Stand on the Highlands side at night and look north, and you are looking at the reason.
Twenty miles of protected water between here and the mouth of the East River. A bay that goes shallow fast and stays shallow, so anything with real draft has to stay in the channel and anything without one can go where it likes. Two rivers behind you, the Navesink and the Shrewsbury, running west into a hundred creeks and coves with houses on them. A ridge at your back, higher than anything else on the seaboard south of Maine, with a clear line of sight out past the Hook to open ocean. And out there, past the three-mile line and later the twelve, a floating warehouse of liquor sitting at anchor in international water where nobody could touch it.
Everything a smuggling operation needs, arranged by glaciers and tides a long time before anybody had a use for it.
Anthony Setaro can tell you exactly how the liquor got from out there to in here, and in the conversation on the previous page he does. What follows is not that. It is the thing we could not stop turning over afterward, which is a different question than the one we asked him.
Not how it worked. Why it worked here.
What the Volstead Act actually bought here
The story of Prohibition on this shore usually gets told as an arrival. The mob comes down from New York, sets up shop, corrupts a sleepy fishing village, and leaves behind some tunnels and a legend.
The order of operations is wrong, and Anthony is very good on why.
New Jersey was among the last states to put real enforcement behind the Eighteenth Amendment. That left this coast as an open edge for years — the last stretch of unwatched water before the biggest thirsty market on earth. But an open edge is only worth something if you have people who can work it, and that is the part that gets skipped.
Running liquor from a ship anchored twelve miles out into a creek behind Highlands, at night, without lights, is not a criminal skill. It is a maritime one. You need to know where the bar is tonight, not where it was last spring. You need to know which channel silts and which holds, how the ebb sets across the Hook, what a nor'easter does to the inlet, and where you can put a shallow boat in the dark and be certain of the bottom.
There was already a town here full of people who knew all of that, because they had been making a living out of that water for two hundred years. The pound fishermen. The clammers. The oystermen and the party-boat captains and the men who ran the Shrewsbury in the fog because that was Tuesday.
Prohibition didn't build a network here. It made an offer to one that was already fully staffed, and the offer was very good. A fisherman could make more in a night on a run than in a season on fish. That is not a moral observation, it is an arithmetic one, and it is the honest reason so many ordinary families here have a rum story and almost none of them have a mob story.
The tunnels are the part everyone remembers. The seamanship is the part that actually mattered.
Still in the ground
The other thing that comes off Anthony's research, and it is the part that turns this from history into something you can drive to, is how much of the physical apparatus is still here.
He is not working from rumor. He works from newspapers, deeds, maps, and then he goes and looks. A garage on a ridge in Atlantic Highlands that family stories had always placed in a particular yard turned out to be exactly where the stories put it — hydraulic lift, rusted gear, sitting under the grass since the 1930s. A signal tower aimed at the water. A room built out like a wheelhouse, with a compass and a foghorn wired to warn a whole compound that something was coming in off the bay. Bottles by the hundreds behind the houses where they were pitched a century ago and never moved.
We have watched this pattern hold on our own side of the hill. When McLoone's Rum Runner went through construction, the building gave up structure that nobody had known was there. That is not a one-off. It is what happens on a coast where an entire operating system was built into ordinary buildings and then quietly abandoned in place.
The phrase Anthony uses for it is history hiding in plain sight, and after two hours with him the phrase stops sounding like a slogan. Most of us drive past four or five of these a day.
The decade all at once
Here is what we keep turning over.
Set aside the individual stories and look at the calendar. In the same few square miles, in the same handful of years: rum boats working the coves at night. The Ku Klux Klan riding these roads, brought in as enforcement muscle for the temperance side, chasing bootleggers through the Highlands hills. A young Vito Genovese keeping a house on this coast before he ran a New York family. Twin Lights standing over all of it, sweeping the same water that Marconi had used to prove that a ship could talk to the shore.
And, at the same time, on the same beach: a boardwalk. Bathing pavilions. Excursion steamers unloading thousands of day-trippers from the city who came down for the water and the amusements and went home in the evening with no idea what would be moving through that same inlet after dark.
That is one decade, one town, one skyline. Not a sequence of eras. A pile-up.
The part he wouldn't finish on tape
Anthony has a theory about Marconi.
The short version is that Guglielmo Marconi's mother was a Jameson — the whiskey Jamesons — and Anthony has thoughts about that connection, and about what it means that the first ship-to-shore radio work in this country happened on the same headland that would later be watching for boats sitting offshore.
He would not take it all the way on the recording, and he was straightforward about why. It is in the book.
That book is Rum on the 'Sink, and by his own cheerful admission it has been coming out for a couple of summers now, because it will not sit still. He posts a fragment and somebody's grandmother's saying comes back and finishes it. Another cousin surfaces with another photograph. Every answer produces three more questions.
We recognize that problem. It is the same problem this archive has, and it is the good version of the problem to have.
(One friendly note for the record, since we are the place-name people: the Navesink and the Shrewsbury are two different rivers, meeting here at the Highlands. The Navesink was for a long stretch called the North Shrewsbury, which is where the confusion comes from and probably where the title's joke lives. We will happily be corrected on that by anybody with a nineteenth-century chart.)
Where it came from
Everything Anthony has found came out of somebody's attic, somebody's yard, or somebody's memory. The 1903 clipping that started all of it was in a trunk that came over from Italy in the 1880s and sat in a rafter for a hundred and twenty years before anyone opened it.
That is not a rare situation around here. It is the normal one. There is a version of this in most of the houses on this hill, and the difference between a story and a source is usually that somebody bothered to go up the stairs.
The people who can still confirm any of it are almost gone. Anthony puts it better than we will: he is not so much writing the history down as getting it out of people while there is time.
So we are going to keep asking. If your family was here in the twenties — a photograph of a boat, a menu, a hotel register, a name in a bible, an hour at your kitchen table about what your grandfather did at night — we want to see it. We scan it, hand it back the same day, and credit you by name.
Note on this page
Recorded 22 July 2026, Highlands, New Jersey. Hollywood East Films and Above the Hook, with Anthony Setaro.
Also on this entry: the episode · the full transcript
Elsewhere: Chris Crater's profile of Anthony, The man rebuilding the Shore's hidden century, on The Slate — the filmmaking side of the same conversation, and a different man than the one we got.
Related: Rum Row, Chapter 12.