Moonshine Memories

Book excerpt: For 25 years, Tom Allison was a revenuer, a federal agent charged with enforcement of the nation’s laws on taxation of liquor. His territory was the hills, hollows and deep woods of Alabama, and his quarry was the illegal whiskey makers. Allison remembers the stake-outs in the brush, the undercover assignments, the long waits to catch the distillery operators red-handed, and, of course, the chases as he and his fellow treasury agents ran down fleeing moonshiners in the dark of night. While Allison is a natural story-teller, the characters who populate this history are too strange to be fiction. Perhaps the only thing more striking than the ignorance of many of the moonshiners is the craftiness of some others.