The Bloody Battle of Moss Landing

Noah Rader died to keep the world safe from our drinking habits

Jul 06, 2025

On the night of July 6, 1925, Noah Rader was finishing up his volunteer work at the United Veterans of the Republic clubhouse in Salinas. Earlier in the day, the veterans group had buried a Civil War hero, and Rader made certain the funeral events went off without a hitch. Walking to his home, a pair of headlights cut through the evening haze; a vehicle slowed to a stop. A man hollered out: Hey. Come on, Rader.

Rader recognized William Oyer’s voice. Oyer was the county sheriff at the time, and Rader was being summoned to action. A soldier at heart, Rader was a veteran of the Spanish-American War who served with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and who earned a Purple Heart while fighting in the Philippines. The Tennessee native had settled in Salinas with his wife and child, running a second-hand furniture store in the Alisal. But he was still a reliable gunslinger, on the side of law and order.

Rader didn’t hesitate to jump into Oyer’s vehicle, where he was informally deputized and handed a pump-action rifle. He’d be dead by midnight, a soldier of domestic fortune who sacrificed his life in the ridiculous whack-a-mole prosecution of Prohibition. Established by the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and enforced by the Volstead Act in 1920, Prohibition was the U.S. government’s paternalistic war on alcohol, back when America was great again.

En route to Moss Landing, the sheriff briefed his “special deputy” about the situation. They were headed out to the remote fishing port, where a patrol deputy had discovered a bunch of sketchy characters hanging around earlier in the evening. They had the dubious look of rumrunners, preparing to offload barrels from a vessel that hadn’t yet moored.

Oyer, a butcher turned lawman, had won the sheriff's election three years earlier after convincing voters he'd "clean up" the vice that plagued Monterey County: liquor, prostitution and gambling. He proved to be a front-line sheriff, and not one of those political hacks who wore a badge and hid behind his desk. He liked to lead raids on speakeasies, social clubs and whore houses.

He was especially vigilant in his hunt for rumrunners.

The remote coastline along Monterey County has long been a practical locale for smugglers; the sleepy coastal villages and secluded inlets along the Central Coast were ideal ports for offloading hooch without detection. During Prohibition, rum boats took surreptitious anchor in Stillwater Cove, in dark spots along the Big Sur Coast, in the protective coves of Point Lobos, and in quiet outposts like Moss Landing, which was populated mostly by folks who minded their own business.

Just a month earlier — in June of 1925 — Sheriff Oyer and his boys had broken up a liquor landing in Pebble Beach, not far from the yacht club. Shots had been fired, but everyone escaped unharmed. Most of the bad guys disappeared in heavy brush, leaving seven vehicles and 375 cases of booze behind. Those who were apprehended proved to be low-level flunkies who honestly didn't know who they were working for.

Experiences like the Pebble Beach skirmish had taught Oyer that law enforcement would always be outgunned, that the rumrunners didn’t play fair. The criminals had machine guns; the cops were armed with shotguns. Vigilante types who were handy with a rifle — eager chumps like Noah Rader — helped balance the ledger.

Earlier in the evening on July 6, 1925, a motor patrolman named Henry Livingston noticed a clutch of unfriendly strangers hanging around Moss Landing. Suspicions aroused, Livingston drove into Salinas to alert others that rumrunners appeared poised to offload illicit liquor. About a half-dozen deputies scrambled to Moss Landing, staging on a small hill to the east of Moss Landing to survey the activity and to plan a raid. The gang of smugglers had their own spies, of course, and in time a cream-colored phaeton — in old-timey days, a phaeton was a jalopy without a top — pulled up to the deputies. The driver got out and approached.

“Who are you fellows?” he asked, according to reports carried in the newspapers. A stupid question, since most of them were in uniform.

“We are officers,” a deputy said. “Who are you?”

“None of your damn business,” the stranger answered.

A couple of the lawmen approached the vehicle, expecting to search for hooch or guns, but the stranger jumped in and whizzed away. After a brief chase, the cops were able to stop the phaeton. The stranger hit the gas again as the officers approached on foot. Again the officers gave chase, but as they hit the highway towards Watsonville, they were greeted by a fusillade of bullets.

Outmanned and outgunned, the officers turned back. Someone called Sheriff Oyer from a pay phone, asking for reinforcements. Oyer headed for Moss Landing, but not before picking up his doomed special deputy, Noah Rader.

Soon after arriving, Oyer and his men motored to the village but encountered another suspicious wise guy, who leaned against his parked vehicle along the side of the road. “What’s going on here?” one of the lawmen, Constable L.A. Beevers, called out.

“You’ll find out pretty quick,” the wise guy reportedly answered. “You’d better keep on going while you’re all in one piece.”

He then ducked down the bank along the slough as gunfire started coming from all directions. The lawmen scrambled and returned fire, but they were blasting shotguns into the dark night against a spray of the gangsters’ machine-gun fire.

Beevers heard Oyer call out that he had been shot. He trotted towards the sheriff, with Rader not far behind. Another bullet whizzed by Beevers and found its way into Rader’s heart.

Once the shooting stopped, the cops on the scene let Rader’s body repose unattended so they could minister to Oyer and Livingston. The sheriff had been shot in the knee, and Livingston had suffered a grazing gunshot wound.

Noah Horace Rader was 45 years old when his life ended in a blaze of gory.

Rader was given a hero’s burial, of course. “A vast throng of friends, with members of fraternal and patriotic organizations, assembled In the parlor of the Salinas Undertaking Co. to attend the final obsequies,” according to The Salinas Californian.

Meanwhile, Californians were gripped by the shocking facts, rumors, speculations and innuendos made public in the aftermath of the Battle of Moss Landing. Accounts of the sensational gunfight were splashed across the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. Outrage abounded. Furious editorials were written in newspapers across the land. Public officials wondered aloud if the cost of enforcing Prohibition was worth the effort.

Predictably, Prohibition was only successful in promoting new opportunities for organized crime. In the big cities east of the Mississippi, gangsters like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz became criminal sensations. The high-profile “Beer Wars” of Chicago were killing dozens of gangland operatives. And now West Coast smugglers had gone too far. A special deputy had died right here in Moss Landing, and the duly-elected county sheriff was getting his shot-up kneecap repaired by surgeons in San Francisco. The brazen criminals were turning violent. A deputy district attorney in Salinas called the bushwacking smugglers “diabolical in their cold-blooded disregard for human life.”

With that level of outcry, the incident propelled a phalanx of determined federal agents who filtered across Northern California to break up the rum-running syndicate. Their investigation turned up a series of astonishing clues, jaw-dropping accusations and inconceivable arrests that kept Moss Landing on the front pages for the next couple of years.

Law enforcement from different agencies — including the U.S. Cavalry stationed at the Presidio of Monterey — launched what at the time was one of the largest manhunts in the history of the state.

“Members of the tank corps of the National Guard, citizen groups, prohibition squads and sheriff’s posses were scouring the country between (San Francisco) and Salinas looking for other participants in the shooting,” according to Thomas Foley, an attorney representing one of the fugitives, in a story he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner more than 15 years after the incident. (Foley later became a superior court judge.)

“Angry mobs gathered around the county jail … and there were many vengeful threats of lynching as feelings ran high,” Foley said.

Three of the suspects were questioned endlessly in what investigators called the “sweating room” at the Salinas jail, and one of them was rumored to be willing to spill his guts.

While a handful of suspects were in jail, local citizens worried that countless other cold-blooded gangsters still lingered around the county. The citizens of Moss Landing had been terrorized during the gun battle, mainly because they had been told in advance by gangsters that they would be “shot to pieces” if they tried to interfere.

Their fears were heightened after the bodies of Mae and Chris Garich were discovered a couple of days later. The Gariches had been living on a boat in the Moss Landing harbor, and they were rumored to have been eyewitnesses willing to cooperate with lawmen. Mae Garich’s bullet-riddled body was found at the mouth of the Pajaro River a couple of days after the Battle of Moss Landing. Her husband’s corpse was found face down in the shallow waters of Elkhorn Slough not long after.

Federal investigators arrived in Monterey County, and their probe unleashed even more sensational headlines. Everyone seemed to be a suspect, including a number of locals. Oyer’s brother, who was a fish and game official familiar with the daily operations at the Moss Landing harbor, was rumored to have been too cozy with the gang. After months of suspicions, William Sandholdt, who ran the wharf in Moss Landing and whose surname now graces a bridge and road connecting Moss Landing to the “island,” surrendered to authorities. (He was later exonerated.)

In the end, two of the suspects the deputies dragged into Salinas after the incident, Simon Bube and Paul Brokaw, were charged with felonies for engaging the posse in gunfire with shots that killed Rader. Brokaw, a graduate of Princeton, was known as the “rum-running fashion plate” of Northern California, due to his stylish wardrobe.

The prosecution of Bube and Brokaw in the Salinas courthouse devolved into a legal circus, according to author J. Anne Funderburg, who devotes several pages to the Battle of Moss Landing in her book “Rumrunners: Liquor Smugglers on America’s Coast.” The prosecutor and one of the defense attorneys traded punches in the courtroom and had to be separated by court officials. It was during that trial that defense witnesses claimed the criminal syndicate had paid Oyer’s brother $200 to keep the law out of their hair that night in July, and they were rightfully surprised to see the sheriff show up with his posse.

After hearing days of conflicting testimony and after witnessing various screwball courtroom shenanigans, the jury in the Bube and Brokaw trial was deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial and prosecutors tried it again. This time they only went after Bube — but that trial also ended in a mistrial. While the local courts were unable to pin Rader’s murder on Bube and Brokaw, federal prosecutors charged them both with violating the Volstead Act. Bube eventually did 16 months in Leavenworth after pleading guilty, while Brokaw got a two-year federal prison sentence after a federal jury convicted him.

Meanwhile, federal agents worked long and hard to chase down mob bosses implicated in the Battle of Moss Landing. They questioned everyone police considered sketchy, from the fish-and-game warden to local brothel madams. With the heat on, snitches started snitching.

The feds’ dragnet eventually paid off with the arrests of J. Herbert Madden and Joseph Parente, the kingpins of what was possibly the largest rum-running operation in Northern California.

Madden and Parente had formed an odd alliance, and Madden’s arrest was a sensational development. At the time of his indictment, Madden was mayor of Sausalito. The son of a boat builder who took over his father’s Sausalito shipyard, he was regarded as a civic-minded Marin County fellow, the sort of back-slapping chap who keeps the wheels of small communities greased. His shipyard kept him in contact with the Coast Guard; in fact, he had earned a contract to repair the Coast Guard’s rum chasers. Those contacts gave him an insider's knowledge of what lawmen were up to. On the other side of the coin, Parente was a two-bit criminal, in and out of San Quentin for a run of stupid capers. When Prohibition began, he hustled Canadian liquor and convinced Madden to provide boats for delivery. A partnership was formed, and a crime syndicate took shape.

Casting a wide net in an effort to coax friendly testimony from low-level goons who might be willing to spill their guts, the feds implicated 20 other men, including a local rancher, a farmer, a night watchman, and the owner of the Moss Landing docks.

Even as he fought prosecution, a recall election against Madden in 1925 failed miserably. He did lose his mayor’s job when he was sent to prison after his conviction. The disgraced mayor accepted his two-year prison term placidly, returning to his boat-building enterprise upon his release and receiving a presidential pardon from President Herbert Hoover in 1932. By 1937, Sausalito had elected him mayor again, and he presided over the opening ceremonies for the Golden Gate Bridge.

Also among the eight men who were convicted and sentenced in San Francisco was a cagey triggerman named Ed Ferris, who had been the subject of a nationwide search following the Battle of Moss Landing and the last to be arrested. Authorities believed he was among the captains of the Moss Landing operation, and likely one of the gunmen. He had evaded capture for about 15 months until agents tracked him down in Petaluma and shot him in the hip when he tried to run.

Back in Monterey County, no evidence was ever produced that linked the rumrunners to the deaths of the Gariches, the Moss Landing couple whose bodies were found dumped nearby. But the mystery that surrounded their deaths created a new round of sensational headlines. Newspapers throughout the country carried stories about the inquests, including a morbid account about the autopsy conducted on Chris Garich. The medical examiner was startled when he encountered a living two-foot long eel hiding under the dead man’s breast bone.

The federal agent running the investigation was oddly silent about his probe, given that virtually every other snoop assigned to the Battle of Moss Landing case couldn’t seem to stop talking to newspapermen. All he would say was that, as far as he knew, Garich’s wife, Mae, was not a paid government informant.

Meanwhile, on the civil-law side of the legal system, Noah Rader’s 14-year-old daughter was getting the run-around from Monterey County’s heartless bureaucrats. The state’s Industrial Accident Commission had awarded Nellie Rader a $4,900 death benefit and $100 in burial expenses for losing her dad.

A Salinas newspaper reported the initial benefits claim had been made by Rader’s widow, Anna, but it had to be withdrawn when it was determined that Rader “had had two other wives and proof of their deaths was lacking.” The Raders’ daughter was then substituted as the claimant. Because the case was high profile and was complicated by the fact that Rader technically wasn’t a salaried employee, the Industrial Accident Commission’s investigation dragged on for many months before commissioners ruled for Nellie Rader. Although her father was not a salaried deputy sheriff, the commission determined that Oyer had paid Rader $5 every time the sheriff called him to duty for “emergency cases,” so his daughter was entitled to the payment.

The bureaucrats at the Monterey County government center disagreed, fighting the commission’s decision all the way to the state Supreme Court. They argued that as a member of a posse comitatus, Rader should not be regarded as a sworn officer of the law and his heirs should not be eligible for death benefits. County attorneys asserted that Rader was simply “performing a duty which every citizen owes to his sovereign, the state,” when he was killed.

The state Supreme Court ultimately ruled unanimously in Nellie Rader’s favor. The ruling established case law in the state for decades. In its decision, the Supreme Court said Rader had “all the authority of a formally deputized officer … and (was) in fact a de jure deputy sheriff” on the night he was killed because Rader “was in the service of the county under appointment by a county officer.”

Years after the famous showdown, newspapers still followed the principal cast of characters who continued to find themselves in and out of trouble with the law, always in the context of the Battle of Moss Landing. In 1930, the discovery of a machine gun buried at the battle site was front-page news, as reporters speculated that it was likely the murder weapon buried by the rumrunners escaping Sheriff Oyer’s men.

Prohibition was ultimately abolished after Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which repealed the Volstead Act in 1933 and restored control of alcohol to the states.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Bill Oyer was hobbled the rest of his life by the bullet that shattered his knee. Even as he was hailed as the hero of the Battle of Moss Landing, he lost re-election 18 months later to an upstart deputy in his department. Pundits mostly blamed his loss on the fact that he had spent much of the campaign either laid up in a hospital or convalescing at home, and editorial writers in Monterey County publicly bemoaned that voters had turned their back on a wounded warrior. In 1928, he was appointed chief of the Monterey Police Department. He died suddenly one morning, four years later, of an infected appendix. He was only 46.

If the write-up of his funeral was any indication, his untimely death shocked the fabric of Monterey society, “Mingled in the press of humanity that thronged the funeral chapel and stood silently about outside were people of high and low degree, people whose skins were black and brown and yellow, as well as white,” according to a reporter for the Monterey Peninsula Herald on June 23, 1932, “Fishermen stood beside public officials and costly apparel blended with the humble garb of the laborer in the democracy of mortality.”

Leading the procession of mourners that day was Henry Livingston, the motor patrolman who had first stumbled across the rumrunners seven years earlier in Moss Landing.

— Story by Joe Livernois
— Illustration from Adobe Stock

Footnote: A plaque commemorating Noah Rader’s death is one of 10 affixed to the Monterey County Sheriff’s Memorial Wall at the sheriff’s headquarters in Salinas.

The Bloody Battle of Moss Landing

Noah Rader died to keep the world safe from our drinking habits

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