Smuggler's Run

Features

This ride is fun for the whole family! Travel as a rum-runner in a four person car from the "harbor" to the docks, late at night. From here, the guests will exit one cart and enter another, becoming the bootlegger, transporting shipments to the speakeasies in upper Manhattan. With the ability to play against others, up to four teams can play at one time, with multiple tracks for each team to travel on. Each team can have up to four members and each cart is affixed with four pump action shotguns that shoot invisible lasers towards targets. Each cart has a certain, specified, amount of "shipment" that needs to be transferred to a speakeasy. While traveling in the cart, be careful of cops and other bootleggers, they can arrest you or steal your revenue! Make sure to shoot your opponents to cause them to spin out of control and shoot the cops to not get behind! If a team is caught by a cop, the cart is stopped for two seconds and some of the shipment will be taken while the other teams can travel on ahead. Whichever team reaches Beckett's "Market" with the highest amount of their shipment intact wins!

History

Known as "rum-running" and "bootlegging", smugglers would secretly transport alcohol to the states during the era of the prohibition. Specifically, "rum-running" refered to the act of secretly transporting alcohol across the water, for example smuggling cheap Caribbean rum to speakeasies on the east coast. However, given how cheap rum is, smugglers turned to "bootlegging", transporting over land, Canadian whiskey, French champagne, and English gin to the major cities. In New York, Chicago, and Boston, through hidden speakeasies, the smuggling ring was a humongous business that created large amounts of profits. In single trips, it was reported that ships transferred $200,000 of confiscated goods per run. This continued throughout the entire Prohibition, and even if some smugglers were arrested, the empire was too large for a complete takedown.

In modern day, smuggling of alcohol still exists even after the end of the Prohibition. In the US the trade runs wild on the black market, just a few years ago, Virginia reported that it lost $20 million to smuggled moonshine in one year, wine industry experts calculate that roughly 20% of all wine sold worldwide are counterfeits, and up until the late 1970s, rum-runners continued in the Appalachian Region of the United States.