Prohibition: The Early Years 1920-1923 | Haunted Rockford

Originally published in “Murder And Mayhem In Rockford, Illinois” by Kathi Kresol.

There are certain images that come to your mind when you hear the word
“prohibition.” One might be sharp-dressed men driving fancy cars; the other might be wild parties with bob-haired women dressed in flapper-style dresses dancing their cares away as the bathtub gin flows. A darker image might be of the gangsters from that period, driving by and shooting their guns at people on the street or police raiding homes and breaking up stills, emptying bottles of moonshine into the street.

There are also stories of everyday folks getting very sick drinking what they thought was homemade moonshine but turned out to be poison. The federal government passed a law that methanol be added to all industrial alcohol to discourage consumption during prohibition. Methanol is a poison that causes blindness and even death. In July 1920, two soldiers from Camp Grant in Rockford Illinois, Private George Girex and Luther H. Davis, were admitted to the base hospital after consuming denatured alcohol.

Girex was in serious condition when checked into the hospital. He was blind and very confused. He was with a group of friends from Camp Grant on West State Street at the Loop Cafe when he passed out. Fortunately, both soldiers made full recoveries. Girex was the one who brought the liquor in a small bottle. At first, the doctors thought he drank the poison in a suicide attempt. His fellow soldiers told the doctors the truth, and eventually it was all explained.

During the period of 1920-33, there was a battle of sorts happening in the streets of Rockford. Sometimes the battle was between the police and the bootleggers. Other times, it was bootlegger against bootlegger as different gangs fought for the advantage in the selling of illegal liquor. There were smaller battles as the liquor makers stole from one another. They would break into houses, stealing equipment, mash or the bottled liquor from one another.
In the war between police and bootleggers, one of the first “kings” to be caught was Stanley “Big Steve” Makeshaitis, a Lithuanian who ran at least five different stills and was suspected of running even more. He pleaded guilty to making, transporting and selling moonshine. He was fined $1,000 and served sixty days for perjury and bootlegging.

The newspapers were filled with stories of the raids that the police held on different houses where the booze was made or the speakeasies where it was sold. People would remodel their homes to hide the booze under trapdoors and in closets. Other bootleggers were even more clever. One man became famous throughout southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois when he shared his secret of smuggling booze in chicken eggs. He blew out the contents of the eggs, filled them with liquor and sealed the holes with candle wax. His house was raided several times, but the police never found any of the hooch. He loved to tell the story of the police tearing apart his house while he sat at the kitchen table right by a basket of freshly gathered eggs. His secret was discovered when he offered to sell it to the wrong man, who later used the information as a bargaining chip with the police.

The illegal liquor business was an equal-opportunity employer. Men and women—white, African American or Native American—were all represented in the jails in the beginning. Whole families became involved as people struggled to hold jobs and feed their families.

Claims of illegal hooch being dangerous were proven in 1922 when Jeremiah Mutimer, a well-loved local man, bought illegal hooch and died shortly afterward. Mutimer, forty-three years old, was going on a trip to California and left the house to buy his ticket. “I think I will go out and get a couple of shots of hooch for my California trip,” he told his niece before leaving the house.

When he returned around 5:00 p.m., he seemed slightly intoxicated and had no train ticket. He pulled the bottle from his pocket and drained the remainder of the liquor. As he finished the bottle, he collapsed. His family thought he was just intoxicated and carried him to bed.

In the morning, his niece’s eight-year-old son, Joe, who was Mutimer’s constant companion, tried to wake him up. Joe was unsuccessful and ran to get his mother. It was then that the family realized that Mutimer was dead. The coroner, Fred C. Olson, was sent for. Olson questioned the family and learned that Mutimer had been drinking. Little Joe told police and the coroner that Mutimer frequently purchased his booze from Big Mary.

Police were very familiar with Big Mary. Her full name was Mary Bukowski, and she was known to the police, the state’s attorney and the people on the southwest side of Rockford. Little Joe accompanied his great uncle to Mary’s place many times in the past to buy the illegal hooch. In fact, on the last trip, just two days before Mutimer’s death, he and Big Mary had argued and Big Mary had threatened Joe and told him not to return.

The county physician, Clarence Boswell, conducted an autopsy on Mutimer and sent the contents of his stomach to Kenneth Jones, the city chemist, to see if he could determine what ingredients were used to make the booze. This would allow them to determine which liquor maker had mixed the lethal dose.

Jeremiah worked as a knitter at the Burson Knitting Company in the past but had quit his job to move to California. He was home for a month-long visit with his family and staying at his niece’s house. The family told the police that Jeremiah was a well-known man with lots of friends. His only problems arose from his drinking habit. It had increased in the last year, and his family was concerned for him.

Jeremiah’s death was later determined to be caused by the swelling of his brain due to the poison contained in the illegal liquor. Big Mary and her son, Sigmund, were both arrested and later released on bond. It was decided that the poisoning was accidental.

Rockford earned a reputation for being so strict on bootleggers that the supply of hooch was well below the high demand. In 1922, bootleggers would come from all over Illinois to attempt to sell illegal liquor at higher prices than they could charge in other areas. This kept the police busy with the increased liquor traffic and with the skirmishes that erupted between the local dealers and the visiting booze sellers.

The bootleggers started to organize into gangs in 1923. The Rockford Sunday Republic dated August 17, 1930, stated the reason for this was “to withstand the attacks being made on them by enforcement officers, and to hold up the tumbling alcohol and moonshine prices which were rapidly slipping down.”

The gangs had to use strong-arm tactics to ensure their success. The first reported gangland killing in Rockford was on October 8, 1923. George Minert, thirteen years old, was looking for insects for his zoology class on the Fred Stoner property on the Old Freeport Road that branched off of Montague Road almost four miles southwest of Rockford. Young Minert must have been horrified when he looked into a culvert and found a body. The man was later identified as Louis J. Milani. Milani had his head bashed in, and his throat was cut ear to ear so deeply that he was almost decapitated. He had deep slashes on his face and hands. A large one-hundred-pound rock had been placed on his chest, and then his body was stuffed into the culvert. The police believed that Milani was grabbed from his rooming house at 412 Sixteenth Avenue, knocked unconscious and then taken outside the city. The evidence proved that he was already in the culvert when his throat was cut.

Police knew that Milani worked in the “bootleg racket.” They worked the theory that Milani had been “taken for a ride” by the gang for an unknown reason. They hit a brick wall in their investigation, and the murder went unsolved.

Coroner Olson was approached by a medical school in Chicago. They requested Milani’s body for teaching purposes. Olson decided that the body should stay in Rockford, in case family turned up at a later date. Louis Milani was laid to rest in the Potter’s Field in at the Winnebago County Poor Farm Cemetery.

Sources:
Rockford (IL) Daily Register Gazette. “Bootlegger Is Fined $1,000 and Draws 60 Days,” June 23, 1921.
___________. “Drinker Is Found Dead; Hunt Seller.” May 5, 1922.
___________. “Moon Too Cheap in the Tri-Cities.” January 10, 1922.
Rockford (IL) Morning Star. “Post Mortem Mutimer Body Causes Stir.” May 6, 1922.
___________. “Soldier Wanted a Drink of Liquor, Not Poison.” July 1, 1920.
Rockford (IL) Republic. “Man’s Head Almost Slashed from Body.” October 8, 1923.
___________. “Moonshine Egg.” June 10, 1921.
___________. “Rival Slew Milani.” October 16, 1923.

Photo Credit:
A Photograph of police dumping confiscated illegal liquor in the street in front of the courthouse. From Midway Village Museum, Rockford, Illinois.