A Look Back:

Decades before the Prohibition era brought smugglers to Newport’s beaches, their boats laden with barrels of whiskey and rum, the city had a problem with unlicensed drinking establishments called blind pigs.

Newport was also once home to an illegal wine bottling operation and housed rum runners hiding from federal agents.

A so-called blind pig, also known as a blind tiger, would charge its patrons to see an attraction, such as an animal, and serve complimentary drinks to circumvent liquor licensing laws.

Police raided two such establishments in Newport on the Fourth of July in 1907.

“For months Newport Beach has suffered much from the two blind pigs taken last night,” the Los Angeles Times reported July 5, 1907.

Police confiscated eight barrels of beer from a blind pig proprietor named Owen J. Owens and five barrels of beer and four cases of whiskey from another man named C.S. Hemstreet during the raid.

“Both of these places had apparently stocked up for the Fourth of July trade, and the back rooms of both were well filled with liquor,” the Times reported.

The liquor was held as bail for the men and later returned to the Los Angeles dealers they bought it from.

During Prohibition, Newport Beach became the ideal place for rum runners to smuggle booze to Los Angeles from ships anchored offshore.

On New Year’s Eve 1924, federal prohibition agents shot at a smuggler piloting a $10,000 yacht laden with 371 cases of liquor at Balboa. The man was presumed dead, according to an L.A. Times article dated Feb. 28, 1925.

The smuggler, Walter Reed Zeilley, jumped ship as federal prohibition agents began to fire, and he swam across Newport Harbor.

Zeilley then broke into the home of a Newport Beach carpenter, E.C. Kersey, and asked if he could hide out there until daybreak.

“The man was wet and cold and then finally he explained he was a rum runner who had been forced to swim across the channel, wade a swamp and climb a cliff to escape from prohibition officers,” Kersey later told a federal grand jury.

Zeilley was later captured and charged with violating federal prohibition laws.

Newport Beach also once housed an illegal wine bottling operation during Prohibition.

Two city employees were arrested in an early morning raid on municipal barns that netted 15 gallons of wine in November 1923, according to a historical L.A. Times article.

The two men, both workers from the Newport street department, were running a wine bottling operation in a barn at what the Times called the “Hidden Ranch” between Newport and Huntington Beach, also known as the Meyers ranch.

One of the men arrested in the raid, Paul Maris, was found at the city barns with 70 gallons of wine. Another man, Harry Ward was found six miles away at the Hidden Ranch, bottling the stuff, along with 80 more gallons of wine.

“...Ward, who was supposed to be ill, receiving medical attention was found in the midst of an array of bottling machinery, empty bottles and eighty gallons of wine,” the Times reported.