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Those Damn RevenuersGuiding the boat carefully so as not to make any noise the two men eased toward the faint shadows of the north bank of the Tennessee River. The night was pitch dark with clouds obscuring the faint glow of the stars. The cold fog that hung over the river bottom permeated the rough clothes the men wore, making the still night seem even more ominous. Leaving the boat tied to a small sapling, the two men silently began walking cross country. With no trail to follow the men relied on instinct alone as they waded through a mixture of swamps, brambles and briar patches. After walking for several hours the men came to an abrupt halt at the top of a small rise. Several hundred yards in front of them the faint glow of a fire was flickering against the background of the dark forest. Silently, the man in the lead made a slight motion of his hand, telling his partner to circle around to the left. Crawling on their stomachs, being careful not to break twigs or make any noise, both men approached the fire from different directions until they were but yards away. In the middle of the small clearing was an illicit distillery with seven or eight mash vats sitting nearby. One man was stoking the fire while others were in the process of filling half-gallon jars with the illicit brew. The men were in a jovial mood; there would be a payday as soon they finished. Suddenly one of the men paused as he saw a shadow at the edge of the clearing. Before he could fully determine what it was, the shadow spoke in a loud authoritative voice: "Federal Agents! You’re under arrest!" Almost immediately, two of the men at the furthest edge of the clearing began to run. Within yards, their flight was interrupted, however, when another man stepped from the shadows of a tree. "Going somewhere, boys?" he asked grinning while dangling a pair of handcuffs in his hands. Shrugging their shoulders, the two would-be fugitives gave up while muttering under their breath, "Damn Revenuers!" The men the moonshiners were talking about were Don Taylor and Kent Blankenship, who between them, struck terror in the hearts of North Alabama moonshiners for well over a decade. During their careers, they busted almost a thousand moonshine stills and sent thousands of violators to jail. During the 1950s and 60s, North Alabama was awash with illicit distilleries. Contrary to the popular notion of moonshiners being folk heroes trying to eke out a living with a small still, many already had criminal records and were drawn to moonshining simply as a way to make an easy dollar. With an investment of between five and six hundred dollars, a person could set up a still and buy the raw materials. The whiskey cost less than a dollar a gallon to produce and could be wholesaled at between five and eight dollars, ensuring the moonshiner a profit on his first run. These enormous profits helped finance other criminal enterprises, ranging from automobile theft to kidnapping, and even worse, in many cases helped to corrupt the justice system. In one year alone, it was estimated that over 7000 gallons of moonshine was transported to Atlanta daily. When Kent Blankenship was transferred to Huntsville as the resident Treasury Agent he’d already had a colorful career. While working in south Alabama he had infiltrated a large moonshine organization and worked undercover for several weeks actually helping to manufacture the liquor. As a result of his work the ring was broken up with many of its members being convicted and sentenced to long terms in federal prison. Possibly, realizing it would be fruitless for him to attempt to work undercover in the area again, it was decided to transfer him to Huntsville where he was not as well known. Blankenship laughed as he recalled his first day in Huntsville. "I had just moved here and didn’t even have my things unpacked when Don Taylor, a State Investigator called. He said he had a tip on a still over in Marshal County and wanted to know if I could give him a hand." "We parked the car near Honeycomb and started up the mountain. We must have walked four or five miles, up mountains and down mountains. Just about the time when I was starting to wonder if there was any flat land in North Alabama, Don motioned me to be quiet and pointed up ahead. His informant had been right– the still was running full blast and the hands were busy bottling the liquor. "Don just casually walked into the clearing like he belonged there and said "Hello, boys." Before they could react we had handcuffs on all of them. "Later, while we were getting ready to dynamite the still, Don asked me how I liked Huntsville. "Too many damn mountains!" I said. "I didn’t know at the time that we would eventually walk over almost every mountain in North Alabama." Informers were an important asset to the revenuers. Often a moonshiner would inform on his neighbor because of some long forgotten feud, or in some cases, simply to put the competition out of business. A few small-time bootleggers were allowed to operate on the condition they would keep the agents informed on who was buying and selling. Most of the time, however, violators would turn informer when confronted with a long stretch in prison. "Often we would arrest a violator," recalled Don, "and Kent and I would play "good guy– bad guy." "Kent would act as if he wanted to make a Federal case and I would say that maybe I could get the case in the state court. Federal laws about moonshining were much more severe. "Of course," I told the violator, "You’re going to have to give us something!" When faced with doing hard time in Atlanta most of the violators talked. The funny thing about them though was that regardless of how they got caught, most of them thought they had been informed on. When arrested they would always ask who told on them and when we wouldn’t tell them they started asking if it was this person or that person. "Their pride wouldn’t let them admit that they might have gotten caught because of their own carelessness." Generally speaking, though, moonshiners were a crafty bunch. They knew all sorts of tricks that warned them if somebody had been snooping around their stills. Much the same way a big game hunter stalks his prey, the revenuers studied the moonshiners habits and became expert woodsmen. The smallest detail, such as a broken limb in the woods or a trail leading across a field to nowhere could have a significant meaning. One old time moonshiner whom we’ll call Jed, (he prefers to remain anonymous) recalls trying to outwit the revenuers. "We used to try and put our stills on a dead end road. We’d find someone who lived on the road to watch out for us. Kin folks were better ‘cause they wouldn’t talk. Then if they saw someone suspicious they would hang a blanket on the clothesline to warn us. Around the area of the still itself we would string black thread– then if it was broken we would know someone was prowling about. "Those damn Revenuers got to where they would watch for that thread and they would just step over it– even at night!" Stealth and cunning was essential in planning a raid. The agents would observe a location and try to determine which way the violators would run when they were confronted. Then with one agent making the arrest the other one would hide on the trail he thought the violator would take. If that failed there was no choice but to try and run them down on foot. One well known story about an agent tells about the time he was chasing a violator who wouldn’t give up. The agent chased him for miles through swamps and briar thickets. He finally narrowed the gap to about 50 feet of the runner but couldn’t gain any more ground. Every time he would stop to catch his breath the violator would stop, too. Then when he started running again, so did the violator. Finally, the agent at the point of collapse, pulled his gun and yelled to the violator, "I’m just going have to shoot you. I can't run anymore!" The violator gave up. Many moonshiners proved innovative in choosing sites for their operations. Besides the normal location in the woods or mountains, many stills were placed in caves, chicken houses, and barns. "We raided a still in Jackson County," remembered Don, "that was actually built under a hog pen!" Once a still was located, the officers would sometimes hide and observe it for days, trying to accumulate evidence on as many people as possible and waiting for the most opportune time to raid it. The best time would be when the operators would be in the process of running it off, an operation that normally required the presence of everyone involved. Sometimes though, the surveillance took an unexpected turn. "I was up in a tree hiding, watching a still on a back road with a pair of binoculars," recalled Kent, "when the whole road started to fill up with cars. I was right in the middle of a "lovers' lane" There was people parking all over the place with no idea that a still was just over the rise! "Sometimes if an operation was a big one we would hold off about raiding it for a few days. We’d follow the cars picking up the whiskey and when they got far enough away from the still so they wouldn’t be suspicious we would arrest them. On one still we must have arrested 12 or 14 trippers before we ever raided the still itself. They never knew they were being watched the whole time!" The trippers, so called because they got paid per trip, were the men who hauled the whiskey from the stills to the customers. The cars they drove were normally high performance, with the seats removed to make room for the gallon jugs. The rear end of the cars were sometimes equipped with special springs to compensate for the weight of the load. A car driving a back road at night with its rear end sagging was a dead give away to the revenuers. "Some nights," recalled Kent, "we would park a few feet off a road that we knew the trippers were using and watch the cars. We had a spotlight and if you flashed it just right you could you could hit the rear end of the car without the driver ever knowing it. "Once a car was spotted with its rear end riding low we would take off and try to ease up behind it before we turned our headlights on. Normally the trippers would be so surprised they would not try to run. If we knew we might have a runner coming down the road that night we would call for a driver." A "driver" was an agent known for his skill in handling an automobile. Often barreling down winding twisting country roads at high speed in pitch black darkness with no headlights, it was not a job for the fainthearted. "Hell, back then," laughed Don, "I’d rather chase a liquor car than eat when I got hungry. I got word one night about a tripper that was going to be on a road up near the state line. I got up there and waited and sure enough, in a little while here he came, driving slow and peaceful just like he was going to church or something. "I got behind him and flipped my headlights on expecting him to pull over. Well, that boy put his foot to the floor and took off like a bat out of hell. We probably ran for eight or ten miles and I realized he wasn’t going to slow down so I eased up next to him and gave him a little nudge– just enough to send him into the ditch. That boy didn’t run any more whiskey for a long time!" Kent Blankenship laughed as he remembered how paranoid the violators became. "There were so many people telling on everybody that some violators would hide the liquor on the side of the road to be picked up. That way they didn’t have to be around when it was picked up. "We got a call one day about some trouble they were having with a road crew up in Jackson County. There was only one guard, with a shotgun, and about 15 or 20 prisoners. Anyway, the prisoners were working on the road clearing brush when they found a stash of whiskey waiting to be picked up. Before the guard realized what had happened the prisoners started drinking and by the time we got up there they were running around the woods whooping and hollering and preaching. "After we got them all rounded up and sent back to the jail, we hid in the brush and waited. In a few hours, about the time the sun started going down, a guy driving a souped-up Chevy pulls up and starts searching the brush. He went to jail, too." However exciting the job might have been at times, it consisted mainly of old fashioned police work– sitting for hours copying tag numbers, meeting with informers and sharing information with the local law enforcement agencies. Sometimes if the agents had a minor violator but could not build a strong case, local authorities would go ahead and issue an indictment without arresting him. Much of the time the violator would then simply disappear, leaving one less violator for the agents to worry about. Sugar was the curse of moonshiners. Immense quantities of sugar was required to operate a still and it had to be purchased– a fact the agents were well aware of. Weeks at a time were spent poring over receipts of grocery warehouses and sugar distributors. Once the agents established that the business were dealing in large amounts of sugar that could not be explained it would be presented with a "letter of demand." The order basically required the business to document all the sugar sold, as well as reporting the purchasers names and tag numbers. "In the end," recalled an old moonshiner, "it was the sugar that put us out of business. We couldn’t buy any locally so we had to truck it in from Nashville or Chattanooga. The wholesalers knew what we wanted it for so they jacked the price up sky high. It just got to where there wasn’t any money in making whiskey anymore." By 1978, moonshining in North Alabama was practically extinct. Many of the people who had once made their money in the liquor business began turning to drugs. The same people who had once built stills in hidden coves began growing marijuana and the trippers replaced their loads of moonshine with kilos of pot. There’s not much demand for people to bust moonshine stills anymore. A younger generation of law enforcement officers, people who have never seen a still and probably never will, have taken the place of people like Kent Blankenship and Don Taylor. The only reminders left are the memories. Stop by Aunt Eunice’s Country Kitchen some morning and look for two elderly men sitting quietly in a corner drinking coffee. Maybe they will invite you to sit down and if you're lucky, they will be telling stories of a time gone by; of a time when they were known as, "Those Damn Revenuers." |
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