A former radio officer aboard an Irish merchant ship has revealed that Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Angela's Ashes, was an unwitting cover, along with a priest, for smuggling Irish Hospital Sweepstake tickets into the US on one occasion more than 50 years ago.
Mr McCourt, who gave talks aboard the QE2 last week on his childhood, travelled less luxuriously aboard the Irish Oak in 1949 on its first year of service. He relates in Angela's Ashes how he and a priest went ashore with two navy officers near Poughkeepsie for a drink while the ship was anchored overnight.
But Mr Bill Jones, the ship's former radio officer, has said the real purpose of the trip ashore was to smuggle in Irish Hospital Sweepstake tickets to sell in New York, a regular practice among Irish merchant marine ships at the time when millions of tickets were sold in the US and Canada. "The only way to get them over was on the Irish ships," Mr Jones said.
When the Irish Oak was diverted from New York to Albany, he had to make alternative arrangements to deliver 15 cartons of lottery tickets, whose sale would make a $400 profit. His $100 share was the equivalent of a month's salary.
"I got on to my boatman in New York. He offered to drive to Albany and organise a motorboat to come out," he said.
The priest and Mr McCourt, an innocent 19-year-old, were brought along to provide an alibi if the party was apprehended by customs officials. Mr Jones said that, as a fellow Limerick man, he took the "lost young fellow" under his wing.
Mr Jones said he and another officer loaded the tickets on to a station wagon on the pier. "You would get jailed if you were caught. They were highly illegal," he said.
Irish-Americans were the biggest customers for the tickets, he added, paying $2 a ticket. In an elaborate three-way traffic, customers would hand back a counterfoil which was then smuggled back to Ireland, and a receipt was issued by Sweepstakes staff which had to be returned to the customers.
Mr Jones retired from the merchant navy in 1956 while the Irish Oak, according to Capt Donnelly, was sold by Irish Shipping in 1967 and finally scrapped in 1980.