Article content

Prohibition ended in British Columbia in 1921. But you still couldn’t buy hard liquor or wine in bars until cocktail lounges were introduced in 1954.

This led to many cabarets or nightclubs operating as “bottle clubs,” where you smuggled in a bottle of booze and bought mix from the house.

Article content

Alternatively you could drink at a bootleggers. There were lots of them in Vancouver from the 1920s to the 1950s, and from time to time some civic do-gooder would try to do something about them, along with other dens of vice.

Article content

In 1936, the do-gooder was Wilfred A. Tucker, an accounting clerk for the City of Vancouver.

Tucker had been asked to look into the accounting and records of the Police Commission. He submitted his report, and all hell broke loose.

“It is stated the report consists of nearly 100 closely typed pages,” The Province said Nov. 12, 1936. “It is divided into eight sections and reading time — estimated after the fashion of some of the crime magazines — would be 150 minutes.”

Mayor Gerry McGeer had been elected as a reformer, but the Tucker report implicated him in wrongdoing. McGeer was not amused, telling The Vancouver Sun the report was “a scurrilous attack on me, (police chief) Col. Foster, the Police Commission and the press.”

Tucker didn’t back down.

“Is Col. Foster in a position to deny that several hundred bootleggers, bawdy-houses and gambling joints are paying for police protection?” asked Tucker in the Nov. 13 Province.

“There are hundreds of what, under the (criminal) Code, can be classed as ‘disorderly houses,’ and that’s a mild description of some of the filthy dens of vice that desecrate our city.

Article content

Article content

“In the City of Vancouver, vice and crime are carried on day and night, the year round, week in, week out, Sundays and weekdays, open 24 hours on end, just so long as customers are on hand to be catered to.”

A Sun story said Tucker’s report alleged “Vancouver’s ‘vice barons’ go scot free but smaller fry are prosecuted, (and) that a Hastings Street gambling club has a net weekly ‘take’ of $12,000, said to make it the largest of its kind in North America.”

Tucker also complained that “efforts were made to ‘muzzle’ him as a ‘little pest.’”

Tucker was dismissed as the accountant of the Police Commission. But his charges were so sensational a commission was set up to investigate his charges.

The commission met from Nov. 21 to Dec. 3. It got off to a rocky start when Tucker refused to speak before the commission chaired by W.A. Macdonald unless the city supplied him with a lawyer. It didn’t.

Foster went before the commission Nov. 24 and stated “vice, gambling, white slavery and bunco operations had been reduced to a minimum” in Vancouver.

There was some startling testimony that ran counter to Foster’s claims. A detective in the gambling squad said he’d been offered a “$500 a week bribe” at a “gambling joint” in Chinatown.

Article content

“The bribe was made on the understanding that Det. MacFarlane would make only periodic raids on the ‘joint,’ arresting one keeper and four or five inmates, instead of three keepers and as many as 78 inmates,” The Sun reported Nov. 26.

MacFarlane’s testimony was a rare example of the police admitting anything. On Nov. 30 an unnamed Province reporter mocked “a long list of detectives” who “paraded in and out of the witness box” with “their theme song the ‘no-payoff’ chorus, which has now become a daily tune.”

Bizarrely, the testimony was all given in a courtroom at the city morgue. Mayor McGeer took the witness stand Dec. 2 and defended his record, stating there had been a “criminal exodus” to the Prairies, Seattle and even China after he took office.

On Dec. 16 commissioner MacDonald cleared Foster and McGeer of all charges, arguing there had been no “payoff” of police or authorities “in the past two years.”

The Tucker report was never actually released to the public, allegedly because it was libellous. But similar allegations of corruption continued to dog the police force for years.

In 1955 a public inquiry found police chief Walter Mulligan had taken bribes. But he was never criminally charged, and skipped town for California.

[email protected]

Article content