William McCoy, "King of Rum Runners" (the real McCoy?)

[Lynn C. Hattendorf Westney]

I'd always heard that came from an early boxer.  Looked up and found
"Kid" McCoy; welterweight Champ. 1896

See
http://www.ibhof.com/mccoy.htm


It is also believed that the term, "The Real McCoy" evolved into the usage
of the English language because of him. To gain a psychological advantage
over his opponents, McCoy feined illness before several bouts or he
would spread the word to the media that he neglected training. On fight
night, much to the surprise of the press and his opponents, McCoy was
usually fit and ready to fight.

Thus, reporters often asked, "Is this the real McCoy?"

>
>    From the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, 31 December 1948, pg. 14, col. 4:
>
> _William McCoy_
> _Dies; "King of Rum Runners"_
> -----------------
> _Captain's Aresthusa Hauled_
>    _Scotch to "Rum Row," Off_
>    _L.I., During Prohibition_
>    STUART, Fla., Dec. 30.--Captain William McCoy, seventy-one, who boasted that he was king of the rum runners during prohibition and coiner of the expression "the real McCoy," died today after a heart attacke aboard his boat, the Blue Lagoon of Coral Strand.
>    Captain McCoy came to Florida from Syracuse, N.Y. in 1898 and with his brother Ben operated coastwise freight and passenger boats until prohibition came.  He then bought a fast schooner, the Arethusa, with a capacity for 6,000 cases of liquor, and began hauling scotch from Nassau to a rendezvous off the Long Island coast that became known as Rum Row.
>    The liquor he sold was always "the real McCoy" when it left his hands, he asserted, disclaiming responsibility for what might have happened to it after it reached the wholesalers and retailers in New York and New Jersey.
>    According to his own account, he made one voyage a month, with a week to load, a week each way from Nassau, and a week to sell, and averaged $60,000 to $75,000 a trip.
>    His buyers went out to Rum Row to speedboats that nearly always, when cornered, managed to out-run and out-maneuver the craft of revnue agents.  Captain McCoy once explained why.
>    "Simple," he said, "very simple.  The Coast Guard orders a fleet of faster boats.  Specifications are printed in the papers.  The rum mob takes the specifications to a Brooklyn man and says, 'Make us a crate that's ten miles faster than these.'"
>    Some of these boats, powered with three Liberty motors, attained a top speed of fifty miles an hour and one of them during a test run ran circles around the Ile de France, outward bound at full speed.
>    After repeal Captain McCoy, with little left of his rum-running wealth, turned to real estate.  The famed Arethusa collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank.
>    In recent years he built a sixty-foot motor sailer in which he and his brother and their cronies made cruises to the Bahamas and West Indies.  He also took up painting as a hobby after a friend gave him a box of paints, and his work was considered better than average.
>    Surviving, besides his brother, is a sister, Mrs. Violet Clark, of Deland, Fla.