Pod Insights SNAFU with Ed Helms S3E7: Judgement Day About this episode Mabel Walker Willebrandt and the Dries have their backs against the wall. The Treasury Department has made their poisoning program public, but will any of it matter when the tainted booze reaches the masses? Meanwhile, a mind-melting twist in the case of Two Gun Hart comes to light.
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1:35 Speaker 04 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 Screwups. 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 faceplants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker, I am also going on tour.
2:10 Speaker 04 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 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. Previously on Snafu, as Mabel Walker Willebrandt was doing everything in her power to stop the tide of liquor washing into America.
2:54 Speaker 05 Klan took over the city, dries and wets Klan and anti-Klan contending forces.
3:00 Speaker 04 Prohibition agents were enforcing the law by repeatedly breaking it.
3:04 Speaker 06 By putting a prohibition agent, Dugan Hart, on trial for manslaughter, it's making him a martyr of prohibition.
3:12 Speaker 04 And the US government kept upping the ante in their misguided plan to get people to stop drinking.
3:18 Speaker 07 When the federal government starts coming up with formulas, they supercharge poisons into the alcohol that the bootleggers are stealing.
3:32 Speaker 04 1928 was a momentous year. At the movies, the world was introduced to a dapper mouse named Mickey, and a nifty new innovation, sound. Radio had just gone national, and the World Series was heard from coast to coast, much to the delight of Yankee superfan Alexander Getler, who's tuning in to hear the Yankees sweep the Cardinals, as he's slicing and dicing bodies in his lab at Bellevue Hospital.
4:01 Speaker 04 Yep, 1928 was a real barn burner, all right. But most of all, because it was a big election here. 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.
4:22 Speaker 05 I am entirely unwilling to accept the old order of things as the best unless and until I become convinced that it cannot be made better.
4:31 Speaker 04 As Al's speeches buzz over radios across America, I can picture Mabel Walker Wilibrant 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 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Mabel wasn't having it.
5:13 Speaker 04 Because when Al Smith said he refused the "old order of things," Mabel heard him rejecting the thing that mattered most to her: sticking to the law and enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment.
5:26 Speaker 05 It's the bottom of the ninth, folks. Two outs, no one on, and the crowd is on its feet. I haven't felt tension like this since the night they raided Chumley's.
5:35 Speaker 04 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.
5:59 Speaker 05 Mabel Walker Willebrandt steps up to the plate, and I tell you what, Ed, she's making the pitcher sweat like a bootlegger in July.
6:08 Speaker 04 Now Mabel was the last batter up. And you better believe she was gonna go down swinging.
6:22 Speaker 04 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 prohibition's war on alcohol went so 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 1928 election, and for Richard Two-Gun Hart, the chickens finally come home to roost.
7:10 Speaker 05 Herbert Hoover is the man to give America a taste of the good life. In his youth, a mining engineer, after the Great War, Hoover brought the golden grain of American farms to Europe's starving whores. He's your Secretary of Commerce. Do you own a fertile farm in a new gold rush? Hoover's your man. Vote Hoover in 1928 to keep the Fed fabulous and to keep America fabulous and fed.
7:35 Speaker 04 Leading up to the 1928 election, Mabel Walker Willebrandt was one busy bee.
7:42 Speaker 05 She campaigned very hard for Herbert Hoover against Al Smith.
7:47 Speaker 04 As author Dan Ocren 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.
8:03 Speaker 05 There was a speech she gave in Ohio particularly, though she doesn't specifically invoke Smith's Catholicism, there hint, hint, wink, wink about it.
8:13 Speaker 04 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.
8:26 Speaker 05 That led to the Smith campaign, really building an issue on the discrimination against him.
8:33 Speaker 04 Al fired back and accused Mabel of leading a bigoted anti-Catholic whisper campaign, which was actually a pretty fair characterization. Al even gave Mabel a nickname: Prohibition Portia. Now, as you history geeks will know, that's a reference to the Portia 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 Portia 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.
9:13 Speaker 04 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 gonna go into the speakeasies of New York City, smash 'em up, and shut 'em down.
9:50 Speaker 04 Obviously, she wasn't gonna 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 1928, as Al Smith was feeling good and officially accepting the Democratic nomination in Houston, Mabel's agents converged on the Big Apple.
10:21 Speaker 04 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 in the hands of the federal government. All guests must leave at once.
11:05 Speaker 04 They made their arrests, and they shut down the bars. The raids would lead to a handsome haul for Mabel: over 100 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.
11:46 Speaker 04 Duran had presided over the implementation of the government's alcohol poisoning scheme. Remember, Formula 6 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. In stills and makeshift labs outside the nation's capital, those bootlegger chemists were burning the midnight oil, coming up with a recipe to counter Formula 6. They re-distilled the tainted alcohol and extracted the poisons.
12:21 Speaker 04 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:
12:32 Speaker 05 "Chemists of the Bureau of Internal Revenue seek to make impossible the untangling of poisons in the denatured formulas. In one case, a dash of gasoline will be added, and in another, some substance will be included to keep the methyl and the grain alcohol from separating."
12:47 Speaker 04 Wow. Gasoline? Tell me you're out of ideas without telling me you're out of ideas. After Formula 6 was successfully defeated, Formulas 3 and 4 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 1918 at the start of prohibition? Well, Duran's chemists had used traces of wood alcohol in their formulas before, but it was always part of a complex cocktail.
13:32 Speaker 04 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.
13:51 Speaker 07 "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're able to use."
14:07 Speaker 04 And of course, right away, bootleggers began siphoning it out of industrial warehouses and dishing it out on the streets.
14:18 Speaker 04 In October 1928, Bellevue Hospital is utter mayhem. Everywhere, people are vomiting, hallucinating, dying in the emergency room. Getler and Norris are overwhelmed. Over just three days in October, they see 33 deaths from poisoned liquor. By Getler's count, 25 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 6, 1928. 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.
15:01 Speaker 04 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 5th 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 won? 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.
15:45 Speaker 04 Smith's crushing defeat was a win for prohibition, and also a win for Hoover superfan Mabel Walker Willibrant, 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.
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16:57 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
17:11 Speaker 04 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
17:22 Speaker 02 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
17:27 Speaker 07 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
17:33 Speaker 02 So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.
17:57 Speaker 04 At Bellevue Hospital, it's not just the bodies that have been stacking up. Alexander Getler'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.
18:14 Speaker 04 And the numbers, as 1928 winds down, are disturbing as hell. The body count from drinking-related deaths in New York City this year alone is 10,000. Ten years ago, when they issued their first warning on the eve of prohibition, Getler and Norris knew things were going to be bad, but this bad? At that 1926 press conference, the Prohibition Bureau issued a reminder to America: Drink and you die.
18:46 Speaker 04 And Americans more or less responded with, "Cool, so yeah, uh, 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 1920, alcoholism was reaching all-time highs. Insurance companies reported that deaths from alcoholism were 600% higher in 1928 than in 1920. 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
19:29 Speaker 04 drinking just wasn't making an impact. Which kinda makes sense, I mean, remember that commercial from the 80s, "This is your brain on drugs"? We all saw that egg frying in the pan, but isn't frying your brain kinda 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 Getler 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
20:13 Speaker 04 his man Getler, and Getler'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.
20:51 Speaker 07 Between October 6th and 8th, 1928, 25 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. These are not statistics, but the bare record of a tragedy as shocking and, in a sense, dramatic. As a fearful-
21:09 Speaker 05 Crash on the subway.
21:11 Speaker 04 Yep, New York City subways in the 1920s were also scary. And this was before the days of Pizza Rat. Anywho.
21:18 Speaker 05 In a word, the wood alcohol is not poison liquor. It is simply poison.
21:24 Speaker 04 And how did the poison get into the liquor? Well, that brings Norris and Getler to the government and their official poisoning program. Now, Norris 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 aftershaves. 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. Then suddenly, they were. So whose fault is that?
22:06 Speaker 05 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.
22:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, pretty unfortunate, right? For any American who just wanted a drink.
22:21 Speaker 05 Poison everywhere, and increasing thousands are drinking it. Shall we simply shrug our shoulders?
22:28 Speaker 04 It's a great point, Norris. Thousands of people are dying from alcohol poisoned by our own government. And we're just like, oh, 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.
23:11 Speaker 04 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.
23:36 Speaker 07 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 $178 million to enforce. This is the net dividend of our noble experiment in extermination.
24:00 Speaker 04 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?
24:24 Speaker 00 Because he's Charles Norris, he's 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.
24:41 Speaker 04 For the past decade, Norris and Getler have watched the city's working-class watering holes shutter, 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 gonna change? Was Norris and Getler's work gonna make any difference at all?
25:25 Speaker 04 In late 1928, our essay on 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 Getler get the attention of the whole country.
25:44 Speaker 02 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.
25:56 Speaker 04 Yep, that was big news, all right. Pour it all out, Deborah Blum.
26:01 Speaker 02 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.
26:21 Speaker 04 News of Norris's essay splashed all over the New York papers.
26:25 Speaker 05 There's one doubter of the nobility of the experiment. Dr. Charles Norris, chief medical examiner of New York, makes protest in The North American Review, calling it a noble experiment in suicide by poison.
26:37 Speaker 04 And the stories land well beyond the Big Apple. It was news in Florida.
26:43 Speaker 05 New York's chief medical examiner declares that the mortality rate from drink, instead of declining with the advance of prohibition, is actually gaining.
26:50 Speaker 04 To Missouri...
26:52 Speaker 05 Charles Norris writes, "At the end of eight years without good liquor, an increasing proportion of our nation is drinking itself to death on bad liquor."
27:00 Speaker 04 To Arizona...
27:01 Speaker 05 Charles Norris says, "Our national casualty list from strong drink will outstrip World War I, with 126,000 deaths."
27:10 Speaker 04 And California...
27:12 Speaker 05 Dr. Norris attributes a large number of deaths in motor accidents, homicides, and accidental deaths from falls to poison liquor. Norris says most of these are directly traceable to poison alcohol.
27:25 Speaker 04 And with that tsunami of media coverage, Norris and Getler finally get people to take note. And you know what? Americans across the country were up in arms.
27:39 Speaker 04 One priest in a working-class Chicago parish nailed it when he said, “They give the good stuff to the sewers and the bad stuff to the people.” The outrage reached the Capitol, 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’s poisoning practices for a few years now. In the aftermath of the 1926 Christmas deaths in New York, Senator James Reed of Missouri cried:
28:10 Speaker 05 “Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor.”
28:19 Speaker 04 A New Jersey senator went as far as to say the federal government was guilty of “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 dries 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:
28:51 Speaker 05 “You can’t poison poison.”
28:55 Speaker 04 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, hard-line temperance advocates like James Duran might not care, Mabel Luck or Wilibrant might not care. Their coalition was willing to break a few eggs, as long as America was a dry omelet. Now, in 1929, the wet lawmakers finally had something solid to fight back with: Norris and Getler’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.
29:37 Speaker 04 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.
29:59 Speaker 04 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 Getler. 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 Whets what they needed to win. And it didn't stop with denaturing.
30:43 Speaker 04 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.
30:59 Speaker 00 You start to see governments just quit 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.
31:13 Speaker 04 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 1929, 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.
31:54 Speaker 04 Surely she'd be rewarded with a big fat promotion and a nifty new title: the Attorney General of the United States.
32:05 Speaker 07 Willibrand has a nice ring to it.
32:07 Speaker 04 And one night in February 1929, 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.
32:31 Speaker 07 As your new Attorney General, I pledge to enforce the law.
32:36 Speaker 04 But Hoover had a different message for Mabel. I just wanted to tell you that the new Attorney General is a friend of yours.
32:45 Speaker 04 Hoover had buried the lead. Turns out, Mabel wasn't gonna 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's very unpopular, she's got less of a constituency. It was starting to sink in. Now that prohibition wasn't useful to Hoover as an issue, he just wasn't gonna be very serious about it anymore, even less than his predecessor, old two-martini-lunch Warren Harding. Mabel was crushed.
33:29 Speaker 04 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.
33:40 Speaker 07 I was a young lawyer, much too young when appointed for the responsibilities heaped on me.
33:46 Speaker 04 Mabel Walker Willebrandt was free falling off the tightrope she'd been walking since the day she arrived in Washington DC 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.
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34:57 Speaker 04 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
35:08 Speaker 02 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.
35:45 Speaker 04 Time to head back out west. Let's check in with Richard Hart, the cowboy whose gunslinging 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 on to those old Wild West shows and live out his cowboy dreams.
36:30 Speaker 04 The Bureau of Indian Affairs was kind of known for that.
36:37 Speaker 04 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, tremendous amount of power. They strive to be autocrats and kind of tin pot 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. Hart was indicted for manslaughter. He was acquitted
37:18 Speaker 04 at trial, but this was finally enough. Even in the most circussy of bureaucratic circuses, Richard couldn't stop getting in trouble with the ring masters. He was too violent for the wannabe cowboys, so he was fired from his federal post.
37:34 Speaker 04 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.
37:51 Speaker 06 My grandfather remembers living in the smallest shack down by the river in Homer, and then suddenly moving into one of the nicest homes in Homer. He remembers his father coming back with no kidding, $100 bills and a nice new suit, and the life really changed.
38:11 Speaker 04 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.
38:34 Speaker 06 Richard started to drink more in the later years, and bragging about the work that he's doing for his family now. But the bartender, in addition to some patrons at the bar, were kind of old enemies, criminals that...
38:49 Speaker 06 Richard Hart used to terrorize back in the day. As soon as they found out who he was, the bartender took some brass knuckles and the other two patrons held him down and they, they, they just, they beat the crap out of him to, to, I guess, put it in house so nicely.
39:09 Speaker 04 Oof, brass knuckles, that can do some damage.
39:12 Speaker 06 Now, Richard had two of his friends with him, but all they could do was just stand back and let it happen.
39:20 Speaker 04 Eesh, some friends. Once the beating was over, Richard was bundled off to the hospital.
39:27 Speaker 06 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.
39:40 Speaker 04 Eventually, the hospital staff got a lead on him.
39:44 Speaker 06 So they came and informed my grandfather and Kathleen. They 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.
39:59 Speaker 04 That lesson, sometimes you just gotta keep that old trap shut.
40:03 Speaker 06 It was a tough lesson to, to learn. That would have been the time to where Kathleen started to ask more questions. I think she was suspecting things.
40:14 Speaker 04 Kathleen was probably wondering about all that new dough that Richard was showing off.
40:20 Speaker 06 There were many long discussions between Richard and Kathleen in, in the evening. Couldn't hear about what, but they happened very frequently and they, they were very emotional as well. Knowing what we know now, what happened in the 30s was, was probably Richard went back to his brothers and said, "I am flat broke. I've got four boys that I, I can't maintain a living and he's lost all of his pride."
40:52 Speaker 04 Turns out, Richard had a bit of a safety net. His brother's. Something he'd never let on to anyone in Homer. You see, while Richard Hart was strutting his stuff under a 10-gallon Stetson, his real identity was hidden. The truth is that Richard "Two-Guns" Hart was an Italian immigrant. His real first name was Vincenzo, and his last name, it wasn't Hart. It was a last name you've definitely heard. See, Richard/Vincenzo's baby brother Alfons was the one who really did something with the family name. You know him as Al Capone. Hold on a second. Al Capone's brother was a prohibition agent?
41:37 Speaker 04 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-Guns" Hart 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 Capone identity, not to mention the clean new seersucker three-piece suit that came with it.
42:21 Speaker 04 And here's where the story might start to sound familiar. When the government finally went after the Capones, 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 Al. Nope. The family bookkeeper was his brother Ralph.
42:53 Speaker 06 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 Capone brothers. The way that you get the organized crime was to basically look at money laundering.
43:10 Speaker 04 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 and some Tide 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 listened to the last season of Snafu, and if you didn't, you really should, you would know that a certain J. Edgar 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.
43:55 Speaker 06 It was the first live televised hearings of any kind of gang activity. Talk about ratings, right?
44:08 Speaker 04 Once Ralph Capone was on the stand getting squeezed, he let slip that there was a secret Capone 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 of Nebraska and paraded in front of the press in Chicago.
44:31 Speaker 06 This guy can testify and they find out that this is actually also Richard Tugendhat, a former prohibition agent.
44:39 Speaker 05 FBI turns up secret brother of Capone's. Federal agents investigating the tax paid by Ralph Bottles Capone today turned up a lost brother whose identity had been kept a closely guarded underworld secret.
44:51 Speaker 06 Everybody's like, wow, this is incredible that Richard Tugendhat, the lawman, is actually the long-lost brother of Al Capone. A long-lost brother in the terms of the media.
45:00 Speaker 04 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. When she 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?
45:43 Speaker 04 Richard answered those questions quite clearly.
45:47 Speaker 06 The last year before I died, sticking up for Ralph under a grand jury testimony in Chicago.
45:54 Speaker 04 In the end, when the law came at him, Richard stood shoulder to shoulder with Ralph and Alphonse. He was given a chance, one final chance, to make his brothers face the music and tell the truth about the inner workings of their criminal enterprise.
46:10 Speaker 04 And he refused.
46:11 Speaker 06 He lied on the stand.
46:14 Speaker 04 Like they had so many times before, Richard's lies paid off. Ralph Capone's case didn't go to trial.
46:24 Speaker 04 The story of Richard Hart, just like the twisted stories of Mabel Walker Willebrandt and Formula 6, 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 Snafu.
47:22 Speaker 04 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 Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. Additional production from Steven Wood, Olivia Canny, and Kelsey Albright. Tori Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapali and Akimani 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.
48:06 Speaker 04 Theme music by Dan Rosato. The role of Mabel Walker-Wilbrant was played by Carrie Bichette. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.
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49:00 Speaker 03 Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or Zolaire should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolaire is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or hardened circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolaire.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolaire.
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