Since you fine folks seem to like bootlegging history, I figured I’d talk about a more modern incarnation of the practice.

A couple of years ago, a story emerged out of eastern Europe that a group of smugglers in Russia and Estonia figured out an ingenious way to run vodka – through a two kilometer pipeline.

Back in 2004, some organized crime thugs hired a few crafty engineers and some eager construction workers, and secretly built a a huge pipeline through a reservoir along the Russian-Estonian border. Upon construction, the smugglers were able to pump around 1,640 gallons of vodka across before they were caught.

Just like in the past, the reason for doing so was to beat the tariffs on imports: In the European Union (which Estonia joined in 2004), a decent bottle of vodka costs more than it does here in the States – in fact, a top shelf bottle of vodka can fetch hundreds of euros per bottle. In Russia, on the other hand, vodka costs about as much as water does (in some places, even less!) – bottles can run for as little as two bucks. All told, the runners beat approximately $79,000 in import taxes.

As smart an idea as it was, there was an especially simple reason why they got caught: vodka from the tap sucks. The quality was so janky, nobody wanted to buy it. Eventually, they found a college town in Estonia to dump the stuff off on students who didn’t know any better, but the process of moving it to the new location tripped them up. The “Five-O” caught some gangsters in the middle of Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, with a truck carrying over 300 gallons of the hooch.

Even though it was unsuccessful in the end, it didn’t stop the copycats: in 2006, Estonian border guards found another pipeline, this time running through the Narva River. In that case, however, the guards caught wind of the operation before construction was complete.