My Beer Was Bootleg
-But Good
Charlie Wilson said that the way to be a success was to
make a superior product. He made a giant out of
General Motors that way. Henry Ford said it before Wil-
son, and his business became pretty gigantic, too.
I had the same idea when I went into the bootleg beer
business. I didn't become a giant in the racket, but you
might say I was one of the biggest midgets who ever
scoffed at the Volstead Law.
Matt Kolb's beer was awful. One time it would be as
flat as pond water with a green scum on it, and the next
batch would have enough gas to blow up the Empire
State. It could be as bitter as biting into a green persim-
mon, or as sweet as the smell of a Greek candy kitchen.
In only one characteristic was it consistent. All of it was
bad—nasty bad, usually.
I set out to make a superior product, and the first per-
son I consulted was a chemist who worked for the City
of Chicago, counting the germs in test tubes of sewage
water and such delicate tasks. I asked him how to makegood beer and, after giving me a lot of long words about
enzymes and such, he said:
"Good water, you want first of all. Fine pure water.
Water is the big thing in all good beverages, from soda
pop on up."
I told him to go find the right kind of water, and he
did. He tested water all over northern Illinois. Samples from
my home town of Des Plaines were pretty good. There was
better stuff in a creek out at St. Charles. But the elixir of
all beer-base water was from an artesian well near Roselle,
he said.
I built a wort plant out there and put my brother Eddie,
who years later came through with the $2,500 while I was
on the loose, in charge.
Wort was an entirely legal product. It is used for making
rye bread. Before I was through, I was producing enough
wort for all the bread baked in a dozen states. It was a
big enterprise, and I paid fifteen cents tax on every gallon
I made.
Into the wort I persuaded Matt to put the finest malt,
white flakes of corn, rice and hops, domestic and im-
ported, that we could buy. And I went to the American
Brewmasters' Institute and hired the best man they could
recommend.
"Matt, we're not going to need any salesmen," I told
my partner. "We're going to put out the best beer in
America. The saloonkeepers will come to us begging to
buy it."
To make beer, all we needed was to put the wort into
vats, under proper temperature control, add brewer's yeast
and water. What happened then was like introducing a
pretty, eager girl to a handsome lad and handing them the
key to a motel room. Nature took care of the rest.
The mixture stood in open vats for twelve days to fer-
ment while the brewmaster pottered around sniffing, sip-
ping and testing the stuff. If it didn't come up to the highest
standards, he dumped it. That was my order. We never
peddled a poor-quality barrel of beer.
After twelve days, the brewmaster dropped the tempera-
ture to thirty degrees and let the brew mellow. The last
step was putting it into barrels, with carbolic gas carbona-
tion added as it went in. Chill it, tap it and fill up a foam-
ing glass—my, my, it was fine beer!
This was an illegal operation, in violation of a federal
law which everyone regarded with the same fondness as a
swift kick with a Number 11 boot. Clergymen, bankers,
mayors, U.S. senators, newspaper publishers, blue-nose re-
formers and the guy in the corner grocery all drank our
beer. They enjoyed it, and I was proud.
In addition to being outside the law, our enterprise was
a big one. At peak production, we had ten fermenting
plants, each one a small brewery in itself. It was too big
a gamble to have the complete works in one place, which
the federal prohibition agents might raid and chop to
ruins with axes.
Each little brewery had to have refrigeration and an ice-
making machine for proper temperature control. Every vat
and other piece of equipment had to be laboratory-clean
or else the beer would be rancid nasty. I had $50,000 tied
up in the business before the first stein of beer gushed out
of a tap.
It was an efficient, well-run business; not a matter of
messing around in basements or bathtubs to run up a few
gallons or hundred gallons of sickening stuff.
Barrels were a big trouble, with leaks springing to re-
lease the carbonation and, sometimes, the beer itself. So
we set up our own cooperage in Schiller Park, hiring all
union-labor craftsmen to handle that end. It paid off big,
because saloonkeepers who bought from us weren't carping
about "leakers" from our deliveries.
I bought a half dozen tank trucks, and had them painted
like those used by the Texaco Oil Company, to haul bulk
beer. The trucks could load 100 gallons a minute, with
the engine throttled down and operating a pump from a
six-inch feed.
At the top of the season—beer really was a six-months-
a-year proposition, with many people turning to rotgut
whiskey during cold weather—we peddled 1,000 barrels a
week. The price was $55 a barrel to the saloon owners, and
it doesn't take much arithmetic to figure our weekly gross.
As for net profit, the brew cost us $4.50 a barrel to pro-
duce, using the finest ingredients, plus wort tax and de-
livery expense. Water is cheap, and there's a lot of it in
beer.
We sold beer to about 200 roadhouses, night clubs and
saloons, all outside of Chicago, to the west and northwest
of the city. Our boundaries were from the city line west to
Elgin and from North Avenue to the Lake County, Illinois
line. We could have expanded, but Matt and I never were
hogs for money.
One question always comes up when people talk with
me about bootlegging. How much graft did we pay? How
many policemen and politicians did we have to bribe, or
put on our payroll?
The payoff, surprisingly, wasn't big.
First and foremost, Matt and I were working the suburbs
and Cook County towns. We didn't have to fill the pockets
of money-hungry Chicago cops. The small-town police
were happy with a ham, a turkey or a $20 bill at Christ-
mas time.
Our business was scattered over a lot of mileage. A bar-
rel here and a barrel there. Nobody realized that Matt and
I were grossing about $1,000,000 a year from beer alone.
That's right, a million dollars. So the politicians and the
fuzz didn't expect big handouts.
The federal agents stuck pretty well to big towns like
Chicago, and our local law was mostly the Cook County
Highway Patrol. I figured out an angle to keep the roads
open for us, with top priority for our beer trucks.
Whenever we had a job open as truck driver or what
not, I hired a cop away from the highway patrol to fill it.
The arrangement was a splendid one.
We paid no man less than $100 a week, which was
more than triple what the patrol guys got for longer hours.
There soon was a waiting list of applicant cops to drive our
trucks. A cop looking for a good-paying job wouldn't in-
terfere with us any more than he would pinch a former
fellow-cop working for us.
As for the politicians, the payoff for them was largely
in beer. A small town mayor or justice of the peace would
be as happy as a juvenile delinquent with a pile of rocks
and an empty greenhouse for a target if we rolled a barrel
of brew up on his back porch every few months.
The big-time boys at the trough wanted more, to be sure.
Tony Cermak was an example. He was then chairman of
the Cook County Board of Commissioners which made
him a powerhouse in the county outside of Chicago, where
our beer trucks rolled. Later he became mayor of Chicago,
and was killed by a bullet fired by a nut as he stood be-
side Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami.
Tony put on a big picnic, to raise political campaign
funds, every summer in the Forest Preserves. My contri-
bution would be 100 barrels of beer. The cost of the beer
didn't lose me any sleep, but Tony's boys made a good
thing by selling it at a buck a mug.
I built up good will that way, like Gene O'Connor with
his wheelbarrow at Stateville.
Beer bought you more sunshine friends than money did,
I realized, so we set up a bottling plant, and it wasn't
cheap. The bottle washer alone cost $4,500, I recall, and
the pasteurizer was even more expensive.
We bottled 750 cases, or 18,000 bottles, of brew a week.
That was all the pasteurizer would handle. And we never
sold so much as one bottle of that beer. It all went for
friendship, jolly friendship. A case of that stuff, and it was
good, meant more to some pols and cops than a $500
bill.
"Try a bottle of this," the guy lucky enough to have some
of it would say to his big shot friends on a Saturday night.
"Finest beer in America. Roger Toiihy sent it along as a
token of his friendship. Fine fellow, Rog."
I lived quietly with my family during those big money
years. I put a workshop, office and bar in my basement.
There was a playhouse for the kids in the backyard. My
wife got along well with our neighbors. There wasn't any
stigma to selling beer. It was a great public service, most
people thought—and the U.S. government finally agreed,
you'll recall.
My hobby was making fishing rods from split bamboo
in my shop, along with lures and baits. Fishing, from my
days along the Denver & Rio Grande as a telegrapher, was
my sport. Northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, Canada, Florida,
and Montauk Point, Long Island, for weakfish and blue-
fish, were my vacation spots. I hunted, too, and was a good
shot. Which reminds me. . . .
One afternoon in a Wisconsin lake, I hooked a thirty-
pound muskie. I tried working him up to the boat, but he
fought like Jack Dempsey in the last round of a tough
bout. The fish pulled away, broke water, danced on his
tail and shook his head. My reel jammed and left me with
only one thing to do.
I took a .25 revolver from my pocket, kept there for the
purpose, and shot the muskie through the head.
In the boat with me was an Indian guide, Joe St. Ger-
maine, who was better than a green hand with a gun. He
was amazed when I boated the fish and showed him the
bullet hole. "Nobody can shoot that good," he said. "You
were lucky."
We had drunk a dozen bottles of beer in the boat, and
now he started throwing the empties out on the choppy
waves twenty-five or thirty feet away. I sat there in the
rocking boat and smashed all twelve bottles with thirteen
shots. Which brings up, to me, an important point:
If I had been aiming to hit, would I have missed that old
guard in the Stateville tower, from a range of thirty-three
feet, on the day of the escape? Nonsense! He was a lot
bigger target than a muskie or a beer bottle, the range was
shorter and the firing conditions were ideal.
But those two shots through the tower window had a
big part, back in a ridiculous trial in 1943, in getting me
tagged for an additional 199 years for aiding and abet-
ting. . . .
Getting back to the late '20s, Matt and I had another
bonanza going, in addition to beer. Ah, those lovely slot
machines!
They were against the law, technically, but they stood
openly and invitingly in practically every roadhouse, drug
store, saloon, gas station and grocery in outlying Cook
County. The only places you wouldn't find them were in
churches, schools, hospitals, post offices and public libraries.
My partner and I had 225 of them in choice locations,
and the only way to make money faster is to have a license
to counterfeit the stuff.
The businessman in whose place the machine was set
up got forty per cent of the coins. Matt and I split the
remaining sixty per cent. My cut would add up to about
twenty dollars a week for each machine, or $4,500 weekly,
and the costs of upkeep and replacement of machines were
far from high.
I met Al Capone about a half dozen times back then,
mostly in Florida on fishing trips. He offered to let me use
his yacht or stay in his big house, surrounded by a wall
about as thick as Stateville's, on Palm Island in Biscayne
Bay, between Miami and Miami Beach. I didn't accept.
Capone wasn't my kind of person. People around him—
or against him—were all the time getting murdered. He
surrounded himself with gunsels. That wasn't right in my
let-everybody-make-a-living way of thinking. I never car-
ried a gun, except on my hunting or muskie-fishing trips.
And I had a rule that none of my employees could tote
arms.
Back in about 1927, I had two business deals with Ca-
pone. The prohibs had knocked off a couple of his Chi-
cago breweries and he had trouble getting enough beer
for his Chicago and suburban Cicero speakeasies. His
brother, Ralph, was in charge of beer for the syndicate, but
Al himself telephoned me and asked me to sell him five
hundred barrels.
We had a surplus at the time, so I agreed. I told him to
send his trucks, with five hundred empties, out to our Schil-
ler Park cooperage. We exchanged five hundred barrels of
good beer—a lot better than he ever made—for his empties.
I gave him a discount price of $37.50 a barrel because of
the big order.
The brew must have sold well. He called me a few days
later and asked for three hundred more. I said okay and
told him that Tuesday—the day I collected from all my
customers and paid off my help—would be the day I
wanted my money.
On Monday, he called me with a beef. "Fifty of those
barrels were leakers," he said. "I'll pay you for 750.
Okay?"
I laughed at him. I knew there couldn't be so much as
one leaker. Not with the crew of craftsmen I had in the
cooperage. They tested every barrel under powerful air
pressure before it was filled. Al was trying to chisel me out
of fifty barrels, and I let him know that I knew what his
pitch was.
"You owe me for eight hundred," I said, "and I expect
to get paid for eight hundred."
His voice was a little lame as he replied: "Well, the
boys told me there were fifty leakers. I'll check on it."
Check on it? Pfui! He knew what he owed me and he paid
it—$30,000 in cash. He could afford to have paid three
times as much, with the prices his speakeasy clipjoints
were getting in Chicago. If there had been even one leaker
among those eight hundred barrels, I would have gotten a
new crew in the cooperage.
He called me again in a week or so and asked to buy
another five hundred barrels. I told him no, that my regu-
lar customers were taking all my output. That wasn't ex-
actly true, but what was the use of needling him by saying
I didn't do business with weasels?