BAD BOOZE TOWN

Once again, If you didn’t already know - the Good Time Girls have teamed up with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast to bring you the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baaaaaadest parts of Bellingham History!

This week in episode 8 we get into prohibition era Bad-Town, complete with rum running, bootlegging and speak-easies (aka Blind Pigs). AND a story straight from the LaBree family vaults.

Between circa 1914 and 1925 two Italian Immigrant brothers, Francesco “Frank” and Julius D’Aprile were in the local news quite a bit for violation of liquor laws. The D’Aprile brothers ran several Italian Grocery Stores on lower Holly Street.

The A’prile brothers were in the news often for violating liquor laws and accused of selling alcohol illegally in their establishments, or being “jointists” (operators of illegal drinking places or “joints”). The news articles are interesting in detailing a lot of the complexities going on, from hidden stills, crazy rigged devices to “dispose” of booze in a raid, the joint where they employed “dancing girls” with scandalous “bobbed hair” to the young bootleggers who got their bottles from the men, to the men who supplied the D’Aprile brothers with booze to sell, including my great grandfather Emery S. LaBree.

I discovered the story of the D’Aprile brothers when searching the Bellingham Herald archives on a genealogy website and found my great-grandfather was a “runner” who helped to supply the brothers with booze to sell in their “blind pig,” and did some time in the Whatcom County Jail. My great-grandfather was bringing the alcohol across the border from Chilliwack, where he was living with his family at the time. When he was busted, he became a “stool-pigeon” in a case against the D’Aprile brothers, in a classic case of what I’m guessing was, ‘rat out the bigger guys.’

The D’Aprile brothers both came to Bellingham around 1910. The “Tripoli” Grocery was first located in the 600 block of Holly in the now-gone “Union Block” in the corner spot formerly occupied by saloon known as Haye’s Place or the Union Bar. A fire damaged the building in 1918, and they re-opened in a new location just across C Street in the U.S. Hotel Building at 704 Holly Street (The Marine Supply building) until they were shut down in 1925.

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You can also at any of these podcast-listening places: google podcasts, apple podcasts, spotify, or podbay as well as on local Bellingham radio station KMRE Thu Nov 12 2020, 10:00pm - 11:00pm