Gentlemen Bootleggers by Bryce T. Bauer

Author:Bryce T. Bauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2014-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

Lauretta Irlbeck in 1929, the year she married Templeton rye kingpin Joe Irlbeck. Her father was grocer and telephonesystem operator Frank Greteman. Courtesy of Elaine Schwaller

Unusually, Wilson decided to let the cases proceed against the bootleggers in county court, under state laws. But this time, he didn’t have to worry about a jury nullifying the law: each of the men pleaded guilty. Judge R. L. McCord, who’d presided over the failed trial against Will Heires, assessed them a fine far harsher than usual—$400—and sentenced each of them to three months in jail.

Though the sentences were tougher than those typically given to Templeton’s bootleggers, they could’ve been a lot worse. A few days before, President Calvin Coolidge, in one of his last acts before turning over the Oval Office to Herbert Hoover, had signed one of the more audacious—and last major—pieces of legislation pushed through by the drys. The Increased Penalties Act, or Jones Law as it was popularly known, did just what its name purported to do: it toughened the punishment for convicted bootleggers. Misdemeanor violations of the Eighteenth Amendment were made felonies. The maximum sentences for first-time lawbreakers were increased tenfold to up to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000. Voters, who’d never really intended the election of 1928 to be taken as a sign that they supported tenacious enforcement of Prohibition, were generally appalled at the law’s harshness, but it stayed on the books until repeal.

Despite Wilson’s success, however, his victory was short lived. The same afternoon of the raid, before the kegs had even been loaded in the truck to be hauled up to the Carroll County courthouse, two bootleggers the raiders had missed were busy running their still, producing Templeton rye to fill the void left by the seized contraband. Worse, Wilson again failed to catch Irlbeck, or even gather any evidence against him. In the year 1929, Irlbeck, in fact, seemed stronger than ever.

The summer of the year before, Irlbeck had even gone to his lawyer in Audubon, former county attorney L. Dee Mallonee, to see if something could be done about the injunction explicitly barring him from bootlegging that was brought against him following his arrest after the raid on John Schultes’s farm. To get it lifted, he needed approval from several county officials, including the sheriff and the new county attorney, both of whom intended to show bootleggers that Audubon was not as welcoming as its neighbor to the north by coming down hard on Irlbeck to make an example out of him. Predictably, they at first balked at the idea, fully aware that the river of rye whiskey flowing out of Templeton had not ebbed a drop since the arrest. “Sign that? Hell no,” one of them told Irlbeck’s lawyer. “I know he went back to operating a still the day he got out.”

At first, Mallonee didn’t know what to say, so he just passed their opposition along to Irlbeck. But Irlbeck saw an opening: they apparently believed he

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.