Speaker 1: Hey there, it's your host ed helms. Here real quick,
Speaker 1: before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind
Speaker 1: you that my brand new book is coming out on
Speaker 1: April twenty ninth. It's called Snaffo, The Definitive Guide to
Speaker 1: History's Greatest screw Ups, and you can pre order it
Speaker 1: right now at snafudashbook dot com. Trust me, if you
Speaker 1: like this show, you're gonna love this book. It's got
Speaker 1: all the wild disasters spectacular face plants we just couldn't
Speaker 1: squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker. I am
Speaker 1: also going on tour to celebrate. That's right. I'm coming
Speaker 1: to New York, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco,
Speaker 1: and my hometown Los Angeles. So if you've ever wanted
Speaker 1: to see me stumble through a live Q and A
Speaker 1: or dramatically read about a kiddie cat getting turned into
Speaker 1: a CIA operative, now's your chance again. Head to snafoo
Speaker 1: dashbook dot com to pre order the book and check
Speaker 1: out all the tour details in day's or just click
Speaker 1: the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's it, on with the chaos. This is Snafu Season
Speaker 1: three Formula six previously on Snaffou As Mabel Walker Willebrandt
Speaker 1: was doing everything in her power to stop the tide
Speaker 1: of liquor washing into America.
Speaker 2: Clan took over the city, Dryes and Wets Clan and
Speaker 2: anti clan contending forces.
Speaker 1: Prohibition agents were enforcing the law by repeatedly breaking it.
Speaker 3: By putting a prohibition agent, Tugenhart, on trial for manslaughter,
Speaker 3: it's making him a martyr of prohibition.
Speaker 1: And the US government kept upping the ante in their
Speaker 1: misguided plan to get people to stop drinking.
Speaker 4: When the federal government starts coming up with formulas, they
Speaker 4: supercharge poisons into the alcohol that the bootleggers are stealing.
Speaker 1: Nineteen twenty eight was a momentous year at the movies.
Speaker 1: The world was introduced to a dapper mouse named Mickey
Speaker 1: and a nifty new innovation fund. Radio had just gone national,
Speaker 1: and the World Series was heard from coast to coast,
Speaker 1: much to the delight of Yankee superfan Alexander Gettler, who's
Speaker 1: tuning in to hear the Yankees sweep the Cardinals as
Speaker 1: he's slicing and dicing bodies in his lab at Bellevue Hospital, YEP.
Speaker 1: Nineteen twenty eight was a real barnburner alright, but most
Speaker 1: of all because it was a big election year. The
Speaker 1: presidency was up for grabs. In one corner was Herbert Hoover, Republican,
Speaker 1: and the guy for the dries. In the other corner
Speaker 1: the wet warrior, longtime Governor of New York, Al Smith.
Speaker 5: I am entirely unwilling to accept the old order of
Speaker 5: things as the best unless and until I've become convinced
Speaker 5: that it cannot be made better.
Speaker 1: As Al's speeches buzz over radios across a mayor, I
Speaker 1: can picture Mabel Walker Willebrandt sitting in her office at
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice, listening and fuming. You might remember
Speaker 1: that Al thumbed his nose at the law and repealed
Speaker 1: the state's prohibition Enforcement Statute five years before. Well, that
Speaker 1: put Al in Mabel's crosshairs. In Mabel's eyes, Al was
Speaker 1: a man so morally bankrupt that he swept the Constitution
Speaker 1: aside to appeal to the masses. And appeal he did,
Speaker 1: promising to take his wet agenda all the way to
Speaker 1: sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. Mabel wasn't having it, because when
Speaker 1: al Smith said he refused the quote old order of things.
Speaker 1: Mabel heard him rejecting the thing that mattered most to her,
Speaker 1: sticking to the law and enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment.
Speaker 5: It's the bottom of the nine folks, two outs going on,
Speaker 5: and the crowd is on its feet.
Speaker 1: I haven't felt tension like this since the night they rated.
Speaker 1: Mabel and her team were entering the ninth inning. It
Speaker 1: felt like her squad, the dries, or as she saw it,
Speaker 1: the only ones who respected the Constitution were behind, with
Speaker 1: two outs and no runners on. Her colleagues at the
Speaker 1: Department of Treasury had made public their deadly poisoning program
Speaker 1: to stop Americans from drinking, and yet still America wasn't
Speaker 1: ready to give up the bottle.
Speaker 5: Mabel Walker Willebrandt steps up to the plate, and I
Speaker 5: tell you what ed. She's making the pictures sweat like
Speaker 5: a bootlegger in July.
Speaker 1: Now, Mabel was the last batter up, and you better
Speaker 1: believe she was gonna go down swing. I'm Ed Helms
Speaker 1: and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw ups.
Speaker 1: This is season three, The Story of Formula six. How
Speaker 1: prohibitions wore on alcohol went so go off the rails,
Speaker 1: the government wound up poisoning its own people. In today's episode,
Speaker 1: our threads start weaving together. Prohibition hangs in the balance.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen twenty eight election, and for Richard two
Speaker 1: gun Heart, the chickens finally come home to roost.
Speaker 6: Herbert Hoover. It's the man to give America a case
Speaker 6: of a good life in his youth, I'm minding engineer.
Speaker 6: After the Great War, Hoover brought the golden graine of
Speaker 6: American farms to Rope's starving hordes. He's your Secretary of Commerce.
Speaker 6: Do you want a fertile farm in the new gold Rush?
Speaker 6: Hoops your man, Hoop Hoover in nineteen twenty eight to
Speaker 6: keep the fed fabulous and to keep America fabulous and fed.
Speaker 1: Leading up to the nineteen twenty eight election, Mabel Walker
Speaker 1: Willebrandt was one busy bee.
Speaker 7: She campaigned very hard for Herbert Hoover against Al Smith.
Speaker 1: As author Dan o'krant says, Mabel traveled the country, speaking
Speaker 1: at churches, town halls, and women's groups, all in the
Speaker 1: hopes of scaring the Bejesus out of people. As she
Speaker 1: described a frightening American future under a potential president Al Smith.
Speaker 7: There was a speech she gave in Ohio. Particularly though
Speaker 7: she doesn't specifically invoke Smith's Catholicism their hint, hint, wink
Speaker 7: wink about it.
Speaker 1: Mabel's speech also included one heck of a Zinger.
Speaker 8: Governor Smith's prohibition plan would put white aprons on the
Speaker 8: States and make them serve as bartenders.
Speaker 1: Don't threaten me with a good time, Mabel.
Speaker 7: That led to the Smith campaign really building an issue
Speaker 7: on the discrimination against him.
Speaker 1: Al fired back used Mabel of leading a bigoted, anti
Speaker 1: Catholic whisper campaign, which was actually a pretty fair characterization.
Speaker 1: Al even gave Mabel a nickname, Prohibition Porsche. Now, as
Speaker 1: you history geeks will know, that's a reference to the
Speaker 1: Porsche who apparently played a role in Julius Caesar getting
Speaker 1: knifed on the Senate floor. Unlike Mabel's limp dog whistle Zinger,
Speaker 1: Al landed a direct hit Prohibition Porsche stuck. Mabel absolutely
Speaker 1: hated it, which is part of what makes it such
Speaker 1: a good nickname, I guess, but also Mabel, come on,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's pretty badass. Suffice to say, Mabel was pissed.
Speaker 1: She was hell bent on exposing Al Smith's New York City,
Speaker 1: his hometown, as a den of vice, and she came
Speaker 1: up with a plan straight out of Carrie Nation's playbook
Speaker 1: to humiliate him. After whiffing in her countless legal attempts
Speaker 1: to enforce prohibition and then failing miserably with the freaking
Speaker 1: ku Klux Klan, this was Mabel's hail Mary to make
Speaker 1: her mark. Now she was going to bust heads. She
Speaker 1: was going to go into the speakeasies of New York City,
Speaker 1: smash him up and shut him down. Obviously, she wasn't
Speaker 1: going to do it herself. She needed an army. Now.
Speaker 1: Mabel knew the NYPD was useless to her. New York
Speaker 1: cops had long ago said forget about it to enforcing prohibition,
Speaker 1: So she picked up the phone and summoned agents from
Speaker 1: all over the country, from Denver to Fort Worth to
Speaker 1: Kansas City, and in June nineteen twenty eight, as Al
Speaker 1: Smith was feeling good and officially accepting the Democratic nomination
Speaker 1: in Houston, Mabel's agents converged on the Big Apple. Eight
Speaker 1: years into prohibition, savvy New Yorkers could spot a prohibition
Speaker 1: agent a mile away. The most shabbily dressed man in
Speaker 1: any nightclub was always a secret agent. But Mabel had
Speaker 1: prepped her crew months in advance. She had them dressed
Speaker 1: to the nines so they could blend into the city
Speaker 1: crowd and glide into the swanky watering holes and maybe
Speaker 1: even throw back a few. And then these impeccably groomed
Speaker 1: agents stepped out to the center of speakeasy dance floors
Speaker 1: and got down to business. And I don't mean dance moves.
Speaker 5: We are enforcement agents.
Speaker 9: This establishment is now the hands of the federal government.
Speaker 8: Our guests must leave at once more.
Speaker 1: They made their arrests, and they shut down the bars.
Speaker 1: The raids would lead to a handsome hall for Mabel,
Speaker 1: over one hundred indictments of speakeasy owners. As the raids
Speaker 1: were going down, Mabel sat behind her mahogany desk at
Speaker 1: the DOJ, pretty damn pleased with herself. These massive sweeps
Speaker 1: did exactly what they were intended to do. They became
Speaker 1: known as the June Raids, and they became a huge
Speaker 1: national story. And as Mabel was unleashing hell from the DOJ,
Speaker 1: a few blocks away, other plans were bubbling away at
Speaker 1: the Department of Treasury, where the Prohibition Bureau had a
Speaker 1: new commissioner, James Duran. Duran had presided over the implementation
Speaker 1: of the government's alcohol poisoning scheme. Remember, Formula six was
Speaker 1: just one of dozens of formulas the government cooked up
Speaker 1: to make drinks undrinkable, and just like they did for
Speaker 1: all the other government formulas, the bootleggers responded instills and
Speaker 1: makeshift labs. Outside the nation's capital. Those bootlegger chemists were
Speaker 1: burning the midnight oil, coming up with a recipe to
Speaker 1: counter Formula six. They redistilled the tainted alcohol and extracted
Speaker 1: the poisons. When word reached James Duran that yet another
Speaker 1: formula had been defeated, he ordered his chemists to keep going.
Speaker 1: An anonymous source told one reporter.
Speaker 5: KMISOD, the Bureau of Internal Revenues seek to make impossible
Speaker 5: the untangling of poisons in the denatured formulas. In one case,
Speaker 5: a dash of gasoline will be added, and another some
Speaker 5: substance will be included to keep the metal and the
Speaker 5: grain alcohol from separating.
Speaker 1: Wow, gasoline, tell me you're out of ideas. Without telling
Speaker 1: me you're out of ideas. After Formula six was successfully defeated,
Speaker 1: formulas three and four were beaten and tossed out later
Speaker 1: that year. But there was one formula that was still effective,
Speaker 1: and it was barely a formula at all. It was
Speaker 1: a simple recipe. To your vat of fine industrial alcohol,
Speaker 1: add wood alcohol straight up.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 1: Remember that original byproduct of home distilling that Norris and
Speaker 1: Getler were warning New Yorkers about way back in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighteen at the start of Prohibition. Well, Duran's chemists had
Speaker 1: used traces of wood alcohol and their formulas before, but
Speaker 1: it was always part of a complex cocktail. Now they
Speaker 1: were just dispensing with everything else and just adding a
Speaker 1: shit ton of wood alcohol, like twice as much as
Speaker 1: ever before. But that's not all. As historian Deborah Blum
Speaker 1: tells us, the government chemists now had their hands on
Speaker 1: the purest, deadliest wood alcohol they could find.
Speaker 4: Germans figured out how to synthesize it. It was a
Speaker 4: super pure version of methyl alcohol, so pure there was
Speaker 4: actually a little more poisonous. They have this amazing supply
Speaker 4: of really pure methanol that they were able to use.
Speaker 1: And of course, right away bootleggers began siphoning it out
Speaker 1: of industrial warehouses and dishing it out on the streets.
Speaker 1: In October nineteen twenty eight, Bellevue Hospital is utter mayhem. Everywhere.
Speaker 1: People are vomiting, hallucinating, dying in the emergency room. Gettler
Speaker 1: and Norris are overwhelmed. Over just three days in October,
Speaker 1: they see thirty three deaths from poisoned liquor by Getler's count,
Speaker 1: twenty five from wood alcohol, and just in time for
Speaker 1: election day. Now, as Getler examines the dead in his lab,
Speaker 1: you can imagine him listening to Election Night returns.
Speaker 9: November six, nineteen twenty eight, the presidential election between Herbert
Speaker 9: Hoover and Al Smith ends in a landslide.
Speaker 1: A landslide, of course, it was Americans were tired of
Speaker 1: the violence. They were tired of the status quo eight
Speaker 1: years in and Prohibition was massively unpopular. Prohibition was on
Speaker 1: the ballot, and no wonder the election wasn't close. But
Speaker 1: hang on a second, I did pretty well in fifth
Speaker 1: grade history, and I don't ever remember there being a
Speaker 1: president Al Smith, which must mean and.
Speaker 9: Hoover sets a record for electoral votes and.
Speaker 1: Crushes Smith Hoover one. Yeah, he sure did, in a knockout.
Speaker 1: In fact, Hoover won on economic promises, but Smith also
Speaker 1: couldn't overcome anti Catholic prejudice and ginned up rumors that
Speaker 1: he was even taking orders from the Vatican and from
Speaker 1: the country's biggest bootleggers. Smith's crushing defeat was a win
Speaker 1: for prohibition and also a win for Hoover San Mabel
Speaker 1: Walker Willebrandt, who saw the victory as voters practically putting
Speaker 1: their stamp of approval on her June raids. Mabel and
Speaker 1: Duran had pulled out all the stops. Al Smith had lost,
Speaker 1: and Prohibition was here to stay and by the way,
Speaker 1: deadlier than ever. On the other side, Charles Norris and
Speaker 1: Alexander Getler didn't have a minute to waste. It was
Speaker 1: time for their big swing to put an end to
Speaker 1: a national emergency at Bellevue Hospital. It's not just the
Speaker 1: bodies that have been stacking up. Alexander gar Hitler's notebooks
Speaker 1: are piled high everywhere, meticulous records of all the data
Speaker 1: he's compiled since the start of Prohibition, documented night after
Speaker 1: painstaking night, and the numbers as nineteen twenty eight winds
Speaker 1: down are disturbing as hell. The body count from drinking
Speaker 1: related deaths in New York City this year alone is
Speaker 1: ten thousand. Ten years ago. When they issued their first
Speaker 1: warning on the eve of prohibition, Gettler and Norris knew
Speaker 1: things were going to be bad, but this bad. At
Speaker 1: that nineteen twenty six press conference, the Prohibition Bureau issued
Speaker 1: a reminder to America, drink and you die, and Americans
Speaker 1: more or less responded with cool, so yeah, make it
Speaker 1: a double. The grand irony here is that people are
Speaker 1: drinking now more than ever before. In New York, cases
Speaker 1: of alcoholism had been going down in the years leading
Speaker 1: into prohibition, but since nineteen twenty alcoholism was reaching all
Speaker 1: time highs Insurance companies reported that deaths from alcoholism were
Speaker 1: six hundred percent higher in nineteen twenty eight than in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty. For those addicted to drinking, it was a
Speaker 1: dangerous time. Even if they heard government warnings. It wasn't
Speaker 1: realistic to think that they could just stop drinking cold turkey.
Speaker 1: For the rest of the population, well, the government messaging
Speaker 1: about the dangers of drinking just wasn't making an impact,
Speaker 1: which kind of makes sense. I mean, remember that commercial
Speaker 1: from the eighties, this is your Brain on drugs. We
Speaker 1: all saw that egg frying in the pan, But isn't
Speaker 1: frying your brain kind of the point? And I do
Speaker 1: wonder who across the country, beyond avid readers of the
Speaker 1: New York papers, was actually getting the warnings from the government.
Speaker 1: News certainly didn't travel then the way it does now.
Speaker 1: Sure they had coast to coast radio, but we're still
Speaker 1: a ways off from the days of push notifications. Now,
Speaker 1: Norris and Gettler were determined to tell the entire country
Speaker 1: just how fucked up things had gotten. So on a
Speaker 1: fall afternoon, Norris sits down in front of a typewriter
Speaker 1: at his desk alongside his man Gettler, and Gettler's stack
Speaker 1: of notebooks. Through the years, our duo had issued periodic
Speaker 1: messages to the public through medical journals and in press
Speaker 1: conferences for the local New York media, but it wasn't penetrating.
Speaker 1: It was just small potatoes. So, refusing to be ignored,
Speaker 1: Getler and Norris decide they need to step things up.
Speaker 1: As Getler flips through his notes and busts out his data,
Speaker 1: Norris starts typing and begins to paint a picture first
Speaker 1: of what's been going down in their backyard, beginning with
Speaker 1: those horrific three days that had just passed In October.
Speaker 8: Between October sixth and eighth, nineteen twenty eight, twenty five
Speaker 8: men and women died in the city of New York
Speaker 8: from wood alcohol poisoning. There is no doubt as to
Speaker 8: the cause of their death on not statistics, but the
Speaker 8: bare record of a tragedy as shocking and in a
Speaker 8: sense dramatic, as a fearful crash on the subway.
Speaker 1: Yep, New York City subways in the nineteen twenties were
Speaker 1: also scary, and this was before the days of pizza
Speaker 1: rat AnyWho.
Speaker 8: In a word, the wood alcohol is not poison liquor,
Speaker 8: It is simply poison.
Speaker 1: And how did the poison get into the liquor well?
Speaker 1: That brings Norris and Getler to the government and their
Speaker 1: official poisoning program. Now Noris acknowledges that alcohol made for
Speaker 1: industrial purposes should be protected and differentiated in some meaningful way. Sure,
Speaker 1: you have supplies of alcohol that are supposed to be
Speaker 1: used in perfumes and after shaves. It makes sense that
Speaker 1: you'd try to deter people from drinking this stuff. But
Speaker 1: then along came prohibition. Legal liquor disappeared, and the aftershave
Speaker 1: is all that was left. People weren't stealing it to
Speaker 1: drink before this, Suddenly they were, so whose fault is that?
Speaker 8: The difficulty is that no one has devised a practical
Speaker 8: way to make alcohol fit for business and at the
Speaker 8: same time unfit for drinking without making it poisonous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty unfortunate, right for any American who just wanted
Speaker 1: to drink.
Speaker 8: Poison everywhere, and increasing thousands are drinking it. Shall we
Speaker 8: simply shrug our shoulders.
Speaker 1: It's a great point, Norris. Thousands of people are dying
Speaker 1: from alcohol poisoned by our own government, and we're just like, okay,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's messed up. And what's even more messed
Speaker 1: up is that the government's response to all these people
Speaker 1: dropping dead was, Hey, it's your fault, you drank it
Speaker 1: tough cookies. Needless to say, Norris doesn't see it that way.
Speaker 1: He throws down a challenge for his readers. These deaths,
Speaker 1: these government poisonings, they were caused by prohibition. To him,
Speaker 1: they were the fault of the people who pushed for
Speaker 1: prohibition in the first place, and then they were the
Speaker 1: fault of the people adding poison to alcohol knowing that
Speaker 1: people were going to drink it. Norris and Getler wanted
Speaker 1: to boil it down for readers so people understood just
Speaker 1: how many people around the country were dropping dead from prohibition.
Speaker 1: It seems pretty clear the only sensible path forward is
Speaker 1: to do one of two things, either end the denaturing
Speaker 1: program or end prohibition itself. Things had gotten so bad.
Speaker 1: Getler and Norris drew a chilling comparison.
Speaker 8: Our national casualty list for the year from this one
Speaker 8: cause will outstrip the toll of the war. These are
Speaker 8: the first fruits of prohibition in terms of life and death.
Speaker 8: This is the price of the great experiment, which has
Speaker 8: cost the nation already one hundred and seventy eight million
Speaker 8: dollars to enforce. This is the net dividend of Ournknoble
Speaker 8: experiment in extermination.
Speaker 1: Finally, Norris slaps a title on this baby, our Essay
Speaker 1: in Extermination. Read between the lines. The title of Norris's
Speaker 1: piece was not our Essay in tragedy. It was our
Speaker 1: essay in extermination. And who are those poor souls subject
Speaker 1: to said extermination from the failed experiment of prohibition?
Speaker 4: Because these Charles Noro sees making the point that we're
Speaker 4: really talking about this going directly to the middle class,
Speaker 4: lower class poor people in this community and by extension,
Speaker 4: the rest of the world, and they're the ones that
Speaker 4: are suffering.
Speaker 1: For the past decade, Norris and Getler have watched the
Speaker 1: city's working class watering holes shudder, only to be replaced
Speaker 1: with back room joints where the liquor was deadly. Most
Speaker 1: of the poisoned liquor that Getler was testing came from
Speaker 1: these dives where bootleggers pushed low grade, albeit affordable alcohol.
Speaker 1: The quality of motor oil booze couldn't hold a candle
Speaker 1: to the stuff rich New Yorkers were able to get
Speaker 1: their hands on, or what certain dry politicians were sipping
Speaker 1: on in the Capitol thanks to our man, George Cassidy.
Speaker 1: It was insane that America found itself here. But was
Speaker 1: anything going to change? Was Norris and Gettler's work going
Speaker 1: to make any difference at all? In late nineteen twenty eight,
Speaker 1: our essay and Extermination first appears in a literary magazine
Speaker 1: called The North American Review. But it's not just the
Speaker 1: devoted readers of The North American Review who will read
Speaker 1: Norris's words. Nope, this time, Norris and Gettler get the
Speaker 1: attention of the whole country.
Speaker 4: So you have the chief medical examiner of one of
Speaker 4: the most important American cities accusing the federal government of
Speaker 4: a planned program of extermination.
Speaker 1: Yep, that was big news. All right, pour it all out,
Speaker 1: Deborah Blum.
Speaker 4: What is the responsibility of a public servant? What is
Speaker 4: the responsibility of the government in the way that it
Speaker 4: represents the people? Our responsibility is to protect people, and
Speaker 4: we are failing. That's one of the points of that essay.
Speaker 4: We're doing the opposite. In fact, we're killing people.
Speaker 1: News of Norris's essays splashed all over the New York papers.
Speaker 10: There's one doubter of the nobility of the experiment. Doctor
Speaker 10: Charles Norris, chief medical Examiner of New York, makes protest
Speaker 10: in the North American Review, calling it a noble experiment
Speaker 10: in suicide by.
Speaker 1: Poison, and the stories land well beyond the Big Apple.
Speaker 1: It was news in Florida.
Speaker 10: New York's chief medical examiner declares that the mortality rate
Speaker 10: from drink, instead of declining with the advance of prohibition,
Speaker 10: is actually gaining.
Speaker 1: To Missouri, Charles Norris writes, at the end of eight
Speaker 1: years without good liquor and increasing proportion of our nation
Speaker 1: is drinking itself to death on bad liquor. To Arizona, Charles.
Speaker 10: Norris says our national casualty list from strong drink.
Speaker 6: Will outstrip World War One with one hundred.
Speaker 10: And twenty six thousand deaths.
Speaker 1: And California doctor Norris attributes a large number of deaths
Speaker 1: in motor accidents, homicides, and accidental deaths from fouls to
Speaker 1: poison liquor.
Speaker 10: Norris says most of these are directly traceable to poison alcohol.
Speaker 1: And with that tsunami of media coverage, Norris and Geler
Speaker 1: finally get people to take note. And you know what,
Speaker 1: Americans across the country were up in arms. One priest
Speaker 1: in a working class Chicago parish nailed it when he said, quote,
Speaker 1: they give the good stuff to the sewers and the
Speaker 1: bad stuff to the people. The outrage reached the capital too.
Speaker 1: The wet legislators, long outnumbered by the dries in Congress,
Speaker 1: had been howling against prohibition from the start. And I
Speaker 1: do want to be clear about this, A small group
Speaker 1: in Congress had been directly calling out the government poisoning
Speaker 1: practices for a few years now. In the aftermath of
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenty six Christmas deaths in New York. Senator
Speaker 1: James Reed of Missouri cried.
Speaker 9: Only when possessing the instincts of a wild beast would
Speaker 9: desire to kill or make blind the man who takes
Speaker 9: a drink of liquor.
Speaker 1: A New Jersey senator went as far as to say
Speaker 1: the federal government was guilty of quote legalized murder for
Speaker 1: adding deadly poisons to the industrial alcohol supply. He even
Speaker 1: introduced a measure on the floor of Congress to look
Speaker 1: into the program, But the Drys had steamrolled those efforts.
Speaker 1: They held their ground, believed in the moral superiority of
Speaker 1: their anti liquor cause, and mocked the wets as drunkards.
Speaker 1: And when it came to denaturing, they lectured their wet
Speaker 1: opponents that alcohol itself was a poison, And, as Senator
Speaker 1: Morris Shepherd from Texas put.
Speaker 7: It, you can't poison poison.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't fight that logic. But smug quips
Speaker 1: were losing their traction. Real people were really dying. Morris
Speaker 1: Shepherd might not care. Hardline temperance advocates like James Duran
Speaker 1: might not care. Mabel Walker Willebrandt might not care. Their
Speaker 1: coalition was willing to break a few eggs as long
Speaker 1: as America was a dry omelet. Now in nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: the wet lawmakers finally had something solid to fight back
Speaker 1: with Norris and Gettler's irrefutable data that the government policies
Speaker 1: were killing thousands. So the wet legislators took action. They
Speaker 1: whipped up a bill. It demanded that government chemists stop
Speaker 1: using their deadliest poisons. They couldn't reach the hardliners, but
Speaker 1: maybe they didn't have to. They just had to reach
Speaker 1: the people in the middle, caught between the two sides,
Speaker 1: the people who could understand that no moral code was
Speaker 1: worth poisoning thousands. And with Getler and Norris finally persuading
Speaker 1: Americans to their cause, the bill passed. Prohibition chemists were
Speaker 1: now required by law to ditch lethal formulas like Formula six.
Speaker 1: They were told to go back to inventing concoctions which
Speaker 1: were merely revolting without being actually lethal. And I want
Speaker 1: to just pause here and take in what a turning
Speaker 1: point this was for Norris and Ghetler, because yeah, this
Speaker 1: was a moment when they finally won. They had been
Speaker 1: beating their heads against the wall from before Prohibition even
Speaker 1: passed that it would be a terrible idea and that
Speaker 1: it would kill people. Now the nation was finally starting
Speaker 1: to listen. Norris's essay and Getler's research gave the Wets
Speaker 1: what they needed to win, and it didn't stop with denaturing.
Speaker 1: The outcry over the Prohibition Bureau's actions continued to grow
Speaker 1: in the media and in the halls of Congress. A
Speaker 1: tide was beginning to turn across the country. State governments
Speaker 1: were slowly beginning to follow New York's lead in its
Speaker 1: descent from federal prohibition itself.
Speaker 4: You start to see government's just quick enforcing prohibition at all.
Speaker 4: They're just like, fuck it, Let the federal government do
Speaker 4: it right. We're not doing this. We don't believe it,
Speaker 4: we think it's morally wrong.
Speaker 1: State and local law enforcement started to say, look, everyone
Speaker 1: knows this whole prohibition enforcement thing has been a complete charade,
Speaker 1: so why are we even pretending to do it? And
Speaker 1: it wasn't just the government. Public opinion was shifting too,
Speaker 1: and the shift was felt all the way to the
Speaker 1: White House, where Herbert Hoover was about to move in.
Speaker 1: In early nineteen twenty nine, Mabel Walker Willebrandt was feeling
Speaker 1: good now that her man Hoover had won the presidency.
Speaker 1: Mabel was sitting pretty I mean, come on, of course,
Speaker 1: she was going to be rewarded for all that shattered
Speaker 1: glass in New York and all her fear mongering across
Speaker 1: the country. Surely she'd be rewarded with a big, fat
Speaker 1: promotion and a nifty new title, the Attorney General of
Speaker 1: the United States.
Speaker 10: Well, well, well, Attorney General Willebrand has a nice ring
Speaker 10: to it.
Speaker 1: And one night in February nineteen twenty nine, a few
Speaker 1: weeks before Hoover's inauguration, Mabel's phone rang. It was the
Speaker 1: President elect. Hoover told Mabel that Congress was putting together
Speaker 1: a bill that would strip the Prohibition Bureau out of
Speaker 1: the Department of Treasury and move it into Mabel's domain,
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice, where Mabel assumed she would be
Speaker 1: given the reins as your new Attorney General.
Speaker 11: I pledged to enforce the law.
Speaker 1: But Hoover had a different message for Mabel.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to tell you that the new Attorney
Speaker 2: General is a.
Speaker 1: Friend of yours. Hoover had buried the lead. Turns out
Speaker 1: Mabel wasn't going to be the new ag Nope, the
Speaker 1: Solicitor General was leapfrogging her and getting that sweet corner office.
Speaker 1: Mabel technically was keeping her job for now, but she
Speaker 1: saw the writing on the wall.
Speaker 7: Hoover had no use for her any longer. She was
Speaker 7: kind of an irrelevancy. But by the time prohibition is
Speaker 7: very unpopular, She's got less of the constituency.
Speaker 1: It was starting to sink in now that prohibition wasn't
Speaker 1: useful to Hoover as an issue. He just wasn't going
Speaker 1: to be very serious about it anymore, even less than
Speaker 1: his predecessor old to Martini Lunch Warren Harding. Mabel was crushed,
Speaker 1: and as she looked back over her time trying desperately
Speaker 1: to make prohibition work, she could only regret how impossible
Speaker 1: her task had been. If only she'd seen it right
Speaker 1: from the beginning.
Speaker 8: I was a young lawyer, much too young when appointed
Speaker 8: for the responsibilities heaped on me.
Speaker 1: Mabel Walker Willebrandt was free falling off the tightrope she'd
Speaker 1: been walking since the day she arrived in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: Eight years earlier, so she handed in her resignation to
Speaker 1: Herbert Hoover. Mabel's war was over, but there was so
Speaker 1: much more fallout yet to come. Time to head back
Speaker 1: out west. Let's check in with Richard Hart, the cowboy
Speaker 1: whose gun slinging ways helped turn the public against Mabel's campaign,
Speaker 1: making an unpopular law even more unpopular. You remember where
Speaker 1: we left Richard. He luckily ducked charges for manslaughter, but
Speaker 1: it still tanked his Prohibition Bureau career. But what came
Speaker 1: next was a twist so twisty even his wife and
Speaker 1: kids were caught off guard. First of all, he got
Speaker 1: himself some new assignments with the Office of Indian Affairs
Speaker 1: that got him out of town. They sent him to
Speaker 1: reservations even further west. He was still hanging onto those
Speaker 1: old wild West and live out his cowboy dreams. The
Speaker 1: Bureau of Indian Affairs was kind of known for that.
Speaker 11: This moment here at the turn of the twentieth century,
Speaker 11: where Native people's are largely confined to the reservations.
Speaker 1: That's historian Akeem Reinhardt.
Speaker 11: Which gives the United States federal government and its agents,
Speaker 11: whether they're military agents through the Office of Indian Affairs.
Speaker 8: Trying this amount of power.
Speaker 11: They strive to be autocrats and kind of tinpot dictators
Speaker 11: of these reservations.
Speaker 1: Richard probably thought this was the place he could really
Speaker 1: keep up his costume drama like he had an even
Speaker 1: more free hand to dole out cowboy justice. Once again,
Speaker 1: he drew his gun during an arrest, and when the
Speaker 1: man resisted, Richard shot him. This time there was no
Speaker 1: ducking the charges. Heart was indicted for manslaughter. He was
Speaker 1: acquitted at trial. But this was finally enough. Even in
Speaker 1: the most circusy of bureaucratic circuses, Richard couldn't stop getting
Speaker 1: in trouble with the ring masters violent for the wannabe cowboys,
Speaker 1: so he was fired from his federal post. So eventually
Speaker 1: he was back in Homer without a steady job. It
Speaker 1: was tough on him and on his wife Kathleen, and
Speaker 1: on the boys they were raising. But despite losing his jobs,
Speaker 1: according to great grandson Corey Hart, Richard was starting to
Speaker 1: flaunt some new money around town.
Speaker 3: My grandfather remembers living in the smallest shack down by
Speaker 3: the river in Homer and then suddenly moving into one
Speaker 3: of the nicest holmes in Homer. He remembers his father
Speaker 3: coming back with no kidding, one hundred dollars bills and
Speaker 3: a nice new suit and the life really changed.
Speaker 1: And as Richard's grandson Jeff says, one night, when he
Speaker 1: was all liquored up, the two gun braggadocio finally caught
Speaker 1: up with him.
Speaker 12: It was in a bar, I think in the lower
Speaker 12: fourth Street in Sioux City.
Speaker 1: He starts bragging about a new family business he's a
Speaker 1: part of. It's conspicuously lucrative and maybe a little shady.
Speaker 1: We'll come back to that in a minute.
Speaker 3: Richard started to drink more in the later years and
Speaker 3: bragging about the work that he's doing for his family
Speaker 3: now at the bartender. In addition to some patrons at
Speaker 3: the bar were kind of old enemies, criminals that Richard
Speaker 3: hurt used to terrorize back in the day. Soon as
Speaker 3: they found out who he was, the bartender took some
Speaker 3: brass knuckles and the other two patrons held him down
Speaker 3: and they just beat the crap out of him to
Speaker 3: I guess put it now so nicely.
Speaker 1: Brass knuckles that can do some damage.
Speaker 3: Now, Richard had two of his friends with him, but
Speaker 3: all they could do was just stamp back and let
Speaker 3: it happens some friends.
Speaker 1: Once the beating was over, Richard was bundled off to
Speaker 1: the hospital.
Speaker 12: It was so severe that he was in the hospital
Speaker 12: and his family didn't know where he was. Nobody could
Speaker 12: find him for like a few days.
Speaker 1: Eventually the hospital staff got to lead on.
Speaker 3: Him, so they came and informed my grandfather and Kathleen
Speaker 3: and went to the hospital. And the beating that he
Speaker 3: had taken to his eye was so severe that his
Speaker 3: eye was gone. So he lost sight in that eye
Speaker 3: and learned a lesson.
Speaker 1: That lesson sometimes you just got to keep that old
Speaker 1: trap shut.
Speaker 3: It was a tough lesson to learn.
Speaker 12: That would have been the time to where Kathleen started
Speaker 12: to ask more questions. I think she was suspecting things.
Speaker 1: Kathleen was probably wondering about all that new dough that
Speaker 1: Richard was showing off.
Speaker 3: There were many long discussions between Richard and Kathleen in
Speaker 3: the evening. Couldn't hear about what, but they happened very frequently,
Speaker 3: and they were very emotional as well. Knowing what we
Speaker 3: know now, what happened in the thirties was probably Richard
Speaker 3: went back to his brothers and said, I am flat broke.
Speaker 3: I've got four boys that I can't maintain a living,
Speaker 3: and he's lost all his pride.
Speaker 1: Turns out Richard had a bit of a safety net
Speaker 1: his brothers, something he'd never let on to anyone in Homer.
Speaker 1: You see, while Richard Hart was strutting his stuff under
Speaker 1: a ten gallon stetson, his real identity was hidden. The
Speaker 1: truth is that Richard two gun Heart was an Italian immigrant.
Speaker 1: His real first name was Vincenzo, and his last name
Speaker 1: it wasn't Heart, it was the last name you've definitely
Speaker 1: heard see Richard slash. Vincenzo's baby brother, Alphonse was the
Speaker 1: one who really did something with a family name. You
Speaker 1: know him as al Capone. Hold on a second, al
Speaker 1: Capone's brother was a prohibition agent. Yeah, it's all as
Speaker 1: crazy as it sounds, folks. Once Richard, for simplicity's sake,
Speaker 1: let's just keep calling him Richard and not Richard Vincenzo
Speaker 1: two gun hert Capone. Anyway, Once Richard was off the
Speaker 1: government payroll, he reached out for help to Chicago, and
Speaker 1: his brother answered the call. Richard left Uncle Sam behind
Speaker 1: and moved on to the Capone family ledger and from
Speaker 1: a shack to the nicest house in town. And what
Speaker 1: we do know is that his wife, Kathleen wasn't the
Speaker 1: only one asking questions. There were others cottoning on to
Speaker 1: Richard's hidden copone identity, not to mention the clean new
Speaker 1: seersucker three piece suit that came with it. And here's
Speaker 1: where the story might start to sound familiar. When the
Speaker 1: government finally went after the Capons, they used the Mabel strategy,
Speaker 1: taking down bootleggers by way of tax evasion. Mabel may
Speaker 1: have been gone for years by now, but the prosecutors
Speaker 1: who followed in her footsteps, well, they kept using her methods.
Speaker 1: They knew where the evidence was in the bookkeeping, and
Speaker 1: the Capone family bookkeeper wasn't ol Nope, the family bookkeeper
Speaker 1: was his brother Ralph.
Speaker 3: The federal court in Chicago where they were trying to
Speaker 3: drill down on Ralph his assets and trying to figure
Speaker 3: out what they could take from him. So everything was
Speaker 3: about drilling down on all the Capellan brothers. The way
Speaker 3: that you can get the organized crime was to basically
Speaker 3: look at money launtering money laundering.
Speaker 1: Take the dirty money from a criminal enterprise and put
Speaker 1: it through the spin cycle of a legitimate business with
Speaker 1: a little fabric softener in some tied fresh scent, and
Speaker 1: boom on the other side, you've got a clean profit
Speaker 1: from a small business that you can safely tuck into
Speaker 1: a bank account. If you listen to the last season
Speaker 1: of Snafu, and if you didn't, you really should, you
Speaker 1: would know that a certain j at Gar Hoover, later
Speaker 1: known for his massive illegal surveillance programs, made a name
Speaker 1: for himself with cases like these. The Capone money laundering
Speaker 1: may have eluded most cops, especially if they were paid
Speaker 1: to look the other way, but Hoover's g men sniffed
Speaker 1: it out, and when it came time to go to trial,
Speaker 1: they decided to make it a spectacle.
Speaker 3: It was the first live televice hearings of any kind
Speaker 3: of gang activity. Talk about ratings.
Speaker 1: Right, once Ralph Capone was on the stand getting squeezed,
Speaker 1: he let slip that there was a secret Copone brother
Speaker 1: out back pinning those crisply washed bills in the sun
Speaker 1: to dry. Yep, that's right. Even from all the way
Speaker 1: out in Homer, Richard was part of his mob family's
Speaker 1: money laundering operation. And so Richard was pulled out out
Speaker 1: of Nebraska and paraded in front of the press in Chicago.
Speaker 3: This guy can testify and they find out that this
Speaker 3: is actually also Richard Tugenhart, a former prohibition agent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it turns up secret brother of Capons. Federal agents
Speaker 2: investigating with ax paid by Ralph Bottles Capone today turned
Speaker 2: up a lost brother whose identity had been kept closely
Speaker 2: guarded underworld secret.
Speaker 3: Everybody's like, wow, this is incredible that the Richard tiugun
Speaker 3: Heart's a law man is actually the long lost brother
Speaker 3: of Al Capone. Long lost brother. Into terms of.
Speaker 9: The media testimony by lost Capone, he peered through thick
Speaker 9: glasses and carried a white cane. He was led into
Speaker 9: the US courthouse on the arm of his wife, a demure,
Speaker 9: middle aged woman who never could be mistaken for a
Speaker 9: gun mall which he was asked for comment. Kathleen didn't
Speaker 9: give up much. All she said was, well, he's not
Speaker 9: a bad man if you think about it. I bet
Speaker 9: none of the Capones thought they were bad guys, just
Speaker 9: the misunderstood protagonists of their own superhero stories.
Speaker 1: Well, this was Richard's final chance to prove that, at
Speaker 1: least in his case, that might be true. Was he
Speaker 1: really a fighter for the law or would he throw
Speaker 1: in his lot with the family. Richard answered those questions
Speaker 1: quite clearly.
Speaker 3: The last year before he died, sticking up for Ralph
Speaker 3: and a grand jury testimony in Chicago.
Speaker 1: In the end, when the law came at him, Richard
Speaker 1: stood shoulder to shoulder with Ralph and Alphonse. He was
Speaker 1: given a chance, won final chance, to make his brothers
Speaker 1: face the music and tell the truth about the inner
Speaker 1: workings of their criminal enterprise, and he refused. He lied
Speaker 1: on the stand like they had so many times before.
Speaker 1: Richard's lies paid off. Ralph Capone's case didn't go to trial.
Speaker 1: The story of Richard Hart, just like the twisted stories
Speaker 1: of Abel Walker, will Lebrandt and Formula six, show us
Speaker 1: just how far off the rails things had gotten during Prohibition.
Speaker 1: But as we come to the final chapter of our story,
Speaker 1: there's still a huge lingering question. Would anyone actually be
Speaker 1: held responsible for the massive failures and fiascos of Prohibition enforcement?
Speaker 1: Richard Hart certainly wasn't, But what about the boss of
Speaker 1: the Prohibition Bureau, the guy who had overseen the IRS
Speaker 1: poisoning program, James Duran. That's next time on Snaffoo. Snafu
Speaker 1: is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment, and Pacific
Speaker 1: Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive
Speaker 1: produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney
Speaker 1: Donaldson and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis
Speaker 1: and Alyssa Martino. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canny
Speaker 1: and Kelsey Albright. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Our
Speaker 1: story editor is nicky Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin
Speaker 1: Callapoly and a Keimedy Ekpo fact checking by Charles Richter.
Speaker 1: Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing music and sound
Speaker 1: design by Ben chug Engineering and technical direction by Nick
Speaker 1: Dooley Andrew Chug Is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music
Speaker 1: by Dan Rosatto. The role of Mabel Walker will Brandt
Speaker 1: was played by Carrie Bische. Special thanks to Alison Cohen,
Speaker 1: Daniel Welsh and Ben Rizak GPT