March 26, 2025 • 33 mins
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?
Preorder the SNAFU book and join me on book tour at www.snafu-book.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey there, it's your host ed helms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Here.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
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 snaffoodashbook dot com. Trust me,
if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.
(00:24):
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
(00:44):
ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q
and A or dramatically read about a kiddie cat getting
turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance again. Head
to snaffoo dashbook dot com to pre order the book
and check out all the tour details and dates, or
just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay,
that's it, on with the chaos. This is Snaffou Season
(01:08):
three Formula six last time on Snaffou, the temperance movement
swept America. Every abolitionist was a teetotal Mabel Walker. Willebrandt
was hired to lead prohibition enforcement.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
There's one way it can be done, get at the
source of supply.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
And much of prohibition enforcement falls strangely to the US
Treasury Department, which.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
Is another way of saying we're going to use it
for political payoffs.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
It's nineteen eighteen 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 He's sitting inside a combat tank
clattering across the bloody battlefield. His name George Cassidy, and
(02:08):
he's under attack. The tank rolls down a slope as
shells explode around it, and then it sinks into a
crater of mud. Its steel armor shields George and his
crew from the bright yellow bursts of artillery flame, but
it can't protect them from the mist that's engulfed the field.
(02:32):
World War one's most insidious weapon, mustard gas. 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,
(02:59):
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
(03:23):
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. 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
(03:45):
it the enemy? The door swings open, and thank god,
it's the Yanks. George is rescued, carried up out of
the crater in 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. In nineteen nineteen,
(04:09):
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
(04:31):
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. 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, Where the hell
(04:54):
can he get a drink 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.
(05:18):
I'm Ed Helms and this is Snaffo, 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.
Today we're riding shotgun with the bootleggers, because men like
(05:40):
George Cassidy didn't come home from the fight in France
just to take the new laws laying down. As Mabel
Walker Willebrandt became prohibitions champion, George Cassidy would become one
of its greatest defires, and the two sides they represented
were about to clash. In nineteen twenty two, two years
(06:19):
into Prohibition, Mabel Walker Willebrandt 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.
Little Mabel grew up crisscrossing the Great Plains in a
nine by twelve foot tent pitched in the fields of Kansas, Missouri,
(06:41):
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 alive. A little like that time my cub scout
(07:03):
trip got rained out, except I had a home to
go back to. That experience had quite an impact on
young Mabel.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
She was a very serious woman.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
You don't say, Daniel, okrint. She woke up every day.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
The first thing she did was taken an ice cold bath,
which gives an indication. I think of how tough she was.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Cold lunging 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. For starters,
(07:45):
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 three thousand in the nation's capital. But Mabel's
headaches extended well beyond the metropolises. Of the Northeast. Also
(08:07):
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
eighteen hundreds, when traders slid their flasks of liquor into
(08:28):
their boots. During Prohibition, bootlegging became a household term banks
in no small part to the notorious Georgia syndicate, the
Savannah Four. Their leader was a guy named Willie Harr.
Willie owned and controlled a fleet of ships that transported
liquor from Scotland and France to another British territory, the Bahamas.
(08:49):
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 Harr didn't exactly
keep a low profile. His nick name 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.
(09:11):
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 Willy Harr's ring had judges politicians,
and it turns out prohibition agents on its payroll, and
(09:34):
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 Harror would
have a future run in with Mabel. Put a pin
in that for a second. But as brazen as Horror
in the Savannah four might have been, the most brazen
bootlegger of all was operating right under Mabel's nose, which
(10:00):
brings us back to good old George Cassidy.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
On the ship coming back, they had a poll about
who was in favor of prohibition, and out of the
two thousand, five hundred guys on the troop carrier, only
ninety eight wanted prohibition.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
After George got off the ship from France, he headed
home to Virginia, and he had plenty of stories for
his pals.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
He was just so damn gregarious.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
That's Fred Cassidy, George's son.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
George party then style.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
He was a dapper dude. If you ever saw him
in his Irish War Veterans' National Commander's uniform, you would
have thought he was a general of the most powerful
army in the world or something.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
George also had a signature greenfelt 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,
(11:14):
which made it hard for him to find work. Before
the war, George had been a brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
When he came back, he couldn't pass their physical to
get rehired.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
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,
(11:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
He liked to imbibe. Everybody around my dad liked to imbibe.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Which isn't a surprise given George was from the moonshining
capital of the world.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
There was a ton of moonshining going on in Virginia.
A lot of the Virginia farmers have their stills out
in a discrete.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Area 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
(12:41):
prohibition agents under Mabel Walker Willebrandt a tall order in
a place like Franklin County, Virginia, nestled in the beautiful
Blue Ridge Mountains, where ninety nine out of every hundred
people were connected to the moonshine business. One agent reported
back to DC on the pointlessness of even bothering the rests.
Speaker 5 (13:01):
I'm sorry to report that at this time it is
almost impossible to get a conviction.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
In any case.
Speaker 5 (13:08):
Juries are in sympathy with the bootlegger and the moonshiner.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
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 fiance.
Speaker 5 (13:31):
It looks to me like the moonshine business is going
to be pretty good. Some of us want to get
in on the ground floor. At least we want to
get in there in time to lay in us alive
for future consumption.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
That's thirty four 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 ship liquor from
his neighborhood to money drinkers across DC felt like a
(14:04):
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 orders were
flowing one way, and George kept the moonshine flowing the other.
(14:28):
George's lifeline was becoming a gold mine because George's clients, well,
they were the kind of people who liked to meet
at the Hotel Varnum in Washington, d C. The Varnum's
a grand old hotel at the corner of C Street
in New Jersey Avenue, a meeting place. Outside, George sees
(14:50):
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 for his next delivery,
George grabs two bags out of his trunk, one in
each hand. George walks along New Jersey Avenue, nodding and
smiling to passers by. He was the friendly sort. George
(15:13):
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
(15:35):
where members of Congress have their offices. Stepping into the
House Office building, George gives a nod to the security
fellaws at the door, and with his bags full of booze,
walks right in. That's right. Among the buyers for George's
top quality of Virginia hooch are the nation's lawmakers. His
(15:57):
clientele are powerful men of every political party and persuasion.
You see, George isn't just any bootlegger. He's become the
go to bootlegger for Congress. And Congress well they're pretty thirsty. Now.
Mabel's not blind to this. She makes regular visits to
(16:19):
the Capitol. Sometimes she even sits in the gallery of
the Senate Chamber room to hear the nation's lawmakers present
their plans.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
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
(16:47):
are persistent violators of the law.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
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.
Speaker 6 (17:20):
The early twentieth century is a uniquely poisonous time for
a number of reasons.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
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.
Speaker 6 (17:41):
We're seeing the rise of industrial chemistry, and there's a
telluge 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 chemistry,
figuring out that they can take all of these poisonous
substances that occur in nature and recreate the mental.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Laboratory 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. No no, no, no, Beaker.
I told you never to talk to me like that,
because I can't understand it. That's a little shout out
to my eighties kids out there. Point is, products of
(18:26):
rapidly advancing chemistry were everywhere in pharmacies, doctors' offices, grocery stores, kitchens,
and of course also in bars, where speakeasy back rooms
were starting to look a lot more like chemistry labs.
The reason classy clubs were hiring actual chemists to make
(18:46):
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. This is the prohibition, you know,
the razzle dazzle of the flappers under the electric lights,
(19:06):
where the big band served up bouncy rhythms and the
bartenders served up potent cocktails. At least that's the front room.
But the back room it was all chemistry.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Baby.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Hello, I'm here to interview for the chemist position.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
I require one dollars payment. Oh, wise guy, A, so
you want your patrons dead?
Speaker 5 (19:42):
I'll take you to the bus.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
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 and plenty of New York
neighborhoods back alley liquor was flowing just as freely, But
no lab coated expert with a safety checklist was looking
(20:08):
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.
Speaker 6 (20:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
You could get your smoke in the back of drug
stores 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 grizzly stuff.
There was also the infamous ginger jake.
Speaker 6 (20:55):
You see ginger Jake, which was another formula genda by
bliggers that actually mimics the symptoms of Parkinson's. Or you
see the cocktail called d Rail in which they were
siphoning off some of the industrial alcohols from the railroads
and serving it up in drinks.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
These drinks could kill during one stretch over a few months.
Debts 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 stenseled
with the word poison on them.
Speaker 6 (21:33):
This acceptance of risk that came with prohibition at these
levels is kind of horrifying, but it was there, and
it was real.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
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 intoxic. These back room chemists were clearly breaking the law,
but a lot of them actually saw themselves as humanitarians.
(22:05):
Every time they caught a dangerous tocsin and a gallon
of hooch and kept it out of a drinker's mouth, Well,
what'd you get.
Speaker 6 (22:12):
That under the seat?
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Can you believe it? It's still half full. 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?
Speaker 4 (22:30):
New York repealed its version of the amendment in nineteen
twenty two, so from that point forward, New York officially
was not supporting prohibition.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
So yeah, under the eighteenth 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 going to do any
cracking down. New York cops weren't going to be making
any arrest and even if they did, New York judges
weren't going to throw the book at any club owners.
(23:05):
Better a 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 derail.
(23:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Bobby, just believe of worries on the whole move and.
Speaker 6 (23:44):
World may go dry.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Her dad made as well.
Speaker 6 (23:48):
As they left the old sales to the bootlegger.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Daughter down in Washington. When news reached the office of
the Department of Justice that the Big Apple was flipping
on off prohibition, Mabel Walker Willebrant was you guessed it pissed.
(24:21):
A Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn, I can picture our pal
Alexandra 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 Whiteman Band,
is buzzing in the background. Gettler's smoking a stogie as
he scans baseball box scores from the morning paper, knowing
(24:42):
Hew 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 also brought to his work at Bellevue. When
(25:02):
a new mystery arrived at his doorstep. He couldn't stand
the idea of a poisoner 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. In nineteen
(25:29):
twenty two, 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
(25:49):
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 quote
dead from poison. Gettler reviews the report. The police on
(26:12):
the scene had suspected suicide, but there was no corroborating
evidence of any kind in the apartment. Gettler 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,
(26:32):
cyanide was used in World War One 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. Gettler's sure cyanide is the cause of death,
(26:55):
even though he hadn't found any signs that 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 Spryan's cyanide
gas around the apartment. They realized the dead couple hadn't
(27:18):
swallowed cyanide, they had inhaled it. Case closed, but Getler's
work isn't quite done.
Speaker 6 (27:28):
Gettler 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.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
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, and they
(28:01):
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 Corner who preceded him.
Their office at Bellevue was still a ramshackle quote unquote
country club. All the labs new equipment was still paid
for by Norris himself. Norris and Getler were working around
(28:23):
the clock, but they sure weren't making bootlegger chemist money.
Gettler was making three thousand bucks a year, which today
would be equivalent to a fifty five thousand dollars salary
in Brooklyn. No wonder he lived with his in laws.
So as poisons in the air were becoming more sophisticated,
the case load of the Medical Examiner's Office was getting
(28:45):
bigger and in nineteen twenty two, one particular case caught
their eye, the case of Robert Doyle. Doyle was a
veteran of World War One, like the tanker turned bootlegger
George Cassidy, and like so many of them who came
back from Europe, Doyle found jobs were scarce in his
hometown Boston, so he left his wife and daughter and
(29:08):
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.
(29:28):
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
(29:50):
didn't know who to trust, He didn't know whose libations
might be toxic, but he bought a drink anyway. One night,
neighbors in and 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,
(30:13):
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 Gray's Anatomy episode where you'd hear the
heartbeat monitor beeping until it slowly fades and flatlines. But
(30:36):
this is the nineteen twenties. There's nothing quite that fancy yet.
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 Gettler. Now it was up to Getler
(31:02):
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. Gettler knew about all the brain power
in advanced chemistry that was going into making industrial alcohol
drinkable and not kill you. In theory, the supply was
(31:22):
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, d c. To Toledo, Ohio.
This was proof people like Robert Doyle weren't dying simply
because of their own reckless thirst for alcohol. No, these
(31:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
Harry Doherty, the Attorney General who was the immediate boss
to Mabel Willebrandt, he was a a drunk and be corrupt.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
One of the craziest stories here man like an incredibly
successful defense attorney becomes the biggest bootlegger ever.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
The fact that there were only twenty six hundred prohibitionations
covering the entire Canadian border, of the Mexican border and
both coasts It's Ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment and
Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's
executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo,
Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl
Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Nevin Kalapoly,
(32:44):
Albert Chen and Carl Nellis, with additional writing and story
editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from
Stephen wood. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Our story
editor is nicki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Callapoly
and a kimmedy A. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our
creative executive is Brett Harris, Editing, music and sound design
(33:06):
by Ben Chug Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley
Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. The music by
Dan Rosatto. The role of Mabel Walker willa Brandt was
played by Carrie Bische. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel
Welsh and Ben Rizak.
Hey there, it's your host ed helms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Here.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
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 snaffoodashbook dot com. Trust me,
if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.
(00:24):
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
(00:44):
ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q
and A or dramatically read about a kiddie cat getting
turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance again. Head
to snaffoo dashbook dot com to pre order the book
and check out all the tour details and dates, or
just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay,
that's it, on with the chaos. This is Snaffou Season
(01:08):
three Formula six last time on Snaffou, the temperance movement
swept America. Every abolitionist was a teetotal Mabel Walker. Willebrandt
was hired to lead prohibition enforcement.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
There's one way it can be done, get at the
source of supply.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
And much of prohibition enforcement falls strangely to the US
Treasury Department, which.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
Is another way of saying we're going to use it
for political payoffs.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
It's nineteen eighteen 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 He's sitting inside a combat tank
clattering across the bloody battlefield. His name George Cassidy, and
(02:08):
he's under attack. The tank rolls down a slope as
shells explode around it, and then it sinks into a
crater of mud. Its steel armor shields George and his
crew from the bright yellow bursts of artillery flame, but
it can't protect them from the mist that's engulfed the field.
(02:32):
World War one's most insidious weapon, mustard gas. 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,
(02:59):
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
(03:23):
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. 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
(03:45):
it the enemy? The door swings open, and thank god,
it's the Yanks. George is rescued, carried up out of
the crater in 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. In nineteen nineteen,
(04:09):
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
(04:31):
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. 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, Where the hell
(04:54):
can he get a drink 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.
(05:18):
I'm Ed Helms and this is Snaffo, 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.
Today we're riding shotgun with the bootleggers, because men like
(05:40):
George Cassidy didn't come home from the fight in France
just to take the new laws laying down. As Mabel
Walker Willebrandt became prohibitions champion, George Cassidy would become one
of its greatest defires, and the two sides they represented
were about to clash. In nineteen twenty two, two years
(06:19):
into Prohibition, Mabel Walker Willebrandt 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.
Little Mabel grew up crisscrossing the Great Plains in a
nine by twelve foot tent pitched in the fields of Kansas, Missouri,
(06:41):
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 alive. A little like that time my cub scout
(07:03):
trip got rained out, except I had a home to
go back to. That experience had quite an impact on
young Mabel.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
She was a very serious woman.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
You don't say, Daniel, okrint. She woke up every day.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
The first thing she did was taken an ice cold bath,
which gives an indication. I think of how tough she was.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Cold lunging 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. For starters,
(07:45):
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 three thousand in the nation's capital. But Mabel's
headaches extended well beyond the metropolises. Of the Northeast. Also
(08:07):
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
eighteen hundreds, when traders slid their flasks of liquor into
(08:28):
their boots. During Prohibition, bootlegging became a household term banks
in no small part to the notorious Georgia syndicate, the
Savannah Four. Their leader was a guy named Willie Harr.
Willie owned and controlled a fleet of ships that transported
liquor from Scotland and France to another British territory, the Bahamas.
(08:49):
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 Harr didn't exactly
keep a low profile. His nick name 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.
(09:11):
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 Willy Harr's ring had judges politicians,
and it turns out prohibition agents on its payroll, and
(09:34):
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 Harror would
have a future run in with Mabel. Put a pin
in that for a second. But as brazen as Horror
in the Savannah four might have been, the most brazen
bootlegger of all was operating right under Mabel's nose, which
(10:00):
brings us back to good old George Cassidy.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
On the ship coming back, they had a poll about
who was in favor of prohibition, and out of the
two thousand, five hundred guys on the troop carrier, only
ninety eight wanted prohibition.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
After George got off the ship from France, he headed
home to Virginia, and he had plenty of stories for
his pals.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
He was just so damn gregarious.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
That's Fred Cassidy, George's son.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
George party then style.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
He was a dapper dude. If you ever saw him
in his Irish War Veterans' National Commander's uniform, you would
have thought he was a general of the most powerful
army in the world or something.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
George also had a signature greenfelt 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,
(11:14):
which made it hard for him to find work. Before
the war, George had been a brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
When he came back, he couldn't pass their physical to
get rehired.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
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,
(11:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
He liked to imbibe. Everybody around my dad liked to imbibe.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Which isn't a surprise given George was from the moonshining
capital of the world.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
There was a ton of moonshining going on in Virginia.
A lot of the Virginia farmers have their stills out
in a discrete.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Area 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
(12:41):
prohibition agents under Mabel Walker Willebrandt a tall order in
a place like Franklin County, Virginia, nestled in the beautiful
Blue Ridge Mountains, where ninety nine out of every hundred
people were connected to the moonshine business. One agent reported
back to DC on the pointlessness of even bothering the rests.
Speaker 5 (13:01):
I'm sorry to report that at this time it is
almost impossible to get a conviction.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
In any case.
Speaker 5 (13:08):
Juries are in sympathy with the bootlegger and the moonshiner.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
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 fiance.
Speaker 5 (13:31):
It looks to me like the moonshine business is going
to be pretty good. Some of us want to get
in on the ground floor. At least we want to
get in there in time to lay in us alive
for future consumption.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
That's thirty four 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 ship liquor from
his neighborhood to money drinkers across DC felt like a
(14:04):
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 orders were
flowing one way, and George kept the moonshine flowing the other.
(14:28):
George's lifeline was becoming a gold mine because George's clients, well,
they were the kind of people who liked to meet
at the Hotel Varnum in Washington, d C. The Varnum's
a grand old hotel at the corner of C Street
in New Jersey Avenue, a meeting place. Outside, George sees
(14:50):
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 for his next delivery,
George grabs two bags out of his trunk, one in
each hand. George walks along New Jersey Avenue, nodding and
smiling to passers by. He was the friendly sort. George
(15:13):
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
(15:35):
where members of Congress have their offices. Stepping into the
House Office building, George gives a nod to the security
fellaws at the door, and with his bags full of booze,
walks right in. That's right. Among the buyers for George's
top quality of Virginia hooch are the nation's lawmakers. His
(15:57):
clientele are powerful men of every political party and persuasion.
You see, George isn't just any bootlegger. He's become the
go to bootlegger for Congress. And Congress well they're pretty thirsty. Now.
Mabel's not blind to this. She makes regular visits to
(16:19):
the Capitol. Sometimes she even sits in the gallery of
the Senate Chamber room to hear the nation's lawmakers present
their plans.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
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
(16:47):
are persistent violators of the law.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
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.
Speaker 6 (17:20):
The early twentieth century is a uniquely poisonous time for
a number of reasons.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
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.
Speaker 6 (17:41):
We're seeing the rise of industrial chemistry, and there's a
telluge 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 chemistry,
figuring out that they can take all of these poisonous
substances that occur in nature and recreate the mental.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Laboratory 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. No no, no, no, Beaker.
I told you never to talk to me like that,
because I can't understand it. That's a little shout out
to my eighties kids out there. Point is, products of
(18:26):
rapidly advancing chemistry were everywhere in pharmacies, doctors' offices, grocery stores, kitchens,
and of course also in bars, where speakeasy back rooms
were starting to look a lot more like chemistry labs.
The reason classy clubs were hiring actual chemists to make
(18:46):
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. This is the prohibition, you know,
the razzle dazzle of the flappers under the electric lights,
(19:06):
where the big band served up bouncy rhythms and the
bartenders served up potent cocktails. At least that's the front room.
But the back room it was all chemistry.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Baby.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
Hello, I'm here to interview for the chemist position.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
I require one dollars payment. Oh, wise guy, A, so
you want your patrons dead?
Speaker 5 (19:42):
I'll take you to the bus.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
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 and plenty of New York
neighborhoods back alley liquor was flowing just as freely, But
no lab coated expert with a safety checklist was looking
(20:08):
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.
Speaker 6 (20:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
You could get your smoke in the back of drug
stores 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 grizzly stuff.
There was also the infamous ginger jake.
Speaker 6 (20:55):
You see ginger Jake, which was another formula genda by
bliggers that actually mimics the symptoms of Parkinson's. Or you
see the cocktail called d Rail in which they were
siphoning off some of the industrial alcohols from the railroads
and serving it up in drinks.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
These drinks could kill during one stretch over a few months.
Debts 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 stenseled
with the word poison on them.
Speaker 6 (21:33):
This acceptance of risk that came with prohibition at these
levels is kind of horrifying, but it was there, and
it was real.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
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 intoxic. These back room chemists were clearly breaking the law,
but a lot of them actually saw themselves as humanitarians.
(22:05):
Every time they caught a dangerous tocsin and a gallon
of hooch and kept it out of a drinker's mouth, Well,
what'd you get.
Speaker 6 (22:12):
That under the seat?
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Can you believe it? It's still half full. 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?
Speaker 4 (22:30):
New York repealed its version of the amendment in nineteen
twenty two, so from that point forward, New York officially
was not supporting prohibition.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
So yeah, under the eighteenth 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 going to do any
cracking down. New York cops weren't going to be making
any arrest and even if they did, New York judges
weren't going to throw the book at any club owners.
(23:05):
Better a 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 derail.
(23:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Bobby, just believe of worries on the whole move and.
Speaker 6 (23:44):
World may go dry.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Her dad made as well.
Speaker 6 (23:48):
As they left the old sales to the bootlegger.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Daughter down in Washington. When news reached the office of
the Department of Justice that the Big Apple was flipping
on off prohibition, Mabel Walker Willebrant was you guessed it pissed.
(24:21):
A Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn, I can picture our pal
Alexandra 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 Whiteman Band,
is buzzing in the background. Gettler's smoking a stogie as
he scans baseball box scores from the morning paper, knowing
(24:42):
Hew 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 also brought to his work at Bellevue. When
(25:02):
a new mystery arrived at his doorstep. He couldn't stand
the idea of a poisoner 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. In nineteen
(25:29):
twenty two, 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
(25:49):
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 quote
dead from poison. Gettler reviews the report. The police on
(26:12):
the scene had suspected suicide, but there was no corroborating
evidence of any kind in the apartment. Gettler 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,
(26:32):
cyanide was used in World War One 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. Gettler's sure cyanide is the cause of death,
(26:55):
even though he hadn't found any signs that 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 Spryan's cyanide
gas around the apartment. They realized the dead couple hadn't
(27:18):
swallowed cyanide, they had inhaled it. Case closed, but Getler's
work isn't quite done.
Speaker 6 (27:28):
Gettler 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.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
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, and they
(28:01):
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 Corner who preceded him.
Their office at Bellevue was still a ramshackle quote unquote
country club. All the labs new equipment was still paid
for by Norris himself. Norris and Getler were working around
(28:23):
the clock, but they sure weren't making bootlegger chemist money.
Gettler was making three thousand bucks a year, which today
would be equivalent to a fifty five thousand dollars salary
in Brooklyn. No wonder he lived with his in laws.
So as poisons in the air were becoming more sophisticated,
the case load of the Medical Examiner's Office was getting
(28:45):
bigger and in nineteen twenty two, one particular case caught
their eye, the case of Robert Doyle. Doyle was a
veteran of World War One, like the tanker turned bootlegger
George Cassidy, and like so many of them who came
back from Europe, Doyle found jobs were scarce in his
hometown Boston, so he left his wife and daughter and
(29:08):
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.
(29:28):
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
(29:50):
didn't know who to trust, He didn't know whose libations
might be toxic, but he bought a drink anyway. One night,
neighbors in and 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,
(30:13):
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 Gray's Anatomy episode where you'd hear the
heartbeat monitor beeping until it slowly fades and flatlines. But
(30:36):
this is the nineteen twenties. There's nothing quite that fancy yet.
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 Gettler. Now it was up to Getler
(31:02):
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. Gettler knew about all the brain power
in advanced chemistry that was going into making industrial alcohol
drinkable and not kill you. In theory, the supply was
(31:22):
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, d c. To Toledo, Ohio.
This was proof people like Robert Doyle weren't dying simply
because of their own reckless thirst for alcohol. No, these
(31:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:57):
Harry Doherty, the Attorney General who was the immediate boss
to Mabel Willebrandt, he was a a drunk and be corrupt.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
One of the craziest stories here man like an incredibly
successful defense attorney becomes the biggest bootlegger ever.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
The fact that there were only twenty six hundred prohibitionations
covering the entire Canadian border, of the Mexican border and
both coasts It's Ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment and
Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's
executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo,
Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl
Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Nevin Kalapoly,
(32:44):
Albert Chen and Carl Nellis, with additional writing and story
editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from
Stephen wood. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Our story
editor is nicki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Callapoly
and a kimmedy A. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our
creative executive is Brett Harris, Editing, music and sound design
(33:06):
by Ben Chug Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley
Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. The music by
Dan Rosatto. The role of Mabel Walker willa Brandt was
played by Carrie Bische. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel
Welsh and Ben Rizak.
Host
Ed Helms
Popular Podcasts
Boysober
Have you ever wondered what life might be like if you stopped worrying about being wanted, and focused on understanding what you actually want? That was the question Hope Woodard asked herself after a string of situationships inspired her to take a break from sex and dating. She went "boysober," a personal concept that sparked a global movement among women looking to prioritize themselves over men. Now, Hope is looking to expand the ways we explore our relationship to relationships. Taking a bold, unfiltered look into modern love, romance, and self-discovery, Boysober will dive into messy stories about dating, sex, love, friendship, and breaking generational patterns—all with humor, vulnerability, and a fresh perspective.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com