Police Action

To Keep Montauk's Parade a Family Affair, They Smashed Some Booze

By Dan Rattiner

If you went to either the dump or any of the railroad station platforms on eastern Long Island the day after the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Montauk, you would have noticed something very strange. These places smelled of alcohol.

The reason for this is simple. This was the result of a police action taken to keep this year's parade from becoming like last year's parade, when an unacceptable number of the 20,000 spectators got drunk and behaved in a rowdy manner.

It wouldn't happen again. Weeks before the parade, the chiefs of the police departments in Montauk, East Hampton, Southampton and all the way down the line met to develop a plan to keep it a family affair.

The parade kicked off at 12:30 p.m. with the first of nearly a hundred very colorful, spectacular and musical floats stepping out and leading the line of them from the Montauk Railroad Station toward town two miles away. It would be over by 3 p.m. with the last of the big floats, the Coneheads, passing by the reviewing stand on Main Street and then drifting off in the general direction of Napeague.

The police assumed correctly that people coming from up-Island to enjoy this parade - and Montauk was glad to have them since it gave a real economic shot in the arm during the off-season - would leave home earlier in the morning. They'd either drive out, or go to the railroad station and board one of the special trains heading out there, all after 8 a.m.

There was not much the police could do about those driving out, except have a huge police presence at the parade itself, which they did.

But for the train, the police could be "invited" by the railroad to come out to the platforms and enforce the rule that says there are to be no open liquor containers allowed either on the platforms or carried onto the passenger cars.

And so, between 9 a.m. and noon, the police formed security check lines out on the railroad platforms all up and down the Island. Prospective passengers were searched. And if liquor bottles were found, those having them were told they could either pour out the contents right then and there on the platform, they could hand over the liquor bottle to a policeman, receive a claim check for it and then retrieve it when they got back, or they could just give the bottle to the policeman and forfeit it. They would not be allowed to board the train with the bottle of booze.

I was intrigued to see in some of the daily papers the next day photos of young Irishmen - we are ALL Irishmen on that day - in coats, their arms outstretched, being frisked by police officers on the platforms. And it made me wonder. What became of the booze?

When it was all over, with everybody enjoying a real good time and with everything well under control as it had been for the 32 prior years before the troubles of last year, I put a call in to the East Hampton Town Police Chief, Todd Sarris.

"I keep seeing in my mind," I said, "these black and white photographs from the 1920s during prohibition of the revenue men with sledgehammers and axes smashing great piles of illegal liquor they had confiscated. Is that what was done to the booze from the parade?"

"Well, some of it got dumped out right at the platforms," he said. "But yes, we did get some bottles of liquor, and yes we did gather them up and take them down to the dump where they were smashed up."

"The police don't keep the good stuff as evidence?"

He laughed.

"No. It's not evidence. It's just what we confiscate. In years past, I recall seeing bottles of liquor we picked up at crime scenes at the police stations. They'd have tags on them. And they'd be in secured lockers. But we don't do that anymore. We just break it all up."

"A shame," I said.

So there you are. It must be a sad day in Ireland, is what it is, when they chop up the fun from the St. Pat's parade. But the smell lingers. Go down to the dump or the train platforms and take a sniff.

Here's to better days.

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