How to Use bootlegger in a Sentence

bootlegger

noun
  • But brick-and-mortar bootleggers are a thing of the past.
    Connor Sheets, Los Angeles Times, 8 June 2024
  • Which means the bootleggers are squeezed out by the monied interests.
    John Koopman, Rolling Stone, 21 Sep. 2023
  • Gatsby was a bootlegger but also used Wall Street to cheat.
    New York Times, 3 Jan. 2022
  • His father, Elmo, was a cotton farmer and bootlegger who did time in jail.
    Richard Cromelin, Los Angeles Times, 28 Oct. 2022
  • And Bootlegger Cove is named for the many bootleggers who landed their wares south of town to avoid detection.
    David Reamer | Alaska History, Anchorage Daily News, 23 July 2023
  • In the 1920s, Moonlight Beach was popular with sunbathers, race-horse aficionados and bootleggers, who used the beach as a hooch drop-off point.
    San Diego Union-Tribune, 2 Oct. 2023
  • The Oregon Journal published the mugshots of a former local bootlegger and two other ex-cons.
    oregonlive, 24 Sep. 2021
  • Jimmy Tallant is a local bootlegger whose father led the mob.
    Sam Sacks, WSJ, 28 May 2021
  • Many of the novel’s characters are types: the former All-American, the renegade bootlegger, the free spirit longing to split town.
    Michael Lapointe, The New Yorker, 20 May 2021
  • The author also learned that her grandfather was a bootlegger.
    Myrna Petlicki, Chicago Tribune, 17 Nov. 2022
  • The bootlegger was framed — really — by none other than Chicago Outfit boss Al Capone.
    Kori Rumore, chicagotribune.com, 17 Mar. 2022
  • For a time it was owned by George Remus, a notorious bootlegger, but the sixth generation Pogues now distill the small-batch bourbon here.
    Caroline Eubanks, Condé Nast Traveler, 23 Sep. 2022
  • The Real McCoy line (named after a famous bootlegger of the 1920s) is distilled at Foursquare is more affordable and easier to find but doesn’t skimp on the quality.
    Tony Sachs, Robb Report, 2 June 2023
  • Apparently, Hayward once threw a 72-hour-long cook-off, was a part-time bootlegger (possibly for his own consumption), and played epic, high-stakes poker games.
    James Tarmy, Bloomberg.com, 19 Aug. 2020
  • Roman Gorsky is the Gatsby figure, not a bootlegger but a fantastically wealthy arms dealer.
    Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker, 27 Feb. 2023
  • The excited homeowner also revealed to Fox News that his research has led him to believe that bottles and hidden compartments were used by a bootlegger named Adolph Humpfner.
    Michael Hollan, Fox News, 18 Oct. 2020
  • Set in a remote rural area of Tennessee, the story begins with a murder before going on to tell the relationship between the bootlegger who committed the crime and the dead man’s son, who doesn’t know his new friend killed his father.
    Chris Koseluk, The Hollywood Reporter, 13 June 2023
  • The island harbors plenty of secrets, too, like long-ago drunken parties in a notorious inn, and bootleggers stashing bottles in Peddocks' coves.
    Madeline Bilis, Travel + Leisure, 10 Aug. 2023
  • Their bourbon, the Alice Brown, is named after a female bootlegger who lived in Lanesville, Indiana, during prohibition.
    Maggie Menderski, The Courier-Journal, 4 Jan. 2023
  • The police busted 32 vendors and seized $1 million worth of contraband, and the administration sued the landlord, following a previous suit by a consortium of luxury brands, to lock out the bootleggers for good.
    Gideon Fink Shapiro, Curbed, 2 May 2023
  • Marian McLain is named after Zoeller’s eighth generation grandmother, a distant relative who the brand claims was one of the first female bootleggers who was arrested in 1799, making her one of the first women to be convicted of this crime.
    Jonah Flicker, Robb Report, 30 Apr. 2023
  • What follows is a historical true crime thriller steeped in peculiar characters, from secret lovers and socialites to seedy bootleggers and corrupt cops, all of whom are connected in a conspiracy that points to very powerful places.
    Ew Staff, EW.com, 10 May 2023
  • Infesting it all, mayors, City Council members, and district attorneys pocketed campaign money and even payoffs from gamblers, bootleggers and madams, as did the police.
    Patt Morrison, Los Angeles Times, 30 May 2023
  • It’s named after George Remus, a notorious bootlegger during the period.
    Joseph V Micallef, Forbes, 1 Aug. 2022
  • The audience numbered perhaps fifty people, including several dancing couples and two bootleggers, whose taping rigs sat on their tables, beside their chicken wings.
    Justin Taylor, The New Yorker, 11 Apr. 2024
  • Spenard is named for Joe Spenard, a bootlegger, squatter and man generally dismissive of legal limitations.
    David Reamer, Anchorage Daily News, 23 Aug. 2020
  • The fantasia was orchestrated by the club’s owner, Sherman Billingsley, a former bootlegger from rural Oklahoma who reinvented himself as a nightlife impresario.
    Alex Vadukul, New York Times, 25 Sep. 2022
  • Unfortunately, after 30 years, climate policy as practiced in the advanced economies has been overtaken by what the economist Bruce Yandle calls Baptist-and-bootlegger incentives.
    WSJ, 18 Dec. 2020
  • With a tunnel right underneath the bar, bootleggers coming across the river smuggled alcohol when the building operated as a speakeasy during Prohibition, according to Tommy's Detroit website.
    Marina Johnson, Detroit Free Press, 5 July 2023
  • His father was Milton George Goldberg, an industrial engineer and onetime bootlegger.
    BostonGlobe.com, 12 Oct. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bootlegger.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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