Ed Helms

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that Prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Second Date Update.

Second date update.

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that Prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition. It's no secret that banning alcohol didn't stop people from living it up in the 1920s.

In fact, you might even say it backfired spectacularly. I'm Ed Helms and on Season 3 of my podcast, Snafu, we're taking you back to the 1920s and the tale of Formula 6. Because what you probably don't know about Prohibition is that American citizens were dying in massive numbers due to poisoned liquor. And all along, an unlikely duo was trying desperately to stop the corruption behind it.

So how did Prohibitions war on alcohol go so off the rails that the government wound up poisoning its own people? To find out, listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition ist synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers and of course failure. I'm Ed Helms and on Season 3 of my podcast Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that Prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

In der Tat, man könnte sogar sagen, dass es spektakulär zurückgefallen ist. Ich bin Ed Helms und in der Saison 3 meiner Podcast-Snafu bringen wir Sie zurück in die 1920er-Jahre und die Geschichte von Formel 6. Denn was Sie wahrscheinlich nicht wissen über die Prohibition, ist, dass amerikanische Bürger in riesigen Nummern durch gebratenes Likor sterben.

Und die ganze Zeit war ein unmögliches Duo, das versuchte, die Korruption hinterher zu stoppen. So how did Prohibitions war on alcohol go so off the rails that the government wound up poisoning its own people? To find out, listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

I, of course, was drawn to the LSD story.

I, of course, was drawn to the LSD story.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey there, Ed Helms here, host of Snafu, your favorite podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. It's the 1920s, Prohibition is in full swing, and a lot of people are mysteriously dying? Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker-Willibrand is becoming increasingly desperate in forcing Prohibition. She was a lone warrior. I mean, how could Mabel not be feeling the pressure?

Her bosses are drunks, her agents are incompetent, even Congress is full of hypocrites. So if Mabel is going to succeed in laying down the law, she needs to make the consequences for drinking hurt a lot more. Which she does. Arguably a little too well. Find out more on Season 3, Episode 4 of Snafu Formula 6.

Listen and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey there, Ed Helms here, host of Snafu, your favorite podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. It's the 1920s, Prohibition is in full swing, and a lot of people are mysteriously dying? Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker-Willibrand is becoming increasingly desperate in forcing Prohibition. She was a lone warrior. I mean, how could Mabel not be feeling the pressure?

Her bosses are drunks, her agents are incompetent, even Congress is full of hypocrites. So if Mabel is going to succeed in laying down the law, she needs to make the consequences for drinking hurt a lot more. Which she does. Arguably a little too well. Find out more on Season 3, Episode 4 of Snafu Formula 6.

Listen and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you. Thank you.

Hey there, Ed Helms here, host of Snafu, your favorite podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. It's the 1920s, Prohibition is in full swing, and a lot of people are mysteriously dying? Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker-Willibrand is becoming increasingly desperate in forcing Prohibition. She was a lone warrior. I mean, how could Mabel not be feeling the pressure?

Hey there, Ed Helms here, host of Snafu, your favorite podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. It's the 1920s, Prohibition is in full swing, and a lot of people are mysteriously dying? Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker-Willibrand is becoming increasingly desperate in forcing Prohibition. She was a lone warrior. I mean, how could Mabel not be feeling the pressure?

Her bosses are drunks, her agents are incompetent, even Congress is full of hypocrites. So if Mabel is going to succeed in laying down the law, she needs to make the consequences for drinking hurt a lot more. Which she does. Arguably a little too well. Find out more on Season 3, Episode 4 of Snafu Formula 6.

Her bosses are drunks, her agents are incompetent, even Congress is full of hypocrites. So if Mabel is going to succeed in laying down the law, she needs to make the consequences for drinking hurt a lot more. Which she does. Arguably a little too well. Find out more on Season 3, Episode 4 of Snafu Formula 6.

Listen and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that Prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

So they asked me to audition for Subtle Sexuality, so I gave them a little followed by some and I sealed the deal with

Kelly gets to kind of erupt in this webisode series, but also Mindy Kaling does too. She's directing these.

Yeah. I'm really excited. This is going to be a great video.

So they already shot it?

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that Prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ha, ha.

But these founders today are much smarter about it. Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and, of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on Season 3 of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that Prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison.

Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

He's trying to attack prohibition itself. So Bacon brings up a case where drinkers in upstate New York had tapped into a vat of methanol and dropped dead. He points the finger at Duran. This is you. This is your fault. These people died because of Prohibition. Duran deflects.

Bacon's convinced these deaths came from industrial denaturants. Duran counters that the wood alcohol could have come from anywhere. These deaths by methanol aren't on him. In fact, since he's facing a congressman from New York, he pulls in the testimony of one famous New Yorker as evidence for his side. He brings in analysis from Alexander Gettler.

Now this moment is, for lack of a better word, bananas. Because as we know, if it weren't for Prohibition, no one would be breaking into industrial warehouses to drink aftershave ingredients. They could just walk down to the liquor store on the corner and pick up some gin.

For Duran to say deaths like this had, quote, no relation to the National Prohibition Act, it's just, well, it's an insult to anyone's basic intelligence.

To be clear, it's true in the case of these particular methanol deaths that Gettler's analysis showed they were killed by pure wood alcohol, not wood alcohol that was mixed into liquor. But Duran is using Gettler's judgment of this one case to deflect from Norris and Gettler's bigger analysis, that prohibition was causing people to turn to denatured alcohol and that it was poisoning them.

And by the way, James Duran knows what he's doing. See, behind the scenes, after the Christmas poisonings in 1926, Duran must have gotten a little nervous. Could those deaths actually be his fault? He wrote directly to the New York Health Commissioner and asked for the city's data on the deaths. The commish wrote back.

So Duran had it right there in black and white. The New York Health Commissioner made the damning connection denaturing alcohol was killing people. But back in the present, now sitting in front of Congress, Duran has the audacity to tell the committee that Gettler's work exonerated him. It was a bold strategy, but then Duran was never gonna just roll over.

So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q&A or dramatically read about a kitty cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance. Again, head to snafu-book.com to preorder the book and check out all the tour details and dates. Or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay, that's it. On with the chaos. This is Snafu Season 3, Formula 6.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but this is a show about screw-ups. Duran's gambit worked. Deny, evade, deflect. It's an old playbook. And Duran was a natural. It was practically a reflex for him.

And here's the real downer, Representative Bacon. He backed down. He asked a raft of questions. But at the key moment, when he could have asked some, you know, follow-ups, he just kind of wilted. The hearing moved on. Just imagine Duran wiping his forehead with a silk hanky and allowing himself a sly, satisfied smile.

No handcuffs, no trial, just a little chit-chat behind closed doors and a slick set of lies, and he was home free. I mean, that's so fracking insane. Do all the stuff we've talked about. Hurt and poison and kill so many people. And just walk away. The Prohibition Bureau was well aware that people were getting injured, even dying, from drinking industrial chemicals.

They knew the system in place to manage those chemicals was porous and corrupt. They knew it was getting out into bootleg liquor. They knew that denaturing industrial alcohol was not deterring people. And in fact, it was just killing them. The indifference to all of those deaths by Duran and the dries in Congress was negligent at best.

Personally, I'd go for cruel, reckless, and rooted in a callous disregard for human life. But even if Duran was able to smoothly lie his way out of this one moment of congressional accountability, not everyone was so easily fooled.

Duran might deny the link, but after the public outcry from Norris and Gettler's report, the American public was finally connecting the dots between national prohibition and people dying in their own towns and neighborhoods. And in 1930, they got a little more affirmation from a bootlegger in a green hat, George Cassidy.

As his case wound through the legal system, George made a connection, a reporter at the Washington Post. I imagine him chatting with folks as he walked in and out of the courtroom. George was a colorful character, and this was a high-profile bust. Some newshound was bound to catch him on a potty break.

So that meant when the verdict came down, and he was going to take the fall, and no one else was going to pay any price at all, George knew exactly what to do. He was ready to tell his story. So, as Garrett Peck says, he gave the Post their first scoop of the century.

That's right, six front page articles. Each morning, people around the country waited with bated breath for the next installment of old George's expose to land on newsstands. Will somebody please arrest me for bootlegging so I can get that kind of press?

Anyway, three weeks before people were set to cast their ballots in the 1930 midterms, a bombshell landed that made voters reconsider which box to check. On October 23, 1930, George wrote, I saw a side of Prohibition no one else has seen.

October 24th.

And on the 25th.

Previously on Snafu, Norris and Gettler finally got the nation's attention.

What's black and white and wet all over? Yeah, a wet newspaper doesn't sound particularly threatening, but with this story, they were torching the dries.

A good old D.C. scandal that couldn't have been more perfectly timed if you were a wet and gunning to kick Prohibition to the curb.

as Fred Cassidy says. That didn't take any prisoners. And neither did the Washington Post. They followed the George Cassidy stories with another series from Butts himself, with headlines like... Prohibition in the Senate.

Okay, they definitely went for the bare butts thing, and God bless them for it. But of course, exposing the hypocrisy of the dries wasn't the only factor in the election. Because in 1929... It was panic.

That November, the wets flooded the House, going from 76 seats to 146. Republican states like Ohio and Illinois and Kansas flung aside dry Republicans for wet Democrats. As for the man who helped push the tidal wave, George Cassidy was behind bars, locked away, serving his time. Well, sort of.

The Drys tried to shrug it off. You can't poison poison. But the backlash sent Mabel Walker-Willibrandt packing. Hoover had no use for her any longer. She was kind of an irrelevancy. Support for Prohibition was on the ropes.

He was handed an 18-month sentence at a jail about two blocks away from his house on Capitol Hill.

Ah, yes, the old George Remus treatment. A jail term fit for a king. King of the bootleggers, at least.

And remember Cassidy's little black book, replete with the contact information of each and every one of his customers, every politician who secretly solicited bootlegged liquor? Well, the Treasury Department got their hands on that little book, James Duran and his bosses. So what did they do with this comprehensive list of every fat cat and hypocrite in Washington?

Did Duran sneak into their offices and drip methanol into their whiskeys? Well, of course not, but at least they cracked down on them, right? Not a chance. In fact, they did the exact opposite. Every photocopied record of Cassidy's client list was tossed into a fire and burned. If George Cassidy got the treatment of a king, then the members of Congress were, I don't know, emperors?

The point is, even when it's clear an emperor has no clothes, in the American old boy crony system, he can always count on a James Duran to cover his ass. After the 1930s midterms, Prohibition was really on the ropes. Alexander Gettler and Charles Norris have spelled out the failures of the Prohibition Bureau's denaturing program.

Cassidy exposed the dry politicians for what they were, hypocrites getting sloshed. James Duran's crew, having failed miserably in their poisoning campaign, were totally flailing.

In 1931, Duran's chemists rolled out another new formula for denaturing alcohol.

It was like the government's heart just wasn't in the whole mass poisoning thing anymore. There were no more incendiary newspaper stories about new deadly formulas. Prohibition Bureau officials, the Treasury Department, they all simply quit talking about it.

They started quietly backing away from the crime scene with a nothing to see here shrug, as if the killing of thousands of Americans never happened. Debra spent years combing through reports from newspapers, medical examiners, insurance companies, and coroner offices, and came to her best estimate on the final body count.

In the early 1930s, support for the dry cause crumbled. The violence of liquor raids played a part. If you're keeping track, that's Richard Hart and the other agents like him. Corruption at every level of enforcement played a part, too. Big thanks to George Cassidy for dragging that one out into the open. And the outrage over the poisoning scheme?

That was a body blow to the support for Prohibition. Gettler's research and Norris's essay exposed just how callous, how morally indefensible Prohibition enforcement had become. By the time 1932 rolled around, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for president, declared that if elected, on day one of his presidency, taps were going to be wide open once again.

You hear that one guy hollering? I love that guy. If my beer mug had been sitting empty in the cabinet for 10 years, yeah, I'd be voting for that too.

On election night, 1932, Roosevelt won in a landslide.

As he addressed the nation, the banner behind him was adorned with his campaign slogan, Happy Days Are Here Again. The American people had spoken. It was closing time on Prohibition. The drinkers in Congress rushed to pass the 21st Amendment.

Bop the champagne, brewers could brew again, bars could serve again. And that means everything's going back to normal, right? Well, no. Prohibition had been an extremely violent mess. It had changed the American way of life. It hadn't stopped the drinking, but it had driven it underground, created black markets, destroyed legitimate businesses.

James Duran, prohibition commissioner, is seated at a long table. Spread out around him are accounting documents, charts, lists of warehouses across the country where industrial alcohol is stored. He's flanked by his staff. He's been pulled into a congressional budget hearing for 1930. It ain't the C-SPAN era, but you can practically see the sweat steaming up Duran's round glasses.

The pre-Prohibition saloons, those immigrant living rooms at the heart of working class neighborhoods, They never really came back. And of course, the real cost was in human lives. People, so many people, had been hurt and killed along the way. So you're probably wondering the same thing I'd been wondering the whole time. Was anyone actually going to answer for all of that?

The boys in Washington already knew exactly who to pin the blame on. Mabel Walker Willebrandt. As time went on, they made her the figurehead of everything that went wrong with prohibition enforcement. During her time as Assistant Attorney General, she had been the face of the law, even swapping burns with Al Smith on the campaign trail, right?

Not that we gotta feel sorry for her after everything she did. I mean, she gave a thumbs up to the KKK. You can't just brush right past that. But by pinning it all on her, they made Mabel a scapegoat for the worst abuses of the Prohibition Bureau. All of the blood spilled. The whole pile of corpses. They got dumped at Mabel's feet. Prohibition Portia. Her fault.

By making Mabel Walker Willebrandt the fall gal, everybody else got off scot-free. Take Duran himself. He weaseled out of accountability for the way he ran the Prohibition Bureau and covered up for Congress. Then he stepped down as commissioner in 1930 and went back behind the scenes. His behind-the-scenes position was, drumroll please, Commissioner of Industrial Alcohol.

Remember how the Prohibition Bureau got shifted over to the Department of Justice once Mabel was gone? Well, it was part of a big show by Congress to make it look like they were really changing things now. They passed the Prohibition Reorganization Act.

Not only did it send Prohibition Policing over to the DOJ, but in its place, the Treasury established a new bureau, the Bureau of Industrial Alcohol. Duran was the new bureau's first employee. Once a commissioner, always a commissioner, I guess. In other words, with Duran having burned Cassidy's black book, essentially covering Congress's ass, none of those guys were going to come after Duran.

But one year into the new job that's definitely not the same as the old job, Duran published his first annual report. It's big news. He's finally reversing course on the whole denaturing thing.

And sadly, that's as close as we get to an admission. It's like, yeah, the wood alcohol we were using was bad. It killed people, but we're stopping all that. And oh, look, check it out. It turns out we can actually come up with a non-toxic way of denaturing industrial alcohol. Who knew? Not sure I really trust the guy after, you know, everything. And now he's got to pass.

He's just passing the word along. Don't worry, y'all. That little poisoning snafu, that won't happen again. To add one more olive to this already extremely dirty martini of a career, I bet you can guess what Duran did when liquor became legal again. He became a lobbyist for the country's biggest distillers. And he set out to fight against government regulation of alcohol. God damn.

I mean, you remember his wife was a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She was the one who wrote that book saying it was bad to even cook with alcohol. I'm dying to know what she thought when old Honey Bun turned around and started chilling for big liquor. And he wasn't the only one. Which brings us for one last time back to Mabel Walker Willebrandt.

Stories have been swirling in the press about the Bureau's violence, its corruption, its cruel and casual approach to mass poisoning. Which means that when Duran sits down to talk about funding his agency, he finds himself in a defensive posture. Partway through, the congressman from New York, deliciously named Mr. Robert Bacon, decides to make Duran answer the kinds of questions he usually ducks.

We left her falling off the tightrope in Washington. But let's just say she was also able to make a nice soft landing because, as Terry Winter says... When Prohibition ended, she went to work for a wine company. It's like... Yeah, these people. In fact, what makes it even crazier is that Mabel started working for this wine company before Prohibition ended.

I mean, does anyone, anyone have a single atom of genuine conviction? It's just all so cynical. Not that Mabel made that her life's work either. She kept climbing from position to position. Eventually, she became a lawyer for two other interesting industries, the airlines and, oh wait, what's this? The movies. Hey, that's what I do.

Also, I gotta say, it's a little ironic that of all the people to comment on what went wrong with prohibition, it may have been Mabel herself who put it best.

Adios, Mabel. It wasn't all your fault. Well, that wasn't not your fault.

It started as a moral crusade, as a minority of hardliners fought to remake American life in their own squeaky clean image. A powerful political lobby turned it into a wedge issue. Congress made it a crime. It was a culture war that made it all the way to the Constitution. Does all of this feel a bit familiar to you? It should, because it's basically the world we still live in today.

Our political system is set up so that certain people benefit from nasty, unending political fights. For starters, take, well, lobbyists.

That's my friend Josh Graham-Lynn. He directs a bipartisan anti-corruption organization called Represent Us. And full disclosure, I do some work with them, too.

Look no further than Mabel Walker-Willibrandt and James Duran to see that this was a huge problem during Prohibition. To hear more about how it's still a problem today, keep an ear out for our bonus episode with Josh, coming very soon. And this revolving door for lobbyists, it's just one of a number of systemic problems in the way our government functions.

Most people in the 1920s didn't want prohibition. Sure, maybe they knew alcohol could hurt people, but they also had a sense that banning it outright was probably not the most sensible solution.

Well said, Paul. Let me reiterate that. Law is not how you change people's minds. I mean, think about the prohibitions we still live with today. Bans on abortion, bans on weed. We've only just overturned the ban on gay marriage.

Since the 1920s, when the temperance movement played on racist fears and gave guns to domestic terrorists, it feels like we've been caught in one culture war after another. When lobbyists get those issues written into law, we end up enforcing moral codes with some kind of kindergarten justice. But setting off a culture war is like taking a jackhammer to the foundations of your own house.

It just might bring your entire home crashing down around you.

Bacon presses him on whether or not the people in New York were killed by his formulas, the ones that pumped lethal toxins into the industrial alcohol supply. In other words, did he sacrifice these people on the altar of prohibition? Let me just say personally, I love this moment. It's like, yeah, we're finally going to get it all from the horse's mouth.

November 1933, New York City. The Waldorf Astoria is putting the finishing touches on three new bars. One of them, with blue and gold columns and a mirrored ceiling, is the jewel of the city. The Hotel New Yorker has purchased $100,000 worth of top shelf whiskey and is building out a new basement wine cellar to house the world's finest wines. All anyone knew anymore was bathtub gin.

The waiters at Lewis Sherry's on Park Avenue relearn the appropriate wines for each course. A hearty Barolo with your steak. Maybe a Chardonnay with your chicken cordon bleu. Requests for liquor licenses filed at New York City Hall are coming in at a rate of 1,000 a day. At Bloomingdale's on the Upper East Side, the line snakes out the door and around the corner.

Customers waiting for doors to open so they can snatch up bottles of imported scotch and wine. As for Charles Norris, well, the end of Prohibition is in sight, but he's still got plenty of work to do. He travels through New York, the waterfront, the Bowery, collecting data and writing down his observations for his annual report. The city is still far from perfect.

The Great Depression now brings its own litany of suffering to the people around him. But the destructive wake of prohibition is finally dissipating. As he passes the Gothic edifice of Bellevue, it's hard not to remember the worst days of the poisonings, when the hospital was surrounded by bodies.

I know we're back in the 1920s, but the drama of this moment, it's what I love about history. It's why we do this damn podcast. As Deborah Blum says.

That was the thick of Prohibition. But now, the piers are clear.

1933. Utah becomes the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment. That seals it. Prohibition is overturned. In New York, Bellevue Hospital makes an announcement, to little fanfare. The formation of a new department, Forensic Medicine. It's the first of its kind in the country. The head of the department will be Charles Norris, and the head of toxicology, Alexander Gettler.

In the next chapter of his career, Norris loved the stage and the microphone, relishing his position as the face of public service. Meanwhile, Gettler continued to live out his days, a private man in a public job. He was offered a chance to do a TV show on forensics, CSI before CSI, but that wasn't his style. He kept his head down, and he worked hard.

But he still couldn't avoid controversy altogether. In fact, according to his grandson Al, the family still remembers that one time Gettler's wife, Alice, dropped by the courtroom to see Gettler in action.

That threat brought home the gravity of Gettler's work to his family, but to Alexander, that was the cost of doing work that really mattered. After Prohibition, even more new poisons were entering daily life. Leaded gasoline, the newly discovered and highly toxic element thallium, sold as a rat poison but so dangerous it was eventually banned.

Not to mention an old poison in the air whose danger was just starting to emerge. Cigarette smoke. Alexander worked against all of these poisons. And in fact, Gettler is still celebrated today by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. They give an award in his name to toxicologists who develop new techniques for chemical analysis. And he wasn't alone.

So true, Deborah. With the screws finally being put to Duran, would citizens finally get answers for the deaths of their loved ones? Would Duran, or anyone else for that matter, finally be held accountable for the Treasury Department's deadly poisoning scheme? I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. This is Season 3, the story of Formula 6.

Because he launched a generation of forensic geniuses who followed in his footsteps. They went on to lead forensics labs from Long Island to Puerto Rico.

They were a special club. They were chemists and toxicologists dedicated to public health, public servants who made sure that we wouldn't accidentally poison ourselves in the pursuit of better living through chemistry. they carried on his legacy. They even called themselves the Gettler Boys.

Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company, in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino.

This episode was written by Carl Nellis and Albert Chin, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canney, and Kelsey Albright. Tori Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapali and Akimany Ekpo. Fact-checking by Charles Richter.

How prohibition's war on alcohol went so off the rails, the government wound up poisoning its own people. In our final episode, James Duran faces a reckoning, first in Congress and then for his career. Along the way, his Prohibition boys finally catch George Cassidy. But that slippery George has one more trick up his sleeve.

As the Great Depression pushes Prohibition off center stage, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler take stock. And so do we. In the U.S. Senate mailroom, a new clerk is sorting the day's incoming letters. It's the spring of 1930, another election year. There's plenty of mail flying in and out as senators coordinate their campaigns. But this new clerk can't stay focused on his work.

He keeps looking up, watching the flow of people coming into the building. He's got his eyes peeled for one thing in particular. He's looking for a green hat. He's looking for George Cassidy. As George's son says, So this guy had it out for dad, and he wanted him bad. The clerk job? It's a ruse. Just a cover.

The guy's name is Roger Butts, and he's a young prohibition agent on his first big assignment. He's just 20 years old, but he's been specially assigned to catch, and I quote, the man in the green hat. You gotta admit, your brand is strong when even the haters are using your handle. Duran's Prohibition Bureau is making one final play to bring him down.

The mailroom charade goes on for a while, but just scanning government offices for suspicious behavior isn't getting him anywhere. So Butts gets off his duff and takes action. He starts asking around.

Yep, according to his own testimony, Butts is, and I quote, in search of some whoopee. One of those W words spelled with an H. I love those. Whiskey. While. Whatever. Someone eventually obliges and introduces Butts to Cassidy two days later in the Senate stationary room. Butts squares George up and determines he matches the physical description he was given by the Prohibition Bureau.

But on this day, Cassidy isn't sporting his typical green hat. He's dressed to the nines in a blue suit, but his hat is tan. What a trickster! So Butts orders a fifth of gin. They shake hands. But Cassidy doesn't fall for the trap. Rather than deliver it to Butts personally, he passes the bottle off through a third party. No evidence. No gotcha. Butts tries again. And again.

But round after round, Cassidy is just a little too slick for him.

Finally, Butts decides he needs to take a different approach. He corners a staffer for a senator he knows is a customer of Cassidy's, and he reveals he's an undercover agent.

Suspicious or no, the man agreed to help Butts make the arrest. The staffer calls Cassidy to place an order. And George drives out to the parking lot of the Senate building to make the drop. Now, I don't know if George let his guard down or what. Maybe this particular staffer was a regular, someone he trusted. Regardless, to George, it was just a normal day.

As his son Fred says... He would have parked someplace close by. when suddenly, Prohibition officers surround his car. They grab him, pull him out. They pop the trunk and rummage through his vehicle.

I think we can all see Butt's smug smile, right? All that hard work is finally paying off. He got his man. But that smile fades because George is smart. No bottles on him. No liquor in the car. A trailing vehicle tries to pull away, and the prohibition agents realize Cassidy is leading a two-car caravan. The liquor's in the car behind him. Agents spring away from Cassidy to stop the second car.

I imagine it from George's perspective, pushed onto the hood of his car, officers grabbing his wrists. He's gotta be hoping his accomplice can shift into reverse and peel out of there. But Butts and the other agents are too quick. The second driver can't maneuver. He stopped and dragged out. The search that follows turns up a motherlode.

Butts says they nabbed at least six-fifths of gin. George's mind must have been racing as Butts pops open the suitcases and counts the bottles. Was this finally it for him? His wife at home, what would she do if he was in the slammer? Maybe he hoped he could skate by because of his two-car plan. He's got deniability, right? They can't pin the liquor on him.

But with the liquor in hand, Butts and the other agents turn their attention to George. When they go through his pockets, they pull out something even more incriminating than a hip flask. They get their hands on the key to his whole operation. A little black book. It's George's client list.

It seems like many extra-legal entrepreneurs before him, George took notes on his criminal enterprise, and it's clear from his ledger he's been bootlegging in Congress for a decade. The case was a slam dunk for butts in the Bureau. When George went to trial, he found he was facing a year and a half in jail. That was bad enough, but then something else really got his dander up.

As the court's decision came down, they ruled it was not a punishable crime for his, ahem, customers to purchase alcohol. In other words, while George was taking the fall, every gin-guzzling senator preaching the good word of prohibition was effectively immune from charges. The law wasn't going to lay a finger on them.

Hey there, it's your host, Ed Helms here. Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April 29th. It's called Snafu, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. And you can pre-order it right now at snafu-book.com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.

So George decided if the courts weren't going to give his sanctimonious customers their due, he would do it himself.

It's got all the wild disasters, spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker. I am also going on tour to celebrate. That's right. I'm coming to New York, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and my hometown, Los Angeles.

Back in his budget hearing turned culture war interrogation, James Duran is fending off charges that he's been diabolically poisoning American drinkers and cackling behind his spindly fingers. Robert Bacon, the New York congressman asking the questions, wants to force Duran to admit mass poisoning through the denaturing program. But it's not just about that.

That would be the U.S. Capitol Building. George's delivery route doesn't take him into the Capitol itself, but rather into the surrounding buildings where members of Congress have their offices. Stepping into the House Office building, George gives a nod to the security fellas at the door. And with his bags full of booze, walks right in.

That's right, among the buyers for George's top-quality Virginia hooch are the nation's lawmakers. His clientele are powerful men of every political party and persuasion. You see, George isn't just any bootlegger. He's become the go-to bootlegger for Congress. And Congress, well, they're pretty thirsty. Now, Mabel's not blind to this. She makes regular visits to the Capitol.

It's got all the wild disasters, spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker. I am also going on tour to celebrate. That's right. I'm coming to New York, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and my hometown, Los Angeles.

Sometimes she even sits in the gallery of the Senate chamber room to hear the nation's lawmakers present their plans.

As people across the country were now drinking more than ever, and bootleggers across the Eastern seaboard were running wild, Congress was too shit-faced to even pretend that they were gonna do something about it. Mabel's corrupt bureau agents were proving to be just as worthless. It was time for Mabel to take things into her own hands.

So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q&A or dramatically read about a kitty cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance. Again, head to snafu-book.com to preorder the book and check out all the tour details and dates. Or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay, that's it. On with the chaos. This is Snafu Season 3, Formula 6.

That's historian Deborah Blum. She says that everywhere across the country, from Mabel's D.C. to New York, all the way to San Francisco, industrial chemistry was becoming more and more a part of everyday life for everyday Americans.

Arsenic, mercury, chloroform, carbolic acid, I would go on. But the last time I had a close encounter with a beaker, I was watching The Muppets.

That's a little shout out to my 80s kids out there. Point is, products of rapidly advancing chemistry were everywhere. In pharmacies, doctor's offices, grocery stores, kitchens, and, of course, also in bars. Where speakeasy backrooms were starting to look a lot more like chemistry labs. The reason?

Classy clubs were hiring actual chemists to make sure that the illegal liquor they were serving to high-end customers wasn't toxic and was only going to fuck you up the right way. This is the prohibition you know. The razzle-dazzle of the flappers under the electric lights, where the big band served up bouncy rhythms and the bartender served up potent cocktails. At least, that's the front room.

But the back room? It was all chemistry, baby. Remember, clean and legal alcohol had all been poured into the sewers at this point. What was left could be dodgy. So to keep their customers safe, top speakeasy managers would turn to chemistry.

But what if you were running a bar and couldn't afford the high fees of a newly in-demand chemical brainiac? Or if you were a drinker who didn't have pockets deep enough to order your cocktails in the main dining room of the Cotton Club? In plenty of New York neighborhoods, back alley liquor was flowing just as freely. But no lab-coded expert with a safety checklist was looking out for you.

As Deborah Blum says, America's poorer drinkers would rather overlook the dubious origins of their booze and literally stomach the risk. People were seemingly so eager for a drink that they just didn't care there was a chance it could land them in the hospital.

Last time on Snafu, the temperance movement swept America.

You could get your smoke in the back of drugstores or paint stores. I know the scene in lower Manhattan has always been a bit edgy, but even without the spiky hair and the dog collars, this was grisly stuff. There was also the infamous Ginger Jake.

These drinks could kill. During one stretch over a few months, deaths from smoke averaged one a day. When Prohibition agents managed to track down the suppliers for the deadly cocktail, they discovered the drinks were served straight from cans stenciled with the word poison on them.

It's that risk big spenders were paying to avoid. Pay the cover charge to get into a big club? You were betting the owner had paid a nerdy chemist to make damn sure your gin and tonic was not a gin and toxic. These backroom chemists were clearly breaking the law. But a lot of them actually saw themselves as humanitarians.

Mabel Walker Willebrand was hired to lead Prohibition Enforcement.

Every time they caught a dangerous toxin in a gallon of hooch and kept it out of a drinker's mouth, well...

They had done some good. And in part because they were so successful at keeping the party going in New York, city and state officials started to ask themselves, why don't we just stop pretending here?

So, yeah, under the 18th Amendment, any state could just stick their middle finger up to prohibition if they had the votes to repeal it. Which is exactly what New York state lawmakers did. They weren't going to do any cracking down. New York cops weren't going to be making any arrests. And even if they did, New York judges weren't going to throw the book at any club owners.

Federal law or no, there was simply too much money in the liquor game. So in effect, New York became a sanctuary city for American drinkers. And if you were a chemist in the city breaking the law on a daily basis, you could rest easy knowing that your community had your back. Not only that, they were downright grateful to you for saving them from Ginger Jake and Derail.

And much of prohibition enforcement falls, strangely, to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Even the cops, the mayor, and the governor were on your side. And the good liquor, it was still there for the drinking, if you had the right chemists in your pocket.

This is so insane. This was all under like official government activity. They built a apartment in San Francisco that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

Yep, we're a long way from the speakeasies of New York, but we're here in the rolling French countryside to meet a new character in our story. He's sitting inside a combat tank clattering across the bloody battlefield. His name? George Cassidy. And he's under attack. The tank rolls down a slope as shells explode around it, and then it sinks into a crater of mud.

If it allows me to go hella-skiing, then yeah, I'm hella on board.

A Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn. I can picture our pal Alexander Gettler in his favorite living room chair, dressed in a suit and tie, of course. The number one song from the most famous band in America, the Paul Whiteman Band, is buzzing in the background. Gettler's smoking a stogie as he scans baseball box scores from the morning paper. Knowing Al, he probably had some skin in the games, too.

A bit of a gambler. Gettler couldn't resist a juicy over-under, and he had a regular card game with his pals. His other second home, besides the lab, was the horse track. Gettler was also a ruthlessly competitive bowler, a spirit he also brought to his work at Bellevue.

When a new mystery arrived at his doorstep, he couldn't stand the idea of a poisoner outwitting him and his sleuthing partner, Charles Norris. On this beautiful spring afternoon, perhaps Alexander is scribbling down his latest betting card when all of a sudden, he gets a call from Norris. There's a new case. And oh, is Al gonna love this one.

In 1922, our Sherlock and Watson have been a very busy duo, solving all kinds of crimes and many of them having nothing to do with the hooch on the streets. But each mystery Gettler solves, he learns a little more about the poisons permeating American life. On this day, when Gettler arrives at his lab, two dead bodies are waiting for him. He scans the police report. Here are the facts.

Inside an apartment in Brooklyn, police had found a couple in street clothes lying on the floor of their bathroom. Their faces were blue, their lips covered with blood. The couple, according to the following day's New York Times, was, quote, dead from poison. Gettler reviews the report.

The police on the scene had suspected suicide, but there was no corroborating evidence of any kind in the apartment. Gettler takes one look at the dead bodies and quickly suspects something else is at play here. A chemical substance that was now seemingly everywhere and was frighteningly lethal. Cyanide. Like mustard gas, cyanide was used in World War I as a chemical warfare agent.

It had long been known as a dangerous poison, but little did the public know it was also becoming a killer in households. Fumigators used it to disinfect apartment buildings, emitting gas that could, say, suddenly kill an unsuspecting couple eating breakfast.

Gettler's sure cyanide is the cause of death, even though he hadn't found any signs that cyanide had been ingested, and the police had found no empty bottles of cyanide anywhere in the apartment. But he checks back with the police, and soon investigators realize that Gettler was right. Pest control folks had just spent an afternoon spraying cyanide gas around the apartment.

They realized the dead couple hadn't swallowed cyanide. They had inhaled it. Case closed. But Gettler's work isn't quite done.

I'm telling you, this guy is a true badass. It was impossible for the newly invented science of toxicology to keep up with the deluge of modern poisons. But Gettler was doing his damnedest. And the New York City Medical Examiner's Office was beginning to earn nationwide respect for their work uncovering the hidden poisons endangering public health.

And they were doing so with virtually no support from the government. The office's staff under Norris was in fact smaller than what it was under the New York coroner who preceded him. Their office at Bellevue was still a ramshackle, quote-unquote, country club. All the lab's new equipment was still paid for by Norris himself.

Norris and Gettler were working around the clock, but they sure weren't making bootlegger chemist money. Gettler was making $3,000 a year, which today would be equivalent to a $55,000 salary in Brooklyn. No wonder he lived with his in-laws. So as poisons in the air were becoming more sophisticated, the caseload of the medical examiner's office was getting bigger.

Its steel armor shields George and his crew from the bright yellow bursts of artillery flame. But it can't protect them from the mist that's engulfed the field. World War I's most insidious weapon, mustard gas. On the battlefield, poison gas was turning war into a new kind of nightmare. Both Germany and the U.S.

And in 1922, one particular case caught their eye, the case of Robert Doyle. Doyle was a veteran of World War I. Like the tanker-turned-bootlegger George Cassidy, and like so many of the men who came back from Europe, Doyle found jobs were scarce in his hometown, Boston.

So he left his wife and daughter and came down to New York City, the biggest city in the world, the thriving metropolis where it seemed like everyone was making money. And he tried to get a job. but no one hired Doyle. He didn't have George Cassidy's gregarious entrepreneurial spirit, I guess, or his Smoky Mountain liquor hookups.

He didn't have Alexander Gettler's brains or his bustling Brooklyn community to rely on. In New York, Doyle found himself turned away from every job, be it bartender, garbage collection, even cleaning the sewers. Away from his loved ones and getting desperate, Doyle had reached for some chemical comfort to drown his sorrows, buying liquor in an unfamiliar city. He didn't know who to trust.

He didn't know whose libations might be toxic. But he bought a drink anyway. One night, neighbors in his boarding house heard shouts coming from his locked room. Someone, or something, was killing Doyle. They forced the door and rushed inside to help him, but found him crawling on the floor, rubbing his eyes and moaning. I'm blind! I can't see!

First, they sent for a doctor, but he didn't have any answers. So they bundled Doyle into a car and sent him to the hospital. Doyle was wheeled into the ER. This would be the part of the Grey's Anatomy episode where you'd hear the heartbeat monitor beeping until it slowly fades and flatlines. But this is the 1920s. There's nothing quite that fancy yet. Just... Doyle didn't make it.

When he died at Bellevue, they moved him out of the line of patients waiting for treatment and into the line of corpses waiting for analysis. Analysis by Alexander Gettler. Now it was up to Gettler to determine who was behind this. For years, he had worried home distillers would accidentally poison themselves with their moonshine. But these deaths were stacking up in a way that didn't add up.

Gettler knew about all the brainpower and advanced chemistry that was going into making industrial alcohol drinkable and not kill you. In theory, the supply was becoming safer, and yet the body count was only growing. Robert Doyle's death occurred as poison alcohol deaths rippled across the country, from New York to Washington, D.C. to Toledo, Ohio. This was proof.

People like Robert Doyle weren't dying simply because of their own reckless thirst for alcohol. No, these people were dying from poisons. And their deaths, now in the hundreds and very soon to be in the thousands, were no accident. Next time on Snafu.

Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino.

This episode was written by Nevin Kalapalli, Albert Chen, and Carl Nellis, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood. Tori Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapalli and Akimany Ekpo. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris.

were experimenting with lethal gases that were quickly becoming the deadliest instruments in the history of warfare. The Great War had a nickname, the Chemist's War. And now, mustard gas seeps into George Cassidy's tank and into the eyes, noses, and lungs of the tankers. George and his two crewmates choke at the controls as the machine grinds to a halt.

Editing, music, and sound design by Ben Chug. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosato. The role of Mabel Walker-Willibrandt was played by Carrie Bichet. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.

This was all under official government activity. They built a apartment that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

The deadly mist causes the tankers to go blind, vomit, and start losing consciousness. The other two men pass out. George holds on. But poisoned by the gas, George is too weak to move. Blinking and struggling to breathe while the battle rages around him, his crewmates have fallen silent. Finally, footsteps approach the tank.

George hears hands banging on the outside, shouts, shadows over the viewport as men peer inside. George's heart stops. Is it the enemy? The door swings open, and thank God, it's the Yanks. George is rescued. Carried up out of the crater in the pool of gas, George makes it off the battlefield alive. But he's devastated to find out he's the only survivor from his crew.

In 1919, when a million American soldiers in France begin the journey home, George is among the troops packed like sardines into fleets of liners and cargo ships, leaving the blood-soaked trenches of the Western Front behind them. As he gazes across the Atlantic, George coughs. His lungs are pocked with chemical burns.

For the rest of his life, every cough reminds him of the horrors he'd faced in the war. Horrors that showed how scientific advancements could be co-opted to create weapons of mass murder. But now George is heading home, and soon he'll be starting a new life. As the shores of the good old U.S. of A. come into view, George is pondering a very important question. Where the hell can he get a drink?

Back home, that question was at the center of another raging war, one in which he would soon find himself smack dab in the middle. I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. This is Season 3, the story of Formula 6, how prohibition's war on alcohol went so off the rails, the government wound up poisoning its own people.

Today, we're riding shotgun with the bootleggers, because men like George Cassidy didn't come home from the fight in France just to take the new laws laying down. As Mabel Walker Willebrand became Prohibition's champion, George Cassidy would become one of its greatest defiers. And the two sides they represented were about to clash.

In 1922, two years into Prohibition, Mabel Walker Willebrand was settling into her gig as head honcho of Prohibition enforcement. To get a sense of how the new U.S. Assistant Attorney General approached her job, there are a few things about her you should know. Little Mabel grew up crisscrossing the Great Plains in a 9-by-12-foot tent pitched in the fields of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

Her family was always on the move, fleeing the latest natural disaster, tornadoes, ice storms, that kind of stuff. Mabel's earliest memory from childhood was of a flash flood rushing through their tent, her mom taking the kitchen table and using it as a raft to keep her daughter afloat and alive. A little like that time my Cub Scout trip got rained out, except I had a home to go back to.

This was all under official government activity. They built a apartment that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

That experience had quite an impact on young Mabel.

Cold plunging is all the rage these days. I guess Mabel was just ahead of the curve. In any case, the Ice Queen didn't get to become the highest-ranking woman in the United States government by waking up each day to whistling birds opening her bedroom shades and the soft glow of the morning sun. No, she woke up every morning with her goddamn game face on.

For starters, it wasn't just Satan's last stronghold, New York City, that was flouting the law. In Mabel's backyard, the supposed dry citadel, speakeasies were popping up on every corner. By some estimates, there were 3,000 in the nation's capital. But Mabel's headaches extended well beyond the metropolises of the Northeast.

Also thumbing its nose at Prohibition was the fine city of Savannah, Georgia, which had turned into an unofficial headquarters for illegal drinking. Booze was flowing, and so were the criminals delivering it. Bootleggers, as they were called. The term goes back to the 1800s when traders slid their flasks of liquor into their boots.

During Prohibition, bootlegging became a household term, thanks in no small part to the notorious Georgia syndicate, the Savannah Four. Their leader was a guy named Willie Haar. Willie owned and controlled a fleet of ships that transported liquor from Scotland and France to another British territory, the Bahamas.

From there, it was shipped to a dozen different states in the U.S., often hidden in secret man-made caves up and down the U.S. coast. Willie Haar didn't exactly keep a low profile. His nickname was the Admiral of Bootleggers, and his Savannah Four had a recreational baseball squad. Their team name presumably slapped across their uniforms, the Bootlegger Team.

I assume they were part of an all-criminal baseball league, along with the Tax Dodgers? Sorry, I had to go there. Mabel was determined to bust them up and even sent a dozen Prohibition Bureau agents to Savannah to do the job. But Willie Haar's ring had judges, politicians, and, it turns out, Prohibition agents on its payroll.

And those agents, convinced to look the other way, came back from Savannah empty-handed. I hope they at least brought back some bootlegger team swag for Mabel. Willie Haar would have a future run-in with Mabel. Put a pin in that for a second. But as brazen as Haar in the Savannah 4 might have been, the most brazen bootlegger of all was operating right under Mabel's nose.

Which brings us back to good old George Cassidy.

After George got off the ship from France, he headed home to Virginia, and he had plenty of stories for his pals. He was just so damn gregarious. That's Fred Cassidy, George's son.

George also had a signature green felt hat that gave him an unmistakable look, a snappily dressed party animal with a trove of war stories. Georgie was one of a kind, but he struggled to transition back to civilian life. Why? Poison. The mustard gas George had sucked in destroyed his lungs, which made it hard for him to find work.

Before the war, George had been a brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad. When he came back, he couldn't pass their physical to get rehired. George couldn't find a steady gig anywhere else either. He put his body on the line for his home country, and now it was letting him down. When he finally did find work, it wasn't the kind of job that had his parents bursting with pride.

You see, George didn't grow up in a household of drinkers. Really, the opposite. George's Irish-American father had been sober for decades. His mom, a Brit, made herself at home in the USA by becoming a proud card-carrying member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. But none of that rubbed off on George. He liked to imbibe. Everybody around my dad liked to imbibe.

Hey there, it's your host, Ed Helms here. Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April 29th. It's called Snafu, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. And you can pre-order it right now at snafu-book.com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.

Which isn't a surprise, given George was from the moonshining capital of the world.

In Appalachia, moonshining had been prevalent since the Civil War, when moonshiners distilled illegal liquor at night and then drivers, or bootleggers, smuggled it across the region. When Prohibition passed, this was all supposed to get shut down, right? Well, turns out it ain't so easy to change an entire culture overnight.

But that was essentially the task facing the Prohibition agents under Mabel Walker Willebrandt. A tall order in a place like Franklin County, Virginia, nestled in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, where 99 out of every 100 people were connected to the moonshine business. One agent reported back to D.C. on the pointlessness of even bothering with arrests.

And, you know, when the moonshiners themselves included judges, politicians, and the local police. How are you supposed to stop that? People like George came back from the war looking for work and saw an opportunity. Here's one American artillery captain who was in the Reserve Corps writing to his fiancee.

That's 34-year-old future president Harry Truman. Fellas like Harry saw bootlegging as a lucrative investment opportunity. George Cassidy saw it as something else, a lifeline. You see, George was running out of options. He was a disabled veteran out of work, which is why shipping liquor from his neighborhood to moneyed drinkers across D.C. felt like a necessary career choice.

He started small, just a couple of bottles for friends and friends of friends, then a few more and a few more. His Blue Ridge, Virginia product must have been pretty good because pretty soon the orders were flowing one way and George kept the moonshine flowing the other.

George's lifeline was becoming a goldmine because George's clients, well, they were the kind of people who liked to meet at the Hotel Varnum in Washington, D.C., The Varnum's a grand old hotel at the corner of C Street and New Jersey Avenue, a meeting place. Outside, George sees two well-dressed white men. He gets out and shakes their hands, then heads around back to make a delivery.

He hands off a small paper package. For his next delivery, George grabs two bags out of his trunk. One in each hand, George walks along New Jersey Avenue, nodding and smiling to passersby. He was the friendly sort. George then crosses the street at Independence Avenue towards his next stop, a white building with a very large, very conspicuous dome. Yeah, it's probably the one you're thinking of.

It's got all the wild disasters, spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker. I am also going on tour to celebrate. That's right. I'm coming to New York, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and my hometown, Los Angeles.

At Bellevue Hospital, it's not just the bodies that have been stacking up. Alexander Gettler's notebooks are piled high everywhere. Meticulous records of all the data he's compiled since the start of Prohibition. Documented night after painstaking night. And the numbers, as 1928 winds down, are disturbing as hell.

The body count from drinking-related deaths in New York City this year alone is 10,000. Ten years ago, when they issued their first warning on the eve of Prohibition, Gettler and Norris knew things were going to be bad. But this bad? At that 1926 press conference, the Prohibition Bureau issued a reminder to America, drink and you die.

And Americans more or less responded with, cool, so yeah, make it a double. The grand irony here is that people are drinking now more than ever before. In New York, cases of alcoholism had been going down in the years leading into Prohibition. But since 1920, alcoholism was reaching all-time highs. Insurance companies reported that deaths from alcoholism were 600% higher in 1928 than in 1920.

So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q&A or dramatically read about a kitty cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance. Again, head to snafu-book.com to preorder the book and check out all the tour details and dates. Or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay, that's it. On with the chaos. This is Snafu Season 3, Formula 6.

For those addicted to drinking, it was a dangerous time. Even if they heard government warnings, it wasn't realistic to think that they could just stop drinking cold turkey. For the rest of the population, well, the government messaging about the dangers of drinking just wasn't making an impact. Which kind of makes sense. I mean, remember that commercial from the 80s, This is Your Brain on Drugs?

We all saw that egg frying in the pan, but isn't frying your brain kind of the point? And I do wonder who across the country beyond avid readers of the New York papers was actually getting the warnings from the government. News certainly didn't travel then the way it does now. Sure, they had coast-to-coast radio, but we're still a ways off from the days of push notifications.

Now, Norris and Gettler were determined to tell the entire country just how fucked up things had gotten. So, on a fall afternoon, Norris sits down in front of a typewriter at his desk, alongside his man Gettler, and Gettler's stack of notebooks.

Through the years, our duo had issued periodic messages to the public through medical journals and in press conferences for the local New York media, but it wasn't penetrating. It was just small potatoes. So, refusing to be ignored, Gettler and Norris decide they need to step things up.

As Gettler flips through his notes and busts out his data, Norris starts typing and begins to paint a picture, first of what's been going down in their backyard, beginning with those horrific three days that had just passed in October.

Yep, New York City subways in the 1920s were also scary. And this was before the days of Pizza Rat. Anywho. In a word, the word alcohol is not poison liquor.

And how did the poison get into the liquor? Well, that brings Norris and Gettler to the government and their official poisoning program. Now, Norris acknowledges that alcohol made for industrial purposes should be protected and differentiated in some meaningful way. Sure, you have supplies of alcohol that are supposed to be used in perfumes and aftershaves.

It makes sense that you'd try to deter people from drinking this stuff. But then along came prohibition. Legal liquor disappeared. And the aftershave is all that was left. People weren't stealing it to drink before. Then suddenly, they were. So whose fault is that?

Yeah, pretty unfortunate, right? For any American who just wanted a drink.

Thousands of people are dying from alcohol poisoned by our own government. And we're just like, okay, I mean, that's messed up. And what's even more messed up is that the government's response to all these people dropping dead was, hey, it's your fault. You drank it. Tough cookies. Needless to say, Norris doesn't see it that way. He throws down a challenge for his readers.

These deaths, these government poisonings, they were caused by Prohibition. To him, they were the fault of the people who pushed for Prohibition in the first place. And then they were the fault of the people adding poison to alcohol, knowing that people were going to drink it.

Norris and Gettler wanted to boil it down for readers, so people understood just how many people around the country were dropping dead from Prohibition. It seems pretty clear the only sensible path forward is to do one of two things, either end the denaturing program or end Prohibition itself. Things had gotten so bad, Gettler and Norris drew a chilling comparison.

Previously on Snafu. As Mabel Walker Willebrand was doing everything in her power to stop the tide of liquor washing into America.

Finally, Norris slaps a title on this baby. Our essay in extermination, Read between the lines. The title of Norris' piece was not our essay in tragedy. It was our essay in extermination. And who are those poor souls subject to said extermination from the failed experiment of prohibition?

For the past decade, Norris and Gettler have watched the city's working class watering holes shudder, only to be replaced with backroom joints, where the liquor was deadly. Most of the poisoned liquor that Gettler was testing came from these dives, where bootleggers pushed low-grade, albeit affordable, alcohol.

The quality of motor oil booze couldn't hold a candle to the stuff rich New Yorkers were able to get their hands on or what certain dry politicians were sipping on in the Capitol, thanks to our man George Cassidy. It was insane that America found itself here. But was anything going to change? Was Norris and Gettler's work going to make any difference at all?

In late 1928, our essay on extermination first appears in a literary magazine called the North American Review. But it's not just the devoted readers of the North American Review who will read Norris's words. Nope. This time, Norris and Gettler get the attention of the whole country.

Yep, that was big news, all right. Pour it all out, Deborah Blum.

Prohibition agents were enforcing the law by repeatedly breaking it.

News of Norris' essay splashed all over the New York papers.

And the stories land well beyond the Big Apple. It was news in Florida.

To Missouri...

To Arizona.

And with that tsunami of media coverage, Norris and Gettler finally get people to take note. And you know what? Americans across the country were up in arms. One priest in a working class Chicago parish nailed it when he said, quote, they give the good stuff to the sewers and the bad stuff to the people. The outrage reached the Capitol, too.

The wet legislators, long outnumbered by the dries in Congress, had been howling against prohibition from the start. And I do want to be clear about this. A small group in Congress had been directly calling out the government's poisoning practices for a few years now.

And the U.S. government kept upping the ante in their misguided plan to get people to stop drinking.

A New Jersey senator went as far as to say the federal government was guilty of, quote, legalized murder for adding deadly poisons to the industrial alcohol supply. He even introduced a measure on the floor of Congress to look into the program. But the dries had steamrolled those efforts.

They held their ground, believed in the moral superiority of their anti-liquor cause, and mocked the wets as drunkards. And when it came to denaturing, they lectured their wet opponents that alcohol itself was a poison. And as Senator Morris Shepard from Texas put it, You can't poison poisons. I mean, you can't fight that logic. But smug quips were losing their traction.

Real people were really dying. Morris Shepard might not care. Hardline temperance advocates like James Duran might not care. Mabel Walker Willebrand might not care. Their coalition was willing to break a few eggs as long as America was a dry omelet.

Now, in 1929, the Wett lawmakers finally had something solid to fight back with, Norris and Gettler's irrefutable data that the government policies were killing thousands. So the Wett legislators took action. They whipped up a bill. It demanded that government chemists stop using their deadliest poisons. They couldn't reach the hardliners, but maybe they didn't have to.

They just had to reach the people in the middle, caught between the two sides. The people who could understand that no moral code was worth poisoning thousands. And with Gettler and Norris finally persuading Americans to their cause, the bill passed. Prohibition chemists were now required by law to ditch lethal formulas like Formula 6.

They were told to go back to inventing concoctions which were merely revolting without being actually lethal. And I want to just pause here and take in what a turning point this was for Norris and Gettler. Because yeah, this was a moment when they finally won.

If they had been beating their heads against the wall from before Prohibition even passed, that it would be a terrible idea and that it would kill people. Now, the nation was finally starting to listen. Norris' essay and Gettler's research gave the Wets what they needed to win. And it didn't stop with denaturing.

The outcry over the Prohibition Bureau's actions continued to grow in the media and in the halls of Congress. A tide was beginning to turn across the country. State governments were slowly beginning to follow New York's lead in its dissent from federal prohibition itself.

state and local law enforcement started to say, look, everyone knows this whole prohibition enforcement thing has been a complete charade, so why are we even pretending to do it? And it wasn't just the government. Public opinion was shifting too. And the shift was felt all the way to the White House, where Herbert Hoover was about to move in.

1928 was a momentous year. At the movies, the world was introduced to a dapper mouse named Mickey and a nifty new innovation, sound. Radio had just gone national and the World Series was heard from coast to coast, much to the delight of Yankee superfan Alexander Gettler, who's tuning in to hear the Yankees sweep the Cardinals as he's slicing and dicing bodies in his lab at Bellevue Hospital.

In early 1929, Mabel Walker Willebrandt was feeling good. Now that her man Hoover had won the presidency, Mabel was sitting pretty. I mean, come on, of course she was going to be rewarded for all that shattered glass in New York and all her fear-mongering across the country. Surely she'd be rewarded with a big fat promotion and a nifty new title, the Attorney General of the United States.

And one night in February 1929, a few weeks before Hoover's inauguration, Mabel's phone rang. It was the president-elect. Hoover told Mabel that Congress was putting together a bill that would strip the Prohibition Bureau out of the Department of Treasury and move it into Mabel's domain, the Department of Justice, where Mabel assumed she would be given the reins.

But Hoover had a different message for Mabel.

Hoover had buried the lead. Turns out Mabel wasn't going to be the new AG. Nope. The Solicitor General was leapfrogging her and getting that sweet corner office. Mabel technically was keeping her job for now, but she saw the writing on the wall.

It was starting to sink in. Now that Prohibition wasn't useful to Hoover as an issue, he just wasn't going to be very serious about it anymore. Even less than his predecessor, old two-martini lunch Warren Harding. Mabel was crushed. And as she looked back over her time trying desperately to make Prohibition work, she could only regret how impossible her task had been.

If only she'd seen it right from the beginning.

Mabel Walker Willebrandt was free-falling off the tightrope she'd been walking since the day she arrived in Washington, D.C. eight years earlier. So she handed in her resignation to Herbert Hoover. Mabel's war was over. But there was so much more fallout yet to come.

Yep, 1928 was a real barn burner, all right. But most of all, because it was a big election year. The presidency was up for grabs. In one corner was Herbert Hoover, Republican and the guy for the dries. In the other corner, the wet warrior, longtime governor of New York, Al Smith.

Time to head back out west. Let's check in with Richard Hart, the cowboy whose gunslinging ways helped turn the public against Mabel's campaign, making an unpopular law even more unpopular. You remember where we left Richard. He luckily ducked charges for manslaughter, but it still tanked his Prohibition Bureau career.

But what came next was a twist so twisty even his wife and kids were caught off guard. First of all, he got himself some new assignments with the Office of Indian Affairs. That got him out of town. They sent him to reservations even further west. He was still hanging on to those old Wild West shows and live out his cowboy dreams. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was kind of known for that.

Richard probably thought this was the place he could really keep up his costume drama, like he had an even more free hand to dole out cowboy justice. Once again, he drew his gun during an arrest, and when the man resisted, Richard shot him. This time, there was no ducking the charges. Hart was indicted for manslaughter. He was acquitted at trial, but this was finally enough.

Even in the most circusy of bureaucratic circuses, Richard couldn't stop getting in trouble with the ringmasters. He was too violent for the wannabe cowboys, so he was fired from his federal post. So eventually he was back in Homer without a steady job. It was tough on him, and on his wife Kathleen, and on the boys they were raising.

But despite losing his jobs, according to great-grandson Corey Hart, Richard was starting to flaunt some new money around town.

And as Richard's grandson Jeff says, one night, when he was all liquored up, the two-gun braggadocio finally caught up with him. It was in a bar, I think on Lower 4th Street in Sioux City. He starts bragging about a new family business he's a part of. It's conspicuously lucrative and maybe a little shady. We'll come back to that in a minute.

Eesh, some friends. Once the beating was over, Richard was bundled off to the hospital.

As Al's speeches buzz over radios across America, I can picture Mabel Walker Willebrand sitting in her office at the Department of Justice, listening and fuming. You might remember that Al thumbed his nose at the law and repealed the state's prohibition enforcement statute five years before. Well, that put Al in Mabel's crosshairs.

Eventually, the hospital staff got a lead on him.

Kathleen was probably wondering about all that new dough that Richard was showing off.

Turns out Richard had a bit of a safety net, his brothers, something he'd never let on to anyone in Homer. You see, while Richard Hart was strutting his stuff under a 10-gallon Stetson, his real identity was hidden. The truth is that Richard Two-Gun Hart was an Italian immigrant. His real first name was Vincenzo, and his last name, it wasn't Hart. It was a last name you've definitely heard.

See, Richard slash Vincenzo's baby brother Alphonse was the one who really did something with the family name. You know him as Al Capone. Hold on a second. Al Capone's brother was a prohibition agent? Yeah, it's all as crazy as it sounds, folks. Once Richard, for simplicity's sake, let's just keep calling him Richard and not Richard Vincenzo Two-Gun Hart Capone.

Anyway, once Richard was off the government payroll, he reached out for help to Chicago, and his brother answered the call. Richard left Uncle Sam behind and moved on to the Capone family ledger, and from a shack to the nicest house in town. And what we do know is that his wife, Kathleen, wasn't the only one asking questions.

There were others cottoning on to Richard's hidden Capone identity, not to mention the clean new Seersucker three-piece suit that came with it. And here's where the story might start to sound familiar. When the government finally went after the Capones, they used the Mabel strategy, taking down bootleggers by way of tax evasion.

Mabel may have been gone for years by now, but the prosecutors who followed in her footsteps, well, they kept using her methods. They knew where the evidence was, in the bookkeeping. And the Capone family bookkeeper wasn't Al. Nope, the family bookkeeper was his brother, Ralph.

Money laundering. Take the dirty money from a criminal enterprise and put it through the spin cycle of a legitimate business with a little fabric softener and some tied fresh scent, and boom. On the other side, you've got a clean profit from a small business that you can safely tuck into a bank account. If you listened to the last season of Snafu, and if you didn't, you really should...

In Mabel's eyes, Al was a man so morally bankrupt that he swept the Constitution aside to appeal to the masses. And appeal he did, promising to take his wet agenda all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Mabel wasn't having it.

You would know that a certain J. Edgar Hoover, later known for his massive illegal surveillance programs, made a name for himself with cases like these. The Capone money laundering may have eluded most cops, especially if they were paid to look the other way, but Hoover's G-men sniffed it out. And when it came time to go to trial, they decided to make it a spectacle.

Once Ralph Capone was on the stand getting squeezed, he let slip that there was a secret Capone brother out back, pinning those crisply washed bills in the sun to dry. Yep, that's right. Even from all the way out in Homer, Richard was part of his mob family's money laundering operation. And so Richard was pulled out of Nebraska and paraded in front of the press in Chicago.

Testimony by Lost Capone. He peered through thick glasses and carried a white cane. He was led into the U.S. courthouse on the arm of his wife, a demure middle-aged woman who never could be mistaken for a gun maul. When she was asked for comment, Kathleen didn't give up much. All she said was, well, he's not a bad man. If you think about it, I bet none of the Capones thought they were bad guys.

Just the misunderstood protagonists of their own superhero stories. Well, this was Richard's final chance to prove that at least in his case, that might be true. Was he really a fighter for the law? Or would he throw in his lot with the family? Richard answered those questions quite clearly.

In the end, when the law came at him, Richard stood shoulder to shoulder with Ralph and Alphonse. He was given a chance, one final chance, to make his brothers face the music and tell the truth about the inner workings of their criminal enterprise. And he refused. He lied on the stand. like they had so many times before, Richard's lies paid off. Ralph Capone's case didn't go to trial.

The story of Richard Hart, just like the twisted stories of Mabel Walker-Willibrandt and Formula 6, show us just how far off the rails things had gotten during Prohibition. But as we come to the final chapter of our story, there's still a huge lingering question. Would anyone actually be held responsible for the massive failures and fiascos of Prohibition enforcement?

Because when Al Smith said he refused the, quote, old order of things, Mabel heard him rejecting the thing that mattered most to her, sticking to the law and enforcing the 18th Amendment.

Richard Hart certainly wasn't. But what about the boss of the Prohibition Bureau, the guy who had overseen the IRS poisoning program, James Duran? That's next time on Snafu. Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio.

It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canney, and Kelsey Albright. Tori Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapalli and Akimany Ekpo.

Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing, music, and sound design by Ben Chugg. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chugg is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosato. The role of Mabel Walker-Willibrandt was played by Carrie Bichet. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.

Mabel and her team were entering the ninth inning. It felt like her squad, the dries, or as she saw it, the only ones who respected the Constitution, were behind, with two outs and no runners on. Her colleagues at the Department of Treasury had made public their deadly poisoning program to stop Americans from drinking, and yet still, America wasn't ready to give up the bottle.

Now Mabel was the last batter up. And you better believe she was gonna go down swinging. I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. This is Season 3, the story of Formula 6, how prohibition's war on alcohol went so off the rails, the government wound up poisoning its own people. In today's episode, our threads start weaving together.

Prohibition hangs in the balance in the 1928 election. And for Richard Two-Gun Hart, the chickens finally come home to roost.

Leading up to the 1928 election, Mabel Walker Willebrandt was one busy bee.

As author Dan Okrent says, Mabel traveled the country speaking at churches, town halls, and women's groups, all in the hopes of scaring the bejesus out of people as she described a frightening American future under a potential president, Al Smith.

Mabel's speech also included one heck of a zinger.

Al fired back and accused Mabel of leading a bigoted anti-Catholic whisper campaign, which was actually a pretty fair characterization. Al even gave Mabel a nickname, Prohibition Portia. Now, as you history geeks will know, that's a reference to the Portia who apparently played a role in Julius Caesar getting knifed on the Senate floor.

This was all under official government activity. They built a apartment that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

Unlike Mabel's limp dog whistle zinger, Al landed a direct hit. Prohibition Portia stuck. Mabel absolutely hated it, which is part of what makes it such a good nickname, I guess. But also, Mabel, come on. I mean, it's pretty badass. Suffice to say, Mabel was pissed. She was hellbent on exposing Al Smith's New York City, his hometown, as a den of vice.

And she came up with a plan straight out of Carrie Nation's playbook to humiliate him. After whiffing in her countless legal attempts to enforce prohibition, and then failing miserably with the freaking Ku Klux Klan, this was Mabel's Hail Mary to make her mark. Now she was going to bust heads. She was going to go into the speakeasies of New York City, smash them up, and shut them down.

Obviously, she wasn't going to do it herself. She needed an army. Now, Mabel knew the NYPD was useless to her. New York cops had long ago said, forget about it, to enforcing prohibition. So she picked up the phone and summoned agents from all over the country, from Denver to Fort Worth to Kansas City.

And in June 1928, as Al Smith was feeling good and officially accepting the Democratic nomination in Houston, Mabel's agents converged on the Big Apple. Eight years into Prohibition, savvy New Yorkers could spot a Prohibition agent a mile away. The most shabbily dressed man in any nightclub was always a secret agent. But Mabel had prepped her crew months in advance.

She had them dressed to the nines, so they could blend into the city crowd and glide into the swanky watering holes. And maybe even throw back a few. And then these impeccably groomed agents stepped out to the center of speakeasy dance floors and got down to business. And I don't mean dance moves.

They made their arrests and they shut down the bars. The raids would lead to a handsome haul for Mabel, over 100 indictments of speakeasy owners. As the raids were going down, Mabel sat behind her mahogany desk at the DOJ, pretty damn pleased with herself. These massive sweeps did exactly what they were intended to do. They became known as the June Raids, and they became a huge national story.

And as Mabel was unleashing hell from the DOJ, a few blocks away, other plans were bubbling away at the Department of Treasury, where the Prohibition Bureau had a new commissioner, James Duran. Duran had presided over the implementation of the government's alcohol poisoning scheme, Remember, Formula 6 was just one of dozens of formulas the government cooked up to make drinks undrinkable.

And just like they did for all the other government formulas, the bootleggers responded. In stills and makeshift labs outside the nation's capital, those bootlegger chemists were burning the midnight oil, coming up with a recipe to counter Formula 6. They re-distilled the tainted alcohol and extracted the poisons.

When word reached James Duran that yet another formula had been defeated, he ordered his chemists to keep going.

Wow. Gasoline? Tell me you're out of ideas without telling me you're out of ideas. After Formula 6 was successfully defeated, Formulas 3 and 4 were beaten and tossed out later that year. But there was one formula that was still effective. And it was barely a formula at all. It was a simple recipe. To your vat of fine industrial alcohol, add wood alcohol. Straight up.

Yep, remember that original byproduct of home distilling that Norris and Gettler were warning New Yorkers about way back in 1918 at the start of Prohibition? Well, Duran's chemists had used traces of wood alcohol in their formulas before, but it was always part of a complex cocktail. Now they were just dispensing with everything else. And just adding a shit ton of wood alcohol.

Hey there, it's your host, Ed Helms here. Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April 29th. It's called Snafu, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. And you can pre-order it right now at snafu-book.com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.

Like, twice as much as ever before. But that's not all. As historian Deborah Blum tells us, the government chemists now had their hands on the purest, deadliest wood alcohol they could find.

And of course, right away, bootleggers began siphoning it out of industrial warehouses and dishing it out on the streets. In October 1928, Bellevue Hospital is utter mayhem. Everywhere, people are vomiting, hallucinating, dying in the emergency room. Gettler and Norris are overwhelmed. Over just three days in October, they see 33 deaths from poisoned liquor.

By Gettler's count, 25 from wood alcohol. And just in time for Election Day. Now, as Gettler examines the dead in his lab, you can imagine him listening to election night returns. November 6, 1928. The presidential election between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith ends in a landslide. A landslide? Of course it was. Americans were tired of the violence.

They were tired of the status quo eight years in, and Prohibition was massively unpopular. Prohibition was on the ballot, and no wonder the election wasn't close. But hang on a second. I did pretty well in fifth grade history, and I don't ever remember there being a President Al Smith, which must mean... And Hoover sets a record for electoral votes and crushes Smith. Hoover won?

Yeah, he sure did. In a knockout. In fact, Hoover won on economic promises. But Smith also couldn't overcome anti-Catholic prejudice and ginned up rumors that he was even taking orders from the Vatican and from the country's biggest bootleggers.

Smith's crushing defeat was a win for Prohibition, and also a win for Hoover superfan Mabel Walker-Willibrandt, who saw the victory as voters practically putting their stamp of approval on her June raids. Mabel and Duran had pulled out all the stops Al Smith had lost, and Prohibition was here to stay. And, by the way, deadlier than ever.

On the other side, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler didn't have a minute to waste. It was time for their big swing, to put an end to a national emergency.

On the dry side was the temperance movement, zealous and all too willing to throw in their lot with outright racists. On the other side, a whole lot of German, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants. Here's historian David Goldberg.

We can only get in touch with David over the phone, which is why it kind of sounds like he's calling from the 1920s.

David's not exaggerating in the slightest. Before long, Catholics across America were being smeared as not only drunkards, but traitors as well. Alexander Gettler was born Jewish, but married an Irish Catholic girl and then converted. That means he left one faith targeted by the DRY movement only to join another.

The Anti-Saloon League's efforts were one of the first instances of single-issue lobbying to dramatically influence American politics.

The Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League were the two main organizations carrying the torch, and or occasionally hatchet, for prohibition. They were the definition of single-issue voters. And when they found a candidate willing to vote for prohibition, they would go all in to get their guy elected.

In other words, when dry candidates won, it didn't necessarily mean they'd won a majority of voters' hearts and minds. It just meant that the WCTU had an influential group of voters who could swing elections. And it worked, time and time again. State after state went dry.

Here are a few actual lines from the Anti-Saloon League's propaganda.

So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q&A or dramatically read about a kitty cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance. Again, head to snafu-book.com to preorder the book and check out all the tour details and dates. Or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay, that's it. On with the chaos. This is Snafu Season 3, Formula 6.

To me, this is starting to sound like just good old fashioned prejudice. And alcohol, just the latest convenient issue to inflame people's fears. the war unleashed a tidal wave of immigrant and ethnic hatred, all dolled up in red, white, and blue.

Turns out fear-mongering beer boycotts are as American as hot dogs. Which, incidentally, got their name around this time too, because Frankfurter sounded a little too German. I'm assuming Sauerkraut also became Liberty Cabbage, and German breweries became targets.

In 1917, the U.S. entered the war. That year, Congress passed the 18th Amendment, which gave the government the power to ban alcohol sales. All that was left was for Congress to actually use its new power. Finally, after almost a century of organizing, sloganeering, and hectoring, the dries got their way. Prohibition became law with the Volstead Act. But that raises a very critical question.

Who the hell's going to enforce it? We'll meet them after the break.

Previously on Snafu. In the 1920s, New York City was facing a record number of unsolved murders.

This is so insane. This was all under like official government activity. They built a apartment in San Francisco that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

If it allows me to go hella-skiing, then yeah, I'm hella on board.

In a nondescript office building somewhere in the nation's capital, a man stands over a beaker of liquid. He's white, middle-aged, hair starting to thin, heavy circular glasses, peering over his experiment like the eyes of Dr. T.J. Ekelberg.

And not to get all middle school English teacher on you here, but just like those famous eyes from The Great Gatsby, James Duran was looking down on 1920s America with more than a little bit of judgment. Duran is a chemist and an avid supporter of the dry movement.

Mild-mannered, methodical, a hard worker with a keen scientific mind, he busies himself with government work while his wife dedicates her time to the Women's Christian Temperance Union. In fact, she'll go on to author a book of non-alcoholic cocktail recipes. There are even substitutes for baking recipes that happen to involve alcohol.

Not to nitpick here, Mrs. Duran, but the alcohol bakes away. People aren't out here getting drunk off pie. But in the Duran's defense, people in 1920 can find a way to get drunk off just about anything. In fact, that's precisely James Duran's problem. See, James is a chemist for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the predecessor to the IRS.

If you're wondering why the IRS needs chemists, you're not alone. But as Thomas Pegram says, it's something that still happens today. You see evidence of it anytime you walk into a liquor store.

Until unlikely duo Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler teamed up to investigate.

The thing is, alcohol has a lot of different uses. In addition to being a wonderful social lubricant, it's commonly used as a solvent in industrial chemistry, a medical disinfectant, and as fuel. But I bet you've never been offered a medical alcohol swab as an aperitif. At least I hope not. And there's a really good reason for that. It's not the same stuff.

Alcohol you're not supposed to drink gets denatured. In other words, it's made unnatural by adding a lot of really bad chemicals. These chemicals don't diminish the alcohol's industrial value, but they make it really hard to drink. Which is the whole point. You're not supposed to drink it.

All of this allows the IRS to draw a chemical distinction between industrial alcohol and all that other yummy stuff you're supposed to drink. And the reason all this matters to the IRS is because different types of alcohol get taxed differently.

And Uncle Sam needs a way to ensure nobody skirts the tax code by making drinking alcohol out of the stuff you're supposed to be using to sterilize needles. Since 1907, James Duran has been proudly polluting, sorry, denaturing industrial alcohol in service of our nation's tax code.

But with the passage of the Volstead Act, James' job suddenly becomes crucial not only to tax enforcement, but to enforcement of the new nationwide dry law.

Yep, in its infinite wisdom, Congress has decided to make alcohol illegal and to make the IRS enforce it. James Duran's job is about to get a whole lot more interesting, and he's not the only one. You ever see Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? It's an old Hollywood classic. A scout troop leader from the American West played by, yet again, Jimmy Stewart. What's with this guy? Hi, I'm Jimmy Stewart.

And basically, I just play every American archetype under the sun, you see. Anyway, he gets handpicked for a Senate seat by a bunch of fat cats. He comes into Congress, still brushing the Oregon trail dust off his necktie. The political bosses think he's such a rube, they can pull his strings and he'll be none the wiser. Of course, they get him all wrong. Why?

Well, they think loving the founding fathers and reciting their speeches by heart makes him a naive bumpkin. But that turns out to be exactly what lets him see right through their greedy schemes. He's got principles, goddammit. Oh, wait, I mean, dagnabbit. And that means something in America.

But two decades before Mr. Smith, another plucky Westerner arrives in D.C. for real. Her name is Mabel Walker Willebrandt. She's a rising legal star, the first woman in Los Angeles to serve as a public defender and the parliamentarian of the city's Women Lawyers Club. She made a name for herself providing free counsel to sex workers, and she's already proven that she can captivate a courtroom.

Norris and Gettler issued a warning to the public as the bodies kept stacking up at Bellevue Hospital. The winter of 1901 in Topeka, Kansas was a cold one. Temperatures hovered in the single digits. I imagine the wind howling down the streets. Too much snow for a car, although someone might bust out a horse-drawn sleigh or two. But inside one saloon, the Senate Bar, the regulars got cozy.

Mabel is a trailblazer, a crusading attorney who never hesitates to stand up for women. Definitely not easy in 1920. She has a well-earned reputation for defying men's expectations. So when President Warren G. Harding begins searching for someone to lead the charge for federal prohibition, a host of California lawyers and judges tell him, we want Walker Willebrandt. Harding offers an interview.

Mabel says farewell to her parents in Cali and rides the rails across the country. Full of confidence, she'll be hired as Assistant Attorney General of the United States. And when I think of her stepping off the train with her big canvas bag and her hair and tight braids over her ears, I see a lot of that Mr. Smith story.

I mean, Jimmy may not have had the braids, but as Mabel catches a trolley through the busy streets of D.C., she's also riding into a world she doesn't know. At just 32, Mabel has a resume that would make most lawyers in Washington green with envy. But enforcing prohibition remains an unenviable and largely untested task.

because by 1920, the national experiment in prohibition is going pretty much exactly like Gettler and Norris had predicted. Enterprising Americans find all sorts of ways to skirt the law, from making moonshine out in the boonies, to smuggling in the good stuff from across the Canadian border, to going full mad scientist and making Franken-cocktails out of industrial alcohols.

If this thing's going to actually last, the feds are going to need a steady hand at the helm of the brand new prohibition unit.

So despite her reservations, Mabel aces her interview with the attorney general. Then, with his stamp of approval, she catches a cab to the White House for a face-to-face meeting with President Warren Harding. Harding and his attorney general had a long history together. They were something of an old boys club, backroom deals, etc. Mabel was a by-the-books West Coast lady trying to break in.

All that is to say that whatever her principles, she needed to know how to play ball if she wanted this job.

As the story goes, President Harding told Mabel, there's only one thing against you. You're too young. Mabel takes what Harding gives her and sends it right back at him.

She knocks the interview out of the park. She gets the job. It's a huge moment for Mabel and for the country. Mabel Walker-Willibrandt is now the highest-ranking woman in government. She's young and ambitious, and in all likelihood, she's thinking that if she plays her cards right, she could get herself a federal judgeship or even become America's first female attorney general.

But the reaction in the press is sadly predictable. These are actual headlines from the time.

The media was already on Harding's case for handing out jobs to his friends and political allies, and now they were going to turn that anger on Mabel, with an extra layer of misogyny just for kicks.

When she announces to the papers that she's not giving interviews until she's gotten her feet under her, one paper proclaims, "...a woman who was not ready and willing to talk or be photographed has been found." Mabel probably saw this coming. There's no question she's hit with snide remarks every time she steps into the spotlight.

But what she can't have prepared for is the resistance she'll meet from her colleagues and the corruption she'll find around every corner.

This was a favorite haunt for elected officials, situated not far from the state capitol, equipped with enough booze for the local elite to forget all about the cold weather, and also the fact that many of them had recently voted to ban the sale of alcohol statewide. At least that's how it was on most nights. but one freezing cold dawn. Before the place opened up, a silhouette fills the doorway.

This is so insane. This was all under like official government activity. They built a apartment in San Francisco that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

If it allows me to go hella-skiing, then yeah, I'm hella on board.

All right. Prohibition's the law of the land. And President Harding has hired Mabel Walker Willebrand to come to D.C. and get to work enforcing it. Just one problem. The apparatus that's supposed to enforce this law is less a finely tuned machine and more like, well, what's the 1920s equivalent of a shit show? I guess it's also a shit show. For starters, there's her boss, the Attorney General.

He was A, a drunk, and B, corrupt. That doesn't make it easy. Thanks, Dan Ockrent. Then there's her staff. You'd think the newly created Prohibition Unit would be designed to resist the corrupting influences of the booze business. After all, most civil servants at the time had to pass a series of tests confirming their aptitude and integrity. But this new unit was made exempt from those tests.

which is another way of saying we're going to use it for political payoffs. Which means Mabel is essentially the meat in a corruption sandwich. She's more or less the only person anywhere in the chain of command who isn't interested in taking bribes to look the other way. The guys enforcing this law and the guys overseeing the whole enterprise, they're all in somebody's pocket.

That's Old Overholt the Bourbon. Yeah, it's bad enough for any member of the cabinet to own a liquor company, but as Secretary of the Treasury, Mellon has a major role to play in Prohibition enforcement. He's supposed to work closely with Mabel's office. And he's James Duran's boss. Drunks, bribe takers, liquor magnates.

These are the people Mabel's supposed to work hand in glove with in the fight to enforce prohibition. Whenever the IRS gets wind of some alcohol-related skullduggery, they're supposed to investigate, gather evidence, and package it all up so the Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker-Willibrandt can swoop in and make the arrests.

It's a woman, six feet tall and easily able to stand eye to eye with any corn-fed man in Topeka. She wears a black dress and black ribbons in her hair, like she's attending a funeral, and she peers into the darkened saloon through little oval-shaped glasses. It's highly unusual for any woman to enter a saloon in this day and age, let alone at 5.30 in the morning.

Mabel then wins the case, the bootleggers get tossed in the clink, rinse and repeat until the country goes drier than an anti-masturbatory cracker. Again, that's how it's supposed to work. But in practice, most of the people around her are either uninterested in enforcing dry laws or actively breaking them.

So it must come as a huge relief to Mabel when she finally finds someone in the IRS bureaucracy who takes the law as seriously as she does. James Duran. She's an ambitious lawyer in the Department of Justice. He's a behind-the-scenes chemist in the Department of Treasury. Fate has brought them together.

Mabel Walker Willebrand and James Duran will enforce prohibition, despite the corruption all around them. As such, they'll both quickly realize enforcement is going to require some new approaches, a new formula, if you will. But they're determined. They're idealistic. And together, these two dedicated bureaucrats are about to unleash hell on American drinkers.

Next time on Snafu, we meet the defiant bootleggers who were already making life a nightmare for the Prohibition Bureau.

And meanwhile, our pal Alexander Gettler was back on the case in New York and making some shocking discoveries.

Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino.

This episode was written by Nevin Kalapalli, Stephen Wood, Carl Nellis, and Akimany Ekpo, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Tori Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapalli and Akimany Ekpo. Fact-checking by Charles Richter.

Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing, music, and sound design by Ben Chug. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosato. The role of Mabel Walker-Willibrandt was played by Carrie Bichet. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.

But this is a highly unusual woman. Her name is Carrie Nation. There's one employee inside the closed bar as Carrie forces the door open. Even if he doesn't know her by the look of righteous fury in her eyes, he can probably guess her intentions from the hatchet she's wielding in her hand. Carrie Nation didn't come here to crack open a cold one with the boys. Or at least, not the way you'd think.

This hatchet is her signature accessory. And before the barman can stop her, she starts putting it to use. Carrie jumps behind the bar and smashes the liquor bottles.

She smashes the glasses. She smashes the faucets, the cash register, the slot machine.

Even the mirror on the wall.

But all of this is prelude, because finally Carrie Nation lays into her number one target, the kegs.

She drives her hatchet into the beer kegs, flooding the bar floor with the devil's elixir. By the time the sheriff arrives, Carrie is soaked to the bone. Her behavior was extreme, but Carrie Nation was nothing if not a zealot. By 1901, she had become the axe-wielding face of the temperance movement. The Senate bar is just the latest stop in her crusade to destroy every last keg in America.

And in that crusade, Carrie is far from alone. Before she started smashing stuff up, Carrie was a devout Christian and felt compelled by God to do things like making clothes for the poor or opening a shelter for the families of violent alcoholics. Her first husband had been a severe alcoholic himself, dying of drink in 1869 and leaving Carrie with their infant daughter.

Influenced by her own experience and that of others around her, Carrie would later say that she felt personally called by God to rid the country of alcohol. Her devoted service to the poor earned her the nickname Mother Nation. At the same time, her manic attacks on saloons earned her the nickname Hatchet Granny. Carrie referred to herself as...

Call her a bulldog, call her hatchet granny, call her whatever you like. Carrie Nation was an impassioned anti-alcohol activist. She and people like her were determined to remake America by any means necessary. I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups.

This is season three, the story of Formula Six, how prohibition's war on alcohol went so off the rails, the government wound up poisoning its own people. Today, we're taking a look at the people responsible for prohibition. See, before the government set about botching the enforcement of dry laws, lone wolves like Cary Nation had already been taking matters into their own hands for decades.

That's Terrence Winter, legendary TV writer and creator of Boardwalk Empire. His show, like ours, takes place in the 20s. But the full story of Prohibition begins a lot earlier.

Terry made himself an expert on this stuff for Boardwalk Empire, digging into the research.

That's historian Paul Thompson. Anti-alcohol sentiment, also called temperance, was a social movement. It eventually led to Prohibition, the outright banning of alcohol, but it didn't start out that way.

Early temperance supporters urged people to abstain from drink, starting with liquor, but eventually also beer and wine. For them, it was a personal choice you could make to improve both yourself and society. Here's Tom Pegram, author of Battling Demon Rum, The Struggle for a Dry America.

Self-control was all the rage in the early 1800s, and not just when it came to booze. Case in point, New England Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham.

Graham loved temperance in all its forms. You name it, he didn't want you to enjoy it. He encouraged a diet of vegetables and whole wheat in order to best suppress those bodily urges. Today, he's most famous for his cracker recipe. Yep, that's right. Graham crackers were designed to stop people from masturbating. But it wasn't all about self-denial.

Temperance advocates tended to believe in other types of social change, things which, even if they sound like basic human rights today, were actually quite radical in 1800s America.

Temperance could easily go hand in hand with blatant racism. In fact, put a pin in that for later. But in the 1800s, the likes of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth were prominent figures in the temperance movement. The people fighting hardest for causes like racial equality and women's rights were often supporters of temperance as well.

Here's author Dan Okrent on what it meant to be a progressive back in the 1800s.

But the dries, as the temperance advocates came to be known, didn't arise in a vacuum. In fact, temperance started to gain steam at precisely the same time as immigrants from Europe streamed into American cities in record numbers.

Hey there, it's your host, Ed Helms here. Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April 29th. It's called Snafu, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. And you can pre-order it right now at snafu-book.com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.

Packed into unsafe tenement buildings, compelled to work exhausting and often dangerous jobs, these newcomers were in desperate need of a place to unwind and throw back a few beers.

That's Annie Polland, the president of the Tenement Museum in the heart of New York City's Lower East Side.

Welcome to Yummytown. That almost makes all the turn-of-the-century typhoid and dysentery worth it.

Our man Alexander Gettler, chief toxicologist at Bellevue Hospital and himself an immigrant, would have been quite familiar with places like this. His family actually brewed their own beer in their bathroom, and their social lives would have been intimately tied to the saloons around them.

Gettler was more workaholic than alcoholic, and there's no record of him joining any associations for singing, dancing, or gymnastics, but this was his world.

People like Gettler worked their asses off to make a life for themselves and their families in the U.S., but as they did, they faced discrimination from the blue-blooded Protestants of this country, ironically, people quite similar to Gettler's partner, Charles Norris, who were fed up with immigrants, their foreign cultures, and their pernicious booze.

Saloons became the primary targets for the Cary nations of the world, as did the immigrants who frequented them. Even though Prohibition was not technically an anti-immigrant policy, Prohibition developed as a movement to change laws to prevent access to alcohol. As its proponents began trying to force it on the country, the battle lines became clear.

It's got all the wild disasters, spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker. I am also going on tour to celebrate. That's right. I'm coming to New York, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and my hometown, Los Angeles.

Alexander Gettler knows this is folly, but he doesn't know how much worse it's about to get.

That's J.W. Quillen, head chemist at the IRS. Now, I know what you're thinking, and don't worry, our old pal James Duran is still around. In fact, he's moved up in the world. Duran's now the Federal Prohibition Commissioner. Quillen works for him.

And on a hot August day, just a week after Babe Ruth's game-winning dinger, Duran has sent Quillen to deliver a warning from the government to drinkers everywhere.

Okay, not exactly breaking news. The stuff has been blinding and even killing people all over the country. And I gotta say, it's pretty twisted to even phrase this as a warning because Quillen isn't some passive bystander here. It's his office doing this in the first place. He lists the chemicals the IRS has been using. See if any of them sound familiar.

Last time on Snafu, double-toting two-gun Hart became a prohibition enforcement agent.

This product is compounded with benzene, kerosene, rucine, and various other products which make it a very deadly poison. That's the fucked up cocktail of poisons Gettler's been seeing in dead bodies at Bellevue. And it's a formula with an official name. We call this concoction Formula 6. And there it is, Formula 6. It's kind of snazzy sounding, but still enigmatic.

The important thing is, one of these toxic recipes has been given a public name. Here's Deborah again.

Quillen reminds everyone what the plan for these formulas is all about.

You see, there is a second, much more sinister layer to this press conference. Because Quillen goes on to say the Treasury Department knows that Formula 6 has not been effective enough, so they're going to release even more formulas that will be even more deadly. The really, really fucked up thing here is they know it's going to kill people. Just listen to the words Quillen uses.

Kind of a weird way to talk about a public health crisis. And a downright evil way to talk about a public health crisis he himself was causing. I mean, imagine how different those Smokey the Bear PSAs would go over if we also knew that Smokey was an avowed arsonist. Quillen ended his press conference promising a wave of alcohol poisoning. As Debra Blum says...

And ended up killing an innocent man. Back in D.C., Mabel Walker Willebrand roped in just about the last people who should ever be involved in law enforcement. This is where the Klan comes in, actually. So what was supposed to be a righteous moral crusade was turning into a bloody, morally compromised debacle.

I wish I could tell you this shocked the nation, but it didn't. The next morning, a couple hundred words about the press conference appear on page 22 of the New York Times. Quillen's threat did not exactly start a national conversation, nor did it convert boozehounds into teetotalers from coast to coast. And honestly, did Quillen expect it to?

I mean, did he or James Duran or Mabel Walker Willebrand or anyone really think that announcing they were adding a little more poison would finally do the trick here? We don't know what was in their minds or in their hearts, but we know they proceeded just as Quillen said they would.

Oh, and even though Quillen is announcing the Feds are retiring Formula 6, that doesn't mean it's going to vanish overnight. Two months after Quillen's announcement, another bureau official casually tells the press he's aware of one million gallons of denatured industrial alcohol poisoned with Formula 6 sitting in warehouses right around New York City.

These supplies belonged to companies who had permits to buy it legally for industrial purposes, but everyone knows that most of these companies are really just fronts for bootleggers. And all that alcohol is heading for the Holiday Punch Bowl.

The feds know how much tainted liquor is out there, and they know that it's destined for human consumption. In other words, one million gallons of poisoned liquor, practically a loaded gun pointed at the city of New York.

But for the moment, since it's categorized as industrial, it's legal. So in the minds of the Prohibition Bureau officials, well, there's nothing they can do. It's like, gee, we'd really love to do something about all that liquor we poisoned, but gosh darn it, it's perfectly legal and privately owned. Our hands are tied.

As Christmas approaches, everyone from Gettler to James Duran knows what's about to happen. The only real question is, how many lives will Formula 6 claim?

Christmas Eve, New York is aglow with holiday lights as a soft rain falls over the city. The evening starts off as a normal holiday shift at Bellevue Hospital. Cheery music wafts through the halls. It's quiet. For now. Then the ER doors swing open. A man barges in, ranting and raving, gasping for air. He's terrified. He says Santa Claus is chasing him with a baseball bat.

The doctors are well aware that, spoiler alert kids, Santa isn't real. But the man who just burst into the ER seems pretty damn convinced. This isn't your normal holiday drunk. This guy is straight up hallucinating. And he's not the only one. As Christmas morning approaches, over 60 more people crash through the ER doors, drunk, sweating, and vomiting. Like the guy being chased by a St.

And even after all that, the dries weren't done yet. On a cold, misty night in late November 1926, two Brooklyn cops stumble upon something extremely suspicious down by the docks on the East River. Under the full moon, a stooped man struggles to carry a big bundle of something towards the water.

Nick, many of them are seeing things that aren't there. But others are already blind by the time they get to the hospital. That night, eight of them die. Returning to his basement lab after the holiday, Alexander Gettler finds his Boxing Day surprise. Eight new dead bodies, not to mention the dozens more people elsewhere in the hospital, blinded or hallucinating.

He gets to work examining the man who spent his final hours raving about being stalked by old Kris Kringle.

Nothing out of the ordinary, just taking a peek at the organs of the recently deceased. And on first glance, Gettler sees the hallmarks of death by alcohol poisoning. The ordinary kind. But that doesn't explain the hallucinations or the blindness. Gettler knows full well that alcohol impairs vision, but it can't blind you on its own, nor can it make you see things that aren't there.

Whatever killed these eight people and poisoned dozens more, it contained some especially nasty chemicals. Gettler turns to his tried-and-true method. He takes biopsies of the body's liver, brain, and blood. He blends them into a sludge... He repeats the same process with each of the fresh bodies. Eight livers, eight brains, eight blood samples, 24 beakers of human chemical slurry.

As he waits for the results, news of more grisly Yuletide fatalities come in from around the country. 150 dead in Philadelphia, 71 dead in Baltimore, 328 in Chicago. Gettler knows he'll get to the bottom of it. Sooner or later, he'll figure out what's in Duran and Quillen's latest formula. But the more pressing question is, will anyone stop them?

We began this season with the story of Bix Beiderbecke, the virtuoso cornetist who, quote, cracked up and collapsed while on tour in Cleveland. It's time to come back to his story. See, Bix survived that 1928 incident, but he never really recovered. To be clear, Bix was already a full-blown alcoholic, which certainly didn't do wonders for his health.

But ever since that night, he had trouble breathing. He had pains in his legs. And he's convinced he was poisoned. Paul Whiteman, leader of the orchestra in which Bix was a member, keeps hoping his star cornetist will recover. For more than a year, he keeps Bix's chair empty. Nobody knows what exactly happened to Bix, but most chalk it up to drunkenness. Maybe he just needs to dry out.

First, Bix goes to his parents' place in Iowa to recuperate. Then he checks into rehab. I'm not sure what rehab was like in the 1920s, but let's just say it was less than fully effective. When he returns to his apartment in New York City, Bix is still in pain and still drinking heavily. When Paul Whiteman comes through town, he invites Bix to join them on stage.

Whip through those old solos again, buddy, even if it's just for one performance. But Bix is wracked with mysterious pain and struggling just to breathe. Sadly, his playing days are over. It's not long before Bix is a patient at Bellevue Hospital. He was so close to Alexander Gettler. Do you think they ever met? their paths did actually cross, kind of.

See, while undergoing treatment at Bellevue, Bix crashes with his friend, the legendary jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden.

When the cops holler out and ask him what he's doing, he panics, kicks the bundle into the water, and runs away. The cops tackle him and handcuff him. But even once they get him to the precinct, he's still not talking. And this isn't just a regular old, I ain't saying nothing kind of silence. More of a stupor. He looks ill. His face oddly flushed. The police suspect he's had quite a lot to drink.

He's got pneumonia. His eyes are still bloodshot. It's a struggle to keep food down. His breath is so shallow, it's starting to seem unlikely he'll ever be able to hit those great cornet licks he's so well known for again. So one day, Jack helps him out of bed and down to the street. Anything to preoccupy him, maybe help him regain a bit of his strength.

But today, Bix is overcome by a strange impulse, a morbid curiosity. Something in his gut, still ravaged by the poison, tells him to take the elevator down to the basement level.

They take the elevator down to the lowest level. The temperature drops about 10 degrees as they step out. It might just be a bad case of the chills, but Bix swears he can see his breath. They slowly teeter towards a heavy iron door clearly marked with the word, Mortuary. A watchman idles by the entrance to the morgue. Turns out he's a jazz fan.

That, along with a five dollar bill, is enough to get them inside.

Jack and Bix are the only living souls in the morgue. No doctors, no students. But there is a lone body lying on an examination table in the middle of the room. She's bloodless, as cold and smooth as marble. Soon she'll be embalmed, redressed, and placed in a pine box. A modest funeral. More than likely, she comes from a family who can only afford the bare minimum.

With one foot in the grave himself, Bix must have wondered what he'd look like when it came time to splay him out on a cold steel table. When Randy told us this story, it really hit me. Because Bix stands out to me as the kind of person Gettler was trying to help, trying to save. And the fact that Bix visited the morgue. He literally walked the halls where Gettler was doing his important work.

It has a kind of sad irony to it. Like, Gettler was working to put the pieces together and stop the poisonings. He was desperate to save as many people as he could, but it was too late for Bix. And it's almost like Bix knew it.

Bix's last few days are hot. It was August in New York. So hot, an already addled Bix can't get to sleep. His neighbors hear him playing his piano in the wee hours of the morning. He's seeing people and hearing things that aren't there. Understandably, he's fixated on death. It comes August 6th, 1931, while Bix is still in his apartment. He's sweating, shouting that there are men under the bed.

They have knives. They want to kill him. The building supervisor tries to calm Bix down by playing along. He gets on all fours and looks under the empty bed. Suddenly, Bix dives down from the bed and slams into him. The man struggles to catch him. A nurse who lives across the hall runs in to help. But the commotion is over. Bix goes slack and crumples to the floor.

Bix Beiderbecke's obituary listed his death officially as pneumonia. Lungs filled with fluid, spasms, shooting pains, hallucinations. Formula 6 had done its job. Slow and painfully sure. But the bigger question was, would anyone face consequences? Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company, in association with Gilded Audio.

Eventually, they identify him as Francesco Travia, a longshoreman who lives in nearby Cobble Hill. They can't get a word out of him, but they do notice his pant legs are soaked in blood.

It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Nevin Kalapalli and Stephen Wood, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canney, and Kelsey Albright.

Tori Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapalli and Akimany Ekpo. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing music and sound design by Ben Chug. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosato.

The role of Mabel Walker-Willibrandt was played by Carrie Bichet. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.

Sorry, I shouldn't laugh about this. That's historian Deborah Blum. Remember, she's an expert on the various ways chemicals can kill you. When you spend your career talking about poisoned corpses, sometimes you just gotta laugh. The police go to Travia's apartment, find a woman's dead body. Well, half of one. And her head is still there and her torso on the floor.

The scene in Travia's apartment is gruesome. So it's not really a stretch to conclude that Travia murdered this woman, chopped her up, and has just disposed of her legs in the East River. The body is identified as Anna Fredrickson, Francesco's neighbor. Anna's family tells the police that she went to Francesco to scrounge up some booze and left his apartment in multiple pieces.

To the NYPD, this looks like an open and shut case. They'd caught Francesco Travia red-handed, or at least red-panted. But then the city's chief medical examiner arrives at the crime scene.

Norris emerges from his car and strolls into the apartment, no doubt dressed in an outfit that cost an arm and a lot of money. He takes a quick look at the crime scene, hears what the cops have to report, and immediately blows up the entire theory of the case.

Norris only needs to see two things, the unnatural flush of the dead woman's skin and the lighting fixtures in the tenement building where she was found.

As Norris knows, this gas is not only poisonous, it's also colorless and odorless, a deadly combination he and Alexander Gettler know all too well from their work examining New York City's dead. The presence of carbon monoxide also explains why Travia's been in a stupor and the strange hue of the alleged victim's skin.

Anna Fredrickson's death was a tragic accident. At some point, as she got drunk with Francesco, one of them must have caused the gas leak.

Charles Norris feels compelled to testify in Francesco's case. He knows this man is innocent. Well, innocent of murder anyway. And he has the scientific facts to prove it.

Hey there, it's your host, Ed Helms here. Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April 29th. It's called Snafu, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. And you can pre-order it right now at snafu-book.com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.

It wasn't the first time Norris and Gettler took on the political powers that be and won. And it wouldn't be the last. Of course, Francesco did still get convicted of improperly disposing of a corpse, and I'm going to give it to the prosecutor on that one, but he did avoid the death penalty because Gettler and Norris investigated and intervened.

From gas leaks to lead pipes to radioactive watches, which is an actual thing you could buy at the time, there was a lot that could kill you in 1920s America. Time and time again, Gettler and Norris cracked cases that cops couldn't crack. And they were just about the only ones in New York City capable of getting to the bottom of the especially twisted mystery of Formula 6.

I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups. This is the story of how Prohibition backfired so badly that the government chose to poison thousands of Americans. Today, a string of mysterious deaths presents Norris and Gettler with another mystery, even as the culprit hides in plain sight. One thing we know about Alexander Gettler is that he loved the Yankees.

And we also know that, as a workaholic, his thoughts were never far from his work. So indulge me as I paint a picture for us. Gettler attending a real Yankee game and piecing together a few work thoughts. Sunday, August 2nd, 1926. Alexander Gettler, notorious workaholic, has given himself a rare day off to enjoy Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium.

His beloved Bronx Bombers are facing the Chicago White Sox, and they're off to a rough start. In the top of the first, Chicago left fielder Bib Falk hits a weak ground ball off Yankee pitcher Waite Hoyt and drives in a run. Bib, Waite. Come on, you gotta love these old-timey baseball names, right? But Gettler, well, he's not loving it.

By the time he's gotten to his seat and lit up one of his White Owl cigars, his Yankees are already down by a run. Now, even amidst all the peanuts and crackerjacks, Gettler's mind wanders to what he's been seeing in his lab and in the news. All over the city and all over the country, people are dying, going blind. Remember that bootleg cocktail, Ginger Jake?

There are people walking around town with a condition nicknamed Jake Leg, which causes the legs to twitch uncontrollably. By now, it's common knowledge that lots of ill-gotten hooch has serious, even fatal side effects. But people are still drinking it. The Yankees have their own formidable tag team, Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.

They're both in the midst of incredible seasons, smashing homers and breaking records. But in the bottom of the first, the Chicago pitcher gets Gehrig to ground out into a fielder's choice, intentionally walks the great Bambino. Oh, come on, pitch to him. Scary cut. And retires the side without letting up a run. Gettler puffs his cigar and cogitates.

There's been a commotion upstate in Buffalo where the health commissioner is alleging that dozens of recent deaths, chalked up to heart disease or apoplexy, were actually the work of methyl alcohol. In his own lab at Bellevue, Alexander's been seeing some downright bizarre things in his test results. And I don't mean the sludge he makes out of dead people. That's all in a day's work.

It's got all the wild disasters, spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker. I am also going on tour to celebrate. That's right. I'm coming to New York, D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and my hometown, Los Angeles.

But the chemicals he's finding in that sludge? Well, they're getting weirder and weirder. Pyridine? What the? Pyridine is colorless and highly flammable. It's commonly found in herbicides and insecticides. In other words, it's poison. Gettler knows the mafiosos distributing tainted liquor aren't afraid to get their hands a little dirty. But still, intentionally serving people insecticide?

and it gets weirder. There's also kerosene and industrial benzene, commonly found in rubber and gas. Now, you don't need to be chief toxicologist of Bellevue Medical Center to know kerosene and alcohol are a bad mix, but never one to jump to conclusions.

Gettler wonders if there's a way these victims might have accidentally consumed these poisons, which sounds crazy, but he's actually seen a lot of it.

Back in 1925, a dozen women died, and at least 50 more became ill with mysterious symptoms, including necrosis of the jaw. Since they all worked at the same watch factory, the cases were assumed to be connected. However, the company doctors tried to sweep it all under the rug. That's when Gettler was called in. He ran some tests and figured out exactly what was going on.

In order to make the watch faces glow in the dark, the workers painted them with radium, which, just like it sounds, is radioactive. The radium girls, as they came to be known, had been licking their paintbrushes to wet them as they painted, unknowingly consuming toxic radium every time. So now back to these latest poisonings by benzene and kerosene.

Maybe all of these victims worked at a rubber tire factory and they were all roommates in a building heated by burning kerosene, but probably not. Gettler can't find any connection between them, apart from the unique blend of the poisons that killed them.

Each of these chemicals is gnarly enough on its own, but when you put them together, it becomes clear whoever invented this cocktail had a deeply sinister intent. Benzene brings on a seizure. Kerosene constricts the throat. Pyridine sends agonizing pain shooting through the gut. Still other additives would have made the limbs go stiff.

Methanol sears the optic nerve after a few gulps, and nearly all the victims went blind before they died. Babe Ruth strikes out to lead off the bottom of the fourth inning. The Yankees are still down, and they haven't even recorded a hit yet.

Alexander is starting to worry about the dollar he's wagered on this game, but he's far more worried thinking about those noxious chemicals showing up in his lab sludge. Yankee pitcher Tommy Thompson keeps the White Sox in check through the fifth inning, but his team is still behind.

So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q&A or dramatically read about a kitty cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance. Again, head to snafu-book.com to preorder the book and check out all the tour details and dates. Or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay, that's it. On with the chaos. This is Snafu Season 3, Formula 6.

The crowd is restless, especially Alexander Gettler, as his mind turns to the most fucked up thing about all these poisonings. Since the dawn of Prohibition, the bootleggers and the mob have been competing directly with the government. The Prohibition Bureau, Mabel Walker-Willibrandt, the IRS, James Duran, and all their cronies.

They've been going back and forth, taking their swings at each other, as the government keeps putting nastier things into industrial alcohol, and the outlaws keep hiring chemists to thwart them. Gettler knows what he's seeing is no accident. Finally, in the bottom of the sixth, with Gehrig on base, Babe Ruth gets a hold of one.

The Colossus of Cloud hammers his 30th home run of the season, and the Yankees take the lead. Gettler rises to his feet with the rest of the crowd as he watches two all-time greats cross home plate. Sorry to spoil it for you, but the scoreline will hold. The Yankees win 2-1. All in all, a bad afternoon for Gettler has turned good thanks to a single swing of the bat.

But as he joins the crowd streaming out of the park and towards the 161st Street subway station, Gettler can't help but wonder, how many of these people would the government be willing to sacrifice for this insane failing strategy of deterrence? Gettler knows better than anyone this strategy isn't working.

If denaturing industrial alcohol stopped people from making drinks out of it, people would have stopped getting drunk. But that's clearly just not happening. If introducing more and more pernicious cocktails of poisons actually scared people away from drinking, they wouldn't keep ending up on a metal tray in Gettler and Norris's lab. It's madness. It's madness.

Gettler thinks to himself as he boards a packed train back to Brooklyn, not only are Duran and his boys intentionally making industrial alcohol unsafe, but this latest concoction seems to be a sign they're going to keep upping the ante. As if there's some magic formula, a perfect mixture so deadly it could finally convince drinkers to give up the booze.

OK, so we've established that public policy, as as it is generated by Congress, has a statistically nonexistent connection to the desires of the public. Why? What what are the primary what is sort of the underpinning reasons for that? Yeah, I mean, the simplest answer is follow the money.

We know prohibition was obviously a colossal government snafu and a fascinating story in its own right. But what are the nitty gritty lessons or insights we can walk away with this season? I wanted to talk to someone who could help us zoom out. Someone who thinks deeply about how power, corruption and unintended consequences shape our world.

Right. It's corrupt and legal. Right. It's corrupt and baked into the system that we have.

And it feels like it's such a cliche to say, like, it's the system. We're going to put the system on trial. But that kind of is the deal. Like, that's exactly what we're dealing with, with our political system right now.

Yeah, most of the two of us that are here do think it's our job to change that system. There are a lot of reasons that we feel polarized as a country right now. And, you know, we can point to the obvious wedge issues. We can point to the information silos, the social media and all of these things. And those are very real. And there are cable news, which is very corporate and cynical.

And these are these are very real factors. Right. But there are also a number of structural factors that are wedging us, things built into the political system engineered to polarize us even further. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about those more structural issues. Yeah, sure.

So I called up Josh Graham Lynn, the co-founder of Represent Us, an organization dedicated to fighting political corruption and making our democracy work better. Unlike, say, a democracy that poisons its own citizens. Josh helped us dig into big questions that inform our understanding not only of Formula Six, but also its lingering echoes into the present.

You said much more competitive. What are the numbers on how gerrymandering has affected the competitiveness of congressional elections?

In the primaries- I just wanna put an exclamation point on that, because it still blows my mind. Over 80% of congressional elections are non-competitive. And what that means fundamentally is that they aren't really elections. Like they're not – they're just kind of a rubber stamping ritual, a process, a kind of like a quaint nod to the past. But it isn't – it's not an actual election. Right.

We're doing the song and dance. We're doing the song and dance of putting a Republican and a Democrat against each other. But in 80 percent of districts, one will always win. Yeah.

And we know that generally the voters that participate in primaries are the most – sort of extreme voters of that group. Yeah, it's the party base, right?

And this is why we see so many politicians emerge that everyone's kind of shaking their heads like, how did this guy get nominated? How did this lady get there? Like, that seems crazy. Well, it's because like the most hardcore fervent Partisans are the ones nominating those people. So you brought up before this sort of question about the media environment.

How do we break free of political influence and lobbyists? How do we bring power back to voters? And ultimately, how do we strengthen democracy for future generations? Turns out the tangled mess of bad decisions behind prohibition isn't just a history lesson. It's a warning. So here it is, my fascinating conversation with Josh Graham-Lynn. Hello, Josh Graham Lynn. Hello, Ed Heckenweiler Helms.

You're saying that more level headed people will reach higher levels of government and they will be the mouthpieces that we see on the media. And that more measured kind of dialogue will have a cultural impact on all of us. Absolutely.

How do you change those incentives?

And that's one of those things, like... That is such a no-brainer, right? And yet we're in this feedback loop where the people that are making those rules are the people that benefit from – the existence of gerrymandering. So what then becomes the way that citizens can make those changes or force our representatives in government to make those changes?

Yeah. And I think I don't I think a lot of people don't realize like how much power citizens can have in that way, that what ballot initiatives can do and that they're really they are really just initiatives from the citizenry. They're not it's not a that doesn't have it's not a political process. It's something that goes citizens initiate and it goes before voters.

And so things like gerrymandering, which no politician is incentivized. Some might have the sort of moral backbone to to to back it up, but they're not incentivized to fix gerrymandering because they're all benefiting from it. So, yeah. So it's it is it is up to us and represent us as seeing a lot of success with ballot initiatives.

Close. Well, hey, so I'm so excited to have you on our Snafu podcast, and I'm just going to throw a couple of disclaimer slash context bits out there first. The first disclaimer is that I know you very well, and I I don't like you at all. No, that's not true. We're very good friends. You are a very good friend of mine.

Yeah. What are some others?

All right. Tell us about that.

So I will explain. Is that right? Australia has used ranked choice voting in all of their major political elections? That's just how they do it. Yeah. I did not realize that. That's amazing. Yeah.

So it's really interesting the amount of misinformation and disinformation that's out there about ranked choice voting because a lot of entrenched power on both sides of the political spectrum realize that it's a shakeup for them.

And the reason we know each other well is because you run an organization called Represent Us. And I have been very active with that organization because I really believe in its mission. So with that out of the way, tell us a little bit about Represent Us and your involvement, how it got started and how you got roped in.

So your incentive is to temper your message and not cater to the extremes. Totally. I mean, how much more chill would our world be if elected officials felt a need to speak to a larger audience?

Another term for ranked choice voting is instant runoff, right? Is that a phrase that kind of, I think, I like that phrase because it helps me understand that it's sort of a, then the vote counting is a sort of multi-step process. Yeah. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Sure.

The ranking is your sort of second round of. Yeah, exactly. Of the votes. It is so elegant. It's so simple. And it's so intrinsically fair. No wonder we don't use it. Yeah. No wonder we don't use it. Exactly. Exactly.

There's another really interesting bit of represent a strategy that has echoes in prohibition. The Volstead Act prohibition was overturned in sort of a – a movement that grew state by state. And it turns out this is part of a larger trend of laws that have passed in this same kind of incremental way. Tell us about how that factors into Represent Us strategy.

Outrageous.

And it doesn't take as much momentum as people might think, right?

And you're saying victories meaning like states building. States changing laws. Like one, two, three, four, five, six states starting to change these laws. Right.

Yeah, right. Because people I think people think it's so overwhelming to just like change a massive federal law. And that does feel overwhelming and almost incomprehensible. Like, how do you do that? But it does start small. You can start with these state initiatives and and then it really is a domino kind of momentum thing.

And it's cool to sort of see that track through history with some of these major cultural moments. prohibition, marriage equality, and so forth. When people are advocating for the American government to work better, that is part of a really remarkable legacy of work that goes back really to the founding of the country.

Ever since we got this country going, there's been an ongoing effort to just make it work better. Can you speak... More to that legacy broadly and what it's really looked like over the last 200 years.

We've already talked about more perfect. Let's just make it more perfect. Like we're getting there. It's always going to be more like we always have to be making adjustments, trimming the sails. And we've sort of talked about it.

More perfect. We'll get there. What would you say to our listeners out there right now, anyone who might be feeling like a little disenchanted or like, what can I do? How can I be part of this process? All of this sounds great, but it's a little out of reach for me and I'm just depressed. Like, what would you say to connect to that person?

Right on. Right on. Yeah. Every time I hear that, I just get all excited about Represent Us.

Isn't that the state where no politicians had to disclose gifts that they got from lobbyists or citizens?

That sounds good. Well, Josh. Some movements are built in the modern era. There you go. You just clone people. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on, Snafu. I really, really appreciate it. And I think our listeners will, too. Just hearing a lot of your insight and point of view on this stuff. This is a show about history's greatest screw ups.

And I just want to thank you for trying to make our country a little less screwed up.

So thanks.

Thank you, sir. Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company, in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. Additional production from Stephen Wood, Olivia Canney, and Kelsey Albright.

And I think there is just a very pervasive sense in America right now that things are feeling a little broken. No matter what side you're on, if your team won or your team lost, there's still this sense that like, well, still a lot of people are feeling kind of screwed and unheard. And that's really what Represent Us is trying to fix. How did it get started? What's kind of the origin story?

Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapalli and Ekemeny Ekpo. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Our associate producer, Tori Smith, edited this episode. Editing, music, and sound design by Ben Chug. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director.

Our amazing theme music is by Dan Rosato. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.

This was all under official government activity. They built a apartment that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

Yeah, so...

Right. And this is because political donations are considered a form of speech. Yeah. Under free speech.

So why are we talking to you in the context of season three of Snafu, which is all about early 20th century prohibition? Well, it's one of the first big sort of conflagrations of values in 20th century America. Of course, culture wars go back centuries.

And before we go further, I kind of want to I think it'd be cool to actually read a definition of culture war because Wikipedia sums it up quite nicely. So a culture war is a form of cultural conflict.

a metaphorical war between different social groups who struggle to politically impose their own ideology, moral beliefs, humane virtues, religious practices, et cetera, upon mainstream society or upon the other. In political usage, the term culture war is a metaphor for hot button politics about values and ideologies realized with

Intentionally adversarial social narratives meant to provoke political polarization among the mainstream of society over economic matters of public policy and of consumption. So one of the really interesting things about culture wars and prohibition is a perfect example of this is how laws get passed and with very little actual support from the general public.

So in the early 20th century, we had organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, and they made a lot of noise, and they also preyed upon a lot of broader cultural fears associating alcohol and drunkenness with immigrants and big cities and crime.

This was all under official government activity. They built a apartment that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

Temperance, on the other hand, was portrayed as an expression of the sort of pure and lily-white, lovely, small-town, old-fashioned American values. But even so, Broadly speaking, the general population did not support a national ban on alcohol at all. And yet it passed. So this is where I'm getting back to where you were starting to jump to in the beginning.

You often talk about a famous Princeton study that demonstrates this phenomenon. Tell us about that study and some of its real world implications in contemporary policy.

It's literally the opposite of what we all think. And it's the opposite of how we think our government was structured to work. Yeah, right. It's nuts.

What are some contemporary policy examples of this, of how this is taking effect? Yeah, I think there's a lot, actually. And some of them are very, you know, very hot. It's arguably every policy. I mean, it really is.

And it is so interesting that so much of what we hear surrounding these issues is triggering. Right. And that's intentional. It's just trying to get emotional responses out of us because. That clouds our judgment and also like creating more polarization and adversarial dispositions among the general population makes it easier to control the general population.

Hey there, I'm Ed Helms, and this is SNAFU, Season 3, Formula 6. How prohibition's war on alcohol went so off the rails, the government wound up poisoning its own people. This is a bonus episode, and as you may recall, I like to bring in guests for these bonus episodes and try to learn something a little bit new or different about the subject.

This is so insane. This was all under like official government activity. They built a apartment in San Francisco that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

If it allows me to go hella-skiing, then yeah, I'm hella on board.

Well, it turns out that even for someone who wanted to do good, even after he started his job as chief medical examiner, the odds were stacked against him. Because, it turns out, there were plenty of officials who simply liked the old way of doing things. Norris' budget for his staff and his workspace was laughably small. That drunk coroner had left him in office literally in shambles.

Before, police officers used coroners to play their political games. But now, with Norris in charge, they were in for a surprise. Like when a few officers brought Norris a body to examine, which happened to be riddled with bullet holes. They asked for a simple John Hancock on a, let's say, pre-filled-out death certificate that said the cause of death was suicide.

Norris looked at the corpse and said...

Norris was serious about his work. He was serious about building the office of the chief medical examiner into an effective research team that could get to the bottom of all the deaths in New York City. But to do that, he needed help. Norris was a doctor, not a chemist, who could detect toxins or poisons in a dead body. And during this time, there were more and more poisons surrounding Americans.

Morphine and teething medicines for infants, opium and sedatives, arsenic and everything from cosmetics to pesticides. And don't even ask about how much formaldehyde they were mixing with cow brains and putting in milk. And I thought the microplastics in my water bottle were bad. And it's not like it was harmless. People were dying from this stuff. So often, in fact, that it was hard to keep up.

So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q&A or dramatically read about a kitty cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance. Again, head to snafu-book.com to preorder the book and check out all the tour details and dates. or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay, that's it. On with the chaos. This is Snafu Season 3, Formula 6.

But here's the thing about poisons. They're just not quite as obvious as bullet holes. And so Norris had a crazy idea. To create a dedicated lab where chemists could work on determining causes of death. Call it a toxicology lab. At the time, no other city in America had one. And you know Norris and his cashmere. He always had to have the best.

This lab would be installed at Bellevue, a New York hospital perched along the East River since 1811.

Norris just needed to pick the right brainiac for the job. Fortunately for him, there was someone who fit the bill right down the hall, an assistant professor at the Bellevue Medical College. And the award for forensic toxicologist for the newly established New York Office of Chief Medical Examiner, where the clocks don't even work, goes to Dr. Alexander Gettler. Come on down, Alex.

Well, when Norris approached him, this Alexander Gettler fellow wasn't convinced that playing Robin to Norris' Batman was his dream job. You see, Alexander Gettler was already in a position that was nothing to sneeze at in those days. And, well, if you looked at where the invitation was coming from...

Let's just say it was pretty clear the medical examiner's office was in the build-the-plane-as-you-fly stage of its existence. Not to mention Gettler was from a completely different world. He was quite different from Flash the Cash Norris.

That's Dorothy Atzel, Alexander Gettler's granddaughter.

And that's Vicki Atzel, Alexander's great-granddaughter.

Gettler worked as a ticket taker for the 39th Street Brooklyn Battery Ferry and took the overnight shift. During the day, he earned himself a PhD in biochemistry at Columbia. Those brains and, you know, fairly intense work ethic got Gettler his teaching job. He had put in the hard yards and he had earned it.

But outside of work, he lived like a lot of other people in his Brooklyn neighborhood, tucked snugly in a brownstone with his wife's son and more than a half dozen Irish in-laws.

But going back and forth between a busy home and a busy hospital, he saw the difference medicine could make in the lives of everyday people. So even though he had turned down Norris's offer, he couldn't put it out of his mind. Maybe if he joined the medical examiner's office, he could do some good. So when Norris came around again, Gettler was ready to consider the job.

But Norris was also completely honest with Gettler. This was nothing like a cushy job in academia. Gettler would have to design the lab from scratch. He would have to figure out for himself how to do the work of detecting poisons. There were no training programs in forensic toxicology. He would have to blaze his own trail.

That was all right, though, because Gettler loved nothing more than a challenge. And cramming more chemistry work into his days, he agreed to take the position, but only if he could keep teaching at the medical college. That's how much he believed in his grind. Norris looked around at the backlog of bodies stacking up in Bellevue and said, Sure, man, whatever you want.

And while the scientific trenches of New York may have been metaphorical, there's no question that our dynamic duo had a very real fight on their hands. Because it turned out that even though the city was moving on from the flu epidemic, and the war in France was winding down, a different kind of war was just getting started.

November 30th, 1928, Cleveland, Ohio. The city has just opened a new music hall downtown. It's 1920s opulence from top to bottom, arched ceilings in an Italian style, columns and balconies glowing with gold leaf, a giant plaster eagle looking down over the stage. Maybe not how I would do the decor, more into tasteful minimalism myself, but the folks in Cleveland are eating it up.

And Norris and Gettler had gotten together just in time for the shit to hit the fan.

Dorothy Atzel is at home at her kitchen table.

Yeah.

She's meeting with one of our writers, Albert Chen. She's very, very carefully handling a dusty blue hardbound book that's older than my mom's wedding china. The book is a collection of typed reports written by Alexander Gettler over the course of three decades.

Yeah, it's been a while since 10th grade chemistry for me, too.

A massive sparkling chandelier spills light over a crowd of thousands who are all losing their minds, cheering for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra playing their hits. They're the most popular band in America, and they have a talented young cornetist blowing sweet notes from his horn. That's Bix Beiderbecke on the coronet. Not many folks name Bix nowadays. That's how you know you're in the 20s, baby.

A great question that before Gettler and Norris came along, no one had any clue how to answer. But Dorothy's daughter Vicki says Gettler figured it out.

That blue book contained all the detective work that Gettler and Norris pursued in their day, and that work kept them busy. Very busy.

Despite what you may be thinking, the apparent lack of nearby urinals was not the biggest public health crisis Norris and Gettler were facing. By early 1919, the deadly wave of influenza was finally passing.

But Norris and Gettler were seeing a concerning uptick in victims, reporting similar symptoms, a sudden sense of weakness, severe abdominal pain, and vomiting, blindness, a slip into unconsciousness, heart failure, and even death. But why? They had a hunch it had something to do with a ubiquitous substance floating through the streets of New York City in 1919.

And no, I'm not talking about all the urine flowing from Gettler and Norris' big laboratory sink. We're talking about liquor.

That's LaShawn Harris, historian of New York City's underground economy.

Light beer, cocktails, a little bit of rum? Not if you were part of the Anti-Saloon League. Let me tell you about these folks. Their mission statement wasn't exactly hard to get at. It's kind of right there in the name, Anti-Saloon. They wanted to hammer the bung back into America's whiskey barrel. To them, drinking was a moral outrage, a sin, and the root of all society's ills.

From small beginnings, they grew into the most powerful lobbying group in America. In Ohio, where they started, they ran a pressure campaign that beat a popular governor. Ohio was dry. But why stop there? They got ambitious. They wanted to wring every last drop of liquor out of the whole wet nation. So as their next target, they set their sights on Gettler and Norris' stomping grounds.

New York City. You see, by their count, New Yorkers drank a dozen pints of alcoholic beverages a week for every man, woman and child, a per capita consumption that was more than three times the national average. One saloon for every six people in New York, the league said.

As Dr. Harris says, New York City at the end of World War I was bursting with working-class saloons, chandeliered hotel bars, and wine-soaked bohemian cafes. The Anti-Saloon League called it the Liquor Center of America. To them, the Big Apple had fermented into a cidery slush of drunkards and degenerates. They had the nation, and especially the nation's politicians, running scared.

He's standing in the back row of the band, doing his thing. Bix is a small, dapper fella dressed in a tux with slicked brown hair parted down the middle like an open Faulkner novel. A few songs into the performance, something strange happens. Bix's eyes roll back. He slumps over on the stage and falls to the ground, completely unconscious.

And then came World War I. It was exactly what they'd been waiting for. The Anti-Saloon League saw the chance to justify a national ban on liquor as a wartime measure. That was easy. No politician wanted to be unpatriotic. But the wartime measure was just the first step. What they really wanted? A permanent ban on liquor enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

One by one, lawmakers in state houses across the country fell in line.

But New York City was, as one paper called it, Satan's last stronghold.

The Anti-Saloon League, they were a lot of lawyers and Methodist ministers from, like, Ohio. New York City, meanwhile, was a lot of working class, immigrant, black and Catholic neighborhoods constantly evolving. These New Yorkers weren't exactly interested in test driving someone else's moral experiment in turning the city dry as a kale chip.

But when a ban hit the whole country, they had no choice. The entire commercial beer supply in New York City, from the warehouses to the grocery stores to the cabinets of every legitimate business, got poured down the drain. But you might be surprised to hear, despite all that beer saying goodbye, New York nightlife wasn't changing. The alcohol fueling it, however, was.

With the beer taps dry, saloons were now serving stiffer and more mysterious concoctions, this time with distilled liquor.

Wood alcohol, known to those of us who passed 10th grade chemistry as methyl alcohol. It was used as a solvent to make varnish and as a fuel, and unfortunately sometimes to mix cocktails. From the taste, you couldn't tell exactly what was in those drinks. But you might find out the next day when you woke up in the hospital, your body loaded with methyl alcohol, a very toxic substance.

And that's if you were lucky enough to wake up. More and more people from all parts of the city were ending up on a gurney outside Gettler's lab.

A bandmate jolts him awake, helps him backstage, and eventually takes him back to his hotel room. That night, Bix has a freakout in his hotel room. He yells hysterically. He destroys furniture. This surprised everyone who knew him. He was a jazz musician, not a member of Led Zeppelin. His bandmates would later describe it as a fit of delirium. They said he cracked up.

In 1919, Bellevue just opened a new pathology building, six stories high, made of solid granite with long arched windows. Inside is the city morgue and the medical examiner's offices. There are autopsy rooms and a forensic chemistry laboratory for Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler to study the dead.

Gettler's laboratory is a layer of blue flames leaking out of Bunsen burners, hissing heating systems, boiling dishes. The wood floorboards are discolored by chemicals and burns. When Norris and Gettler see a rise in cases of people who've been crippled by blindness just before death, they have a hunch that the reason is poisoning due to toxic liquor. Wood alcohol.

But no test exists to detect wood alcohol in cadavers, so Gettler does what he always does in cases like this. He creates one. Gettler's test is grinding up a chunk of tissue into a flask and then boiling it into a dark sludge. He measures the formaldehyde bubbling out. Most alcohol would release just a trace of it. Wood alcohol releases an overpowering amount.

Literally.

A fair amount, actually. For generations, people had been making their own liquor and getting sick doing it. Moonshine, white lightning, liquid courage, call it what you want. But this cheap homemade stuff mostly stayed at the margins of American society. Now, however, it was becoming the mainstream.

So, in 1918, Gettler wrote an article for the country's leading medical journal to get word out to doctors and public health officials. He saw prohibition coming, and he knew exactly what it would mean.

Gettler connects the dots. What he sees in 1918 makes him think that people aren't going to be drinking less because prohibition is the law of the land. Instead, they're going to be drinking a much more suspect, much more dangerous supply. This message, it didn't land. But he was right. By the winter of 1919, more than 60 New Yorkers died from drinking wood alcohol. Another 100 were blinded.

Then, almost that same number of alcohol-related deaths, only this time, just in the month of December alone. So Gettler sat down at his desk, picked up his pen, and tried again.

Don't get confused here. Wood alcohol, methyl alcohol, and methanol? Those are just three different names for the same nasty beast. And you should never, ever drink it. As Gettler's granddaughter Dorothy says...

In this report, Gettler begins to identify the presence of wood alcohol in an alarming number of cases. On the day after Christmas in 1919, Gettler and Norris switch tactics. Just writing for America's doctors wasn't going to save the country's direction. Sorry, doctors. I mean, you've been telling us it's all diet and exercise for, like, ever, and we just don't listen.

So with two major reports reaching too small of an audience, Norris and Gettler take this story straight to the general public. They called a press conference. They invite a throng of reporters from the New York papers into their offices in Bellevue. The newshounds file in past broken chairs and over the blood-spattered carpet left behind by the drunk coroner as a parting gift.

Then, Gettler and Norris deliver their message.

That little ditty is the American songbook classic, Georgia On My Mind. Maybe you know the iconic Ray Charles version, but this is an original recording with the composer Hoagy Carmichael from the last recording session of Bix's career. In his solo, you can still hear Bix's genius.

They issued that warning in December 1919. Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler were now on the case, a case that would consume them across the next decade, and expose the killer of Bix Beiderbecke. Remember him? The jazz musician who collapsed in Cleveland at age 28. It would take our dynamic duo to the heart of a cruel and misguided scheme, a snafu that led to the mass poisoning of thousands.

And the people behind it? The U.S. government.

Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino.

This episode was written by Albert Chen, Carl Nellis, and Nevin Kalapalli, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood. Tori Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is Nikki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapalli and Akimany Ekpo. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris.

Editing music and sound design by Ben Chugg. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Andrew Chugg is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by Dan Rosato. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak.

And though you might not be able to tell, Bix reportedly didn't have enough breath to finish some of the gorgeous phrases in his solo towards the end of the song. Bix is struggling. He never really recovers. A year later, Bix is home in his Queens, New York apartment. By now, he's bedridden, down to just 150 pounds, complaining of constant headaches, dizziness, memory loss, and blackouts.

This was all under official government activity. They built a apartment that had a glass mirror where he could sit there and watch. And then they would drug these customers. And he was just sort of taking notes and God knows what else behind this double mirror. And this was all in the name of science.

This summer night, a neighbor visits and finds Bix in bed, under the sheets, hallucinating. Bix dies that night. He was just 28. What happened to him? That question haunted Bix's family and his fans. Sure, they knew Bix wasn't well, and they knew that like a lot of touring musicians, Bix was a heavy drinker. That had been true since his teens.

But it would take years for anyone to see how this all fit into a larger story. In the 1920s, taking a drink put Bix, along with millions of Americans, right in the middle of the decade's bitter divide over alcohol. In the end, the war between the wets and the dries would have a massive human cost. I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw-ups.

Last season, we told the story of the burglary that exposed J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI. This season, we go back a little further in time, all the way to the 1920s. We're bringing you a dark tale from the heart of the Prohibition era. As we all know, Prohibition did not work. It was what you might call a snafu.

Within that snafu is another snafu, one you probably haven't heard, about how a lot of Americans started dying mysteriously, and the unlikely duo who tried to figure out why and save them. on this season of Snafu, the story of Formula 6. How prohibition's war on alcohol went so off the rails, the government wound up poisoning its own people. I thought I had a pretty good handle on Prohibition.

The 1920s, the era before the Great Depression when we felt like, hey, World War I is over. What better to do than party? The Harlem Renaissance, jazz, votes for women. America was feeling a burst of new energy. We were trying out cars, trying out radio. Heck, we were trying out movies. And as a Georgia boy, I can't help loving how much love Georgia was getting in that decade.

In addition to Georgia on my mind, another classic emerged, Sweet Georgia Brown. And the background to all of that was, of course, Prohibition. It's just kind of part of our mental furniture, right? For me, the word Prohibition takes me back to all the great portrayals in classic American cinema, like The Untouchables, two straight hours of mafia set pieces.

Who could forget when Elliot Ness faces down Al Capone in a hotel lobby?

If you didn't sneak out to hear De Niro drop F-bombs in an Italian accent, were you even 13 the summer The Untouchables came out? I mean, just listen to that macho chest thumping. Cops and mobsters, good guys and bad guys going toe-to-toe. It's classic Hollywood stuff that just reels you in.

Yeah, almost no one had. So I called up someone who really brought prohibition into focus for me, along with millions of TV fans like me.

It's so, so great to meet you. That's Terrence Winter, creator of the epic TV series Boardwalk Empire. I put the question to him. I'm curious if you hit on in your research, are you familiar with Formula 6? I am not. And that was wild to me because his show is stacked with the kinds of details that made 1920s Atlantic City come to life.

But the sense we have that we already know prohibition, it can actually lead us astray a little because cliches about life in the 1920s are so thick. Thank you. We assume we know what it's all about. You know, liquor was made illegal. It was a big mistake. There was a bunch of mobsters and Tommy guns. And then it got repealed.

Obviously, yes. I mean, we're talking about the birth of jazz. We're talking about Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Eddie Lang, Earl Hines. I could go on. The point is, we tend to paint history with broad brushes. Like Terry says, when we think about the prohibition era, our minds probably go immediately to the cliches we know best.

And the real, complex human lives that ordinary people lived in the past don't always come through when we talk about history. But this story, the story of Formula 6, reveals something bizarre that was happening all along underneath all the organized crime and speakeasy gin and temperance moralizing. A shocking government plot rooted in the first modern American culture war.

It starts with a pair of scientists, investigators, who happen to see it coming. In fact, they tried to stop it It's 1918 in New York, and the city is facing a problem. Okay, the city is facing a lot of problems, but here's a tricky one. A record number of murders are going unsolved. A city report lays blame squarely on one government office in particular, the office of the coroner.

The coroner was essentially the city's chief death investigator. He issued death certificates and performed autopsies for all murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. A pretty grim but important job. And yet, the city's coroners were either horribly unqualified or terribly corrupt. Or, quite often, both.

Hey there, it's your host, Ed Helms here. Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April 29th. It's called Snafu, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups. And you can pre-order it right now at snafu-book.com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.

That's Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook, Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She describes how at the time, the police essentially used coroners to rubber stamp false reports and sometimes even cover up murders. And when she says anyone could become a coroner, she means it.

And if you think that's bad, let me introduce you to the head coroner of New York in 1918, a guy who showed up to crime scenes completely hammered.

After stories like that started coming to light, the mayor had no choice but to make some changes. It was time to find someone who could get to the bottom of all these crimes. Someone who is less Homer Simpson and more Sherlock Holmes. Or, I don't know, maybe anyone who could stand upright? City officials decided the coroner's office was a joke, an embarrassment, and a waste of taxpayers' money.