Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms S3E3: Battle Lines About this episode The bootleggers' perspective comes into sharp focus as we meet a survivor of the Great War, George Cassiday. Meanwhile, why were speakeasies across the nation transforming into veritable chemistry labs?
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Transcript 5,494 words · 16 speakers
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0:34 Speaker 01 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 29th. It's called Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. And you can preorder it right now at snafu-book.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.
1:17 Speaker 01 So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q&A or dramatically read about a kitty cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance. Again, head to snafu-book.com to preorder 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 Snafu, Season 3, Formula 6.
1:46 Speaker 01 Last time on Snafu, the temperance movement swept America.
1:50 Speaker 02 Every abolitionist was a teetotaler.
1:53 Speaker 01 Mabel Walker Willibrant was hired to lead prohibition enforcement.
1:58 Speaker 03 There's one way it can be done: get at the source of supply.
2:02 Speaker 01 And much of prohibition enforcement falls, strangely, to the US Treasury Department.
2:08 Speaker 04 Which is another way of saying we're gonna use it for political payoffs.
2:21 Speaker 01 It's 1918 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 story. He's sitting inside a combat tank clattering across the bloody battlefield. His name: George Cassidy. And he's under attack.
2:45 Speaker 01 The tank rolls down a slope as shells explode around it, and then it sinks into a crater of mud.
2:54 Speaker 01 Its steel armor shields George and his crew from the bright yellow bursts of artillery flame.
3:01 Speaker 01 But it can't protect them from the mist that's engulfed the field: World War I's most insidious weapon: mustard gas.
3:12 Speaker 01 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.
3:32 Speaker 01 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.
4:07 Speaker 01 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 and 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.
4:41 Speaker 01 In 1919, 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.
5:15 Speaker 01 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.
5:27 Speaker 01 Where the hell can he get a drink?
5:35 Speaker 01 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.
5:51 Speaker 01 I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. This is season three, the story of Formula 6. 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 Willibrand became prohibition's champion, George Cassidy would become one of its greatest defiers. And the two sides they represented were about to clash.
6:50 Speaker 01 In 1922, two years into prohibition, Mabel Walker Willibrandt 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.
7:08 Speaker 01 Little Mabel grew up crisscrossing the Great Plains in a 9-by-12-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 and 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.
7:44 Speaker 04 She was a very serious woman.
7:47 Speaker 01 You don't say, Daniel Ockrent.
7:49 Speaker 04 She woke up every day, the first thing she did was take an ice-cold bath, which gives an indication, I think, of how tough she was.
7:55 Speaker 01 Cold plunging 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.
8:18 Speaker 01 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 3,000 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 1800s when traders slid their flasks of liquor into their boots.
9:04 Speaker 01 During prohibition, bootlegging became a household term, thanks in no small part to the notorious Georgia syndicate, the Savannah Four. Their leader was a guy named Willie Har. 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 Har didn’t exactly keep a low profile. His nickname 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.
9:44 Speaker 01 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 Willie Har’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 Har would have a future run-in with Mabel. Put a pin in that for a second. But as brazen as Har and the Savannah Four might have been, the most brazen bootlegger
10:28 Speaker 01 of all was operating right under Mabel’s nose. Which brings us back to good old George Cassidy.
10:36 Speaker 05 When the ship coming back, they had a poll about who was in favor of prohibition. And out of the 2,500 guys on the troop carrier, only 98 wanted prohibition.
10:50 Speaker 01 After George got off the ship from France, he headed home to Virginia, and he had plenty of stories for his pals.
10:56 Speaker 05 He was just so damn gregarious.
10:59 Speaker 01 That’s Fred Cassidy, George’s son.
11:01 Speaker 05 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.
11:12 Speaker 01 George partied in style.
11:14 Speaker 05 He was a dapper dude. If you ever saw him in his Irish War Veterans National Commander’s uniform, you would’ve thought he was a general of the most powerful army in the world, or something.
11:26 Speaker 01 George also had a signature green felt 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 breakman on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
11:53 Speaker 05 When he came back, he couldn't pass the physical to get rehired.
11:58 Speaker 01 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.
12:31 Speaker 05 He liked to imbibe. Everybody around my dad liked to imbibe.
12:36 Speaker 01 Which isn't a surprise, given George was from the moonshining capital of the world.
12:42 Speaker 05 There was a ton of moonshining going on in Virginia. A lot of the Virginia farmers, you know, have their stills out in a discreet area.
12:52 Speaker 01 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 Willibrant. A tall order in a place like Franklin County, Virginia, nestled in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, where 99 out of every 100 people were connected to the moonshine business. One agent reported back to DC on the pointlessness of even bothering with arrests.
13:34 Speaker 06 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.
13:46 Speaker 01 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 fiancee.
14:03 Speaker 06 It looks to me like the moonshine business is gonna be pretty good. Some of us wanna get in on the ground floor. At least we wanna get in there in time to lay in a supply for future consumption.
14:16 Speaker 01 That's 34-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 shipping 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
14:56 Speaker 01 orders were flowing one way, and George kept the moonshine flowing the other. George's lifeline was becoming a goldmine, because George's clients, well, they were the kind of people who liked to meet at the Hotel Varnum in Washington DC. The Varnum's a grand old hotel at the corner of C Street and 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. Thanks, pal. For his next delivery, George grabs two bags out of his trunk.
15:39 Speaker 01 One in each hand, George walks along New Jersey Avenue, nodding and smiling to passersby. 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 fellas at the door.
16:19 Speaker 01 And with his bags full of booze, walks right in.
16:24 Speaker 01 That's right, among the buyers for George's top-quality Virginia hooch are the nation's lawmakers. His clientele are powerful men of every political party and persuasion.
16:37 Speaker 01 You see, George isn't just any bootlegger. He's become the go-to bootlegger for Congress. And Congress, well, they're pretty thirsty.
16:49 Speaker 01 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.
17:00 Speaker 03 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.
17:24 Speaker 01 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.
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18:23 Speaker 08 The early 20th century is a uniquely poisonous time for a number of reasons.
18:29 Speaker 01 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.
18:44 Speaker 08 We're seeing the rise of industrial chemistry. And there's a deluge 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. Chemists are figuring out that they can take all of these poisonous substances that occur in nature and recreate the mental laboratory.
19:08 Speaker 01 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.
19:18 Speaker 09 Beaker, I told you never to talk to me like that, because I can't understand it.
19:26 Speaker 01 That's a little shout out to my 80's 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 backrooms 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.
20:04 Speaker 01 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 bartender served up potent cocktails. At least, that's the front room. But the backroom? 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.
20:36 Speaker 10 Hello, I'm here to interview for the chemist position. I require $1 million payment. Aw, wise guy, eh? So you want your patrons dead? Well, I'll take you to the boss.
20:49 Speaker 01 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? In 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.
21:30 Speaker 08 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.
21:44 Speaker 01 You could get your smoke in the back of drugstores 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 grisly stuff. There was also the infamous Ginger Jake.
21:59 Speaker 08 You see Ginger Jake, which was another formula ginned up by bootleggers that actually mimics the symptoms of Parkinson's. Or you see the cocktail called Derail, in which they were siphoning off some of the industrial alcohols from the railroads and serving it up in drinks.
22:20 Speaker 01 These drinks could kill. During one stretch over a few months, deaths 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 stenciled with the word "poison" on them.
22:37 Speaker 08 This acceptance of risk that came with prohibition at these levels is kind of horrifying, but it was there and it was real.
22:45 Speaker 01 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 and toxic. These backroom chemists were clearly breaking the law. But a lot of them actually saw themselves as humanitarians. Every time they caught a dangerous toxin in a gallon of hooch and kept it out of a drinker's mouth, well...
23:15 Speaker 11 Where'd you get that? Under the seat, can you believe it? It's still half-full.
23:20 Speaker 01 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?"
23:34 Speaker 04 New York repealed its version of the amendment in 1922. So from that point forward, New York officially was not supporting prohibition.
23:46 Speaker 01 So yeah, under the 18th 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 gonna do any cracking down. New York cops weren't gonna be making any arrests. And even if they did, New York judges weren't gonna throw the book at any club owners. Federal 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 Doral.
24:31 Speaker 01 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.
24:58 Speaker 01 Down in Washington, when news reached the office of the Department of Justice that the Big Apple was flipping off prohibition, Mabel Walker Willibrant was, you guessed it,
25:09 Speaker 01 pissed.
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25:53 Speaker 01 A Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn. I can picture our pal, Alexander 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 White Men Band, is buzzing in the background. Getler's smoking a stogie as he scans baseball box scores from the morning paper. Knowing Al, 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 he also brought to his work at Bellevue. When a new mystery arrived at his doorstep, he couldn't stand the idea of a poisoner
26:38 Speaker 01 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.
26:59 Speaker 01 In 1922, 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 “dead from poison.” Getler reviews the report.
27:43 Speaker 01 The police on the scene had suspected suicide, but there was no corroborating evidence of any kind in the apartment. Getler 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 I 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. Getler's sure cyanide is the cause of death, even though he hadn't found any signs that
28:28 Speaker 01 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 spraying cyanide gas around the apartment. They realize the dead couple hadn't swallowed cyanide, they had inhaled it. Case closed. But Getler's work isn't quite done.
29:00 Speaker 08 Getler 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.
29:10 Speaker 01 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.
29:33 Speaker 01 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 coroner who preceded him. Their office at Bellevue was still a ramshackle quote-unquote "country club." All the lab's 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. Getler was making three thousand bucks a year, which today would be equivalent to a fifty-five thousand dollar salary in Brooklyn. No wonder he lived with his in-laws. So, as poisons in the air were becoming more sophisticated, the caseload of the medical examiner's office was getting bigger.
30:17 Speaker 01 And in 1922, one particular case caught their eye: the case of Robert Doyle. Doyle was a veteran of World War I. Like the tanker-turned bootlegger George Cassidy, and like so many of the men 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.
31:00 Speaker 01 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.
31:30 Speaker 01 One night, neighbors in 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 Grey's Anatomy episode where you'd hear the heartbeat monitor beeping until it slowly fades and flatlines. But this is the 1920s. There's nothing quite that fancy yet.
32:11 Speaker 01 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 Getler. 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. Getler knew about all the brain power and advanced chemistry that was going into making industrial alcohol drinkable and not kill you.
32:52 Speaker 01 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 DC, 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.
33:28 Speaker 04 Harry Doherty, the Attorney General, who was the immediate boss to Mabel Willibrand, he was A, a drunk, and B, corrupt. One of the craziest stories you hear, right? Like, an incredibly successful defense attorney becomes the biggest bootlegger ever. The fact that there were only 2,600 prohibition agents covering the entire Canadian border, the Mexican border, and both coasts? It's ridiculous.
33:54 Speaker 01 SNAPU 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 Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Nevin Kalapali, Albert Chen, and Carl Nellis, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood. Tori Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapali and Akimini Ekpo. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing, music, and sound design by Ben Chug.
34:39 Speaker 01 Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosato. The role of Mabel Walker Willibrant was played by Carrie Bichette. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.
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