Hey there, it's your host ed helms.
Here.
Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April twenty ninth. It's called Snaffo, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups, and you can pre order it right now at snaffoodashbook dot com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book. It's got all the wild disasters spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker.
I am also going on tour to celebrate that's right. I'm coming to New York, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and my hometown Los Angeles. So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q and A or dramatically read about a kiddie cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance again. Head to snaffoo dashbook dot com to pre order the book and check out all the tour details and dates, or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay,
that's it, on with the chaos. This is Snaffou Season three Formula six last time on Snaffou, the temperance movement swept America. Every abolitionist was a teetotal Mabel Walker. Willebrandt was hired to lead prohibition enforcement.
There's one way it can be done, get at the source of supply.
And much of prohibition enforcement falls strangely to the US Treasury Department, which.
Is another way of saying we're going to use it for political payoffs.
It's nineteen eighteen in France, the Western Front. Yep, we're a long way from the speakeasies of New York, but we're here in the rolling French countryside to meet a new character in our He's sitting inside a combat tank clattering across the bloody battlefield. His name George Cassidy, and he's under attack. The tank rolls down a slope as shells explode around it, and then it sinks into a
crater of mud. Its steel armor shields George and his crew from the bright yellow bursts of artillery flame, but it can't protect them from the mist that's engulfed the field. World War one's most insidious weapon, mustard gas. On the battlefield. Poison gas was turning war into a new kind of nightmare. Both Germany and the US were experimenting with lethal gases that were quickly becoming the deadliest instruments in the history
of warfare. The Great War had a nickname the Chemist's War, and now Mustard gas seeps into George Cassidy's tank and into the eyes, noses, and lungs of the tankers. George and his two crewmates choke at the controls as the machine grinds to a halt. The deadly mist causes the tankers to go blind, vomit, and start losing consciousness. The other two men pass out. George holds on, but poisoned
by the gas. George is too weak to move, blinking and struggling to breathe while the battle rages around him. His crewmates have fallen silent. Finally, footsteps approach the tank. George hears hands banging on the outside, shouts shadows over the viewport as men peer inside. George's heart stops. Is it the enemy? The door swings open, and thank god, it's the Yanks. George is rescued, carried up out of
the crater in the pool of gas. George makes it off the battlefield alive, but He's devastated to find out he's the only survivor from his crew. In nineteen nineteen, when a million American soldiers in France begin the journey home, George is among the troops packed like sardines into fleets of liners and cargo ships, leaving the blood soaked trenches of the Western Front behind them. As he gazes across the Atlantic, George coughs. His lungs are pocked with chemical burns.
For the rest of his life, every cough reminds him of the horrors he'd faced in the war, horrors that showed how scientific advancements could be co opted to create weapons of mass murder. But now George is heading home, and soon he'll be starting a new life. As the shores of the good old us of A come into view, George is pondering a very important question, Where the hell
can he get a drink back home? That question was at the center of another raging war, one in which he would soon find himself smack dab in the middle. I'm Ed Helms and this is Snaffo, a show about history's greatest screw ups. This is season three, The story of Formula six. How Prohibition's war on alcohol went so off the rails the government wound up poisoning its own people.
Today we're riding shotgun with the bootleggers, because men like George Cassidy didn't come home from the fight in France just to take the new laws laying down. As Mabel Walker Willebrandt became prohibitions champion, George Cassidy would become one of its greatest defires, and the two sides they represented
were about to clash. In nineteen twenty two, two years into Prohibition, Mabel Walker Willebrandt was settling into her gig as head honcho of Prohibition Enforcement to get a sense of how the new US Assistant Attorney General approached her job. There are a few things about her you should know. Little Mabel grew up crisscrossing the Great Plains in a nine by twelve foot tent pitched in the fields of Kansas, Missouri,
and Oklahoma. Her family was always on the move, fleeing the latest natural disaster, tornadoes, ice storms, that kind of stuff. Mabel's earliest memory from childhood was of a flash flood rushing through their tent, her mom taking the kitchen table and using it as a raft to keep her daughter Afloat alive. A little like that time my cub scout trip got rained out, except I had a home to go back to. That experience had quite an impact on young Mabel.
She was a very serious woman.
You don't say, Daniel, okrint. She woke up every day.
The first thing she did was taken an ice cold bath, which gives an indication. I think of how tough she was.
Cold lunging is all the rage these days. I guess Mabel was just ahead of the curve. In any case, the Ice Queen didn't get to become the highest ranking woman in the United States government by waking up each day to whistling birds opening her bedroom shades and the soft glow of the morning sun. No, she woke up every morning with her goddamn game face on. For starters, it wasn't just Satan's last stronghold, New York City that was flouting the law. In Mabel's backyard, the supposed Dry
Citadel speakeasies were popping up on every corner. By some estimates, there were three thousand in the nation's capital. But Mabel's headaches extended well beyond the metropolises. Of the Northeast. Also thumbing its nose at Prohibition was the fine city of Savannah, Georgia, which had turned into an unofficial headquarters for illegal drinking. Booze was flowing, and so were the criminals delivering it. Bootleggers,
as they were called. The term goes back to the eighteen hundreds, when traders slid their flasks of liquor into their boots. During Prohibition, bootlegging became a household term banks in no small part to the notorious Georgia syndicate, the Savannah Four. Their leader was a guy named Willie Harr. Willie owned and controlled a fleet of ships that transported liquor from Scotland and France to another British territory, the Bahamas.
From there it was shipped to a dozen different states in the US, often hidden in secret man made caves up and down the US coast. Willie Harr didn't exactly keep a low profile. His nick name was the Admiral of Bootleggers, and his Savannah Four had a recreational baseball squad. Their team name presumably slapped across their uniforms, the Bootlegger Team. I assume they were part of an all criminal baseball league along with the tax Dodgers. Sorry, I had to
go there. Mabel was determined to bust them up and even sent a dozen Prohibition Bureau agents to Savannah to do the job. But Willy Harr's ring had judges politicians, and it turns out prohibition agents on its payroll, and those agents, convinced to look the other way, came back from Savannah empty handed. I hope they at least brought back some bootlegger team swag for Mabel. Willie Harror would have a future run in with Mabel. Put a pin
in that for a second. But as brazen as Horror in the Savannah four might have been, the most brazen bootlegger of all was operating right under Mabel's nose, which brings us back to good old George Cassidy.
On the ship coming back, they had a poll about who was in favor of prohibition, and out of the two thousand, five hundred guys on the troop carrier, only ninety eight wanted prohibition.
After George got off the ship from France, he headed home to Virginia, and he had plenty of stories for his pals.
He was just so damn gregarious.
That's Fred Cassidy, George's son.
He didn't give a shit who you were, where you were, from, what you did, or any of that stuff. Come on up, have a drink with me, you know, and we'll have a good time. We'll talk about all kinds of stuff.
George party then style.
He was a dapper dude. If you ever saw him in his Irish War Veterans' National Commander's uniform, you would have thought he was a general of the most powerful army in the world or something.
George also had a signature greenfelt hat that gave him an unmistakable look. A snappily dressed party animal with a trove of war stories, Georgie was one of a kind, but he struggled to transition back to civilian life. Why poison The mustard gas George had sucked in destroyed his lungs, which made it hard for him to find work. Before the war, George had been a brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
When he came back, he couldn't pass their physical to get rehired.
George couldn't find a steady gig anywhere else either. He put his body on the line for his home country, and now it was letting him down. When he finally did find work, it wasn't the kind of job that had his parents bursting with pride. You see, George didn't grow up in a household of drinkers, really the opposite. George's Irish American father had been sober for decades. His mom, a brit made herself at home in the USA by becoming a proud card carrying member of the Women's Christian
Temperance Union. But none of that rubbed off on George.
He liked to imbibe. Everybody around my dad liked to imbibe.
Which isn't a surprise given George was from the moonshining capital of the world.
There was a ton of moonshining going on in Virginia. A lot of the Virginia farmers have their stills out in a discrete.
Area in Appalachia. Moonshining had been prevalent since the Civil War, when moonshiners distilled illegal liquor at night, and then drivers or bootleggers smuggled it across the region. When prohibition passed, this was all supposed to get shut down right. Well, turns out it ain't so easy. To change an entire
culture overnight. But that was essentially the task facing the prohibition agents under Mabel Walker Willebrandt a tall order in a place like Franklin County, Virginia, nestled in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, where ninety nine out of every hundred people were connected to the moonshine business. One agent reported back to DC on the pointlessness of even bothering the rests.
I'm sorry to report that at this time it is almost impossible to get a conviction.
In any case.
Juries are in sympathy with the bootlegger and the moonshiner.
And you know when the moonshiners themselves included judges, politicians, and the local police, how are you supposed to stop that? People like George came back from the war looking for work and saw an opportunity. Here's one American artillery captain who was in the Reserve Corps writing to his fiance.
It looks to me like the moonshine business is going to be pretty good. Some of us want to get in on the ground floor. At least we want to get in there in time to lay in us alive for future consumption.
That's thirty four year old future president Harry Truman. Fellas Like Harry saw bootlegging as a lucrative investment opportunity, George Cassidy saw it as something else, a lifeline. You see, George was running out of options. He was a disabled veteran out of work, which is why ship liquor from his neighborhood to money drinkers across DC felt like a necessary career choice. He started small, just a couple of bottles for friends and friends of friends, then a few more,
and a few more. His Blue Ridge Virginia product must have been pretty good, because pretty soon the orders were flowing one way, and George kept the moonshine flowing the other. George's lifeline was becoming a gold mine because George's clients, well, they were the kind of people who liked to meet at the Hotel Varnum in Washington, d C. The Varnum's a grand old hotel at the corner of C Street in New Jersey Avenue, a meeting place. Outside, George sees
two well dressed white men. He gets out and shakes their hands, then heads around back to make a delivery. He hands off a small paper package for his next delivery, George grabs two bags out of his trunk, one in each hand. George walks along New Jersey Avenue, nodding and smiling to passers by. He was the friendly sort. George then crosses the street at Independence Avenue towards his next stop, a white building with a very large, very conspicuous dome. Yeah,
it's probably the one you're thinking of. That would be the US Capitol building. George's delivery route doesn't take him into the Capitol itself, but rather into the surrounding buildings where members of Congress have their offices. Stepping into the House Office building, George gives a nod to the security fellaws at the door, and with his bags full of booze, walks right in. That's right. Among the buyers for George's
top quality of Virginia hooch are the nation's lawmakers. His clientele are powerful men of every political party and persuasion. You see, George isn't just any bootlegger. He's become the go to bootlegger for Congress. And Congress well they're pretty thirsty. Now. Mabel's not blind to this. She makes regular visits to the Capitol. Sometimes she even sits in the gallery of the Senate Chamber room to hear the nation's lawmakers present their plans.
During the closing days of a recent session, a senator objected to and prevented the passage of important legislation while in such a condition of intoxication that he had to hold his desk to keep himself upright. I have become well acquainted with the fact that many Congressmen and senators who vote for the bills designed to aid prohibition enforcement are persistent violators of the law.
As people across the country were now drinking more than ever, and bootleggers across the Eastern Seaboard were running wild, Congress was too shitfaced to even pretend that they were going to do something about it. Mabel's corrupt bureau agents were proving to be just as worthless. It was time for Mabel to take things into her own hands.
The early twentieth century is a uniquely poisonous time for a number of reasons.
That's historian Deborah Blum. She says that everywhere across the country, from Mabel's DC to New York all the way to San Francisco, industrial chemistry was becoming more and more a part of everyday life for everyday Americans.
We're seeing the rise of industrial chemistry, and there's a telluge of new chemical compounds created by industries in the United States, which is, you know, one of the countries that really takes the forefront of the industrial manufacturing age chemistry, figuring out that they can take all of these poisonous substances that occur in nature and recreate the mental.
Laboratory arsenic mercury, chloroform, carbolic acid. I would go on, but the last time I had a close encounter with a beaker, I was watching the Muppets. No no, no, no, Beaker. I told you never to talk to me like that, because I can't understand it. That's a little shout out
to my eighties kids out there. Point is, products of rapidly advancing chemistry were everywhere in pharmacies, doctors' offices, grocery stores, kitchens, and of course also in bars, where speakeasy back rooms were starting to look a lot more like chemistry labs. The reason classy clubs were hiring actual chemists to make sure that the illegal liquor they were serving to high end customers wasn't toxic and was only going to fuck
you up the right way. This is the prohibition, you know, the razzle dazzle of the flappers under the electric lights, where the big band served up bouncy rhythms and the bartenders served up potent cocktails. At least that's the front room. But the back room it was all chemistry.
Baby.
Remember, clean and legal alcohol had all been poured into the sewers at this point what was left could be dodgy. So to keep their customers safe, top speakeasy managers would turn to chemistry.
Hello, I'm here to interview for the chemist position.
I require one dollars payment. Oh, wise guy, A, so you want your patrons dead?
I'll take you to the bus.
But what if you were running a bar and couldn't afford the high fees of a newly in demand chemical brainiac, Or if you were a drinker who didn't have pockets deep enough to order your cocktails in the main dining room of the Cotton Club and plenty of New York neighborhoods back alley liquor was flowing just as freely, But no lab coated expert with a safety checklist was looking
out for you. As Deborah Blum says America's poorer drinkers would rather overlook the dubious origins of their booze and literally stomach the risk. People were seemingly so eager for a drink that they just didn't care there was a chance it could land them in the hospital.
Unless you're rich, you're drinking whatever you can get your hands on. So one of the cocktails of the Bowery, which is a really poor neighborhood in New York, was called smoke, and that was fuel, alcohol and water.
You could get your smoke in the back of drug stores or paint stores. I know the scene in Lower Manhattan has always been a bit edgy, but even without the spiky hair and the dog collars, this was grizzly stuff. There was also the infamous ginger jake.
You see ginger Jake, which was another formula genda by bliggers that actually mimics the symptoms of Parkinson's. Or you see the cocktail called d Rail in which they were siphoning off some of the industrial alcohols from the railroads and serving it up in drinks.
These drinks could kill during one stretch over a few months. Debts from Smoke averaged one a day. When prohibition agents managed to track down the suppliers for the deadly cocktail, they discovered the drinks were served straight from cans stenseled with the word poison on them.
This acceptance of risk that came with prohibition at these levels is kind of horrifying, but it was there, and it was real.
It's that risk big spenders were paying to avoid pay the cover charge to get into a big club. You were betting the owner had paid a nerdy chemist to make damn sure your gin and tonic was not a gin intoxic. These back room chemists were clearly breaking the law, but a lot of them actually saw themselves as humanitarians. Every time they caught a dangerous tocsin and a gallon of hooch and kept it out of a drinker's mouth, Well, what'd you get.
That under the seat?
Can you believe it? It's still half full. They had done some good, and in part because they were so successful at keeping the party going in New York City and state officials started to ask themselves, why don't we just stop pretending here?
New York repealed its version of the amendment in nineteen twenty two, so from that point forward, New York officially was not supporting prohibition.
So yeah, under the eighteenth Amendment, any state could just stick their middle finger up to prohibition if they had the votes to repeal it, which is exactly what New York state lawmakers did. They weren't going to do any cracking down. New York cops weren't going to be making any arrest and even if they did, New York judges weren't going to throw the book at any club owners. Better a law or no. There was simply too much money in the liquor game. So in effect, New York
became a sanctuary city for American drinkers. And if you were a chemist in the city breaking the law on a daily basis, you could rest easy knowing that your community had your back, not only that they were downright grateful to you for saving them from ginger Jake and derail. Even the cops, the mayor, and the governor were on your side. And the good liquor it was still there for the drinking if you had the right chemists in your pocket.
Bobby, just believe of worries on the whole move and.
World may go dry.
Her dad made as well.
As they left the old sales to the bootlegger.
Daughter down in Washington. When news reached the office of the Department of Justice that the Big Apple was flipping on off prohibition, Mabel Walker Willebrant was you guessed it pissed. A Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn, I can picture our pal Alexandra Getler in his favorite living room chair, dressed in a suit and tie. Of course, the number one song from the most famous band in America, the Paul Whiteman Band,
is buzzing in the background. Gettler's smoking a stogie as he scans baseball box scores from the morning paper, knowing Hew he probably had some skin in the games too. A bit of a gambler, Getler couldn't resist a juicy over under, and he had a regular card game with his pals. His other second home besides the lab was the horse track. Getler was also a ruthlessly competitive bowler, a spirit also brought to his work at Bellevue. When
a new mystery arrived at his doorstep. He couldn't stand the idea of a poisoner outwitting him and his sleuthing partner, Charles Norris. On this beautiful spring afternoon. Perhaps Alexander is scribbling down his latest betting card, when all of a sudden he gets a call from Norris. There's a new case,
and oh is al gonna love this one. In nineteen twenty two, our Sherlock and Watson have been a very busy duo, solving all kinds of crimes, and many of them having nothing to do with the hooch on the streets. But each mystery Getler solves, he learns a little more about the poisons permeating American life. On this day, when Getler arrives at his lab, two dead bodies are waiting for him. He scans the police report. Here are the facts.
Inside an apartment in Brooklyn, police had found a couple in street clothes lying on the floor of their bathroom. Their faces were blue, their lips covered with blood. The couple, according to the following day's New York Times, was quote dead from poison. Gettler reviews the report. The police on the scene had suspected suicide, but there was no corroborating
evidence of any kind in the apartment. Gettler takes one look at the dead bodies and quickly suspects something else is at play here a chemical substance that was now seemingly everywhere and was frighteningly lethal. Cyanide, like mustard gas, cyanide was used in World War One as a chemical warfare agent. It had long been known as a dangerous poison, but little did the public know it was also becoming
a killer in households. Fumigators used it to disinfect apartment buildings, emitting gas that could, say, suddenly kill an unsuspecting couple eating breakfast. Gettler's sure cyanide is the cause of death, even though he hadn't found any signs that cyanide had been ingested and the police had found no empty bottles of cyanide anywhere in the apartment. But he checks back with the police, and soon investigators realize that Getler was right.
Pest control folks had just spent an afternoon Spryan's cyanide gas around the apartment. They realized the dead couple hadn't swallowed cyanide, they had inhaled it. Case closed, but Getler's work isn't quite done.
Gettler goes on to write the fundamental paper on cyanide and its toxicity and how we find it in a body it's still cited today.
I'm telling you, this guy is a true badass. It was impossible for the newly invented science of toxicology to keep up with the deluge of modern poisons, but Getler was doing his damnedest, and the New York City Medical Examiner's Office was beginning to earn nationwide respect for their work uncovering the hidden poisons endangering public health, and they were doing so with virtually no support from the government.
The office's staff under Norris was in fact smaller than what it was under the New York Corner who preceded him. Their office at Bellevue was still a ramshackle quote unquote country club. All the labs new equipment was still paid for by Norris himself. Norris and Getler were working around the clock, but they sure weren't making bootlegger chemist money. Gettler was making three thousand bucks a year, which today would be equivalent to a fifty five thousand dollars salary
in Brooklyn. No wonder he lived with his in laws. So as poisons in the air were becoming more sophisticated, the case load of the Medical Examiner's Office was getting bigger and in nineteen twenty two, one particular case caught
their eye, the case of Robert Doyle. Doyle was a veteran of World War One, like the tanker turned bootlegger George Cassidy, and like so many of them who came back from Europe, Doyle found jobs were scarce in his hometown Boston, so he left his wife and daughter and came down to New York City, the biggest city in the world, the thriving metropolis where it seemed like everyone was making money, and he tried to get a job,
but no one hired Doyle. He didn't have George Cassidy's gregarious, entrepreneurial spirit, I guess, or his smoky Mountain liquor hookups. He didn't have Alexander Getler's brains or his bustling Brooklyn community to rely on. In New York, Doyle found himself turned away from every job, be it bartender, garbage collection, even cleaning the sewers, away from his loved ones, and getting desperate. Doyle had reached for some chemical comfort to
drown his sorrows, buying liquor in an unfamiliar city. He didn't know who to trust, He didn't know whose libations might be toxic, but he bought a drink anyway. One night, neighbors in and his boarding house heard shouts coming from his locked room. Someone or something was killing Doyle. They forced the door and rushed inside to help him, but found him crawling on the floor, rubbing his eyes and moaning,
I'm blind, I can't see. First, they sent for a doctor, but he didn't have any answers, so they bundled Doyle into a car and sent him to the hospital Bellevue. Doyle was wheeled into the er. This would be the part of the Gray's Anatomy episode where you'd hear the heartbeat monitor beeping until it slowly fades and flatlines. But this is the nineteen twenties. There's nothing quite that fancy yet.
Just Doyle didn't make it. When he died at Bellevue, they moved him out of the line of patients waiting for treatment and into the line of corpses waiting for analysis. Analysis by Alexander Gettler. Now it was up to Getler to determine who was behind this. For years, he had worried home distillers would accidentally poison themselves with their moonshine. But these deaths were stacking up in a way that
didn't add up. Gettler knew about all the brain power in advanced chemistry that was going into making industrial alcohol drinkable and not kill you. In theory, the supply was becoming safer, and yet the body count was only growing. Robert Doyle's death occurred as poison alcohol deaths rippled across the country, from New York to Washington, d c. To Toledo, Ohio. This was proof people like Robert Doyle weren't dying simply
because of their own reckless thirst for alcohol. No, these people were dying from poisons, and their deaths, now in the hundreds and very soon to be in the thousands, were no accident. Next time on SNAFU.
Harry Doherty, the Attorney General who was the immediate boss to Mabel Willebrandt, he was a a drunk and be corrupt.
One of the craziest stories here man like an incredibly successful defense attorney becomes the biggest bootlegger ever.
The fact that there were only twenty six hundred prohibitionations covering the entire Canadian border, of the Mexican border and both coasts It's Ridiculous.
Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Nevin Kalapoly, Albert Chen and Carl Nellis, with additional writing and story editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from
Stephen wood. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is nicki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Callapoly and a kimmedy A. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris, Editing, music and sound design by Ben Chug Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. The music by Dan Rosatto. The role of Mabel Walker willa Brandt was
played by Carrie Bische. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and Ben Rizak.