00:00:02
On Christmas Eve in 1926, the New York Times reported that the shops were crowded. There were more
00:00:08
visitors than usual for the season. And at Bellevue Hospital, limousines had delivered hundreds of gifts for the
00:00:16
patients from the Astor family. And dozens of trucks had arrived full of trees. The newspaper reported that there was,
00:00:25
quote, good cheer at Bellevue. And then, a man came running into the emergency room.
00:00:33
And he's screaming because he believes that Santa Claus has been chasing him for blocks with a baseball bat.
00:00:44
Not long after that, he died. And then another person arrived in the emergency room.
00:00:50
And then another. People are they're struggling to breathe. They cannot see very well.
00:00:59
They're acutely nauseated. They're suffering from terrible headaches. And many of them just collapse. [music] They
00:01:07
simply collapse on the spot and go into convulsions. This is journalist Deborah Blum.
00:01:14
>> [music] >> Hallucinations were were common to this, you know, what I'm going to call this
00:01:20
sort of outbreak. So this was different than [music] than what they'd seen at the hospital before.
00:01:26
Absolutely right. I want to say within that first night, they saw more than two dozen people within several days. It's
00:01:37
tripled. And about a third of those people are dead by the time we get past [music]
00:01:45
Christmas. This started happening in emergency rooms around the city. You know, the numbers start ratcheting
00:01:53
up um in really a remarkable way. And the people come in to emergency rooms around the city. Or, and this is
00:02:05
the other thing that you start to see happening at this time, you start just finding bodies in the street.
00:02:13
By New Year's Day, the refrigerators in Bellevue's morgue were full. And bodies were lined up in the
00:02:19
hallways. Over the next weeks and months, people kept dying. The same thing was happening across the
00:02:28
country. And it was happening because of a plan created by the US government. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
00:02:47
>> [music] >> Eight years earlier, a doctor named Charles Norris and a [music] forensic
00:02:53
chemist named Alexander Gettler had begun to worry that a huge problem was coming.
00:03:00
Charles Norris started seeing the early signs when he began working as the first
00:03:05
official chief medical examiner of New York City >> [music] >> in 1918. Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler had
00:03:13
[music] started noticing reports coming in about people dying after a sudden onset of blindness and then coma.
00:03:22
Both symptoms of having ingested something called wood alcohol. Unlike the alcohol that we normally
00:03:29
drink, which is made up of something called ethanol, wood alcohol, or methanol, can be made by distilling wood.
00:03:38
And with wood alcohol, which has a different chemical formula, what happens when you drink it is that instead of
00:03:45
metabolizing it away to really harmless compounds, our body metabolizes wood alcohol
00:03:53
in a very different way to two very toxic compounds, one of which is formic acid and one of which is
00:04:02
formaldehyde. And one of the really interesting things, if you're drinking wood alcohol
00:04:09
or methanol rather than ethanol, um is that it tastes just the same. You get the same current sort of buzz to
00:04:19
it. Um that buzz disappears faster with wood alcohol. You're going to start feeling
00:04:25
sick faster with wood alcohol, but that's going to take a few hours. You're in this period in which if you think
00:04:33
you're just drinking, you know, the regular good stuff and you're not, you're actually your body is beginning
00:04:41
to metabolize this into some very bad things. And you are really going to start at that point feeling
00:04:48
not entirely in control. Two teaspoons of undiluted wood alcohol, or methanol, can make you go blind.
00:04:57
And as little as an eighth of a cup can kill you. And about 1918, the government is like
00:05:04
sending up warning bonfires everywhere that they're going to make alcohol illegal to drink. And the American
00:05:12
people start figuring out ways that they can ensure that they still have alcohol
00:05:17
at hand. And so, people start setting up little, you know, [snorts] apparatus or stills or ways to ferment,
00:05:28
you know, organic material in their houses. They have backyard stills. They have basement stills. And to make the
00:05:36
alcohol, I'm in New York City. I'm not exactly running out to Nebraska to, you know, harvest a little few golden waves
00:05:43
of grain. I'm going to use the organic material at hand. So, what's that going to be? I could start with, if I have,
00:05:53
you know, a garden, I can distill my garden. But a lot of times people were distilling what they had at hand. And
00:06:00
sometimes it was their furniture. Sometimes it was their shoes. Sometimes they were sneaking into
00:06:05
Central Park and breaking off a few branches and bringing home leaves. They actually
00:06:12
weren't fully informed about just how dangerous this is. They just knew they could make something that would give
00:06:18
them a buzz. So you started seeing the scattering of deaths related to these, you know, home distilling operations
00:06:28
putting whatever into them. Shoes? Yes. They actually I mean, because think about it. It's leather.
00:06:36
It's an organic material. People distill their shoes. And that says something [laughter]
00:06:40
to me about how much they were determined to drink no matter what. What did Alexander Gettler and Charles
00:06:47
Norris think about this coming prohibition? Oh, they were completely against it. And in fact, Gettler was
00:06:55
publishing sort of warning statements in scientific journals in 1918 saying, this is a really bad idea.
00:07:05
People are going to die. Um and and the country is putting itself at risk by doing this. And they never
00:07:13
left that platform. Both of them from the beginning said the people who are going to be most at risk
00:07:19
are poor people without power. And that really mattered to both of them. I mean,
00:07:24
Norris came from a wealthy family, the Norrises who founded Norristown, Pennsylvania. In fact, but Gettler, you
00:07:31
know, was an immigrant. His parents were Hungarian immigrants. And he had [snorts] put himself through, you know,
00:07:38
his chemistry degree by working on a a night ferry. So you see this also infusing their
00:07:44
sense of outrage that this is a program that is going to most harm people who have no voice, little power, and little
00:07:52
money. The night before prohibition went into effect in 1920, there were cocktail parties all around
00:07:59
New York. People dressed up like they were going to a funeral with black top hats and
00:08:05
veils and drank in rooms draped in black fabric with coffins to collect empty bottles.
00:08:14
A lot of people went out and got drunk. >> [music] [music] >> We'll be right back.
00:08:25
To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Before prohibition went into effect, it
00:08:41
was reported that some towns sold their jails. They believed that without alcohol,
00:08:47
their citizens wouldn't commit any more crimes. Chewing gum and grape juice manufacturers predicted a jump in sales.
00:08:56
And the Salvation Army opened bars that served buttermilk. Theaters expected big crowds of former
00:09:02
drinkers looking for something else to do. But after prohibition began on January
00:09:10
17th, 1920, people just kept drinking. Where does the alcohol come from? Well, some of it, like I said, is is home
00:09:21
brew. Um so you have, you know, you have people doing their best to do that. You
00:09:25
have sort of small-scale criminal enterprises making, you know, large they have larger stills.
00:09:35
Um and they distribute their illegal alcohol to illegal bars or speakeasies. Some of these were closets at the back
00:09:46
of stores. So, um but you have these really small, you know, operations quite often brewing up
00:09:55
whiskies that are dangerous. A lot of people got creative to get around the rules of prohibition.
00:10:04
In Oklahoma [music] City one year, a man stumbled into a hospital. He was barely able to walk.
00:10:10
>> [music] >> He told the doctor that he'd strained himself working on a car and had felt
00:10:15
[music] a tingling in his calves. Then he lost control of his legs [music] below the knee.
00:10:21
In some ways, it looked like polio. But the patient didn't have >> [music] >> any of the other symptoms, like fever
00:10:29
and difficulty swallowing. Later that day, [music] another man came in with the same strange paralysis.
00:10:37
By the end [music] of the day, three more patients with the same symptoms had arrived at the hospital.
00:10:43
One of them was a podiatrist and told the doctor that he thought [music] he'd caught this from his patients.
00:10:50
Over the last few days, 65 of them had come to his office with the same symptoms.
00:10:55
He gave the doctor a list. The doctor started interviewing the patients. What was happening didn't seem to be an
00:11:03
infectious disease. >> [music] >> No children had been affected and very few women.
00:11:09
But when the doctor asked the patients if they took any medicine, they all said they took something called
00:11:15
[music] Jamaican ginger, which was usually just called Jake. Jake was an elixir that was supposed to
00:11:23
help with stomach aches. It had a high alcohol content, but it was legal to sell during prohibition, as
00:11:30
long as it contained a certain amount of a very bitter solid material in it, which tasted [music] terrible.
00:11:37
But still, people drank it for the liquor. >> [music] >> Some pharmacists had a back room where
00:11:42
their customers could go drink it with a bottle of Coca-Cola to chase it down. [music]
00:11:48
Jake had been around for a while and no one had lost control of their legs. So doctors thought it must have been
00:11:54
contaminated with something new. Within days, other cities across the country started having outbreaks.
00:12:03
An investigator with the federal government's public health service started analyzing what was left in Jake
00:12:09
bottles. He discovered that they contained a kind of plasticizer, >> [music] >> which attacks the nervous system in the
00:12:17
same way ALS does. Bootleggers had added it to the Jamaican ginger drink, along with castor oil, in
00:12:24
place of the original solids, so that it would taste a little better and still pass a prohibition agent's inspection.
00:12:32
The condition it caused came to be known as Jake leg. There are at least a dozen blues songs
00:12:38
about it. It affected tens of thousands of people. At one point, a drink made with the
00:12:46
alcohol from antifreeze became popular with train hoppers. They called it derail because it got
00:12:53
people very drunk very quickly. It also killed people. And then you also see that the big
00:13:03
Actually, some of them weren't that big, but you know, sort of the criminal gangs
00:13:06
that existed became much bigger because there was so much money in trafficking with illegal alcohol. The Al Capones of
00:13:14
the 1920s, the Lucky Lucianos. And they do this in two ways. One is there's quite a trade in trying to
00:13:22
smuggle in real alcohol across the Canadian border, up from the Caribbean. Um most of that is good alcohol and that
00:13:32
goes to their wealthy clients. That doesn't go to the poor, they're drinking Sterno
00:13:36
and water. There was a cocktail in New York called smoke that was just a water stirred into Sterno.
00:13:43
Um and then the other thing they do is they start stealing industrial alcohol. Industrial alcohol was still being
00:13:51
manufactured. It was the stuff used in things like perfume and cleaning products.
00:13:58
And a lot of it was ethanol, which you could drink. But manufacturers had been adding
00:14:04
unpleasant or even toxic substances to it for years. The government required them to do this
00:14:12
denaturing process. If they didn't, [music] manufacturers would have to pay liquor
00:14:17
taxes. So you see these big criminal enterprises hiring their own chemists to try to detoxify the alcohol to the
00:14:28
best of their ability. They don't really care if it [music] is 100% good, it just
00:14:34
has to be good enough that, you know, not all their clients are dropping dead on the spot, right? And so the
00:14:40
bootlegger chemists are finding all these ways to pull these additives out of the industrial alcohol so that they
00:14:48
can repackage it and sell it and [music] they do that fairly successfully, I think. At
00:14:54
one point during prohibition, like the big I mean, we call them mafia now, but the big criminal gangs like Al Capones
00:15:03
were in total stealing about 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol a year, uh reconditioning it, as it
00:15:12
were, and then selling it, dying it or flavoring it and selling it as various, you know, faux whiskeys. I mean, one of
00:15:22
the things about prohibition is everything was whiskey, right? There was no wine and beer and soft stuff, right?
00:15:28
If you wanted to drink, you drank hard stuff. The bartenders at speakeasies covered up
00:15:34
the taste [music] by inventing new cocktails with strong flavors, like the Bee's Knees with honey and
00:15:40
lemon juice, or the Southside with lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves and seltzer.
00:15:48
One British visitor to New York wrote, "The speakeasies are a remarkable feature of the new American life.
00:15:55
Every time you go for a drink, there's adventure. You go to locked and chained doors.
00:16:01
Eyes are considering you through peepholes in the wooden walls. You sign your name in a book and receive
00:16:07
a mysterious-looking card with only a number on it. There may be a red signal light, which
00:16:12
can be operated from the door, in case of police demanding entrance." I was looking at one description of one
00:16:20
of the speakeasies in New York and they always had a band start to play songs about the police whenever they spotted
00:16:28
the government agencies in in the speakeasy itself. Uh some of the speakeasies would put stuffed animals at
00:16:37
the center of the tables and if the they saw the police, they'd put them under the table so that people knew. But they
00:16:44
would raid. They raided speakeasies all the time. A lot of customers went to jail.
00:16:50
One prohibition agent in New York who called himself the city's champion hootch hunter, came up with all kinds of
00:16:57
ways with his partner to get into speakeasies and collect evidence. One time, one of them jumped into cold
00:17:04
water and the other rushed him into a bar screaming that the man needed a drink before he froze to death.
00:17:11
One of them liked to carry around a barrel of pickles. He said, "Who'd ever think a fat man with pickles
00:17:17
was an agent?" When they arrested an ice cream vendor who sold gin out of his cart, they
00:17:23
disguised themselves as football players. They also pretended to be grave diggers,
00:17:28
fishermen, streetcar conductors, and one of them even pretended to be an opera singer.
00:17:34
He serenaded everyone in the speakeasy before he shut it down. And so they're like doing this sort of piecemeal
00:17:43
prosecution, but that what they weren't able to do was to get at the big centers of sort of
00:17:50
where the industrial alcohol was going and where it was being detoxified because that wasn't so easy to find. And
00:17:58
so even though you have all these showy well-publicized raids, you know, um pictures of people going to jail, uh
00:18:07
they actually weren't making that much of a dent, right? So this is really frustrating.
00:18:14
They're really pissed off. You see them starting to say things like, "You know, these people are choosing to
00:18:21
be criminals. And so since they're choosing to be criminals, we don't owe them any particular support." And so
00:18:31
they decide, since all of their, you know, on-the-ground, boots-on-the-ground enforcement isn't working, that what
00:18:39
they can do is use chemical enforcement to make alcohol so dangerous that they won't drink it.
00:18:49
The US government decided to poison industrial alcohol, which was, you know, the sort of base alcohol of prohibition
00:18:57
at this point. The government started experimenting with adding different substances [music]
00:19:04
that the bootlegger chemists might not be able to remove. And in the summer of 1926,
00:19:10
the New York Times reported that "It is admitted by prohibition [music] enforcement authorities that Washington
00:19:16
chemists are working on more deadly formulas to poison >> [music] >> or denature alcohol so that bootleggers
00:19:24
cannot renature it and thus make it potable." They tried adding all kinds of things,
00:19:31
including kerosene and mercury bichloride. But still the bootleggers chemists figured [music] out how to get them out.
00:19:40
But the government chemists realized fairly quickly that the one poison they can't get out of the alcohol, you know,
00:19:47
this sort of deliberately contaminated ethanol, is is methanol, wood alcohol, and
00:19:53
despite all their best efforts, they really can't get the methanol out into any meaningful amount. And so, in 1926,
00:20:04
the government actually comes up with a formula. It's actually called formula one.
00:20:09
And at that point, you know, the amount of methanol used in industrial alcohol is, you know, 1%, 2%.
00:20:18
It's really small. They ramp it up to formula one requires it being ramped up to 5 to 10%. And at that amount, it
00:20:27
becomes really, really, really poisonous. And the bootlegger chemists are not able to get it out. And the
00:20:35
bootleggers, they just put this on the market. We'll be right back. >> [music] >> By Christmas Eve 1926,
00:20:59
the industrial alcohol the government had poisoned had made its way into people's drinks.
00:21:05
And in New York City, people were showing up at Bellevue Hospital hallucinating, going blind, and dying.
00:21:13
And Norris and Gettler know these people are being killed by methanol, and [music]
00:21:19
they were really ticked off. >> [laughter] >> In [snorts] in the way I think that
00:21:25
people who are public health officials working in a city in which their job is to try to save lives, and the federal
00:21:34
government is taking lives. >> [music] >> I mean, eventually, they they just say
00:21:41
this outright. On December 28th, Charles Norris issued a public statement. The government knows it is not stopping
00:21:51
drinking by putting poison in alcohol. It knows what the bootleggers are doing with it. And yet [music] it continues
00:21:58
its poisoning process, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing
00:22:04
that poison. [music] Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with
00:22:10
the moral responsibility for the deaths that poison liquor causes. A lawyer for the Anti-Saloon League
00:22:18
issued a response and said that anyone who drank at a speakeasy was in the same category as the man who walks into a
00:22:25
drugstore, buys a bottle with a label on it marked poisonous, and drinks the contents.
00:22:32
He said that the government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable when the
00:22:39
Constitution prohibits it. The mayor of New York asked Charles Norris to review the alcohol deaths in
00:22:46
the city. When Norris and his staff analyzed bottles, every single one had wood alcohol.
00:22:54
Norris wrote in his report, "There is practically no pure whiskey available anywhere in the city,
00:23:01
and that there's actually no prohibition. All the people who drank before prohibition are drinking now, provided
00:23:09
they are still alive." This report pretty much says the US government is killing people.
00:23:17
>> [music] >> One Chicago Tribune editorial said, quote, "Normally, no American government would
00:23:24
[music] engage in such business. It would not and does not set a trap gun loaded with nails to catch [music] a
00:23:30
counterfeiter. It would not poison postage stamps to get a citizen known to be misusing the
00:23:36
mail. It is only in the curious [music] fanaticism of prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered
00:23:44
justified." >> [music] >> I think the government, or at least the people who are putting this policy in
00:23:50
place, >> [music] >> originally they thought, I think, that if they just announced that the
00:23:58
government was deliberately poisoning alcohol, people would say, "Oh, I'm not going to drink that. [music]
00:24:03
Why would I risk my life when I might be picking up more poisonous alcohol? I just won't drink." But but to be fair, I
00:24:11
don't think [music] they realized how many people were going to drink anyway. Now, you know, we're talking about uh
00:24:21
media ecosystem. How's this information getting out? The New York Times is covering it, but not everyone it can
00:24:27
afford a subscription to the New York Times. [music] And and, you know, you have a whole class of people who uh
00:24:34
actually can't afford a newspaper subscription. I think a lot of the people who died post this government poisoning
00:24:43
program were people who just didn't know how [music] dangerous it was. They that
00:24:49
information wasn't getting into their communities. They were just trying to get through their days. They were not,
00:24:58
you know, huddled around the radio or reading the warnings published in magazines or the newspapers of the day.
00:25:06
And there are communities that don't trust the government for very good reason. Um so, they also would have not
00:25:13
entirely believed everything they were hearing. [music] And finally, you know, the government, which wants you to quit
00:25:21
drinking, [music] announces that they've made alcohol more dangerous. Well, sure,
00:25:28
>> [music] >> right? Why wouldn't they try that on me? In 1928, Charles Norris issued a warning
00:25:36
[music] to New Yorkers that practically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic.
00:25:42
He did whatever he could to publicize what was happening. He announced every death from alcohol
00:25:48
poisoning. He gave interviews and wrote articles. In one, he wrote, "Our national casualty list for the year
00:25:56
from this one cause will outstrip the toll of the war. These are the first fruits of
00:26:02
prohibition. This is the price of our noble experiment in extermination." And you see some, you know, very strong
00:26:10
reactions, especially at the state level, from state politicians just saying that, you know, this has become
00:26:18
insane, right? You we just can't keep on murdering people. On December 19th, 1930, The New York
00:26:27
Times published an article with the headline, "Poison Alcohol Takes Large Toll."
00:26:33
It quoted the director of the Treasury Department's Bureau of Industrial Alcohol saying that they were receiving
00:26:39
reports of deaths in many parts of the country from poisonous alcohol, namely, [music] industrial alcohol
00:26:46
manufactured under government supervision. Then he announced [music] that they expected to eliminate wood
00:26:53
alcohol from industrial alcohols. I think that there were some folks who at the government level became less and
00:27:02
less comfortable with something that was increasingly being called murder by American newspapers.
00:27:10
And so, they still want to stop people from drinking, and so they started adding other compounds.
00:27:19
Um they did a whole lot of work with different formulas [music] to just make it smell bad and taste bad and try to
00:27:28
put people off it that way. So, they're still trying to do chemical enforcement,
00:27:32
but there's a kind of step back from the idea that, you know, the ultimate chemical enforcement is to make it so
00:27:38
poisonous that the drinkers die. Um the Treasury Department actually had a press
00:27:44
conference [music] and had reporters come in and try some of the, you [music] know, take take shot
00:27:51
glasses of some of the new formulas. You know, people have been drinking for longer than we know that people have
00:28:01
existed. So, to think that a government can just decide you can't drink anymore and that it won't
00:28:06
>> [laughter] >> Yes. That it will work is pretty naive. Agreed. Prohibition lasted 13 years.
00:28:15
>> [music] >> It ended at 5:32 p.m. on December 5th, 1933. >> [music] >> In New York, hotels started rolling bar
00:28:25
carts into lobbies. And Bloomingdale's department store >> [music] >> started selling bottles of port and
00:28:31
whiskey at the moment the news came on the radio. The line went down the [music] street.
00:28:46
>> [music] >> Criminal is created by Lauren Spor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
00:28:58
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lilly Clark,
00:29:04
[music] and Lena Sillison. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Somenetti.
00:29:09
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at
00:29:14
thisiscriminal.com, where we'll also have a link to Deborah Blum's book, The Poisoner's Handbook:
00:29:21
Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz [music] Age New York. You can sign up for our newsletter at
00:29:28
thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program,
00:29:35
Criminal [music] Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads
00:29:38
a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator
00:29:45
Lauren Spor [music] talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories
00:29:50
that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to
00:29:55
patreon.com/criminal. [music] We're on Facebook at this is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at
00:30:02
criminal_podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media
00:30:10
Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at [music] podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.