Under the pale moonlight, cat-mouse chase shines on

Va. agents stalk whiskey makers in 'liquor country'

Finding moonshiners is part of Randall Toney's job with the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control department. Agents have a hard time getting cooperation during investigations. (Andrea Bruce/washington post)

ROCKY MOUNT, Va. - It was so quiet out in the country, the officers didn't want to make a sound. Lying in the woods, huddled in sleeping bags, they couldn't use their cars or even turn on a light.

The moonshiners might see them.

The officers, from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, had been pursuing a local businessman for years. At last, a tip had led them to a distillery. Silently, from across the road, they watched who came and went. They sneaked in a surveillance camera. The moonshiners also had surveillance cameras.

The cat-and-mouse game culminated in a raid in which ABC officials, joined by sheriff's deputies and federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, burst into a barn on the rural property and found four large silver-colored pots used to make moonshine - cheap, illegal whiskey. That led to the largest federal moonshine case in southwestern Virginia in years and a 31-count indictment filed in November in federal court.

People have always enjoyed their liquor in rural Franklin County, which calls itself the "moonshine capital of the world," a slogan seen on billboards and T-shirts and even at a moonshine exhibit on the campus of a local Methodist college. A late-1990s federal-state crackdown, Operation Lightning Strike, slowed the liquor trade.

Federal officials say it has yet to recover. But the ABC says moonshining is starting to make a comeback as moonshiners, who have been known to hide their stills behind fake headstones in cemeteries and camouflage them with green paint in the woods, adapt to the scrutiny.

"I could give you a list about as long as your arm of people who I know are in the business full time right now," said Buddy Driskill, special agent in charge of the state alcohol agency's Lynchburg office. Driskill says Washington and Baltimore are prime destinations for the untaxed and unlicensed liquor, named for 18th-century bootleggers who smuggled brandy off the British coast by the moonlight. These days, people consume moonshine in illicit establishments known as "nip joints."

"They're making a whole lot of liquor," Driskill said.

Jay Calhoun is determined to stop them. A burly ABC agent who wears a John Deere cap, olive-colored overalls, Calhoun lives among the moonshiners near Rocky Mount, a community of 5,000 in the Blue Ridge Mountains, 25 miles south of Roanoke.

"They know us, and we know them," said Calhoun, 50, who heads the ABC's three-person illegal whiskey unit. The familiarity is such that a moonshining suspect once offered to give Calhoun a ride to court for the trial. Another time, Calhoun bumped into a "still hand," the person who runs the stills. "I was in this little country store getting a can of sardines or pinto beans or something, and he was buying the same thing," Calhoun said. "I knew where he was going, and he knew I was going in to work, too."

With his partner, Randall Toney, 57, Calhoun operates out of a tiny, unmarked two-room office with surveillance equipment packed into a corner. Many nights, the agents drive the rural roads of Franklin County, looking for stills.

Because moonshine is so ingrained in the culture and history of the region, the industry is clannish. Once a year, they'll get a call with the location of a still.

At some point that call came in about Jody Alton "Duck" Smith, 60, a lifelong Franklin County resident and a car dealer with a penchant for community service.

A 1998 raid hinted at a possible other side. The ABC uncovered and destroyed a large whiskey still on property owned by Smith, agents said.

Surveillance of the still in the current case took months. Court records show that ABC agents installed a camera across the street from the still. Smith was seen by agents at the location, the records say. When ABC and ATF agents raided the still in May 2006, they found 1,728 one-gallon jugs and 50 pounds of barley, according to the indictment in US District Court in Roanoke. Smith was charged with operating the distillery. He pleaded not guilty.

William Lindsey, an attorney for Smith, said his client denies the charges but hasn't had much else to say. "Folks around the alleged illegal liquor business don't talk much, God bless 'em," he said.