Wholesale Liquor dealer Van Pickerill played duel roles when statewide prohibition descended on Evansville, Indiana, first as a perpetrator of schemes to get around the law and second as the star witness against a bootlegging ring led by the city’s police chief. For coming clean he was attacked in court by the attorney for the police chief with a torrent of ugly names and accusations. Nonetheless Pickerill appears to have walked away from the criminal proceedings a free man and able to launch a new life.
Indiana, a state that had been reliably “wet,” in 1906 passed a local option prohibitionary law. That act did not still the drumbeat for altogether banning the making and sales of alcohol. In 1918 the Indiana Legislature passed a statewide liquor ban and the governor signed. The law took effect on April 12, 1919.
Political pushback against the “dry” law in Evansville led to the re-election of Mayor Benjamin Bosse, shown left. Bosse, in turn, appointed as chief of police a previously demoted police officer and crony, Edgar Schmitt, right. The newly minted Chief announced purchase of a sleek speedboat, similar to the one shown below, ostensibly to halt smuggling of booze over the Ohio River from “wet” Henderson, Kentucky, a distance of just over eleven miles.
The sleek vessel, named the Fanola, ran up and down the river, sparking press stories of thrilling chases. Strangely, however, no arrests were made. In reality the Fanola had a far different purpose. With a green light from Mayor Bosse the craft was bootlegging illegal liquor from Kentucky and stashing it in the police station, shown here.
The new “dry” law dictated a short window of just one week for Evansville liquor dealers to get rid of their stocks or face their destruction and loss. Pickerill, aware of this deadline, as early as November 1917 began purchasing on-hand whiskey from affected dealers who were shutting down. Just ten days before the April 18, 1918, deadline, Van Pickerill sold his Evansville liquor store and moved his stocks and an enterprise he called the Mint Springs Distillery Company to Henderson.
Pickerill had been born in Custer, Breckinridge County, Kentucky, in 1879, the son of George W. and Julia Ray Pickerill. By 1910 he was recorded in Evansville directories living with a married older brother, Calvin D. Pickerill. Although I do not have Van’s picture, a description of him exists in a WW II draft registration form. At age 63 he was recorded as 5 feet, 8 inches tall, weighing 140 pounds with a ruddy complexion and “salt and pepper” hair.
In addition to running a wholesale and retail liquor business Pickerill claimed control of a distillery near Owensboro, Kentucky, known in federal parlance as RD#2, 2nd District. That distillery, built in 1874 on the Ohio River, was owned and operated by long series of well known Kentucky whiskey men, including Millett, Callahan, Monarch, Medley, and Meschendorf. Although the Pickerills likely purchased the whiskey there for their proprietary “Old Mint Springs” and “Father Time Pure Corn” whiskeys, I find no evidence of actual ownership.
Despite having moved their liquor to Henderson, the Pickerill brothers continued to live in Evansville. Both men became deeply involved in a major conspiracy by Evansville government officials and others to circumvent Indiana liquor laws. After the legal deadline Van Pickerill agreed to buy remaining stocks from Evansville liquor dealer Jack Hampton. Catching wind of the sale, Chief Schmitt got there first, confiscating the booze and adding it to the stash at police headquarters.
Apparently recognizing that acting alone was a losing proposition given involvement of city officials in the bootlegging, Pickerill became associated with the Schmitt-Bosse whiskey ring. Beginning in January 1919 he began paying Chief Schmitt $500 a week hush money to bring liquor into Evansville. A month later Pickerill coughed up another $1,000 to help Schmitt ostensibly bribe individuals in the sheriff’s office and clear the highway from Henderson and Evansville from surveillance by law enforcement. Later he would give the police chief $500 to vacation with his wife in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Vanderburgh County Sheriff Edgar Males and his deputies were not to be bribed. On February 25, 1918, they went into hiding along the Evansville docks. As Schmitt’s bootlegging Fanola docked and tied up, Sheriff Males and his men stepped out of the shadows. “Hello Sheriff,” greeted the boat’s mechanic. “What do you want down here?” Males’ response was short and stunning: “You’re under arrest,” directed to the police boat’s four crewmen. Search of the vessel revealed more than 100 cases of whiskey of whiskey aboard. The Evansville conspiracy had begun to erode.
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| The Booze-toting Hearse |
Meanwhile the Pickerills were having their own problems with honest lawmen. Seven weeks after the Fanola raid, the brothers attempted to bring in a stash of bootleg whiskey to the Henderson dock in a hearse, shown below, where the liquor was to be picked up by boat and brought to them via the river, They had calculated that the vehicle would not attract undue notice. They had not considered that a hearse being unloaded on a dock might be considered unusual. “Hearses as a rule, when loaded, do not stop at wharfs,” one Henderson policeman told the press. The officers took photographs and noified Sheriff Males. The liquor shipment was tracked via a loaded taxicab to the home of Calvin Pickerill. There deputies discovered 49 gallons of whiskey. Calvin was arrested and later fined $100 and given a one month jail sentence.
The Evansville conspirators had another major setback when the investigation was taken out of the Indiana courts and pursued at the Federal level. Although National Prohibition was still months off, the Webb-Kenyon Act, passed by Congress in 1913, had survived multiple court challenges and was in full force. The law made it a federal offense to export whiskey from a “wet” state into a “dry” one. The lead investigator was Lemuel Ertus “Ert" Slack. shown right, a smooth but hard-nosed U.S. attorney. (Slack later became mayor of Indianapolis.) A grand jury was empaneled under the watchful eye of Federal Judge A.B. Anderson.
Judge Anderson, left, gave no doubt to his stance: "A person cannot sit here in court like I have for several years hearing these cases unless he is a prohibitionist,…I am one and I am here to tell you I am in favor of prohibition, as it is the only way to have decent government. The saloonkeepers, by their action in the corruption of city officials sworn to do their duty, have compelled the citizens to bring on prohibition. "The cure of the thing is to cut it off at the very root and that is what prohibition does.”
Meanwhile Pickerill was increasingly concerned about his own role in the bootlegging conspiracy. He heard rumors that the judge was going to call a witness who would bring his name into the inquiry and asked a police co-conspirator to try to stop the informant. The effort failed. Knowing well his brother’s fate, Van made a feint to get out of liquor trafficking by buying an Evansville hardware store, shown below. He renamed it the Van Pickerill Hardware Company. The move considerably alarmed the bootlegging cabal. Chief Schmitt and Mayor Bosse paid a visit to Pickerill and, according to a report, “tried some tactics” to insure his silence.
My guess is that by that time, Van had decided to “come clean.” In 1912 at age 33 he had married Mary E. Walsh, a local Evansville woman. The couple would have two sons, Van F., born in 1904 and James Frederick “Jay” born in 1906. The thought of a conviction and federal prison, away from family, must have been terrifying to Pickerill. He began to meet quietly with U.S. Attorney Slack.
Pickerill became the prosecution’s “star witness” against the conspiracy. It is not evident that he testified in open court, although he gave a detailed a formal deposition. All traces of what Pickerill revealed to authorities and a grand jury somehow have disappeared. It is clear, however, that he disclosed names, dates and illegal activities in considerable detail.
During the June 1920 trial the defendants attempted to make Pickerill the culprit. Police Chief Schmitt’s attorney, Thomas Duncan of Evansville, charged that Pickerill had been the mastermind of the illegal liquor trafficking, referring to him as a “moral leper,” “serpent,” and “arch conspirator. Evansville would never be decent as long as the Pickerills were free to walk about the city, Duncan admonished the grand jury. Those who had implicated the police chief, he said, were “the lower scum of society.”
Duncan’s bombast had no effect. The jurors found Edgar Schmitt guilty on all counts of importing liquor from Henderson into Indiana, a clear violation of the Webb-Kenyon Act. Judge Anderson sentenced the police chief to two years in the federal prison in Atlanta and fined him $2,000 and court costs. Of the 67 defendants, Schmitt’s punishment was the most severe. Of those charged and sentenced, 62 pled guilty and five others were found guilty. Of an additional 11 accused of being implicated, two had fled arrest and not been found. Nine others were discharged by the judge. Pickerill appears to have walked away a free man. Despite accusations that Mayor Bosse had received bootleg whiskey worth thousands, he was not indicted. Two years later Bosse died in office at 47 years old, a victim of lobar pneumonia.
One of Pickerill’s first moves after the trial was to sell the hardware business and building he had purchased in his futile attempt to disguise himself as a legitimate businessman. The structure, however, continued to be called the Pickerill Building. Despite any animosity they might have encountered in Evansville from the friends and family of those convicted, the Pickerills continued to live there. With his brother Calvin working as a salesman, Van opened an Evansville music store, replacing booze with Beethoven, Bach and Brahms.
Apparently tiring of Evansville and the music business, Pickerill in 1933 moved to Springfield, Illinois. Under the name Van Pickerill & Sons, for a short time he became a gasoline wholesaler and distributor. The liquor business, however, continued to have a hold on him. With the end of National Prohibition in 1934, Pickerill went to work as a local sales representative for the legendary “Pappy” Van Winkle of the Stitzel-Weller Distillery in Louisville, below. A decade later, with his sons, Van F. and James “Jay,” Pickerill opened his own wholesale liquor house. The business rapidly found success in Springfield and Pickerill gained a reputation as a leader in the liquor trade, becoming a co-founder of the National Wine and Spirits Association.
Van Pickerill died in Springfield in May 1956 at the age of 76 and was buried in Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery, Block 31. His monument and gravestone are shown below. He had been preceded in death by son Van F., killed in a 1952 auto accident. Continuing under the name Van Pickerill & Sons, son Jay guided the fortunes of the liquor house with notable success until his death at 63 in 1983. A former president of the National Wine & Spirits Assn., Jay in 1981 received Time Magazine’s “Distinguished Wholesaler Award.”
Thinking about the story sketched here, I wonder when the Pickerill clan got together in later days if they ever talked at length about the moment Van Pickerill decided to “come clean” about Evansville’s dirty business and what that fateful decision had meant for him and his family.
Note: A more complete recitation of the corruption that characterized Evansville in the early 20th Century is contained in a 2022 book by R. Erick Jones,called “Wide Open Evansville.” A local boy, Author Jones also has put a considerable amount of relevant material on the Internet, including a timeline of the conspiracy, from which some of this post was created. For more information on Pappy Van Winkle, see my post of November 22, 2014.
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