US Revenuers find gold in them thar hills

By ROGER FRANKLIN herald correspondent

NEW YORK - They tend to be a conservative lot around Rocky Mount, Virginia.

Lawmen have a job to do, the locals all say, just as moonshiners have theirs. And if everyone played the role that God ordained, then life would not bring too many nasty surprises.

That has been the view at least since the end of the Civil War, when the teetotal General George Custer invaded the hills to smash stills and root out Franklin County's prodigious trade in homemade liquor.

Custer and generations of his successors would bust the 'shiners, who could expect a slap on the wrist and a sly wink from their neighbours on the jury. It was a venerable tradition, that often ended with unrepentant moonshiners stopping by the general store on the way home from the courthouse to load up on supplies for the next batch of mash.

So why, the locals wonder, has the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms grown suddenly so stroppy? And what gets the townsfolk even more confused is that while 30 leading citizens are facing charges that could put them behind bars for a decade or more, so are two Clinton Administration appointees who helped to plan the anti-moonshine crusade.

In Franklin County, the locals cannot tell the good guys from the bad ones any more - which also happens to be the way civil liberties groups regard what is going on in the secluded hollows of the Blue Ridge Mountains' moonshine belt.

"They'd raid a 'kettle' and shoot over our heads so that we'd know to run away," retired Kentucky mash man A. C. "Acey" Mews said of the good old days.

"If it was us who saw 'em coming first, then we'd shoot over their heads to let 'em know we were leaving.

"Nobody hurt anybody. We had families, and them agents had families. We got paid for our liquor and they got paid for stopping us. There were rules - fair rules when you knew the game."

But not any more, not after the recent raids that saw federal agents in combat gear storm through the Farmers Exchange, a century-old general store that sits in front of an unusually large warehouse off Rocky Mount's main drag.

Owner Bill Helms, who was dragged away in handcuffs with brother Ramsey, is both outraged or embarrassed.

As a former town councillor, a brother in good standing at the Elks Lodge and leading light of the local school board, he does not think his mugshot deserved to be in papers across America - particularly not with stories that branded the Helms boys "moonshine kingpins" and likened them to a pair of backwoods John Gottis. It was too much shame for Ramsey Helms, who committed suicide days later.

"I can't see that we did anything wrong," said Bill Helms, aged 54. "I've never been near a still in my life, and that went for Ramsey, too."

But according to a novel interpretation of the law that has become a cornerstone of the Clinton Administration's efforts against organised crime, all the brothers had to do was stand behind the counter of their emporium to qualify as public enemies.

Franklin County's moonshiners, whose hundreds of small stills are estimated to produce well over one million gallons of white lightning every year, need regular supplies of grain, sugar, yeast and copper pipe.

According to the feds, the fact that the brothers were happy to sell vast quantities of those commodities made them every bit as guilty as the folks who tend the stills.

It is an approach that has civil libertarians very worried, since another part of the same anti-racketeering legislation allows law-enforcement agencies to keep property deemed by the courts to have even a remote association with illegal activities.

In California and Oregon, the owners of garden-supply stores have lost their businesses for selling fertilizer to marijuana growers.

New York police auction the cars of men caught soliciting kerbside hookers. And off New England, in an even more innovative legal twist, the Coast Guard has snatched pleasure boats found to contain as little as a single, solitary marijuana seed.

Law-enforcement agencies get to keep most of the cash and, in some jurisdictions, individual agents collect lucrative commissions. One officer in drug-sodden Miami pocketed more than $US600,000 ($1.3 million) in 12 months.

Defenders of civil liberties say the policy makes accomplices of policemen, who become the ultimate beneficiaries of the trade in narcotics and moonshine. A few lawmen have even broken ranks to denounce the trend.

"The focus is on short-term easy money, not detective work," said former Customs agent Bill Gately, a specialist in money-laundering techniques. He worries that police are ignoring small drug rings until they grow large enough to make for a profitable bust.

It is certainly hard for supporters to deny that temptation exists, especially after the indictment of two Clinton appointees who ran the Justice Department's office of asset administration - the same department that now controls the Helms brothers' store and some $US7 million worth of additional property seized from the 28 other defendants rounded up in the Rocky Mount raids.

According to prosecutors, the duo were siphoning cash out of seized bank accounts while soliciting kickbacks from receivers who won contracts to oversee the legitimate businesses of defendants awaiting trial.

If Uncle Sam is in the least embarrassed about operating tattoo parlours, bikie bars and a legal Nevada brothel, he is too busy counting the profits to show it.

Back in Franklin County this season's batch of plum-flavoured moonshine should have been hitting the streets about now.

Trouble is, with all the mountain dew that has evaporated under so much federal heat, for the first time in two hundred years, store-bought liquor is cheaper than the illegal variety.