LIQUOR: PopskulPs Progress

‘A hot tip came into Alcohol Tax headquarters in Washington last week; if they would look in a spot in the Maryland woods thirty miles from the capital, they would find a big still. Three agents hustled to the spot. When they got close, they sniffed the telltale reek of fermenting *Background: portrait of Founder A. P. Giannini. mash. Led by their noses, they found a nice big still and vats that could hold 7,000 gallons of mash, enough to produce 240 gallons of high-proof moonshine a day. As the agents dynamited the still, one said: “I’ve never seen one this big before, even in the Carolinas.”

The manufacture of bootleg whisky, once pretty well confined to eleven Southern “moonshine” states, is no longer an amateur, hillbilly operation. Racketeers in big cities have made it big business. Big stills have been found in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark and New York. Thomas J. Donovan, vice president of Licensed Beverage Industries, Inc., said at an industry gathering last week that racketeers now build stills that cost from $50,000 to $75,000, peddle their output through Manhattan parking lots, neighborhood candy stores and tenement speakeasies. “Obviously,” concluded Donovan, “they aren’t doing it simply on speculation. They know they have a ready market to recoup their investment.”

“The Biggest Racket.” Bootlegging, says Calvert Distillers’ President W. W. Wachtel, has become “the biggest money-making racket in the world.” Though nobody knows exactly how big the racket is, the liquor industry has some impressive evidence of its size. Last year federal, state and local agents seized some 20,000 stills v. 29,000 seized in 1928 during Prohibition by federal agents. It is estimated that one still out of five is found. On that basis, there may be more than 100,000 illegal stills in operation.

Legal liquormen blame the moonshine boom on high taxes. When the tax was raised from $9 to $10.50 a gallon last November, the Government hoped to collect an additional $200,000,000; instead, the increase has been piddling. The industry thinks the high taxes have taken some legal buyers out of the market, shunted many more to cheap moonshine.

Tiger Blood. Making moonshine is easy, and the profits are large. Racketeers copy the big distillers’ methods. The pale, unaged liquid that results is “white light-nin’,” “white mule,” “Splo,” or “tiger blood.” Many a Southern countryman would rather drink it than store whisky. One lead-bellied Georgia farmer told a Treasury agent: “I bought legal once. Couldn’t stand the stuff. Threw it to the hogs ‘n they all died.”

In gallon jugs, moonshine sells in cities for about $2 a fifth. The deliveries are made by a new breed of rumrunner, drivers of souped-up cars which can hit 100 m.p.h. All but the amateurs equip them with truck springs in the rear to eliminate the telltale sag caused by heavy loads. The average fee for transportation is around $1.00 a gallon. Sold undiluted at the still for $4 a gallon, the juice still leaves the moonshiner with an operating profit of 200% or more.

One of the big problems of moonshining is labor supply: likely men are inclined to shy at the risk of being caught. But profits are still big enough so that Old Popskull is enjoying its most spectacular boom since the days of the Volstead Act.