Larry Fay (1888 – January 1, 1933) was one of the early rumrunners of the Prohibition Era in New York City.
Fay made a half a million dollars bringing bootleg whiskey into New York from Canada.
With his profits he bought into a taxi cab company and later opened a nightclub, the El Fey, on West 47th Street in Manhattan in 1924, featuring Texas Guinan as the emcee and a floorshow produced by Nils Granlund.
[2] Fay, who had a record of forty-nine arrests but no felony convictions, was involved in several enterprises in the ensuing years, and was said to have amassed and lost a fortune.
[6][7] Also, Fay's life served as the basis for James Cagney's character, Eddie Bartlett, in the 1939 gangster film, The Roaring Twenties.