Their names have stayed out of the newspapers for many years, but two generations of Boulwares worked the high seas off the coast of South Carolina – and points further south – for decades, ostensibly as fishermen.
Were they also engaged in other, less legitimate offshore endeavors?
Barrett T. Boulware died on September 12, 2018 following a brief battle with an aggressive form of cancer.
“He went to Mayo, did it all,” one local source told me. “(But) he still died fast.”
“Barrett enjoyed life, lived it to the fullest with his many friends but most of all he loved his family,” his obituary noted.
His death came six years after his father passed away at the age of 87.
It has long been alleged he used his shrimp boats for hauling contraband,” one Lowcountry attorney told me on Saturday, referring to the younger Boulware. “He has long been rumored as a smuggler. He was a wheeler and dealer, a very flamboyant personality.”
The same rumors also ran rampant about the elder Boulware, a peer of former S.C. fourteenth circuit solicitor Randolph “Buster” Murdaugh Jr. In fact, the elder Boulware’s father – a lawyer named Thomas McCullough Boulware – tried cases with Murdaugh in the late 1940s.
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