Actor Who Played A Guy Driving Illegal Moonshine?

Contents

- 0.0.1 What happened to Wayne on Moonshiners?

1 Who was the famous bootlegger?

What happened to Wayne on Moonshiners?

48-year-old Johnny Wayne Griffis is charged with distillation – manufacture of prohibited liquors and beverages, and a class C misdemeanor of sale, offer for sale, possession or barter of prohibited liquors and beverages. Back in 2020, Griffis competed on the Discovery Channel show ‘Moonshiners: Master Distiller.’

Who was the famous bootlegger?

In the “roaring twenties,” Al Capone ruled an empire of crime in the Windy City: gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, bribery, narcotics trafficking, robbery, “protection” rackets, and murder. And it seemed that law enforcement couldn’t touch him. The early Bureau would have been happy to join the fight to take Capone down.

Who was the richest bootlegger?

King of the Bootleggers: The Rise, Fall and Betrayal of George Remus George Remus was the biggest bootlegger of the Prohibition era, but his reign was short-lived. How did it all come crashing down around him? Author Karen Abbott tells Remus’s roller-coaster story in The Ghosts of Eden Park, tracing his rise to the top of the bootlegging racket, his imprisonment, his wife’s betrayal, and the saga’s fatal finale.

Who were the Big 6 Bootleggers?

The ‘Big Six’ of Bootlegging – During the 1920s, the prohibition of alcohol created opportunities for criminals to make a lot of money. Luciano became one of the “Big Six” of bootlegging along with childhood friend Lansky, Siegel, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro and Abner “Longy” Zwillman.

Who was the famous moonshiner from Kentucky?

The Legend of Big Six Selling untaxed alcohol is a big no-no, but there still are those who try to get away with it. They’re called moonshiners, and they’ve been around since 1791, when the federal government placed a whiskey tax on any and all alcohol produced in the United States.

Entucky was a hotbed for moonshine activities that became a game of cat and mouse as federal agents came looking for stills to demolish throughout the backwoods of eastern, south-central and western Kentucky.
Although these back-road chemists might have operated on the theory of out of sight, out of mind, there was one Fed whose mission was to search and destroy.

His name was William Bernard “Big Six” Henderson, and no one did it better. A few years ago, the History Channel produced a documentary, Rumrunners, Moonshiners and Bootleggers, tracing the history of moonshine. In it, Henderson was featured as the most legendary still buster, thus cementing his notoriety.

Henderson stood 6 feet, 4 inches tall, weighed more than 250 pounds, and sported a thick shock of white hair. “I could run like a deer, didn’t drink nor smoke, and nobody outran me,” Henderson once said. Throughout his 28 years as a federal agent, he busted 5,000 stills and sent 5,600 moonshiners to jail, according to his personal daily record.

“You can do the math,” he said. We did. Working a normal five-day work week, Henderson would have “busted” 178 stills per year or one every other day of his career as a “revenoower.” He became so famous in some parts that moonshiners often painted “Big Six” on the sides of the barrels they illegally produced, knowing many of them would end up in his hands anyway.

Thurlow, a moonshiner, named his still Big Six.
Starting work one morning, Thurlow greeted it like a co-worker.
Good morning, Big Six,” he said to the still.
Why don’t we just run ourselves off a little batch, you and I? What do you say to that, Big Six?” ” That you’re caught, Thurlow,” Henderson said, stepping out of the mist.

Many kids in the 1950s and ’60s played games of cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians, but in the hills and hollows of Kentucky, a different version—moonshiners and revenuers—was popular. While the young boys were playing their games, girls inserted “Big Six” into their jump-rope chant: “My mother told me to watch the still in case Big Six came over the hill.” The people of eastern and south-central Kentucky didn’t have the still business all to themselves.

In the 1950s, Golden Pond in western Kentucky was known as the “Moonshine Capital of the World,” with as many as 15 stills running a day, although locations in North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia also laid claim to that moniker. Eventually, the Land Between the Lakes project left Golden Pond a ghost town (now free of spirits) between Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake as part of the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area.

Henderson chased moonshiners from one end of Kentucky to the other. His larger-than-life reputation developed from some of his own tales, and part of his legend was the fair treatment he showed to those he apprehended. “I never regarded them as doing something evil,” Henderson said, “just illegal.

I never abused them.
Illed a few, but never abused them.” The moonshiners Big Six Henderson tracked down respected him as much as they feared him. “Mr.
Six,” one woman said when he arrested her husband for a third time, “we’re proud to have folks know we know you.” Henderson was born in 1903 in Rineyville, a few miles from Elizabethtown in Hardin County.

He died in 1987 at 84 and was buried in St. John’s Cemetery. How did he get the nickname “Big Six?” Many thought it was because of the,44-caliber pistol he was rarely seen without. Others said he threw a baseball much like Hall of Famer Christy “Big Six” Mathewson when he pitched in a semi-pro baseball league to pay for college and law school.

In fact, it became so embedded in Henderson’s name that by the time he became a U.S. marshal, “Big Six” was part of his letterhead and signature on his official correspondence. Louisville resident Dr. Neal Garrison grew up in Bowling Green in the 1950s and ’60s when Henderson was the official timekeeper at Western Kentucky University games.

Garrison’s dad, Dick, was Big Six’s assistant and took over for Henderson when he retired. “He was my godfather,” Garrison said. “He was close to lots of influential people, especially when it came to athletics.” He liked being a man of influence and befriended many athletes.

The crossover between Big Six’s career and love of sports is easy to explain.
It was a game to me—a challenge,” he said.
Big Six was close to Diddle and Rupp and helped them recruit.
He was also close to Moose Krause at Notre Dame and one of the reasons Paul Hornung went there,” Garrison said.
Henderson was proud of his association with Cliff Hagan, one of Kentucky’s greatest basketball players.

“My first memory of Big Six was in 1949, right after our Owensboro team won the state championship,” Hagan said. “He was the timekeeper. I scored 41 points in our win over Lexington Lafayette, and he came out on the floor and handed me the game ball. He said, ‘I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but I want you to have this ball.’ ” Hagan’s friendship with Big Six grew, and they even traveled together on a college visit to Notre Dame.

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Hagan, of course, eventually chose UK, where he put together a legendary college career. Hagan wore No.6 at UK as a tribute to his courtside friend who often told him about his raids. “Big Six was such a character and sometimes would embarrass his wife, Gladys, with all of the stories he told. He even had a hand-printed necktie that showed me shooting a hook shot.

It was sometimes funny when he had it on and was around some people from Western, he’d put his hand over it to cover it up.” Henderson’s connection to WKU was special, too. “It was about 1928 when I first met Coach Diddle,” he recalled in an oral history.

I played against Western for L&N Pan-American.” For decades, Henderson’s association with the school grew as he became the official timekeeper for Hilltopper basketball games.
He thought so much of Diddle that on Jan.6, 1962, in recognition of WKU’s 1,000th game, Henderson personally went out in the Bowling Green community and raised 1,000 silver dollars to present to the coach during the game.

Tom Curley has been part of the Kentucky high school state basketball tournament stat crew for 45 years and operated the clock for the old ABA Kentucky Colonels basketball team. Before that, he manned the clock for several games at Diddle Arena while a student at WKU in the 1960s.

Curley remembers the first time he met Henderson at the state tournament. “I was scared to death. He was so intimidating,” Curley said. “He’d show up in a coat and tie, wearing a cowboy hat with that big gun on his side. We had three seats—one for Big Six, one for his gun and one for me.” Curley said Henderson liked to engage the crowd, especially those sitting behind him.

“Later in his career, he paid more attention to the crowd than the game. Sometimes, as much as a minute would run off the clock because he was talking and not paying attention.” Henderson was such a storyteller that he once participated in a national storytelling festival in Tennessee.

Big Six stories took on a life of their own.
There were a couple, however, that were a little far out, but still believable.
Well, maybe.
Dad played poker with Gen.
George Armstrong Custer,” Henderson was quoted as saying.
Yes, Custer was stationed in Elizabethtown for two years.
According to Henderson, Custer tried to persuade his dad to re-enlist in the Army, but he declined, missing the opportunity to die with Custer six months later at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

The time frame may not match the story, but that’s not to say Big Six wasn’t confused—or maybe he lived by the adage that facts should never ruin a good story. In an 1978 interview, he claimed a friendship with Babe Ruth, “I was there when Babe hit his called shot,” which Big Six called his biggest thrill.

It was the third game of the 1932 World Series in Chicago’s Wrigley Field, in which the Yankees swept the Cubs 4-0.
I was sitting up there in the box seats he’d given me,” Big Six said.
‘Course, that’s why I was so fond of Babe.” Henderson would have been 29.
How Ruth and Henderson became acquainted, no one knows.

Big Six played semi-pro baseball and worked for the L&N. Major League Baseball teams traveled by train then, so there’s a chance they could have met as the Yankees traveled from New York to Chicago. Or they might have crossed paths at one of the Yankees’ barnstorming games in Louisville.

Big Six’s life reached folk hero status, earning him a spot in Esther Keller ‘s book, Moonshine: Its History and Folklore,
Between what others said and what he said about himself, stories—embellished or not—have kept his exploits alive 30 years after his death.
It was no myth that he could creep through the woods as quiet as smoke and could run like a deer for miles.

Usually, he didn’t have chase his quarry. “Homer, halt,” he shouted at one fleeing ‘shiner. The man froze in his tracks. “I’m halted, Big Six. I’m halted.” Why wouldn’t a distillery name one of its fine bourbon after Big Six to honor his exploits? It would be the perfect mix of fact and fiction, and Big Six Bourbon would be the real deal.

California-produced Big Six Bourbon Barrel Aged wines are named for Mickey “Big Six” Doyle, said to be Kentucky’s fastest 1920s bootlegger. Doyle, not to be confused with a Boardwalk Empire character, drove a lightning-fast 6-cylinder car. Unlike Henderson, Doyle may be totally fiction and certainly had no connections to Ruth, Rupp, Diddle or Hagan.

In a 1978 interview saved by the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, Big Six had “eyes the color of wet turquoise.” If ever a bourbon were named in his honor, he’d have been OK with it. His stories have been packed, unpacked and packed again.

Who was the most famous bootlegger of the 1920’s?

The Speakeasies of the 1920s – Prohibition: An Interactive History This 1927 program for the Cotton Club, New York’s foremost nightclub and speakeasy during Prohibition and many years beyond it, advertised Cab Calloway and his orchestra. The program shows that the club, featuring African-American performers, catered to a wealthy white crowd.

A woman eyes the photographer warily while standing at the door of a speakeasy, the “Krazy Kat,” in Washington, D.C., a hangout for the city’s bohemian crowd, circa the early 1920s.
Some Prohibition-Era speakeasies required more than a password – they issued membership cards used to identify the bearer as a true, and maybe dues-paying member.

When Prohibition took effect on January 17, 1920, many thousands of formerly legal saloons across the country catering only to men closed down. People wanting to drink had to buy liquor from licensed druggists for “medicinal” purposes, clergymen for “religious” reasons or illegal sellers known as bootleggers.

Another option was to enter private, unlicensed barrooms, nicknamed “speakeasies” for how low you had to speak the “password” to gain entry so as not to be overheard by law enforcement. The result of Prohibition was a major and permanent shift in American social life. The illicit bars, also referred to as “blind pigs” and “gin joints,” multiplied, especially in urban areas.

They ranged from fancy clubs with jazz bands and ballroom dance floors to dingy backrooms, basements and rooms inside apartments. No longer segregated from drinking together, men and women reveled in speakeasies and another Prohibition-created venue, the house party.

Restaurants offering booze targeted women, uncomfortable sitting at a bar, with table service.
Italian-American speakeasy owners sparked widespread interest in Italian food by serving it with wine.
Organized criminals quickly seized on the opportunity to exploit the new lucrative criminal racket of speakeasies and clubs and welcomed women in as patrons.

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In fact, organized crime in America exploded because of bootlegging. Al Capone, leader of the Chicago Outfit, made an estimated $60 million a year supplying illegal beer and hard liquor to thousands of speakeasies he controlled in the late 1920s. The competition for patrons in speakeasies created a demand for live entertainment.

The already-popular jazz music, and the dances it inspired in speakeasies and clubs, fit into the era’s raucous, party mood.
With thousands of underground clubs, and the prevalence of jazz bands, liquor-infused partying grew during the “Roaring Twenties,” when the term “dating” – young singles meeting without parental supervision — was first introduced.

Speakeasies were generally ill-kept secrets, and owners exploited low-paid police officers with payoffs to look the other way, enjoy a regular drink or tip them off about planned raids by federal Prohibition agents. Bootleggers who supplied the private bars would add water to good whiskey, gin and other liquors to sell larger quantities.

Others resorted to selling still-produced moonshine or industrial alcohol, wood or grain alcohol, even poisonous chemicals such as carbolic acid. The bad stuff, such as “Smoke” made of pure wood alcohol, killed or maimed thousands of drinkers. To hide the taste of poorly distilled whiskey and “bathtub” gin, speakeasies offered to combine alcohol with ginger ale, Coca-Cola, sugar, mint, lemon, fruit juices and other flavorings, promoting the enduring mixed drink, or “cocktail,” in the process.

As bootlegging enriched criminals throughout America, New York became America’s center for organized crime, with bosses such as Salvatore Maranzano, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. At the height of Prohibition in the late 1920s, there were 32,000 speakeasies in New York alone.

The most famous of them included former bootlegger Sherman Billingsley’s fashionable Stork Club on West 58 th Street, the Puncheon Club on West 49 th favored by celebrity writers such as Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, the Club Intime next to the famous Polly Adler brothel in Midtown, Chumley’s in the West Village and dives such as O’Leary’s in the Bowery.

Harlem, the city’s black district, had its “hooch joints” inside apartments and the famed Cotton Club, owned by mobster Owney Madden, on 142 nd Street. Owners of speakeasies, not their drinking customers, ran afoul of the federal liquor law, the Volstead Act.

They often went to great lengths to hide their stashes of liquor to avoid confiscation – or use as evidence at trial — by police or federal agents during raids. At the 21 Club on 21 West 52nd (where the Puncheon moved in 1930), the owners had the architect build a custom camouflaged door, a secret wine cellar behind a false wall and a bar that with the push of a button would drop liquor bottles down a shoot to crash and drain into the cellar.

Near the end of the Prohibition Era, the prevalence of speakeasies, the brutality of organized criminal gangs vying to control the liquor racket, the unemployment and need for tax revenue that followed the market crash on Wall Street in 1929, all contributed to America’s wariness about the 18 th Amendment.

Who was the famous moonshiner in Kentucky?

Entucky was a hotbed for moonshine activities that became a game of cat and mouse as federal agents came looking for stills to demolish throughout the backwoods of eastern, south-central and western Kentucky. Although these back-road chemists might have operated on the theory of out of sight, out of mind, there was one Fed whose mission was to search and destroy.

Henderson stood 6 feet, 4 inches tall, weighed more than 250 pounds, and sported a thick shock of white hair.
I could run like a deer, didn’t drink nor smoke, and nobody outran me,” Henderson once said.
Throughout his 28 years as a federal agent, he busted 5,000 stills and sent 5,600 moonshiners to jail, according to his personal daily record.

Thurlow, a moonshiner, named his still Big Six. Starting work one morning, Thurlow greeted it like a co-worker. “Good morning, Big Six,” he said to the still. “Why don’t we just run ourselves off a little batch, you and I? What do you say to that, Big Six?” ” That you’re caught, Thurlow,” Henderson said, stepping out of the mist.

I never abused them. Killed a few, but never abused them.” The moonshiners Big Six Henderson tracked down respected him as much as they feared him. “Mr. Six,” one woman said when he arrested her husband for a third time, “we’re proud to have folks know we know you.” Henderson was born in 1903 in Rineyville, a few miles from Elizabethtown in Hardin County.

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In fact, it became so embedded in Henderson’s name that by the time he became a U.S. marshal, “Big Six” was part of his letterhead and signature on his official correspondence. Louisville resident Dr. Neal Garrison grew up in Bowling Green in the 1950s and ’60s when Henderson was the official timekeeper at Western Kentucky University games.

The crossover between Big Six’s career and love of sports is easy to explain. “It was a game to me—a challenge,” he said. “Big Six was close to Diddle and Rupp and helped them recruit. He was also close to Moose Krause at Notre Dame and one of the reasons Paul Hornung went there,” Garrison said. Henderson was proud of his association with Cliff Hagan, one of Kentucky’s greatest basketball players.

Hagan, of course, eventually chose UK, where he put together a legendary college career.
Hagan wore No.6 at UK as a tribute to his courtside friend who often told him about his raids.
Big Six was such a character and sometimes would embarrass his wife, Gladys, with all of the stories he told.
He even had a hand-printed necktie that showed me shooting a hook shot.

I played against Western for L&N Pan-American.” For decades, Henderson’s association with the school grew as he became the official timekeeper for Hilltopper basketball games.
He thought so much of Diddle that on Jan.6, 1962, in recognition of WKU’s 1,000th game, Henderson personally went out in the Bowling Green community and raised 1,000 silver dollars to present to the coach during the game.

Curley remembers the first time he met Henderson at the state tournament.
I was scared to death.
He was so intimidating,” Curley said.
He’d show up in a coat and tie, wearing a cowboy hat with that big gun on his side.
We had three seats—one for Big Six, one for his gun and one for me.” Curley said Henderson liked to engage the crowd, especially those sitting behind him.

Big Six stories took on a life of their own. There were a couple, however, that were a little far out, but still believable. Well, maybe. “Dad played poker with Gen. George Armstrong Custer,” Henderson was quoted as saying. Yes, Custer was stationed in Elizabethtown for two years. According to Henderson, Custer tried to persuade his dad to re-enlist in the Army, but he declined, missing the opportunity to die with Custer six months later at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

It was the third game of the 1932 World Series in Chicago’s Wrigley Field, in which the Yankees swept the Cubs 4-0.
I was sitting up there in the box seats he’d given me,” Big Six said.
‘Course, that’s why I was so fond of Babe.” Henderson would have been 29.
How Ruth and Henderson became acquainted, no one knows.

Big Six’s life reached folk hero status, earning him a spot in Esther Keller ‘s book, Moonshine: Its History and Folklore, Between what others said and what he said about himself, stories—embellished or not—have kept his exploits alive 30 years after his death. It was no myth that he could creep through the woods as quiet as smoke and could run like a deer for miles.

California-produced Big Six Bourbon Barrel Aged wines are named for Mickey “Big Six” Doyle, said to be Kentucky’s fastest 1920s bootlegger.
Doyle, not to be confused with a Boardwalk Empire character, drove a lightning-fast 6-cylinder car.
Unlike Henderson, Doyle may be totally fiction and certainly had no connections to Ruth, Rupp, Diddle or Hagan.