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Title: Larry Fay

Description: Larry Fay (1888-1932), American rumrunner, bootlegger and racketeer, shown under arrest in 1925 for violating the Volstead Act (Prohibition); Fay ran up forty-six arrests in NYC during the 1920s, mostly based upon his bootlegging activities; he operated a large fleet of taxicabs, which served as a front for a small army of musclemen who extorted kickbacks from dairymen and rigged the prices of milk; through his illegal and legitimate enterprises, Fay became a millionaire and, with aspirations of improving his social image, he purchased a huge estate in Great Neck, N.Y., and gave immense, lavish parties at his mansion, inviting the wealthy and the socially elite, who knew him vaguely as a high-society bootlegger; author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who then lived near Fay's sprawling mansion, attended several parties and studied the long-faced gangster. Fay seemed disinterested at his own fetes, strolling in his elegantly tailored suit through a phalanx of strangers who did not know him; trailing behind Fay were always a number of silent, dark-complexioned men, his bodyguards, careful to make sure that everyone observed proper conduct and no one annoyed the boss. Fitzgerald would use Fay as his role model for the gangster-protagonist in his classic novel, The Great Gatsby; in Fay's broadening criminal empire, he began buying many upscale speakeasies, with the celebrated Texas Guinan (Mary Louise Cecelia "Texas" Guinan; 1884-1933) as his chief hostess; when the Depression deepened, Fay lost much of his wealth and when he reduced the pay of Edward Maloney, his doorman at the Casa Blanca Club, Maloney shot him four times on January 1, 1932, killing him (Maloney went to prison for sixteen years); bootleggers; bootlegging; gangsters; Jazz Age;

Keywords: racketeers, rumrunners, Roaring Twenties, speakeasies