Prohibition

Prohibition is invoked as a historical precedent for using the Bahamas to circumvent American law. In the novel’s account, bootleggers used the islands for warehousing, placing the era within a longer sequence of illicit commerce that also includes Civil War blockade runners and contemporary drug dealers.

The Bahamas as a Refuge for Evasion

The reference occurs when Raymond Peepgass visits Nassau to inspect the nominal address of Colonial Real Properties, Ltd. Its brass plaque sits among forty others bearing the names of banks and corporations, but the building contains no actual office for the company—or even for First Gould Guaranty, one of the largest institutions represented there. The address is a front for overseas financial operations. The surrounding explanation presents Bahamian secrecy laws as a means for individuals to hide money and for banks to establish Eurodollar accounts.

That account gives Prohibition a specific place in the islands’ history: bootleggers used the Bahamas for warehousing. Peepgass’s tour moves from the blockade runners who traded with the Confederacy during the American Civil War, through Prohibition, to drug dealers using the islands for a similar purpose in the novel’s present. The succession does not claim that these activities were identical; it emphasizes the repeated use of geographical proximity and legal secrecy to keep American commerce beyond the reach of American law.

Historical Scale and the Novel’s Present

Nassau’s proximity makes the offshore arrangement practical as well as secretive: the narration places it a thirty-minute flight from Miami and an hour from Atlanta. Peepgass sees the city as cramped and worn, yet the brass plaques give its modest commercial address an international reach. The contrast makes the mechanism concrete: the appearance of a small local office conceals transactions and institutions extending far beyond the street where it stands.

The novel also sets this history beside Atlanta’s conspicuous wealth and business culture, without suggesting that the scenes are direct consequences of Prohibition. Charlie Croker’s estate includes 29,000 acres, scores of animals, 36 buildings, and a mile-long landing strip. In PlannersBanc’s prosperous days, he is received in a lavish executive suite, while his donations include $100,000 toward the High Museum’s new building and $5 million to Georgia Tech. Later, the prospect of leasing space at Croker Concourse becomes a matter of financial survival. These episodes belong to the book’s contemporary world of display, lending, and debt; against them, the Bahamas passage offers a distinct historical register in which legal boundaries themselves become obstacles to be worked around.