ABSTRACT
By the dawn of the twentieth century, America already had a long and entrenched history of smuggling as a form of white-collar crime. The immediate precursors to American smuggling as an instance of white-collar criminality were the eighteenth-century merchants who directly profited from the contraband their ships imported into the colonies. The likes of John Hancock and his uncle Thomas exemplified the white-collar criminals of the colonial era and established the prototype of a reputable class of individuals involved in crimes supportive of their business interests, specifically the smuggling of contraband to benefit the bottom line of their business ledgers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the entrepreneurial descendants of these colonial merchants turned again to white-collar crime and smuggled, at first, to survive the draconian regulations of a government attempting to avoid entanglements in the conflict between two of the major military powers of modern Western civilization. Yet within only a few years, after the nascent nation had become enmeshed again in war against its former colonial master, some of these same mercantilists profited by trading with the new nation’s enemy, putting profit above patriotism and the law, trafficking both across the northern land border and across the seas.
