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It’s All About Stupid Taxes

Crack For Crackers

As dangerous backwoods traditions go, moonshine is up there with bent hickory rockers and line dancing. So why are the Feds cracking down on the last stills in America?

Dickie Atkins is what you might call a craftsman. Sort of a Bob Vila of booze. Some guys make fly rods, and some guys make banjos. But Dickie makes liquor. When it’s in operation, his distillery isn’t a boutique version of Seagram’s; it’s a beat-up still down a trash-strewn path in the middle of Appalachia. But his moonshine is handcrafted and carefully bottled-clean as a whistle, clear as a bell and good enough to drink until you can’t even fall over. So it’s not surprising that Dickie’s hooch has a dual-cult following. There are those who want Dickie’s moonshine. And there are those who want Dickie-for making moonshine.

He’s had a chance to meet members of both groups. He remembers a visit he had one night when he heard footsteps behind his still. It was a Fed—a revenuer, one of the blackshirts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. So Dickie jackrabbited up a hill, through the Virginia sycamores. The ATF gunner yelled, “Run, you long-legged son of a bitch!” And Dickie yelled back, “I am running, you son of a bitch!” And he loved every damn minute of it—because he got away.

When he tells the story now, it sounds like a black-and-white flicker from the days of hillbilly moonshiners outwitting the sanctimonious thugs of Prohibition—but it happened in the ’60s. In Franklin County, Virginia, the self-proclaimed Moonshine Capital of the World, guys like Dickie are the foot soldiers of the county’s traditional underground economy, cooking tax-free white lightning in the backwoods and sneaking thousand-gallon deliveries to city slums throughout the Northeast, where moonshine is still prized for a 100-proof high that no store-bought hooch can hope to match.

Talk like a…Moonshiner “Forget tonight’s grease spot. They’re gettin’ law run over at the local blind tiger, and a granny fee ain’t gonna cut it. Looks like we’ll be doing the crazy apple thing tonight.” Blind Tiger \blahnd TAH-guh\ A place where you can buy illegal whiskey. The thing about blind tigers? They’ll never see how beautiful they are. Corn Whiskey \kahn WISS-kay\ Made primarily from corn mash, with a little sugar added. Considered the best among ’shiners. Crazy Apple \meshugunah AA-pull\ A mixture of homemade brandy and whiskey. One question: Is there such a thing as a sane apple? Every one we’ve ever run into was clinical. Granny Fee \GRA-neh fay\ Payoff money to law enforcement officers. Derived from the fees that midwives used to charge for delivering babies. But in this case, the “baby” is money and the “midwives” are cops. See how educational crime can be? Grease Spot \GRACE pah\ A place where you meet to hand off granny fees. In the South, grannies are known for their innate greasiness. Law Run \LAO ron\ Being chased by a revenuer through the forest or in a car, as in “gettin’ law run.” Makes sense to you? Then it’s true: You’re nuts, because it confuses the hell out of us. Mountain Teapot \MAON’in tay-pah\ A small still. Actually, it’s a still that’s both short and stout. (Tip it over. Pour it out.) Real McCoy \REE-yul Mick-owoy\ A ’shine runner from Florida whose stuff was so good, it became a barometer for quality. You know what wasn’t a barometer for quality? The movie The Real McCoy, starring Kim Basinger. Oh, do allow us to pontificate on the suckiness of that bad boy! Run \RON\ A single production cycle of a still. Also a form of exercise for gaunt people in wispy shorts. “Let’s go for a run at lunch,” they would say. Runner \RUUH-nuh\ A person who transports the hooch. Also know as a “wheelman,” “bootlegger” and “person who transports the hooch.” Still Hand \STEE-ul hey-and\ The guy who tends a still operation—i.e., carts in the sugar and grain, mixes the mash, fires the stove and jugs the final product.

You may never have a chance to sip great moonshine, and that’s a shame. The taste of moonshine is memorable—if not appealing. But it tastes better when you remember that a tax-free gallon can cost as little as eight dollars. Despite the product’s popularity, Dickie is an endangered breed in an endangered trade. Two years ago, federal agents from the ATF swept into Franklin County to smash what they claimed was a “moonshine mafia” as trigger-happy as any drug cartel.

Dickie wasn’t named in the massive indictment that came down last July—the Feds were after the big shots who had dominated the booze business and had been his bosses all his life. But Dickie knows them all—and so does everybody else in Franklin County. Around here, they’re known as the black-pot kings, the men with the contacts in the cities to distribute the product, the money to set up the stills and the muscle to protect themselves. Now the men were facing charges that could net them each up to 12 years in prison.

Operation Lightning Strike, as the ATF called it, shattered the time-honored rules of engagement in Franklin County, the old code between bootlegger and lawman. For 70 years, the tacit agreement in the hills had been that if you made, sold or hauled moonshine and were smart and fast enough to outrun the law, then so be it. If you got through the roadblocks without shooting anybody or getting yourself or anyone else hurt, you could belly up to the bar the next day with the local deputy and swap the story for a drink. Even if through some incompetence you managed to get caught, soft state liquor laws and sympathetic juries meant you’d do only a few months.

It wasn’t collusion or corruption; it was a combination of local justice, common sense and a rural code of honor based on the fact that few people in Franklin County consider moonshining to be anything more than an effort to avoid a completely nonsensical tax. People in Appalachia have real problems: drug addiction and trafficking, dumbed-down schools, cynical politicians, unemployment and persistent poverty.

A bunch of guys brewing up moonshine just isn’t an issue, here or elsewhere. If it’s a problem, it’s Washington’s, since it’s all about stupid taxes. Taxes (and a thermonuclear kick) are about the only things that separate moonshine from a legit whiskey. Moonshine is a venerable country craft-one that takes more skill and finesse than it does to make those other artifacts of rural inspiration: yard art and fruit preserves. Local reasoning suggests that if there were living brain cells in D.C., the government would tax all that crappy “crafts” dreck and leave the good stuff alone, just to encourage the art of home distilling. There’s a suspicion that if moonshiners were lesbian performance artists, there’d be no ATF on the front porches of Franklin County. To the people in this corner of Appalachia, making moonshine is the American version of Irish poteen or Mexican mescal or Italian grappa. After all, there aren’t many things you can make at home that are any good. You’ve got meat loaf and moonshine—that’s about it.

Unfortunately, the gentleman’s agreement that had kept a lid on violence and prosecutorial excess has now expired in court orders. Bartley H. McEntire, the 36-year-old ATF agent in charge of Operation Lightning Strike, clarifies the new policy. “These guys are no different in their tactics from members of organized crime,” he says. “And for the first time, we’re treating them as such.” That doesn’t mean he’s seizing their airplanes and impounding their Beemers. It means he’s staking out their double-wides and bothering the huntin’ dogs. His agents are armed bureaucrats, chasing phone records, bank statements, tax returns, canceled checks, bills of sale, deed transfers, vehicle registrations-the weak links of conspiracy that might pinch a moonshiner or two. McEntire’s movielike model for his operation? Eliot Ness taking down Al Capone—for tax evasion. The fallout could leave Franklin County bone-dry and shorn of its oldest tradition. The local reaction? Not pretty.

Rumor has it, under the bottle’s influence, Dickie could be mean. They say he could drink five quarts of moonshine a day. But right now he was sober, amiable, out of the bottle, out of the business and my new best friend. There’s too much heat these days, he says, and yet he hasn’t given up hope. On a Saturday morning this past January, Dickie did something few moonshiners ever do for strangers. He took me to a still he’d been working “not long past.” We got in his truck and drove west into a remote section of the county where Dickie had grown up-deep into the mountains, through high moraines and pine-covered knobs. Then, on foot, into a stretch of backwoods, past a trailer home, past the corpses of at least 50 cars scarring the hillside, to the “still place”—now a busted, black ruin of metal and wood under a corrugated tin roof.

It’s just one of the hundreds Dickie has worked, and it had been recently axed and blown up by marauding Feds. Dickie looked at it wistfully. “I’d set up a still tomorrow, by God, if I had me a good place,” he told me. “I swear I would! I’d rather make liquor than eat when I was hungry.”

For decades, making liquor in a home still was an insignificant folk art. It took progressive politics (read: Prohibition) to turn moonshine into big business: By the 1930s, according to reports, 90 out of 100 Franklin County citizens were making or had some connection with illicit liquor”.

The booze is moved quietly in thick, industrial, gallon-size jugs packed in the backs of pickups and vans. Its markets are the ghettos of Washington, D.C., Trenton and Newark, New Jersey, the row-house badlands of north Philadelphia and the slums of Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia, and Raleigh, North Carolina. There urban retailers ply dollar shots in “nip joints,” usually in the backs of bodegas and bars. The retailers, according to the ATF, are usually African-American hustlers who have family connections to the Whiskey Belt.

It’s a lucrative trade because a gallon of moonshine costs less than $4 to make and can fetch up to $16 in the city. On the consumer side, that’s a bargain (compared with, say, $36 for a half-gallon of store-bought stuff), so demand has always been high. Nevertheless, the majority of ’shiners don’t make millions, although one Franklin County operation was reportedly churning out 4,000 gallons a week for the Philly market—a profit of $52,000 for seven days work, or $2.7 million a year. The trade skirts Uncle Sam’s excise tax, which in Virginia comes to about $21 a gallon ($13.50 to the Feds, $7.80 to the state). The ATF claims that between 1992 and 1999, moonshiners accounted for a not-really-whopping $5 million in state and federal tax fraud each year.

Does such a relatively paltry amount justify a special ATF operation? Local Rocky Mount attorney and former assistant U.S. attorney William G. Davis thinks the government’s allegations of a multimillion-dollar “moonshine mafia” are ridiculous. “We’re not in John Gotti’s neck of the woods,” said Davis, who has defended dozens of moonshiners. “These people are hardworking men. I’d like you to ask [Assistant U.S. Attorney] Sharon Burnham how much the government is going to spend on this. The figures they’re putting out on moonshine production are bullshit. It’s less than half what the ATF is saying, because if there was that much money around, you’d see it and hear about it. And I’ll promise you that the government’ll spend more money than they claim they’ve lost in taxes. I firmly believe that.”

So I called Burnham to find out exactly how much the ATF had spent so far on Operation Lightning Strike. “We don’t keep track of expenses on a case-by-case basis,” Burnham said. You don’t? But even when pressed, she couldn’t-or wouldn’t-say how much the operation will cost taxpayers. The ATF office in Raleigh lamely says it won’t discuss how much it had cost to run the operation until after the trial.

But if anybody’s making money on moonshine, it sure isn’t the grunts. Men like Dickie—the still hands-make 100 bucks a day, hauling sacks, tending the burners and mixing mash. But Dickie, 53, is happy with the simple rewards of his existence. He lives next door to his mother’s trailer in a ramshackle house by a stream near a tiny village called Ferrum. He’s pale and thin, wears his gray-blond hair in a pompadour and dresses like he should be drag racing a ’55 Ford. He walks with a slouching swagger and talks with the mumbled twang of the woods. He learned how to moonshine from his dad, Charlie, who, in turn, had learned the trade from his father. “I’ve been making liquor ever since I was 10,” Dickie says as we drive through the hills. “My daddy told me he’d let me stay out of school and give me $10 to work a still. Every night, [we’d] filter 50, sometimes 100 cases—six gallons to a case. In the ’60s, we’d clear $1,500 apiece over four weeks. Hell, it was money in the pocket. But in the past 10 years, everything’s changed,” Dickie continues. “Some damn son of a bitch sees you doing anything, they’ll turn you in too quick now, won’t they?”

The ATF began its crackdown on Franklin County in May 1999. Agents raided a farm-supply store in Rocky Mount, alleging that it was the main supplier of moonshine staples-jugs, sugar, yeast and grain-to at least three moonshine rings operating in Franklin, two surrounding counties and one county in North Carolina. In other words, the store was the equivalent of a head shop for men who make hangovers.

A government campaign of intimidation slowly began to pay off. According to a May 1999 affidavit, at least two informants had helped agents close in on the Helms brothers (who owned the store), and in doing so, opened the paper trail to the county’s top moonshiners. Last July, a full year after the raid, the ATF unveiled its 78-count indictment alleging money laundering, travel-act violations, liquor violations, perjury and obstruction of justice. Agents arrested more than 20 defendants, including several of Dickie’s old employers. Some of them went beyond country cute to real bad. Among them was William “Dee” Stanley, 55, who had been collared numerous times over the past 30 years for everything from shootings to stockpiling hooch. He also allegedly threatened to blow up the local ATF offices in nearby Roanoke, Virginia. The Feds have dubbed him the John Gotti of the moonshine world because he has yet to do serious jail time thanks to good lawyers and, allegedly, well-compensated witnesses. And because John Gotti is really famous. This time, Burnham says, these boys will be going to jail for at least 12 years apiece.

And it’s about time, says McEntire, the ATF’s point man. “Moonshine has been destroying generations of families,” he says. “It’s a history of shootin’ and killin’ all the way back to the late ’50s. Hell, Dee Stanley shot…So many of these guys shot. It amazes me when people say there’s nothing wrong with moonshine. And then you look at all these people involved in it, like Dee, and all the things he’s done.”

In fact, Dee is the closest thing to a celebrity that Franklin County’s got. A guy at a local bar says, “Dee? He’s the head ’shiner, the big-timer. I’ve heard he’s as nice a guy as they come.” Even the sheriff of Franklin County, Quint Overton, says, “Dee’s a hard worker, whether he’s workin’ his farm or his still.” But the sheriff adds, “When he’s drinkin’, though, he can be mean.”

Stuff

The local folk say moonshine makes men nastier than other liquors—sort of a crack for crackers. And Dee and his two sons, Scott and Jason, are known for their violent streaks while under the influence. But they usually take it out on one another. In 1997, Dee shot 27-year-old Scott in a booze-fueled brawl. Scott survived and told a court he was too drunk to remember who shot him. But everyone knew it was Dee. A year later, the brothers got into it with each other and raced for the family pistol. Jason got there first and blew away his bro, killing him. He got 12 months: self-defense. Juries aren’t likely to throw the book at a boy who was just defending himself. Mostly, moonshine killings are crimes of passion—rarely business.

Still, the locals know that if moonshining ended tomorrow, they’d still have a world of misery to contend with. “Listen, I’ve raided more stills than McEntire’s ever seen,” Sheriff Overton says, referring to the ATF agent. ”Get out there and run ’em down! I ran ’em down. But these people are human beings trying to make a few extra dollars. It’s a violation, sure, but I say they’ve violated a tax law. You don’t have kids out here drinking moonshine. But kids are doing crack and methamphetamine. There’s a drug problem in Franklin County. We make 75 to 100 arrests every year for drugs. Moonshining ain’t no problem like that. The ATF comes down here and they want everybody to drop what they’re doing,” Overton concludes, “but they’re not giving me manpower for drugs.” Not long ago, local deputies busted a guy named Billy Brown who was alleged to have been moving between 40 and 50 kilos of cocaine a year up from Florida at the height of his operation in the mid-’90s. How many moonshiners is 50 kilos of blow a year worth?

So it’s not surprising that people curse the ATF. One day, an old drunk man in oil-stained jeans yelled at me at a bar. “Franklin County is a private family,” he said. “Private! I’ve been in it all these years. It’s a sacred thing. You think you know?”

The government thinks it knows. The ATF and the U.S. Attorney’s office find these sentiments rather quaint—well, OK, ridiculous. As prosecutor Burnham says, “We are charged with enforcing federal law. We cannot make exceptions for the people because they believe they have some nobility to their history of criminal actions.”

In fact, Burnham has made exceptions that matter: By selectively enforcing laws, such as those against moonshining, while ignoring others, Burnham is holding up her enforcement effort to well-deserved ridicule from locals and others. Tackling the boys in the hills is one thing. Going after drug lords is something else altogether.

Last winter, I asked Dickie what he thought would happen in the big moonshiner trial. “I hope they turn every damn one of ’em loose,” he said. “All of ’em are good people. Just made a little liquor, that’s all.” No such luck. When the Stanley case finally came up for trial in March, Dee and Jason each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to running moonshine and two counts of money laundering. If these guys were drug dealers, of course, they’d be looking at some serious probation. But because the Feds have to show results for all the time and money they’ve poured down this hole, Jason and Dee are facing up to 60 years-and both could be liable for fines in the millions. One good sign for the boys: In a plea-bargain deal, Dee will be able to hold on to his Rocky Mount property and some other assets.

Whatever the final sentences, the moonshine war is over. By the time the government’s vendetta is finished, a hallowed tradition will be down the drain. Locals may have to turn to coke just to make themselves feel better about losing home-made hooch. “Franklin County’s the driest it’s ever been,” Dickie said mournfully. “Goddamn, I wouldn’t know where to get a decent drink in Franklin County.”

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