Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 1, 1994 TAG: 9401030284
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LON WAGNER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For 30 years, Dickie Adkins slipped in and out of the hollows and farms of Franklin County without getting caught doing his job: making moonshine.
But in April, Adkins' luck - and the 9,600-gallon illegal distillery he was operating - ran dry. Alcoholic Beverage Control agents, Blue Ridge Parkway rangers and Floyd County deputies caught Adkins and two of his cohorts up to their elbows in corn mash - a sweet, syrupy, beer-like concoction that would have been whiskey in a few hours.
"We was getting ready to cap two pots, and I seen 'em coming down through the field," Adkins recalled recently in an interview from the Floyd County Jail. "I hollered to the boys. . . . I told 'em, `Y'all get the hell away from here,' but we was done surrounded."
That afternoon, after posting bond, Adkins was the spitting image of the carefree moonshiner, a mountain man just carrying on an Appalachian tradition. With the TV cameras following, Adkins smiled and said, "C'mon boys, let's go get a beer."
More than 100 years after Irish and Scotch-Irish immigrants fled their homelands and brought with them the know-how to cook homemade whiskey, the practice thrives in this part of the state.
During the past two years, ABC agents have broken up 29 illegal distilleries in Franklin County alone, and the agency admits there's no way of telling how many continue to operate.
A few people make small quantities of moonshine for their own use or for friends. Some mix in apples or peaches to produce brandy. But for many, moonshining is no cottage industry: It's big business.
Figures provided by moonshiners and ABC agents suggest the illegal whiskey industry centered in Franklin County is a multimillion-dollar trade.
A rule of thumb in the moonshine business is that it costs $1,000 per black pot - an 800-gallon hand-crafted fermenting tank - to set up a distillery. By that standard, an average-size eight-pot distillery costs about $8,000 to establish.
Each run of those eight pots would pump out 960 gallons of moonshine, worth $7.50 apiece if bought at the site. The still would turn a profit after its second batch was sold.
The still where Adkins was arrested had 12 pots, large by Floyd County standards. But the Adkins' still wasn't the largest discovered this year.
Paul Henson, 30, was convicted on four felony charges in November for running the largest illegal distillery ever discovered in Virginia. That Pittsylvania County distillery, just over the Franklin County line, had 36 black-pot stills. It could have brought in at least $1.4 million annually and evaded $4.2 million in state and federal taxes.
The federal government alleges that Henson was shifting profits from a $7 million marijuana-smuggling ring into the moonshine operation. Henson will be tried on the drug charges this spring.
"This is business, and this is big business. It's millions of dollars of fraud," assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Mott said during Henson's moonshine trial.
Trying to debunk the stereotype of moonshiners as harmless, small-time operators, Mott told the jury: "Andy Henson is no Snuffy Smith stealing chickens to support Aunt Loweezy and cousin Jughaid."
Agents were stunned last January when they found the 28,000-gallon distillery on Henson's property.
They shook their heads over its size. It was 50 percent larger than the previous Virginia record, a 24-pot distillery uncovered in the Endicott section of Franklin County in 1972.
But they marveled over Henson's apparent connections in the moonshine pipeline.
"You don't make liquor on spec," says Jimmy Beheler, the ABC special agent in charge of a four-man task force set up in Franklin County to stanch the flow of illegal whiskey. "They didn't put 36 black-pot stills in that building just because they liked making liquor. That liquor was already sold. He had it contracted out."
Selling moonshine is not like selling blue jeans.
A blue jean manufacturer might have a pretty good idea of how many pairs he can sell before making them. But if he produces more than he can sell, he can always put the overstock in a warehouse.
A bootlegger doesn't want overstock. The reason is obvious - the felony charge for making untaxed liquor carries a one- to five-year sentence, and the misdemeanor charge for possessing it carries up to a 12-month sentence. So if he has things calculated right, all the whiskey is spoken for before he makes it.
Henson's operation was elaborate. He built a 90-foot-by-45-foot barn to cover the distillery and installed fans on each end to blow hot air out of the building.
He ran electrical wires from a house on the property to the still and put electric pumps in a pond to transfer the water needed to the distillery. He chopped down pine trees and floated them in the pond to cover the pumps.
But in another way, Henson wasn't so clever.
"What was unique about this, he was putting all his eggs in one basket," says Jay Calhoun, the Pittsylvania County ABC agent who got the tip about Henson's operation.
"A guy might have a total of 28 or 32 pots, but he's going to spread his investment around," Calhoun says. "You take a guy like this, if he goes down he's going to lose his market."
Bootleggers and the distributors who buy their moonshine are known for their paranoia, so tapping into the illegal whiskey pipeline is tricky.
"Hell, they don't even trust each other," Beheler said. "I mean, we'll raid a still, then we'll raid one the next week; and nine times out of ten they'll blame it on the guy we raided the previous week."
Franklin is the only county in Virginia with an ABC task force solely charged with tracking down moonshiners. In fact, many of the distilleries raided in neighboring Pittsylvania, Henry and Floyd counties are run by Franklin County men.
Beheler estimates there are 20 to 25 people in Franklin County whose sole income comes from selling illegal whiskey. Those people finance the distilleries that guys like Adkins set up and run.
Some are strictly money men and never get close to a distillery; others know how to set up a still and where the moonshine winds up. But when the risk of the operation is at its peak - distilling, bottling and transporting the liquor - they stand aside and let the still hands do their job.
Beheler says he can identify many of these financiers, but they're sheltered enough that he can't get to them.
"You got the people living in a $150,000 to $200,000 home, and they claim $6,000 a year in taxes and they're `farmers,' " Beheler says, "Farmers . . . hell. They're so deep in liquor they couldn't farm if they wanted to."
Others familiar with the business - people who would not talk on the record - say Beheler and other ABC agents overstate both the impact and extent of the moonshine business to justify their jobs. Those people say just a handful of money men are behind the county's illegal liquor business.
If that is the case, those few people bankroll an extensive illegal whiskey network.
The moonshine hierarchy
Not everyone in the moonshine business gets rich. Some just get by.
If Dickie Adkins worked for a legal industry, he'd be an assembly line worker. In the illegal liquor business, Adkins is known as a "still hand."
Still hands do the grunt work: they lug dozens of 50-pound bags of sugar through the woods to the still site. They tend hundreds of gallons of bubbling mash in stifling 100-degree summer heat and numbing winter cold.
They hammer together metal and boards to make the distilling pots - and if the wrong person spots them they stand handcuffed and watch ABC agents take an ax to the distillery.
The still hands are paid according to how much they produce; if they get caught, they don't get paid.
"You make a good living if you have luck," Adkins says. "Can't make any money in jail. The law had run me eight or 10 other times, but this is the first time I been caught."
Though Adkins is one of the rare moonshiners who will talk publicly about the trade, more than two dozen still hands know how to mix the ingredients - known as "mashing in" a still.
There were 32 arrests in 1992 and 1993 during 20 still raids, but that includes a few men who were arrested twice. At nine other raids, the ABC moved in after the still operators had fled.
Adkins claims he learned how to mash in a still from his father when he was just 10 years old. He says he doesn't mind talking about moonshining, because the authorities already know about him.
"They know what I've done all my life, but I've been run and got away," Adkins says. "I've never had no problem with the law; they have a job to do and they do it fair.
"I've probably worked a public job six months in my life."
To Adkins, a "public job" means a legitimate one. Adkins and other still hands can get paid for their "non-public" job a couple of different ways. They can collect $3 for each case of whiskey they produce, or take in $60 per pot. That might seem like a paltry salary, but a still hand can run two pots every six hours, which translates to $20 tax-free an hour.
A hard-working still hand who can run two pots a day, five days a week, can pull in $600. That means $2,400 a month, and a yearly take of $28,800 - no payroll deductions, no taxes. That, of course, is under ideal conditions; each time the ABC cuts up a still, a moonshiner's production and income halts for weeks.
Even when he's working, Adkins says, moonshining is not a glamorous trade.
"People think, `You make a thousand, two thousand dollars,' but it's hard work - it's hell making liquor out in the wintertime; it's hard in the summertime," Adkins says. "I've made good money, but I've throwed it away."
Covering their tracks
Those who don't throw it away hide it. Bootleggers register their pickups in their wives' or girlfriends' names, so if the authorities catch them with a truck full of liquor they don't have to forfeit the truck.
And moonshiners sometimes take elaborate steps to mask their identities. Floyd County Sheriff Tom Higgins says he has worked moonshine cases in which a bootlegger went to a family after one of its members died and paid for the dead person's Social Security card.
Franklin County moonshiners fan out up and down the Eastern Seaboard, delivering cases - six one-gallon cartons - of potent illegal whiskey to middlemen in Richmond, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. The going rate in those East Coast cities is about $65 per case.
Beheler says the whiskey runner goes to a big city, delivers dozens of cases to one or two distributors, then heads home.
"They're not going to go around like a milk truck, and stop here and drop off a case and a half and stop there and drop off a case," Beheler says. "They're going to go right to where they need to be, unload it and come back."
Several times a year, these delivery men turn into embarrassing ambassadors for Franklin County.
In January 1992, Rocky Mount moonshiner William Gray "Dee" Stanley was arrested in a truck near Lexington on Interstate 81. The 1992 Ford pickup he was driving was equipped with heavy duty springs, so the truck would not appear to sag from the weight of a heavy load. Stanley was hauling 364 gallons of moonshine, which at $65 per case in a Northern city would have sold for $4,000.
Eight months later, ABC agents found the same truck when they searched Stanley's garage - this time loaded with 367 gallons of moonshine. On neither occasion was the truck registered to Stanley.
Getting back to work
Generally, state laws and the Franklin County courts recognize the modest, workhorse role still hands play in the moonshine business. Franklin County prosecutor Cliff Hapgood says many first-time moonshiners charged with simple possession of untaxed whiskey spend no time in jail. A first-timer charged with manufacturing illegal whiskey, on average, spends six months in jail and pays a $500 fine.
"It wouldn't make much sense for the guy who's stirring the mash and jugging it to be fined half a million dollars," Hapgood says. "The people caught at the still, it's not their still, it's not their money.
"I'm not trying to glamorize it, but it's a lot of hard work."
Adkins, 46, is paying for a life in the moonshine business.
"I like to make it, and I like to drink what I make," Adkins says. The nearly 100-proof, unaged alcohol has messed up his stomach, and he says he has liver problems.
Four days before Christmas, Adkins got out of jail. He says it will take a while for him to have a still set up and running again, but he'll do it - because Dickie Adkins makes his living making liquor.
"I'm getting too old for it," Adkins admits. "Got me a little grandbaby - got to save me some money for her one of these days."
\ 1992-93 FRANKLIN COUNTY RAIDS\ ILLEGAL LIQUOR DISTILLERIES\ \ Distilleries raided: 29\ \ 800-gallon pots: 150\ Liquor seized: 3,737 gallons\ \ Mash dumped: 98,200 gallons\ \ Arrests: 32\ Vehicles seized: nine\ \ Projected yearly output: 337,500 gallons Potential revenue: Assuming 100 gallons per pot, 45 batches per distillery per year, the potential production for two years was 675,000 gallons. At $7.50 per gallon wholesale, that whiskey would have brought in slightly more than $5 million.\ Source: Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control task force
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by CNB