SNAFU with Ed HelmsOrganized crime, speakeasy gin, and jazz impresarios stole headlines in the 1920s, but behind the scenes boiled a bizarre government plot rooted in the first American culture war. In New York City, a pair of scientists sees the devastation written on the wall, and they try to put a halt to the mayhem before it's too late.
November thirtieth, nineteen twenty eight, Cleveland, Ohio. The city has just opened a new music hall downtown. It's nineteen twenties 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. A massive sparkling chandelier spills light over a crowd of thousands who are all losing their minds hearing for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra playing their hits. They're the most popular band in America. And they have a talented young coronetist blowing sweet notes from his horn. That's Bis bider Beck on the coronet. Not many folks named Bix nowadays. I'd say, you know you're in the twenties, baby. 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 Faukner 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. A band mate jolts him awake, helps him backstage, and eventually he takes him back to his hotel room. That night, Bix has a freak out 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 Yon John jor Ya just a little song Keep Georgia on my Mind. Georgia on My.
Mind, That Little Diddy 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 Hogi Carmichael from the last recording session of Bix's career. In his solo, you can still hear Bix's genius, and though you might not be able to tell, Bis 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 queen's New York apartment. By now, he's bedridden, down to just one hundred and fifty pounds, complaining of constant headaches, dizziness, memory loss, and blackouts. This summer night, a neighbor visits and finds Bix in bed under the sheets, hallucinating. Bis dies that night. He was just twenty eight. 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, Bicks 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 nineteen twenties, taking a drink put Bis, 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 dryes would have a massive human and cost. I'm ed Helms and This is Snaffo, a show about history's greatest screw ups. Last season we told the story of the burglary that exposed Jay abder Hoover's secret FBI. This season, we go back a little further in time, all the way to the nineteen twenties. 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 snaffoo. Within that snaffhoo is another snaffhoo when 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 Snaffo, the story of Formula six. How prohibitions 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 nineteen twenties, the era before the Great Depression, when we felt like, hey, world War One 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 mint 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.
Come on, you can't concern of a pic you talk to me like that in front of my son.
If you didn't sneak out to hear de Niro drop f bombs in an Italian accent, were you even thirteen? 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. But then, well, I heard the story of a Prohibition snafo that genuinely surprised me because it wasn't part of the Prohibition story that I knew. It was the story of Formula six and a devastating Prohibition era program by the federal government. Hey, honey, have you ever heard of Formula six?
No?
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. Hey, so good to meet you, man, 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're if you hit on in your research, are you familiar with Formula six? I am not, And that was wild to me because his show is stacked with the kinds of details that made nineteen twenties Atlantic City come to life.
Even though it's one hundred years ago, it's still felt modern. People dressed in suits, they went out to restaurants, they talked on the telephone, they drove in cars. You know, it's still felt cool, It still felt like accessible.
This was modern.
You know, you could wear some of those clothes today.
I mean, I gotta say, I do look pretty good in a pair of spats. But the sense we have that we already oh Prohibition, it can actually lead us astray a little because cliches about life in the nineteen twenties are so thick 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. Yeah.
I mean, every time you ever see anything in the twenties, everybody's doing the fucking Charleston is like, did they do any other songs written between nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty?
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, 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 happened to see it coming. In fact, they tried to stop it. It's nineteen eighteen 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 blamed 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 debts, a pretty grim but important job. And yet the city's coroners were either horribly unqualified or terribly corrupt, or quite often both.
They made corners out of anyone who needed a job who the party machine owed them a favor.
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 corners to rubber stamp false reports and sometimes even cover up murders, and when she says anyone could become a coroner. She means it.
There were signed painters that were milkmen.
There were funeral home operators, there were lawyers, and there were notably doctors who were such terrible doctors that they had lost their practices.
If you think that's bad, let me introduce you to the head corner of New York in nineteen eighteen, a guy who showed up to crime scenes completely hammered.
There are death certificates that literally say could be diabetes or possibly an auto accident. Right, I mean, you're just going seriously.
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, so they shut it down. But they couldn't just ignore the reasons people died in New York. They had to replace it with something. Their idea, a new system for the city and a new position that would be filled by a qualified doctor who would appoint a trained staff to examine cases and rule on causes of death. This new lead position was Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. So they announced the job opening and in walked de fella named Charles Norris. Uh no love Walker, Texas ranger Chuck Norris, and god knows, I'm scared of him. But just to be clear, this is doctor Charles Norris of New York, New York.
He was a really big guy and he had one of those kind of classic spade like beards. He had a big booming voice and a Yale football player's presence, and he used it when he needed to.
That's right. This particular Norris was a yalely with the appropriate aristocratic roots.
He was a descendant of the Norrises who founded Norristown, Pennsylvania.
So they were a long time, well establish important American family.
Which means that yep, Norris was rich rich. He didn't hide it. Norris was a public servant who rode around like Bruce Wayne.
He never went anywhere without his being driven by his chauffeur.
And even when he.
Went to crime scenes, you know, his chauffeur would take him to the crime scene and he would get out in his cashmir coat and his expensive hat.
Not exactly a man of the people, you'd think, but money bags aside. It turns out public service actually ran deep in Norris's blood. Norris's ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War. Ever heard of it. They stripped lead gutters and rain spouts from their house to make bullets for the Continental Army.
Yeah, the house is flooding again.
My smoking chair will be ruined.
My beloved.
It is a sacrifice we make to bring full and now nation.
And then in the Civil War, Norris's grandfather negotiated the first one hundred million dollar loan financing the Union government's war against the Confederates.
All of them, all of them.
Norris took the do gooder spirit of his ancestors and studied medicine, became a doctor, and now as the Great War raged in Europe, he was looking to do his part to keep the people of New York safe. So he made a real run at the position of Chief Medical Examiner when the job opened up, an actually qualified doctor who wanted to use his position for the public good. 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's budget for his staff and his workspace was affably small that drunk corner had left him in office literally in shambles.
At one point, he was actually forced to buy the clocks on the walls of the medical Examiner's office because the mayor the mudget is such an agree that they couldn't even afford clock.
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 that don't think so.
It is entirely out of the question, in my opinion, to even consider the possibility of a suicide on account of the number and situation of.
The bullet wounds.
There were four bullet wounds across the corpse.
In other words, seems impossible that this poor guy shot himself in the heart, shoulder, leg, and arm. 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 cowbrains and putting in milk. And I thought that microplastics and 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. 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 eighteen eleven.
As he thinks about organizing his department, the first thing he thinks is, we need a chemist.
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 too doctor Alexander Gettler. Come on down, alex You're the lucky winner, uh, doctor Getler, Doctor Gedler. Well, when Norris approached him, this Alexander Gettler fellow wasn't convinced that playing robin to Norris's 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, Getler was from a completely different world. He was quite different from Flash the cash Norris.
He was trim, yeah, dark hair, he had a long angular face, chomping on a cigar all the time.
From what I understand, that's Dorothy Atseel, Alexander Gettler's grand.
Every picture we have of him, he's in a suit, and.
That's Vicki y Atzel, Alexander's great granddaughter.
He's got like a pretty serious expression, which I think was kind of his mo He was a pretty serious guy. He just kind of like went to work as anyone would go to work with his suit jacket on.
He wasn't from wealth or Ivy League education or anything like that. He just kind of pulled himself up and followed what he wanted to do, got the education he needed, worked nights so he could go to school during the day.
Tickets please all right, have a nice day.
Getler worked as a ticket taker for the thirty ninth Street Brooklyn to 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 Getler 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 ugly in a brownstone with his wife's son and more than a half dozen Irish in laws.
He raised his kids in the middle of this kind of chaos of the Irish American life in Brooklyn. I think the hugely influenced also his sense of the world because he was so connected to her family.
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 Getler. This was nothing like a cushy job in academia. Getler 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. Would have to blaze his own trail. That was all right, though, because Gentler 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.
My grandfather was tapped to be the chief toxicologist. It just felt almost like they were like superhero crusaders as well, you know, like starting something and actually not just starting it, but turning the page on a system that didn't work, wasn't fair and was corrupt.
It's funny what you say, is you gonna say what you said, mom about them being like superheroes that have just like it feels like it was. They're like a buddy cop movie of like these two scientists in the trenches together.
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, and Norris and Gettler had gotten together just in time for the shit to hit the fan.
It's been in the big baggie in the box, in a closet, and if you look at each of the pages, they're all like sort of frayed and chipping.
Dorothy Atsel is at home at her kitchen.
Table, hesitating, separating the pages. Yeah, because every time I open it there's pieces of paper that just kind of flake off.
Eating with one of our writers, Albert Chen. She's very very carefully handling a dusty blue, hard bound book that's older than my mom's wedding china. The book is a collection of typed reports written by Alexander Getler over the course of three decades.
His dissertation was the balance of acid forming and base forming elements in food and its relation to ammonia metabolism. I don't know what that means.
Yeah, it's been a while since tenth grade chemistry for me too.
And then like this one, which was from nineteen twenty one, a method for the determination of death by drowning. So now I understand what this is about.
That's easy to understand.
Back in the day when he was doing all of his work, they were pulling bodies out of the Hudson and you, how do you know if they drowned or they died by another means?
A great question that before Gettler and Norris came along, no one had had any clue how to answer. But Dorothy's daughter, Vicky says Gettler figured it out.
People would come to him with problems that they like didn't even really know the cause of, just like all of these people who work in the same place are having the same issue. They're all getting weird tumors and cancer, transit workers or subway workers who were all feeling really like sluggish and like cognitively fuzzy. And he would first figure out like the cause of the problem and then solve it.
That blue book contained all the detective work that Getler and Norris pursued in their day, and that work kept them busy, very busy.
They were so like focused on their work and they're trying to do things they didn't want to, like leave the lab to use the bathroom, so they just urinated in the big sink they had in the lab, which I'm like, Okay, I guess if you're really focused on your work and you really don't want to take the time, I get it.
But despite what you may be thinking, the apparent lack of nearby urinals was not the biggest public health crisis Norris and Getler were facing. By early nineteen nineteen, the deadly wave of influenza was finally passing, but Norris and Gettler, we're 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 nineteen nineteen. And no, I'm not talking about all the urine flowing from Getler and Norris's big laboratory sink. We're talking about liquor.
Alcohol is everywhere.
The term that New York never sleeps is true of the nineteen twenties, like there are nightclubs on every single corner.
That's Lashawn Harris, historian of New York City's underground economy.
Even in Black and Tan club inter racial clubs in New York City to in the early twentieth century, African Americans are going to these clubs, both middle class and working class people and are drinking. Alcohol is something that black churches use for various different ceremonies. We also know that alcohol is something that different social groups are engaging and whether they be light beer or cocktails or a little bit of rum, it's something that one can engage in while at church. It's a part of your social life.
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 more outrage, a sin and the root of all societies 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 ring every last drop of liquor out of the whole wet nation. So as their next target, they set their sights on Gettler and Norris's stomping grounds, New York City. You see, by their account, 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 doctor Harris says, New York City at the end of World War One was bursting with working class saloons, chandeliered hotel bars, and wine soaked bohemian caps. The Anti Saloon League called it the Liquor Center of America. To them, the Big Apple had fermented into a sidery slush of drunkards and degenerates. They had the nation, and especially the nation's politicians, running scared, and then came World War One. 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 US Constitution.
The US House of Representatives has voted in favor of the proposed eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the coach, manufacturer, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. The amendment will now make its way for the fifty states.
January seventh, nineteen eighteen, Mississippi.
Becomes the first state to ratify the eighties Amendment.
Georgia becomes the thirteenth state to ratify the eighteenth Amendment.
One by one, lawmakers and state houses across the country fell in line California as the twenty second state to ratify the eighteenth Amendment, But New York City was, as one paper called it, Satan's last stronghold.
An apple did the trick in the garden of Eden.
Imagine what I can do with the big apple in America.
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 band 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.
As the amendment is circulating and moving forward to when it actually goes into place around New York City, people are starting to prepare for it by making sure they have their own little home stills or backyard stills or you know what people used to call bathtub gin. Even if they can't get it legally, they want those systems in place and they were using wood or other materials that they could easily access in an urban area, and they were making wood alcohol.
Wood alcohol known to those of us who passed tenth 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.
Bellvue was this sort of Gothic brick building on the sort of mid to lower East side of Manhattan. There was something about that brick ivy gothic look of the place. There was something about, you know, the fact that so many deaths occurred there.
It had a kind of mythology.
About it for a number of reasons.
Right, they saved a.
Lot of lives, but a lot of people died there that it just had this kind of reputation of being a slightly haunted place.
In nineteen nineteen, 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 Hitler 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 would 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.
They're really trying to get to the bones of this, right, literally, how much poisoned alcohol is out there?
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 nineteen eighteen, Getler 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.
He titles this article, would alcohol Poison It? He's not messing around. He puts the word poison right in the actual article title. So he says, the prohibition by our government of the manufacture of distilled liquors will unquestionably lead to much moonshining, adulteration, and dilution of the liquors offered to the public.
It is quite evidence given the recent poisonings in the city of over thirty persons, six of whom died with a whiskey sold in the poorous sections of the city that on analysis was believed to contain a considerable amount of wood methyl alcohol. Wood alcohol tastes like ethyl alcohol and morovo. It is considerably cheap, Hence the adulter ate buys the latter ignorant. That's a via poisoning, blindness and often death lurks with it.
He's saying to doctors around the country, you know, let people know this is dangerous, this is coming.
And arm yourself.
He said, I want to send up a signal flare, please take this as a warning. Where at the very start of this, essentially what that piece says, in a beautifully scientific way, is.
I'm not talking about alcohol. I'm talking about poison.
Gettler connects the dots. What he sees in nineteen eighteen 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 nineteen nineteen, more than sixty New Yorkers died from drinking wood alcohol. Another one hundred were blinded. Then almost that same number of alcohol related deaths only this time just in the month of December alone. So Getler sat down at his desk, picked up his pen, and tried again.
The Critical Study of Methods for the Detection of methyl alcohol by Alexander O.
Getler.
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.
Says, here, during the years nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen, I have had occasion to examine over seven hundred human organs for alcohol. In addition to this, about two hundred and fifty liquors of various descriptions were analyzed.
In this report, Getler begins to identify the presence of wood alcohol in an alarming number of cases. On the day after Christmas in nineteen nineteen, 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 news hounds file in, passed broken chairs and over the blood spattered carpet left behind by the drunk coroner as a parting gift. Then Getler and Norris deliver their message.
Anything that passes for whiskey and the saloons is dangerous. The first symptom is a mere pain in the stomach, But one teaspoon what alcohol is enough to cause blankness? Drinking a tumble of it will kill you within hours.
Sure, what does it smell like? Complete blindness such in this booze? Have you tried it yourself, doctor Dorris?
Prohibition is not going to make alcohol disappear. It's instead going to create numerous substitutes for whiskey that I have that.
Before prohibition really takes off.
He's looking the federal government right in the eye and saying, I want to let you know that we're looking at this now. We're seeing people starting to die. This is a terrible idea. Whatever you know, politics and morality you think is behind what you're doing. The bottom line of what you're going to do is kill people.
They issued that warning in December nineteen nineteen. Charles Norris and Alexander Getler were now on the case, a case that would consume them across the next decade and expose the killer of Bicks bider Beck, remember him, the jazz musician who collapsed in Cleveland at age twenty eight. It would take our dynamic duo to the heart of a cruel and misguided scheme, a snaffoo that led to the mass poisoning of thousands and the people behind it. The US government this season on snaffo.
The fact that there were only twenty six hundred prohibitionations covering the entire Canadian border, of the Mexican border, and both coasts.
It's ridiculous.
When we're five years into prohibition, the government is starting to go, Okay, this isn't work.
What is wrong with the American people.
The bartender took some brass metals and the other two patrons held him down and well to beat the crap out of him.
He said, if I ever get out and the two people, I'm going to go get the DA and that son of a bitch Gettler.
If I made that up, come on and this absolutely all happened?
Did people die?
They died? Daily Snapfoo 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 Papelka, 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 Callapoly, with additional writing and story editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen wood. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is nicky Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapoly and a kimminy 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 creator of director. Theme music by Dan Rosatto. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and Ben Ryzac
