Sig Spitzer & Jersey’s Big Bootlegging Bust

On September 20, 1920, Harry Sands, a federal agent in charge of enforcing National Prohibition laws, announced that a raid on a Perth Amboy, New Jersey, warehouse had yielded the largest stash of bootleg liquor ever seized by authorities anywhere in America.  Among those arrested was a 46-year-old local liquor dealer, accused of overseeing transport and sale of the illicit booze.  Shown left, he was Sigmund “Sig” Spitzer.

Spitzer was born in Austria in March 1874, received an elementary education there, and emigrated to the United States about 1888 when he was only about 14 years old, apparently traveling by himself.  He settled in with Spitzer relatives in Perth Amboy, just outside New York City.  In his 1899 naturalization hearing Sig indicated that his education had continued in night school where he had learned to speak and write in English.

Details about his activities over the next decade are sketchy.  My guess is that he was engaged in a relative-owned company where he learned the liquor trade and demonstrated distinct ability at merchandising.  In 1898, Sigmund married. His bride was Rose Scheffler, also an immigrant from Austria, the daughter of Abram and Frieda Scheffler.  Sig was 24;  Rose was 20.  The 1900 census found the newlyweds domiciled in Perth Amboy with the luxury of a live-in servant girl.  Before long the Spitzers would have five children, four boys and a girl.

This growing family may have impelled Spitzer to strike out on his own.  By 1902 he was running regular advertisements for “Spitzer’s Hotel Central,”  a cafe/saloon located next door to his wine and liquor store, at the major intersection of State and Smith Streets in downtown Perth Amboy.  The area is shown above on a postcard. 

From the outset Spitzer’s advertising was aggressive, emphasizing that he had no connection to any other liquor store and calling out the competition.  A 1904  ad stated:  “A drop of demonstration is worth a pound of argument.  Our imitators argue lenghly, but as they say in Missouri ‘You have to show me.’…Our imitators will please say nothing but imitate….Beware of imitators.”

Spitzer does not appear to have been a “rectifier,” someone compounding whiskeys on premises and making proprietary brands the main focus of sales.  His ads emphasized nationally known “name” brands of whiskey. He also marketed liquor in ceramic jugs and flasks that bear his embossed name and address. These probably were sold at wholesale to the saloons that proliferated in the city. 

For approximately twenty years Spitzer prospered in the liquor business.  He was able to move his family out of an apartment over the saloon and liquor store and into a spacious three-story home at 197 High St., shown below.  The 1920 census found the family there, served by a live-in cook and maid.  In that year, however, National Prohibition had shut down Spitzer’s saloon and liquor business.  He was more than a little annoyed at losing his substantial income.

At his naturalization hearing two decades earlier, the judge had asked a witness asked if Sigmund was “disposed to the good order and happiness” of the United States and the witness answered in the affirmative.  The response seems ironic in the light of future events.  Subsequently Spitzer decided that if he could not sell liquor legally he would attempt bootlegging.

With a co-conspirator named Frank Gold, Spitzer formed a warehousing firm owning a large storage facility on Brunswick Avenue in Perth Amboy.  Working by night with employees they filled it with cases and barrels of whiskey and other alcohol.  If anyone got too inquisitive they were told the stash was for “medicinal purposes,” since liquor could still be sold with a prescription in drug stores.

Connecting with bootleggers in Trenton, New Jersey, Spitzer and Gold hatched an elaborate scheme to bribe key Prohibition agents to overlook liquor supplies identified by a card “of a certain type” that would be pasted on barrels and cases.  The Feds were on to the game, however, and watching the warehouse closely, one step ahead of the bootleggers.

On September 20, 1920, Spitzer, overseeing activities in Gold’s warehouse, supervised as 250 cases and 25 barrels of whiskey were loaded on a truck and dispatched to Trenton.  Confederates were waiting there to take the liquor to a shadowy purchaser in Philadelphia, a man known only as Mr. Bond.  Bond, as it was soon discovered, was Harry Sands, the top Prohibition enforcement agent on the East Coast.  In Philadelphia the Trenton bootleggers were promptly arrested.

At the same time federal agents swooped down on the Perth Amboy warehouse where they confiscated an additional 962 cases and 118 barrels, amounting to 10,756 gallons of whiskey worth an estimated $162,150, equivalent to more than$2 million today.  It was the biggest bust of a bootlegging scheme in the country, according to Sands.  Spitzer, identified as secretary-treasurer of the warehouse company, was arrested with Gold and others and held on $5,000 bond.

Before Spitzer could be brought to trial, in a surprise move a United States Commissioner ordered that the liquor seized in the raid at the Gold warehouse would have to be returned on the grounds that the search warrant that authorized the seizure had not been properly drawn.  Indictment of the co-conspirators proceeded nonetheless and a trial set for late February.  Gold pleaded guilty but Spitzer maintained his innocence and a separate trial date was set.

Although I have not been able to find the results of that proceeding, it does not appear that Spitzer spent any jail time.  In fact he seems to have rebounded in a remarkable way.   Within very few months he re-emerged in the commercial life of New Jersey as vice-president and cashier of the First National Bank of Perth Amboy, a major local financial institution with offices in the building shown here.

Spitzer, however, was a “whiskey man” through and through.  No sooner had  Repeal been achieved in 1934 when he opened a liquor store at or near his original location at State and Smith Streets.  Recognizing his advancing years, Sig added two of his children to the management team.  Son Robert, later a senior partner in the New York Stock Exchange firm of Spitzer & Co., was listed as vice president, and daughter Mrs. Frances Jampol was secretary. 

The last entry for S. Spitzer, Inc., Liquors, was 1949 when Sig would have been 75.  That same year his wife, Rose, 71, died.  He lived on another 19 years in retirement, dying in 1968 at the advanced age of 94.  During more than a half century Sig Spitzer had been involved in the liquor trade, both licitly and “not so.”  It is a record few individuals have equaled.

Note:  I was initially drawn to research Sigmund Spitzer by the look of his whiskey jugs but was not sure there much of a story until coming across a reference in the New York Times of his arrest in 1920.  Thus much of the article has been fashioned from stories in the Times and New Jersey dailies.