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 You might remember that Al thumbed his nose at the law and repealed the state's prohibition Enforcement Statute five years before.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