I was recently reading a Maigret novel by George Simenon, which is a detective series set in France that began in the 30s, and one of the characters in the book is said to be involved in smuggling alcohol on ships from Northern Europe to the United States during the Prohibition era. Was this really a common practice in the era, or exaggeration for the novel? To what extent did Europeans participate in bootlegging?
The rum runners did not usually stock up in Europe. Canada, the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon (south of Newfoundland), the Bahamas, and Mexico, were the usual places to load alcohol.
The ships that loaded the booze rarely actually smuggled it into the US. Instead, they sat outside the 3 mile limit (later, in 1924, the US raised the limit to 12 miles) and sold to the actual smugglers, who shipped the booze ashore in small, fast, boats.