Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  At the garage by day, Parks learned to tear apart and rebuild cars. Most were Fords, but Parks also began learning the nuances of up-and-coming carmakers such as Buick, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Lincoln, Packard, and Ford's nemesis, Chevrolet. It was hard, grimy work, but it was honest work, and the pay was good.

  There was even better money to be had, Parks found, after hours and in the dark of night. In addition to the service station, Uncle Miller and his wife owned a small restaurant on Luckie Street in Atlanta, and many of their customers came for more than just food. Uncle Miller sold them pint-size “mason” jars of white lightning. Raymond's job a couple of nights a week was to drive to the country and buy a few dozen gallon-size tins of corn whiskey—sometimes from Walter Day, sometimes from family and friends back home in Dawsonville. He'd deliver the load to his uncle, who transferred the liquor to the pint jars. Parks began earning much more delivering whiskey than he would have made working solely as his uncle's mechanic. He also watched and learned.

  If Walter Day taught Parks about the art of distillation, Uncle Miller taught him the business side of buying and reselling moonshine. And in time, Parks decided to go into business for himself. On one of his trips to Dawsonville, he negotiated with some family members, who agreed to sell him gallons of corn liquor at 90 cents apiece. Then, on nights when Uncle Miller didn't need him, he drove to Dawsonville and back to Atlanta with a Ford full of liquor. He solicited customers in his northwest Atlanta neighborhood, offering a gallon for $1.20 to $1.30. Like a milkman, he drove around taking orders—ten gallons here, twenty there. Some customers were restaurant owners who wanted to keep a few jars of something special behind the counter. Some were retailers, who bought in bulk, then decanted the liquor into more manageable jars.

  Parks's entree into big-time whiskey selling coincided with the mass migration of the descendants of southern slaves, many thousands of blacks fleeing the poverty of the farmland. Unemployed black farmhands were migrating from idled farms into cities—some to Atlanta, others traveling the “Hillbilly Highways” toward the Midwest, especially to Ford's Detroit. Whiskey's formerly rural consumers—white and black—were seeking factory work, starting new lives in the city, and taking with them a taste for moonshine. That diaspora created the need for subversive new transportation systems for illegal whiskey. Parks, with a canny eye for opportunity, catered largely to those black customers who had settled near his uncle's service station in the grittier, less developed northwest corner of Atlanta.

  Parks delivered to rough, illicit watering holes such as the Bucket of Blood and Club Martinique, to makeshift joints in people's homes, such as Peg's Inn and Mountain Breeze. As many of his customers were unwelcome at white establishments, they created their own illegal bars called “nip joints” or “nip houses,” where drinkers came to buy one-dollar shots of Parks's high-proof white whiskey. One famous joint tried to fool any snooping revenuers by hiding tanks of whiskey in the ceiling and piping it directly to the kitchen faucet.

  Customers usually paid up front, and Parks filled their orders within a few days. Yet, while the enterprise allowed Parks to put more distance between himself and the poverty and violence of his rural Georgia birthplace, the threat of arrest lurked constantly.

  After working for Uncle Miller during the day, Parks would drive his Model T up to Dawsonville, load it with sixty to a hundred one-gallon tin cans of liquor, arranging it all tightly in the trunk of his Model T and in the space created by the yanked-out backseats, over which he tossed a blanket. He'd drive back down Highway 9 toward Atlanta, or west along Highway 53, taking the winding dirt lanes slowly so as not to attract the law's attention. He'd stop and park on a dirt path or behind a barn and sleep until dawn, then continue down from the mountains, stopping where the dirt road became blacktop. There, he'd pull over and, using a bucket he kept hidden beneath a bridge, dip water from a creek and wash the red dirt off his wheels and fenders. Then he'd roll through Marietta and on into Atlanta, nonchalantly blending in with the other morning commuters. He'd deliver the whiskey to his customers, or stow the car at a public parking garage for delivery later that day, then start another workday fixing Fords at his uncle's garage.

  Parks was just sixteen at this point, but the fortuitous duality of his profession—daytime mechanic, nighttime moonshiner—brought income the likes of which he'd never seen. In addition to his pay from Uncle Miller, for both his day job and night job, Parks was netting 30 cents per gallon in his own moonshining enterprise. That meant Parks, on top of his regular pay, was making an extra $30 for each night of tripping. His hunger for more profits had him delivering whiskey nearly every night of the week, either for himself or for his uncle. With the extra $150 to $200 a week in moonshine profits, Parks bought a second, slightly more luxurious personal car, a ′29 Chevy convertible. He kept the heavy-duty, workhorse Model T as his delivery car. But each night of tripping increased that chance that his car would end up in the wrong hands.

  One morning, he drove carefully, though slightly above the speed limit, on the Canton Highway toward Atlanta, with a load of whiskey stacked behind him. At the city's outskirts, an unmarked deputy's car roared up from behind, passed, and then cut in front of him. Parks stomped on the brakes and swerved off the highway. He instinctively jumped out of his whiskey-crammed Ford and bolted across a newly plowed cornfield toward the dense woods on the other side. The deputy fired a warning shot in the air, but Parks's long legs just pumped faster. Fit and muscular from all the mash mixing and trudging through the woods carrying sugar sacks to Walter Day's stills, Parks was “fast as a rabbit,” a childhood friend once said.

  When he reached the far side of the field, with the flabby deputy lagging behind, Parks plunged into a thicket of brambles. When the thorny branches became too thick to proceed, he dropped to the dirt and slithered. Finally, he found a low spot in the ground, curled into a ball, and waited. The deputy shouted and cursed, but hesitated to tangle with thorn-covered briars. He finally stalked off back to his patrol car. Parks was scared, and not about to take any chances, even after the deputy drove off. So he waited, and waited.

  Later that day, he heard the growl of a wrecking truck towing away his Ford.

  Still he waited.

  As dusk turned to dark, he finally crawled from his hiding spot, brushed himself off, walked to the nearest streetcar stop, and rode back into Atlanta. He laid low at home for a few days, while an attorney—a sharp named Swift Tyler, who would serve him well in the coming years—agreed to take on his case and tried to get his car back. Incredibly, Tyler was able to successfully argue that Parks wasn't in his own vehicle that day and managed to get the cops to return the Model T. The case was dropped due to lack of evidence, and Parks was back in business. But the experience taught him a lesson: don't take chances, don't be stupid, and consider every other car on the road as the enemy.

  A few months later, while driving through the downtown intersection called Five Points, Parks got spooked by a car that came up fast behind him and rode his tail. Parks's backseat was stacked so high with liquor, he couldn't get a good look at the driver. He decided, same as before, to stop and run, and turned onto Marietta Street looking for a place to pull off. Then he noticed the other car was no longer behind him—it had continued straight. Parks drove off to make his delivery (he called it “doing the work”) and then stopped at a west side restaurant for lunch with a friend. In the parking lot, Parks saw the very car that had tailed him, and Parks's friend knew who owned it—a boy named Ralph, who was inside the restaurant, sitting at a booth with three girlfriends.

  Parks's friend went back to his car to get a tire iron to fight with, but Parks just strutted into the restaurant, right up to Ralph's table. Before Ralph could open his mouth, Parks punched him square in the face. The girls screamed and the boy tried to get up, but Parks popped him again and then fled before anyone could call the cops.

  Word of Parks's reputation began to spread. And he was soon on his way to becoming
the new force in North Georgia moonshine.

  As the number of Fords and other cars began choking downtown Atlanta's streets, a new type of structure began to rise into the skyline: the multilevel parking garage. Those structures became very useful for Parks's growing moonshine business.

  Parks purchased more vehicles and began hiring others to help him with deliveries. He started keeping his cars in the city garages, rotating them in and out for delivery jobs to avoid drawing the law's attention to one particular car. He also used the parking garages as transfer spots. He called it “setting off”—a large load of a hundred gallons would be “set off” into smaller deliveries of ten to twenty gallons, the parsing-out of which was done in the garages at the Terminal Railway Station, near the Fox Theater, at the famed Varsity Drive-in, and around Georgia Tech University.

  One day, Parks was setting off some five-gallon sacks of liquor on the top deck of the Ivy Street Garage. He had driven to the garage with the load, and he and a coworker were sorting it into other delivery cars when a police car screeched up behind them. Parks and the other boy ran. One of the cops caught his coworker, but Parks made it to the top of the stairs just a few steps ahead of the other officer. He ran and fell and rolled down three flights until he reached Ivy Street. Parks waited in a crouch at the bottom of the stairwell, catching his breath and making sure no one was hiding outside to nab him. Then he heard the cop's voice echo down through the stairwell, “Let the son of a bitch go. I ain't gonna break my neck for him.” Parks took off through the exit and sprinted right through Five Points. He didn't stop until he got home to Francis Street, a couple of miles away.

  His whiskey cars became property of the city of Atlanta, but Parks would rather buy new cars than strive for heroics trying to retrieve them and end up shackled before a judge. At the time, it was common for moonshiners to sacrifice the occasional car, even one full of whiskey.

  Parks tried to avoid more close calls by getting his hands on one of the new two-way radios the police had begun using. He listened in to keep up with roadblocks and such, and if he overheard talk of busy police activity, he'd call it quits. One afternoon, he got spooked when he heard his own name repeated over and over on the radio (“Be on the lookout for a Raymond Parks…”). He simply pulled over on the spot and walked away from his liquor car.

  As business improved, he decided to stop buying whiskey from a middleman and to start making his own. The thirty-cent-per-gallon profit was nice, but he figured he could make even more. So he borrowed money to purchase a few pot stills, copper tubing, sacks of sugar. He scouted the backwoods of Dawsonville for clean creeks and the right amount of protective cover. Then he hired still hands to do the work he'd recently done for Walter Day. For this new venture, he sought help from the owner of a parking deck near the Spring Street train station, a moonshiner-turned-businessman named Henry Penson. Parks's Uncle Miller had worked for Penson before buying the service station and had introduced Parks to the man. When Parks first told Penson about his whiskey-making enterprise, Penson told him to meet him on the third floor of his parking garage, where he kept a huge stash of used tires, stacked taller than a man. Hidden deep inside the tire stacks was a small safe where Penson kept extra cash. He pulled out a wad of bills and loaned Parks $2,000 with no interest. Whenever Parks needed more money, Penson would tell him, “Meet me at the tires.”

  Parks never quite considered himself a criminal. With a wealthy patron behind him, though, Parks could easily have ventured into darker enterprises—loan-sharking, prostitution, or robbery. Many infamous criminals of the late 1920s and early 1930s—murderous bank robbers such as Machine Gun Kelley and Baby Face Nelson—got their start in the crime trade as bootleggers. It was just a short step from moonshiner to bank robber.

  But Parks had no plans to start cleaning out banks or toting a machine gun, though he did start a lucrative new venture: his own private three-number lottery, which he called “the numbers” and which others called “the bug.”

  Parks's bug worked like a legit, state-run lottery, with customers paying a dime for each three-number pick. Whoever picked the correct combination won five dollars. Parks oversaw the whole operation like a maestro. He was the “banker” and hired “pick-up men,” most of them black, to drive around collecting customers' tickets (usually restaurant cashiers' checks), which were sold on the streets by scores of “runners.” Each night, at an office at Uncle Miller's garage, the tickets were sorted and the money counted. The pick-up men would stop by to see if any of their customers won and would deliver their winnings the next day. Pickup men received 10 percent of all they sold, and the runners received fifty cents for each “hit.” To avoid accusations of cheating, the day's winning number was determined arbitrarily—Parks took the middle three numbers from that day's butter and egg futures close on Wall Street. The operation grew so quickly that Parks soon had forty-three pick-up men working for him. In time, he bought most of them a used car to help with pick-ups and payoffs. Parks even brought one of his sisters to Atlanta to work for him counting all the cash.

  Parks's lottery became so popular, he was soon collecting thousands of dollars a day. Some days, hundreds of customers would guess correctly, and he'd have to shell out five dollars for each winning “hit.” But there were far more days of profit than loss.

  Parks wasn't the only numbers man. At the time, Atlanta's “bug racket” was growing so fast that the mayor and police chief announced plans to more aggressively investigate “numbers big shots” and to “stamp out the lottery evil.” Parks considered the bug just a friendly little neighborhood game and, like moonshining, hardly a crime. But the law didn't see it that way. Just like robbing banks, running numbers and liquor was illegal and deserved incarceration. And just like any dangerous profession, the longer you did it, the greater the risk. Parks knew that a moonshining racketeer's luck is short-lived, and he began to worry that he'd grown too big too fast. If he wasn't careful, he'd end up dead or in prison, like more than a few of his friends and relatives.

  Parks began offering donations to a few neighborhood street cops. Atlanta's men in blue didn't receive a paycheck, exactly. But they sure appreciated the occasional jars of white lightning, especially at Christmastime, and repaid the favor by looking the other way when one of Parks's delivery boys rolled past in a low-slung Ford. As the lottery business grew, more and more police held out their hands. With his moonshine and lottery profits, Parks could afford such wise investments. At a time when most men his age were earning less than five dollars a day, Parks was raking in twenty times that on his moonshining alone, and he was just getting started. He had even earned himself a title. They called him the “moonshine baron.”

  Trouble was, the detectives and the chief downtown had another name for him: mobster. And they were watching him more closely each day.

  By the early 1930s, Prohibition had become a joke. Even Al Capone mocked the hypocrisy: “When I sell liquor, it's bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray… it's hospitality.” H. L. Mencken observed that drinking had actually increased during Prohibition but that people were drinking more bad, illegal whiskey than the good, legal whiskey they'd drunk before Prohibition. Among those fighting to keep Prohibition intact was Henry Ford, who once threatened to shut down his assembly lines if the Eighteenth Amendment was overturned. But the majority of the nation had grown weary of the experiment with abstinence, and in 1933, Prohibition was repealed, thirteen years after it began. Franklin Roosevelt celebrated with a cocktail at the White House, and Mencken slugged back a tall glass of water, wiped his lips, and declared it “my first in 13 years.”

  Even Henry Ford quickly gave in to the new reality of liquor in America. The day after repeal, at a luncheon at the Dearborn Inn, he served his guests flagons of beer.

  Parks wondered what the legalization of liquor would do to his moonshining empire. But he wouldn't have to wait long for an answer.

  Prohibition's repeal in 1933 made it legal once ag
ain for most Americans to buy, sell, and drink alcohol. However, the end of a federal ban hardly put an end to the forces of abstinence. For starters, repealing Prohibition meant that local governments controlled the sale of alcohol in their regions. Large, primarily Baptist swaths of northern Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina voluntarily remained “dry,” meaning: alcohol was still illegal there and therefore in much demand. Furthermore, in regions where alcohol was permitted, there remained the issue of the fine print.

  The only legal alcohol was now the stuff brewed in legitimate, taxpaying distilleries. Bottles emerging from those distilleries carried a stamped label to prove that the appropriate tax had been paid to Uncle Sam—roughly two dollars a gallon by 1934. Citizens could brew small batches of beer and wine for their personal use but were not allowed to make even small amounts of liquor. Selling untaxed, homemade whiskey—aka moonshine—was still very illegal.

  For many southerners, illegal moonshine remained preferable to legally taxed and “bonded” whiskey. During Prohibition, folks had developed a strong taste for backwoods white lightning, which offered the added pleasure of thumbing a nose at the federal government up north. The repeal of Prohibition, therefore, instead of slowing the flow, actually kicked off a heyday for southern moonshine that would last until World War II, a period in which a complex, emotional game of cat and mouse was played out between bootleggers and their pursuers.

  By Prohibition's demise, Parks had earned enough from bootlegging and the bug to buy out his Uncle Miller and take over Hemphill Service Station. Parks saved money obsessively, rarely attending dances and nightclubs like others his age. For him, it was all about the work. He began investing his money, first by buying his uncle's house, then buying others along Francis Street and renting them out. On one of his moon-shining runs, he met a beautiful woman named Lois. They married and were soon expecting a child. Parks also made plans to open one of northwest Atlanta's first legal liquor stores.