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 snafudashbook 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 day, or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay,
that's it, on with the chaos. This is Snaffoo Season three Formula six last time on Snaffoo double tote and two gun hearts, became a prohibition enforcement agent. If he couldn't use his gun, he would use his fist to apprehend these criminals and bootleggers and ended up killing an innocent man. Back in DC, Mabel Walker willebrandt roped in just about the last people who should ever be involved
in law enforcement. This is where the klan comes in. Actually, so what was supposed to be a righteous moral crusade was turning into a bloody, morally compromised debacle.
I have no objection to people dressing up in sheets if they enjoyed that sort of thing.
And even after all that, the dries weren't done yet. On a cold, misty night in late November nineteen twenty six, two Brooklyn cops stumble upon something extremely suspicious down by the docks on the East River under the full moon. A stooped man struggles to carry a big bundle of something towards the water. When the cops holler out and ask him what he's doing, he panics, kicks the bundle into the water and runs away. The cops tackle him and handcuff him, but even once they get him to
the precinct. He's still not talking. And this isn't just a regular old I ain't saying nothing kind of silence, more of a stupor. He looks ill, his face oddly flushed. The police suspect he's had quite a lot to drink. Eventually they identify him as Francesco Travia, a longshoreman who lives in nearby Cobble Hill. They can't get a word out of him, but they do notice his legs are soaked in blood.
The police go back to his apartment they find this dismembered body.
I love this story so much, and sorry I shouldn't laugh about this.
That's historian Deborah Blum. Remember she's an expert on the various ways chemicals can kill you. When you spend your career talking about poisoned corpses, sometimes you just gotta laugh. The police go to Travia's apartment find a woman's dead body, well half of one.
And her hat is still theretor torso on the floor.
The scene in Travia's apartment is gruesome, so it's not really a stretch to conclude that Travia murdered this woman, chopped her up and is just disposed of her legs in the East River. The body is identified as Anna Fredrickson, Francesco's neighbor. Anna's family tells the police that she went to Francesco to scrounge up some booze and left his apartment in multiple pieces. To the NYPD, this looks like an open and shut case. They'd caught Francesco Travia red handed,
or at least red panted. But then the city's chief medical examiner arrives at the crime scene.
Norris is the on call medical examiner that night.
He goes all the way out to Brooklyn, driven by his chauffeur, to the shabby little Black Worker apartment in Brooklyn goes in.
Norris emerges from his car and strolls into the apartment, no doubt dressed in an outfit that cost an arm in the lot of money. He takes a quick look at the crime scene, here's what the cops have to report, and immediately blows up the entire theory of the case.
He takes one look at it and goes, you know, know that that woman was dead before he cut her up.
Noras only needs to see two things. The unnatural flush of the dead woman's skin and the lighting fixtures in the tenement building where she was found.
A lot of people lived in buildings that were pretty much equipped by.
What was called illuminating gas.
Right. An illuminating gas was a cold derived gas. It had hydrogenetics, so it was explosive, and it had carbon monoxide in it, so it was poisonous.
As Noras knows, this gas is not only poisonous, it's also colorless and odorless, a deadly combination he and Alexander Getler know all too well from their work examining New York City's dead. The presence of carbon monoxide also explains why Travia has been in a stupor and the strange hue of the alleged victim's skin.
When you are killed by carbon monoxide, your skin flushes a deep pink. So here she is, she's bled out completely right, she should be pale as a sheet. Instead, she's flush pink, because that's what carbon monoxide does.
Anna Fredrickson's death was a tragic accident. At some point as she got drunk with Francesco. One of them must have caused the gas leak.
They knock a kettle or something over that's boiling away on a gas burner, put out the flame, illuminating gas which they don't smell, start seeping into the apartment. And he and Getler have already shown that when carbon monoxide gets to the kind of level he's looking at, it kills you.
So she has to have been dead.
Charles Norris feels compelled to testify in Francesco's case. He knows this man is innocent, well innocent of murder anyway, and he has the scientific facts to prove it.
And he goes actually into court opposite to the district attorney and the police department and wins.
It wasn't the first time Norris and Getler took on the political powers that be and won, and it wouldn't be the last. Of course, Francesco did still get convicted of him properly disposing of a corpse, and I'm gonna give it to the prosecutor on that one. But he did avoid the death penalty because Gettler and Norris investigated and intervened. From gas leaks to lead pipes to radioactive watches, which is an actual thing you could buy. At the time, there was a lot that could kill you in nineteen
twenties America. Time and time again, Gettler and Norris cracked cases that cops couldn't crack, and they were just about the only ones in New York City capable of getting to the bottom of the especially twisted mystery of Formula six. I'm ed Helms and this is Snaffo, a show about history's greatest screw ups. This is the story of how Prohibition backfired so badly that the government chose to poison
thousands of a Mata Americans. Today, a string of mysterious deaths presents Norris and Gettler with another mystery, even as the culprit hides in plain sight. One thing we know about Alexander Geittler is that he loved the Yankees, and we also know that, as a workaholic, his thoughts were never far from his work. So indulge me as I paint a picture for us Gettler attending a real Yankee
game and piecing together a few work thoughts. Sunday, August second, nineteen twenty six, Alexander Getler, notorious workaholic, has given himself a rare day off to enjoy Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium. His beloved Bronx Bombers are facing the Chicago White Sox, and they're off to a rough start. Right in the top of the first, Chicago left fielder Bib Fuck hits a weak ground ball off Yankee pitcher Wait Hoyt and
drives in a run. Bib Wait, come on, you gotta love these old timey baseball names, right, But Getler, well, he's not loving it. By the time he's gotten into his seat and lit up one of his White Owl cigars, his Yankees are already down by a run. Now, even amidst all the peanuts and cracker jacks, Gettler's mind wanders to what he's been seeing in his lab and in the news. All over the city and all over the country. People are dying going blind. Remember that bootleg cocktail ginger Jake.
There are people walking around town with a condition nicknamed Jake Leg, which causes the legs to twitch uncontrollably. By now, it's common knowledge that lots of ill gotten hooch has se even fatal side effects, but people are still drinking it. The Yankees have their own formidable tag team, Lou Garrig and Babe Ruth. They're both in the midst of incredible seasons,
smashing homers and breaking records. But in the bottom of the first the Chicago pitcher gets Garrig to ground out into a fielder's choice, intentionally walks the great Bambino, I'll come on pitch to a scarty cut and retires the side without letting up a run. Hitler puffs his cigar and cogit dates. There's been a commotion upstate in Buffalo, where the health commissioner is alleging that dozens of recent deaths chalked up to heart disease or apoplexy were actually
the work of methyl alcohol. In his own lab at Bellevue, Alexander's been seeing some downright bizarre things in his test results. And I don't mean the sludge he makes out of dead people. That's all in a day's work. But the chemicals he's finding in that sludge, well, they're getting weirder and weirder. Purody what the pyridine is colorless and highly flammable. It's commonly found in herbicides and insecticides. In other words,
it's poison. Geitler knows the mafiosos distributing tainted liquor aren't afraid to get their hands a little dirty, but still intentionally serving people insecticide.
That's not good for business.
And it gets weirder. There's also kerosene and industrial benzene, commonly found in rubber and gas. Now you don't need to be chief toxicologist of Bellevue Medical Center to know kerosene and alcohol are a bad mix. But never one to jump to conclusions, Gettler wonders if there's a way these victims might have accidentally consumed these poisons, which sounds crazy, but he's actually seen a lot of it. The Radium Girls.
Back in nineteen twenty five, a dozen women died and at least fifty more became ill with mysterious symptoms, including necrosis of the jaw. Since they all worked at the same watch factory, the cases were assumed to be connected. However, the company doctors tried to sweep it all under the rug. That's when Getler was called in. He ran some tests
and figured out exactly what was going on. In order to make the watchfaces glow in the dark, the workers painted them with radium, which, just like it sounds, is radioactive. The Radium Girls, as they came to be known had been licking their paint brushes to wet them as they painted, unknowingly consuming toxic radium every time. So now back to
these latest poisonings by benzene and kerosene. Maybe all of these victims worked at a rubber tire factory and they were all roommates in a building heated by burning kerosene, but probably not. Gettler can't find any connection between them apart from the unique blend of the poisons that killed them. Each of these chemicals is gnarly enough on its own, but when you put them together it becomes clear whoever invented this cocktail at a deeply sinister intent. Benzene brings
on a seizure. Kerosene constricts the throat, Pyridine sends agonizing pain shooting through the gut. Still, other additives would have made the limbs go stiff. Methanol sears the optic nerve after a few gulps, and nearly all the victims went blind before they died.
Out.
Babe Ruth strikes out to lead off the bottom of the fourth inning. The Yankees are still down and they haven't even recorded a hit yet. Alexander is starting to worry about the dollar he's wagered on this game, but he's far more worried thinking about those noxious chemicals showing up in his lab sludge.
Hey, nice to one hot dog, No nough.
The Yankee pitcher Tommy Thompson keeps the White Sox in check through the fifth inning, but his team is still behind. The crowd is restless, especially Alexander Gettler, as his mind turns to the most fucked up thing about all these poisonings. Since the dawn of Prohibition, the bootleggers and the mob have been competing directly with the government, the Prohibition Bureau, Mabel Walker, Willebrandt, the Irs, James Duran, and all their cronies.
They've been going back and forth, taking their swings at each other. As the government keeps putting nastier things into industrial alcohol and the outlaws keep hiring chemists to thwart them. Gittler knows what he's seeing is no accident. Finally, in the bottom of the sixth, with Garrig on base, Babe Ruth gets a hold of one the Colossus of cloud hammers his thirtieth home run of the season, and the
Yankees take the lead. Gettler rises to his feet with the rest of the crowd as he watches two all time greats cross home plate. Sorry to spoil it for you, but the score line will hold. The Yankees win two to one. All in all, a bad afternoon for Gettler has turned good thanks to a single swing of the bat.
But as he joins the crowd streaming out of the park and towards the one hundred and sixty first Street subway station, Getler can't help but wonder how many of these people would the government be willing to sacrifice for this insane, failing strategy of deterrence. Getler knows better than anyone this strategy isn't working. If denaturing industrial alcohol stopped people from making drinks out of it, people would have
stopped getting drunk. But that's clearly just not happening. If introducing more and more pernicious cocktails of poisons actually scared people away from drinking, they wouldn't keep ending up on a metal tray in Getler and Norris's lab. It's madness, Gettler thinks to himself as he boards a packed train
back to Brooklyn. Not only are Duran and his boys intentionally making industrial alcohol unsafe, but this latest concoction seems to be a sign they're going to keep upping the ante, as if there's some magic formula, a perfect mixture so deadly it could finally convince drinkers to give up the booze. Alexandre Getler knows this is folly, but he doesn't know how much worse it's about to get.
This is a warning to all you drinkers tempting fate.
That's JW. Quillen, head chemist at the IRS. Now, I know what you're thinking, and don't worry. Our old pal James Duran is still around. In fact, he's moved up in the world. Duran's now the Federal Prohibition Commissioner. Quillen works for him, and on a hot August day, just a week after Babe Ruth's game winning dinger, Duran has sent Quillen to deliver a warning from the government to drinkers everywhere.
Alcohol found in speakeasies is not safe to drink.
Okay, not exactly breaking news. The stuff has been blinding and even killing people all over the country. And I gotta say it's pretty twisted to even phrase this as a warning, because Quillan isn't some passive bystander here, it's his office doing this. In the first place, he lists the chemicals the irs has been using. See if any of them sound familiar.
This product is compounded with benzene, kerosene, rusine, and various other products which make it a very deadly poison.
That's the fucked up cocktail of poisons Getler's been seeing in dead bodies at Bellevue. And it's a formula with an official name.
We call this concoction formula six.
And there it is Formula six. It's kind of snazzy sounding, but still nigmat The important thing is one of these toxic recipes has been given a public name. Here's Debrah again.
There were dozens of these formulas, each with a different number, each with a different mix of things.
Quillan reminds everyone what the plan for these formulas is all about.
Specialty denatured alcohol is used for the manufacture of hair tonic and toilet perfumes. This alcohol is unfit for beverage purposes.
Sure that sounds like a warning, but a little PSA to the speakeasy regulars, this ain't you see. There is a second, much more sinister layer to this press conference because Quilling goes on to say, the Treasury Department knows that Formula six has not been effective enough, so they're going to release even more formulas that will be even more deadly. The really really fucked up thing here is they know it's going to kill people. Just listen to the words Quillen uses.
The cup of tear is lined with death, either swift and dramatic or slow and painfully sure.
Kind of a weird way to talk about a public health crisis, and a downright evil way to talk about a public health crisis he himself was causing. I mean, imagine how different those Smoky the Bear PSAs would go over if we also knew that Smokey was an avowed arsonist. Quillen ended his press conference promising a.
Wave of alcohol poisoning.
As Deborah Blum says.
The government is starting to go, Okay, this isn't working. Let's supercharge poisons into the alcohol that the bootleggers are stealing.
I wish I could tell you this shocked the nation, but it didn't. The next morning, a couple hundred words about the press conference appear on page twenty two of the New York Times. Quillen's threat did not exactly start a national conversation, nor did it convert boozehounds into teetotalers from coast to coast. And honestly, did Quillen expect it to.
I mean, did he or James Duran, or Mabel Walker Willebrand or anyone really think that announcing they were adding a little more poison would finally do the trick Here. We don't know what was in their minds or in their hearts, but we know they proceeded just as Quillen said they would. Oh and even though Quillen is announcing the FEDS are retiring Formula six, that doesn't mean it's
going to vanish overnight. Two months after Quillen's announcement, another Bureau official casually tells the press he's aware of one million gallons of denatured industrial alcohol poisoned with Formula six,
sitting in warehouses right around New York City. These supplies belonged to companies who had permits to buy it legally for industrial purposes, but everyone knows that most of these companies are really just fronts for bootleggers, and all that alcohol is heading for the holiday punch bowl.
I could take you down to a warehouse on the East Side and show you five hundred thousand gallons of this stuff, which I amsertion is being sold for beverage purposes.
The FEDS know how much tainted liquor is out there, and they know that it's destined for human consumption. In other words, one million gallons of poisoned liquor practically a loaded gun pointed at the city of New York.
I know of a place in Newark where there are three hundred thousand gallons. It will probably be cut and made into all sorts of intoxicating liquors.
But for the moment, since it's categorized as industrial, it's legal. So in the minds of the Prohibition Bureau officials, well, there's nothing they can do. It's like, gee, we'd really love to do something about all that liquor we poisoned, but gosh darn it, it's perfectly legal and privately owned. Our hands are tied as Christmas ap roaches. Everyone from Gettler to James Duran knows what's about to happen. The only real question is how many lives will Formula six claim.
Say Frankie, what time is it?
I don't know. It's pitch dark in the clocks all the way over there.
Not gee, now we'll never know.
Looks like you boys need Undark?
What the hell is that?
Call yourself?
Yes.
With Undark watches, you can tell the time, no matter the time, even when it's dark, even.
When it's dark. What's the secret? How did you get it here?
That's right? The secret is radium.
You see here, at Undark we've harnessed the benevolent power of radiation to make watches that glow in the dark. We use nothing but pure radium to deliver a watch that glows and shines, so you know the time even in the dark.
Christmas Eve, New York is a glow with holiday lights as a soft rain falls over the city. The evening starts off as a normal holiday shift. At Bellevue Hospital, cheery music wafts through the halls. It's quiet for now. Then the er doors swing open. A man barges in, ranting and raving, gasping for air. He's terrified, he says, Santa Claus is chasing him with a baseball bat. The doctors are well aware that spoiler alert kids, Santa isn't real, but the man who just burst into the er seems
pretty damn convinced. This isn't your normal holiday drunk. This guy is straight up hallucinating, and he's not the only one. As Christmas morning approaches, over sixty more people crashed through the er doors, drunk, sweating and volomitting like the guy being chased by Saint Nick. Many of them are seeing things that aren't there, but others are already blind By the time they get to the hospital that night, eight
of them die. Returning to his basement lab after the holiday, Alexander Getler finds his Boxing day surprise eight new dead bodies, not to mention the dozens more people elsewhere in the hospital, blinded or hallucinating. He gets to work examining the man who spent his final hours raving about being stalked by old Chris Kringle.
Extremities, blue lungs, bloated, full of fluid, stomach lining, hemorrhaged.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Just taking a peek at the organs of the recently deceased, and on first glance, Gettler sees the hallmarks of death by alcohol poisoning the ordinary kind, but that doesn't explain the hallucinations or the blindness. Gettler knows full well that alcohol impairs vision, but it can't blind you on its own, nor can it make you see things that aren't there. Whatever killed these eight people and poisoned dozens more, it contained some especially nasty chemicals.
Gettler turns to his tried and true method. He takes biopsies of the body's liver, brain, and blood. He blends them into a sludge. He repeats the same process with each of the fresh bodies, eight livers, eight brains, eight blood samples, twenty four beakers of human chemicals slurry. As he waits for the results, news of more grisly yule tide fatalities come in from around the country. One hundred and fifty dead in Philadelphia, seventy one dead in Baltimore,
three hundred and twenty eight in Chicago. Gettler knows he'll get to the bottom of it sooner or later. He'll figure out what's in Duran and Quillen's latest formula. But the more pressing question is will anyone stop them. We began this season with the story of Bix bider Beck, the virtuoso cornetist who quote cracked up and collapsed while on tour in Cleveland. It's time to come back to his story. See Bis survived that nineteen twenty eight incident,
but he never really recovered. To be clear, Bix was already a full blown alcoholic, which certainly didn't do wonders for his health. But ever since that night, he had trouble breathing, he had pains in his legs, and he's convinced he was poisoned. Paul Whiteman, leader of the orchestra in which Bix was a member, keeps hoping his star cornetist will recover. For more than a year, he keeps Bix's chair empty. Nobody knows what exactly happened to Bis,
but most chocolate up to drunkenness. Maybe he just needs to dry out first. Bix goes to his parents' place in Iowa to recuperate. Then he checks into rehab. I'm not sure what rehab was like in the nineteen twenties, but let's just say it was less than fully effective. When he returns to his apartment in New York City, Bix is still in pain and still drinking heavily. When Paul Weitman comes through town. He invites BIS to join them on stage. Whip through those old solos again, buddy,
even if it's just for one performance. But Bix is racked with mysterious pain and struggling just to Breathe sadly his playing days are over. It's not long before Bix is a patient at Bellevue Hospital. He was so close to Alexander Getler. Do you think they ever met their pads? Did actually cross? Kind of see? While undergoing treatment at Bellevue, Bix crashes with his friend, the legendary jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden.
There's a story about him taking Jack Teagarden to the more Get, the famous hospital in New York that's still there.
That's Randy Sanke, renowned musician and an expert on BIS.
And he writes this letter where he talks about how the poison is settled in his legs and he can't get up without falling over. His signature is just so scratchy. I mean, you can tell that he's shaking. He's not in good health, good control of you know, of his motor abilities.
He's got pneumonia. His eyes are still bloodshot. It's a struggle to keep food down. His breath is so shallow it's starting to seem unlikely he'll ever be able to hit those great core netlicks he's so well known for again. So one day Jack helps him out of bed and down to the street. Anything to preoccupy him, maybe help him regain a bit of his strength. But today Bix
is overcome by a strange impulse, a morbid curiosity. Something in his gut, still ravaged by the poison, tells him to take the elevator down to the basement level.
What floor, sir?
They take the elevator down to the lowest level. The temperature drops about ten degrees as they step out. It might just be a bad case of the chills, but Bick swears he can see his breath. They slowly teeter towards a heavy iron door clearly marked with the word mortuary. A watchman idols by the entrance to the morgue. Turns out he's a jazz fan. That, along with a five dollars bill, is enough to get them inside.
Bis you sure you want to do this?
Jack and Bix are the only living souls in the morgue. No doctors, no students, but there is a lone body lying on an examination table in the middle of the room. She's bloodless, as cold, and smooth as marble. Soon she'll be embalmed, redressed, and placed in a pine box a modest funeral. More than likely, she comes from a family who can only afford the bare minimum. With one foot in the grave himself, Bix must have wondered what he'd look like when it came time display him out on
a cold steel table. When Randy told us this story, it really hit me because Big stands out to me is the kind of person Getler was trying to help, trying to save. And the fact that Bis visited the morgue. He literally walked the halls where Getler was doing his important work. It has a kind of sad irony to it, like Getler was working to put the pieces together and stop the poisonings. He was desperate to save as many people as he could, but it was too late for Bis.
And it's almost like Bix knew it.
You know, whether there was this death wish concurrently, It's hard to say, but it seems like things developed pretty fast in the last few days.
Bix's last few days are hot. It was August in New York. So hot and already addled, Bix can't get to sleep. His neighbor's hear him playing his piano in the wee hours of the morning. He's seeing people and hearing things that aren't there. Understandably, he's fixated on death. It comes August sixth, nineteen thirty one, while Bis is still in his apartment. He's sweating, shouting that there are men under the bed. They have knives, they want to
kill him. The building supervisor tries to call him Bicks down by playing along. He gets on all fours and looks under the empty bed. Suddenly, Bix dives down from the bed and slams into him. The man struggles to catch him. Hell, oh, we need a dot. A nurse who lives across the hall runs into help, but the commotion is over. Bix goes slack and crumples to the floor.
And if officially prounced Bis dead. But you said this boy is dead.
Big Spider. Beck's obituary listed his death officially as pneumonia, lungs filled with fluo spasms, shooting pains, hallucinations. Formula six had done its.
Job slow and low in sure Sure poor who.
But the bigger question was would anyone face consequences? 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 Calopoli and Stephen Wood, with additional writing and story editing from Alissa
Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canny, and Kelsey Albright. Torry Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is nicki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Callapoly and a kimmedy Ekpo Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing music and sound designed by Ben Chug, Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music
by Dan Rosatto. The role of Mabel Walker will Brandt was played by Kerrie Bische. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and Ben Ryzak,