Foreword: Below are brief tales of three liquor dealers, each facing “dry” laws and regulations affecting the profitability of their enterprises. Each “whiskey man” took drastic steps to avoid the pressures of prohibition with results none of them would have anticipated.
Faced with a dismal financial future, Herman Eggers in 1912 from his Louisville Kentucky liquor house hatched a scheme to sell his whiskey to customers in Kentucky counties that had adopted local prohibition. He composed and sent a form letter to doctors and druggists in “dry” localities asking their help. In the letter Eggers pointed out that for medicinal purposes Kentucky law allowed licensed doctors and druggists to receive whiskey shipments in five gallons or less. Eggers explained: “There are a number of people in your neighborhood who would like to receive goods but cannot order within the state as the laws prevent shipments….If you will permit those who order to have goods shipped to you, without expense to you, it will be an accommodation to both of us.”
Eggers assured his potential collaborators that his proposal was within Kentucky law and urged them to write him with the names of friends who might be interested in shipments. As a reward for their trouble in handling his liquor, cooperating doctors and druggists would be given one free gallon of whiskey for every ten gallons he shipped. “I do not know if this would be legal,” Eggers acknowledged. (It wasn’t.)
Among the physicians who received Eggers’ letter was Dr. Thomas C. Holloway, an eminent gynecologist of Lexington, Kentucky, a town that intermittently had gone dry. Dr. Holloway was caustic in his response to Eggers: “As I have no intention of engaging in the whiskey business, I do not see what right you had to presume I would be interested in your bootlegging proposition.” The outraged physician went further by sending the exchange of letters to the Kentucky Medical Journal, the state’s leading journal for doctors and druggists. They published it under the headline “Forum” on September 1, 1912.
With Eggers’ scheme exposed, its utility was gone. Even if tempted initially, the “weaker elements” of the medical fraternity, to use Holloway’s term, likely found themselves walking away from Egger’s proposition once it was widely known to other doctors and likely revealed to law enforcement officials. Moreover, Eggers had been exposed as someone willing to conspire to evade the law.
It must have seemed like the perfect scheme. With accomplices, Ralph Parilla, a Youngstown, Ohio, a liquor dealer restricted by WWI prohibitionary laws in 1919 planned to remove barrels of whiskey that he owned from a government-guarded warehouse under the pretext of exporting them to Canada. He first would extract the whiskey, substitute water, and truck the barrels over the border. The whiskey he could bottle and sell. Then things went terribly, terribly awry.
At first the scheme seemed to go well. With the help of two accomplices, Parilla brought the barrels from the warehouse to a farm he owned on the outskirts of Youngstown. There they syphoned off the whiskey into smaller containers through small holes in the barrels that could be covered and concealed once the water had been substituted. Then things began to unravel.
The process of transporting the whiskey from the warehouse had raised suspicions and was communicated to Fred Counts, a federal agent for prohibition enforcement. Counts spent 24 hours gathering evidence and the next day went looking for Parilla, fingered by others as the “mastermind.” On the farm Counts found the empty barrels, caught up with Parilla, arrested him and took him to jail.
The gambit proved costly to Parilla who immediately forfeited a $30,000 bond to the Feds. He also was required to post $10,000 personal bond to get out of jail, the sum total equivalent to $1 million today. On trial in federal court, Parilla and his co-conspirators were found guilty but appealed the decision on technical grounds to the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. That court proved equally unsympathetic and upheld their convictions and fines.
In September 1920, Harry Sands, a federal agent in charge of enforcing National Prohibition laws, announced that a raid on a Perth Amboy, New Jersey, warehouse had yielded the largest stash of bootleg liquor ever seized by authorities anywhere in America. Among those arrested was a 46-year-old local liquor dealer, accused of overseeing transport and sale of the illicit booze. Shown left, he was Sigmund “Sig” Spitzer.
With co-conspirator Frank Gold, Spitzer formed a warehousing firm owning a large storage facility in Perth Amboy. Working by night with employees they filled it with cases and barrels of whiskey and other alcohol. If anyone got too inquisitive they were told the stash was for “medicinal purposes,” since liquor could still be sold with a prescription in drug stores. Connecting with bootleggers in Trenton, New Jersey, Spitzer and Gold hatched an elaborate scheme to bribe key Prohibition agents to overlook liquor supplies identified by a placard “of a certain type” that would be pasted on barrels and cases. The Feds were on to the game, however, and watching the warehouse closely, one step ahead of the bootleggers.
On September 20, 1920, Spitzer, overseeing activities in Gold’s warehouse, supervised as 250 cases and 25 barrels of whiskey were loaded on a truck and dispatched to Trenton. Confederates were waiting there to take the liquor to a shadowy purchaser in Philadelphia, a man known only as Mr. Bond. Bond, as it was soon discovered, was Harry Sands, the top Prohibition enforcement agent on the East Coast. In Philadelphia the Trenton bootleggers were promptly arrested.
At the same time federal agents swooped down on the Perth Amboy warehouse where they confiscated an additional 962 cases and 118 barrels, amounting to 10,756 gallons of whiskey worth an estimated $162,150, equivalent to more than$2 million today. It was the biggest bust of a bootlegging scheme in the country, according to Sands. Spitzer, identified as secretary-treasurer of the warehouse company, was arrested with Gold and others and held on $5,000 bond. The record does not disclose the ultimate disposition but I assume Spitzer and his colleagues went to jail.
*****
Oldtimers will remember “The Shadow” radio drama and his intonation of the same mantra each episode: “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay.” That was a lesson Eggers, Parilla and Spitzer learned the hard way.
Note: More complete posts on each of these “whiskey men” may be found elsewhere on this website: Herman Eggers, October 20, 2018; Ralph Parilla, May 26, 2016; and Sig Spitzer, October 24, 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment