Bartlett in the 1938 film The Roaring Twenties; airplanes; bootleggers; bootlegging; cabs; film; gangsters; Jazz Age; mobsters; motion pictures; movies; Prohibition; Roaring Twenties; rumrunners; smugglers; Keywords: smuggling, taxis, trucks, Volstead Act Orientation: Portrait Dimensions: 1200 x 1393 (1.67 MPixels) (1.16) Print Size: 10.2 x 11.8 cm; 4.0 x 4.6 inches File Size: 4.79 MB (5,020,602 Bytes) Resolution: 300 x 300 dpi Color Depth: 16.7 million (24 BitsPerPixel) Compression: None Image Number: 0000096032 Source: Jay Robert Nash Collection |
