Thursday, February 1, 2018

The one that got away

Old Paco was a criminal investigator for the ATF from the 1950s into the early 1970s (it was known as the Alcohol and Tobacco Unit of the Treasury Dept. when he began his career), and was a legendary "revenooer", chasing bootleggers throughout North Carolina. On a table of memorabilia at his funeral service, I spotted a thick case file that he had built on his arch nemesis, the notorious moonshine king bearing the improbable name of Percy Flowers - described in this Wikipedia article as "an American businessman, philanthropist, noted fox hunter and North Carolina's number one producer of illegal alcohol in the mid twentieth century." Old Paco and various other agents tried for years to put Flowers away, but he pretty much had Johnston county in his pocket, which included, among other things, practically every jury that ever heard a case against him. My father said that Flowers was one of the smartest men he ever met, a fellow who could have made a fortune in any honest line of work he might have chosen, but he apparently never had more fun than when making money illegally, and definitely there lived within him something of the age-old rural American hostility to a far-away, meddlesome federal government and its hoggish desire for taxes.

7 comments:

rinardman said...

So, it sounds like Old Paco was the Elliot Ness, and Percy Flowers was the Al Capone of North Carolina.

Would've made a great TV series. I could see a combination of The Untouchables and The Dukes of Hazzard!

Paco said...

You've got that right! Those bootleggers were fantastic drivers.

JeffS said...

Bootleg driving eventually morphed into NASCAR. There's a moral there. I just can't figure out what it is .......

A fine story about your father, Paco. I appreciate your sharing it.

RebeccaH said...

If Old Paco had lived in Tennessee instead of North Carolina, he might have been chasing some of my relatives. I know for sure my great-uncle Zeke made hooch from the fruit trees in his back yard, but by then he was living in Texas and he kept it under the legal limit for backyard hooch.

Anonymous said...

Tom Wolfe wrote a fascinating essay tracing the birth of American autoracing straight back to the moonshiners. I think it was later expanded into his "Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake..." book.

Deborah said...

That's a fun fact about Texas that isn't in the promos. God bless Texas! (N y'all thought it was just weed.)

Mike_W said...

I get the impression Percy Flowers identified with the fox.