Revenuer Memoirs

Sheriff said…
“Kotex hell, Lizza,
you can eat oatmeal
like the rest of the prisoners.”

~ Joseph E. Carter,
Retired Special Agent
Damn the Allegators

I’ve been called a Yankee, which is not entirely unreasonable if you listen to my accent, though that’s so hard to pin down that I’ve been taken for a local in places as diverse as New Orleans and Amsterdam. I’ve also been taken for a law enforcement agent because of my close-cropped hair and lines of inquiry that tend to deal with illicit liquor.

Neither is true.

Some distillers, though, have assumed—because I am sympathetic to illicit whiskey and folk distilling and because I like a drop of home-distilled beverage on occasion—that I surely must despise cops. Not as rule.

In fact, if it weren’t for active and retired law enforcement agents who put me on the trail of allegedly retired moonshiners, I would have had a much tougher time writing about American moonshine. Cops tend to be great storytellers, especially when it comes to the cat-and-mouse games of wily distillers whose sheer audacity sometimes stymies belief.

Revenue agents, empowered since the 1860’s to “protect the revenue” of the US, have a long history of writing down their stories, sometimes in journals that have been squirreled away in attics, basements, and closets across the country. Along with them are photos, posters warning of poisonous moonshine, and other memorabilia from the days when hunting moonshiners was a priority.

A few revenooers have published their stories as books or articles in “I remember”-type columns in local papers about tax-dodging moonshiners. I’ve been trying to track down as many as possible, hunting not just bookstores and online sources, but museums, archives, libraries, historical societies, etc. A few to get you started if, like me, you’re interested in both sides of the argument that rendering unto Caesar isn’t a practice universally beloved.

Atkinson, George (1881) After the Moonshiners. Frew & Campbell, Wheeling, WV.

Carter, Joseph E. (1989) Damn the Allegators. Atlantic Publishing Company, Tabor City, NC.

Kearins, Jack J. (1969) Yankee Revenoer. Moore Publishing Company, Durham, NC.

Stapleton, Isaac (1948) Moonshiners in Arkansas. Zion’s Printing and Publishing Company, Independence, MO.

Weems, Charles H. (1992) A Breed Apart. Atlantic Publishing Company, Tabor City, NC.

Moonshine School Redux

To give you some perspective on the rarity of moonshine stills, the Georgia Department of Revenue Alcohol and Tobacco Division shut down only five stills statewide in 2007.
Of course, those are only the ones it knew about.

~ John Madewell

Raban County’s moonshine school is back in the news. The school, which I mentioned last month, is a training ground of sorts—and the only one I know of—for law enforcement agents from around the United States to learn first-hand the sights, sounds, smells, and (I presume since I haven’t attended) tastes associated with making illegal liquor.

And I don’t just mean tastes of the finished product; part of successfully tracking larger-scale moonshiners who make their liquor outdoors is the ability to taste a fermenting mash and be able to tell how far along it is—whether, for instance, a mash will be ready in one day or three, given the weather (when you're making outside, warm weather means a faster ferment). Knowing what a mash tastes like as it goes through its fermentation stages helps determine when to be in place to watch a currently unoccupied still site, nabbing the operator when it’s time to return for the run.

WTVC in Chattanooga’s In-Depth Look at Moonshine Making discusses the school and has two linked videos called Lessons in Makin' Shine here. Featured are Randall Deal, who has received a presidential pardon for his distilling and Tony Gallaway, who ran some shine back in the 1970’s but is now a county marshal.


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Moonshine a Bygone Chapter? Not so much.

Illicit distilling mostly is a bygone chapter of the Prohibition era, especially for deputies more versed on meth labs than whiskey stills.

~ Ryan Harris
Chattanooga Times Free Press

I got an email recently from Tom Montague who's the Slow Food governor for the US southern regions. He had sent a link to a Chattanooga Times Free Press article about moonshine bust last week in LaFayette, Georgia. At the bottom of the article page, there's a video featuring Sheriff Steve Wilson of Walker County explaining what happened: do check it out.

The gist of the piece—which detailed a moonshining operation found, partially dismantled, and hauled off by the Walker County Special Operations Group (see the slideshow here)—is that the officers regarded moonshining as so rare that some felt this bust might be a once-in-a-lifetime operation. While I laud the notion to donate the remains of the still to a museum, two things occur to me:

1. I wish they'd worked out that donation idea before taking pickaxes to the thing. Broke-down donations, while not worthless, don't even come close to having intact artifacts with the back stories of the people involved. Because something is old and/unusual doesn't make it valuable in and of itself. Just look at me.
2. As someone who's interviewed dozens of clandestine distillers, I can assure you that if running across a still is a once-in-a-lifetime event, I've racked up dozens of lives.
   

Here's a rundown of what's going on with that "bygone chapter of the Prohibition era" recently — in fact, just for fun, only in the South where moonshine is supposed to have died out:

• Alamance County Moonshine and Homicide Investigation — North Carolina authorities investigating a death find an apple brandy operation (video here)
• Woman, 75, arrested for operating a still — Old Bettie Golliday got busted with 36 gallons. If convicted, she might get three years
• Hell, there's even a course for law enforcement agents in Georgia on sussing out moonshiners taught in part by former shiners.
  
• Meth, moonshine, and weed are found in a Kentucky bust. Notice this quote, though:

Inside the residence officers found approximately 2 grams of methamphetamine, a sawed-off shotgun, a suspicious container, and an active moonshine still. Because of its small size, police believe the moonshine was being produced for personal use.

I added the italics. In my experience, it's those small stills that newcomers to artisan distilling will come to know. Families that might have one day passed generations of distilling traditions down the line have in many places turned to meth. It wasn't until I moved to California that I saw my first case of "Meth Mouth"—a 20-something year old guy whose dentition was so rotted that he had more fingers than teeth. I've got an obvious soft spot for home-made whiskey and the people who make it at home. Meth, though, ain't nothing but a cancer that's been eating away the heart of centuries of tradition in the mountain south.


Whoops. Off-topic. Moonshine is alive and well, but it's not so recognizable anymore to law enforcement, historians, and aficionados looking for the old-style mountain dew. Today's stills are smaller, more discreet—in fact, might not look anything like the old-school copper pots—and far more likely to be used for personal production than for making spirits for the marketplace.


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Moonshine School

This is the most at ease I've been in a still house.
If it were the old days, 
we'd have someone at the hill 
watching for all this law.

~ former moonshiner Randall Deal

Randall Leece Deal has had some agreeable roles. In 1972, he was a cast member of Deliverance, a movie that, even these thirty-six years on, makes a lot of men squeal (he's not in that scene. No, his one line concerned the size of the biggest river in the state). In 2006, George Bush issued him an official presidential pardon for his decades-old moonshining convictions. Seems ol' Randall had made some liquor in his day.

But it's is current gig that's caught my fancy. See, for the last eighteen years or so, Deal has been helping Georgia law enforcement agents learn about moonshine. As older agents retire, there's a concern that younger generations, perhaps more properly focused on meth labs, won't have the skills to track down and recognize moonshine operations. That's where Deal comes in.

The retired moonshiner recently took part in a four-day course for law enforcement agents around the country to learn whiskey ways in Raban County, Georgia. Despite all kinds of noise that moonshine is a dead or dying craft, an awful lot of moonshiners keep getting busted.

Read the story here. Watch the video here. Oh, and for you Popcorn Sutton fans, the video includes footage of Sutton free on bail and a few shots of some big-ass stills (his?) about to be hauled away.

Goes well with:

• US Department of Justice's petitions of pardon
  
• George Atkinson's 1881 memoir After the Moonshiners. The engraving above is entitled Deputy Returning Fire on Moonshiners and it's from the book by Atkinson who was a revenue agent at the time.