For someone without an education, and not inclined to steady labor, bootlegging offered one of the best paths to riches. A 1925 study had shown the annual earnings of a Dallas bootlegger to be about $36,000, far surpassing that of many doctors and bank presidents. The bootlegger may have exceeded those men in prestige as well. To a legion of drinkers, who believed the government and the bluenoses had conspired against them, the whiskey man represented a blend of public servant and folk hero.
Binion, using an ever-expanding network of friends and family, quickly established himself as a middleman in the liquor trade, the modern-day equivalent of an importer-distributor. He staked out a commercial terrain between the hidden still in the country and the undercover saloon in town. Binion’s crew arranged for, transported, and protected the inventory, while tacking on a sizable markup.
In this endeavor he declared himself a failure. “I never did make no money bootlegging,” he said. “Every time I got ahold of any money, something’d happen, and I’d lose a bunch of whiskey or something, and just kept me poor as a church mouse all the time.”
That’s not what the moonshiners believed. Most of Binion’s bootlegged corn liquor came from a network of stills hidden in the hardwood bottomlands of the Trinity River near Fairfield, 90 miles southeast of Dallas. Produced by Roger Young and his family, this whiskey even had a name: Freestone County Moonshine. The Youngs’ liquor was prized by drinkers for its potency and relative purity. It lacked adulterants such as lye, which caused a drinker’s lips to swell in terrible pain, and lead, which brought on the partial paralysis known as jake leg.
Though an average still could produce up to 60 gallons a week, the Youngs struggled to keep up with Binion’s growing business. On rare occasions when production ran ahead of demand, the Youngs wrapped gallon jugs of whiskey in burlap and buried them in a nearby cow pasture, a process they jokingly referred to as “aging.” With Binion as their primary cash customer, the Youngs became one of the wealthiest families in Freestone County. “They had more money down there than anybody,” a relative recalled. “They were rolling in money.”
Federal revenue agents generally did not present a problem, because the moonshiners bought off the county sheriff, who tipped them to impending raids. Bad weather, however, could shut down deliveries. Heavy rain turned the dirt roads of the bottomlands into impassable bogs, so the Youngs couldn’t get their liquor to the town of Corsicana, the usual rendezvous spot with Binion’s driver.
When the Youngs’ liquor wasn’t available, Binion bought Oklahoma hooch. “But the Oklahoma whiskey didn’t seem to be as good as the Freestone County whiskey,” Binion remembered. Other times, he trafficked in product smuggled from a real distillery, manufactured before Prohibition. “They had bonded whiskey, which cost more money to handle and everything, and I never did too much of that. Just once in a while, I’d fool with a little bonded whiskey. But the bootlegging, to me, was never no good.”
Despite his disclaimers, Binion’s reputation among the illegal distilleries was that of a man of force and will. “Binion began to muscle in on whiskey operations,” a Dallas police report said, “and reportedly had gone into illegal whiskey plants and stated, ‘Everything that comes in between now and midnight is mine.’ ”
Raids and arrests happened infrequently, but they still presented a risk to Binion’s business. “Me and a guy by the name of Fat Harper, we got ahold of about $20,000 together, so we bought a lot of whiskey,” Binion recalled. They decided to keep some off the market in a warehouse owned by a man named Ward. “So we stored all this whiskey up in the warehouse when the weather was good to make a killing when the weather got bad and the whiskey’d go up.” But Ward fired an employee who got revenge by ratting to the police. “They came down there and arrested old man Ward and about 13 people,” Binion said. “Didn’t get me and Fat, but we had to put up all the money to get them out. That whacked us out for sure.”
Even with the police mustering only occasional interest, Binion himself could not avoid arrest. “I got 60 days one time, and four months another time,” he said, though his record shows a $200 fine and a 30-day sentence for violation of liquor laws.
After one collar for bootlegging, Binion faced up to five years in prison. But the judge was a friend of sorts. “I knew him and he knew me,” Binion said. “And he says, ‘You know, you’re supposed to go to the penitentiary.’ And I says, ‘Your honor,’ I said, ‘don’t send me to the penitentiary,’ something to that effect. And he says, ‘Why?’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I’m not going to bootleg anymore.’ ” That wasn’t true, but it kept him out of the pen.
Beyond his bootlegging problems, Binion was in and out of other trouble in Dallas, but of minor consequence. In 1924 he was charged with tire theft but not prosecuted. Later he was no-billed after a minor gambling arrest. A 1927 arrest for burglary and felony theft went unprosecuted. And a 1929 charge of aggravated assault was also dropped. That arrest appears to have stemmed from his reaction to a traffic accident in Dallas. As one of his sons told it much later, an unarmed Binion was attacked just after the wreck by more than a dozen men and—in a gladiatorial feat—ripped the bumper from his car and used it to defeat them one and all. “They kept coming,” son Ted said, “till there was 14 of them with broken bones.” But the legend doesn’t quite match the facts, according to local newspaper reports, which said Binion used the damaged bumper from his car to strike just one person: the other driver, a middle-aged woman. For this, he became known to police as the Bumper Beater.
Because a large car part wasn’t always available, Binion usually employed more conventional protection. Dallas police twice arrested him as a young man for carrying concealed firearms—a pistol in one case, a sawed-off shotgun in another. The pistol got him 60 days.
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The jail time didn’t stop him from carrying a gun. Having a piece in his pocket was an occupational necessity for a bootlegger, as Binion demonstrated on a warm, breezy October evening in 1931. He believed that another whiskey seller, a black man named Frank Bolding, had been stealing some of his liquor. The two of them met in the backyard of one of Binion’s safe houses, on Pocahontas Street in South Dallas, to talk the matter over.
“Me and him was sitting down on two boxes,” Binion recalled. “He was a bad bastard. So he done something I didn’t like and we was talking about it, and he jumped up right quick with a knife in his hand.”
The instinctive move for Binion would have been to jump up, too. “Then he’d cut the shit out of me,” Binion said. “But I was a little smarter than that. I just fell backward off of that box and shot the sumbitch right there.” Binion, in his later years, related other versions of the story. His son Ted told this one: “The guy hadn’t pulled the knife yet, even though he did have one … Dad felt like he was going to stab him.”
Whether or not the man brandished a blade, the result was indisputable: Bolding was shot in the throat. He fell to the ground, where he writhed and groaned. Binion stood over him and continued their discussion with, “I fooled you, didn’t I, you black son of a bitch.” Neither Binion nor his crew sought a doctor for the wounded man, and within minutes he was dead.
Binion surrendered to authorities, claiming, “He come at me with a knife.” Even if that were false, a dead black bootlegger couldn’t excite much interest from the police, and it barely made the papers. Binion didn’t spend so much as a night in jail for the killing. Ultimately he pleaded guilty to murder, and received a two-year suspended sentence, allowing him to walk free. He probably could have escaped completely untouched by the courts had he pressed the matter. But the suspended sentence was a better bit of backscratching.
“I’ll tell you why,” he later said of his benign trip through the courthouse. “Bill McCraw was the district attorney. Me and him was goddamn good friends. He was gonna run for governor as DA. It looked kind of maybe bad if he’d just turned me loose … But I just—we just—decided I’d take a two-year suspended sentence to kind of make him look a little better, don’t you see, which we did.”
Not only was he a free man, Binion had a new nickname, thanks to his quick-draw dispatch of Bolding. Now everyone called him the Cowboy.
