Allan Bronfman

Two Montrealers, Sam Bronfman and his brother Allan, sought by Royal Canadian Mounted Police as alleged members of a huge $5,000,000 Canadian liquor smuggling ring, announced last night from Ottawa that they were prepared to return to Montreal and surrender.

– Gazette, Thursday, Dec. 13, 1934

Return they did, together with their two other brothers, Harry and Abraham. And so began what Bronfman family chronicler Peter C. Newman calls  »the legal battle of their lives. »

The charges were fallout from Prohibition in the United States, the  »noble experiment » that had ended the year before as something of an ignoble failure. …