Bootleg Report

Texans, according to their own adage, "drink wet and vote dry." So strong are Texas prohibitionists that 143 of the state's 254 counties prohibit the sale of liquor in any form; so powerful are Texas thirsts that a drink is seldom harder to get in a dry area than in the 29 counties where the sale of hard liquor is legal. Last week, in an eleven-part series that marked the first time any Texas newspaper had ever published a searching, statewide report on the social effects of the state's alcoholic schizophrenia, the Houston Post (circ. 201,647) stirred the biggest uproar among dry voters and wet drinkers since Texas adopted its local option law in 1876.

The Post series, which started out by branding Texas-style prohibition "a giant illusion," was written by James Mathis, 32, a Post reporter who has won two state journalism awards for exposes of Texas housing and insurance swindles (TIME, Jan. 16, 1956). Mathis traveled 3,500 miles to get the story, downed enough illegal highballs to give readers a detailed, hard-hitting account of police corruption, judicial laxity, millionaire mobsters and juvenile crime.

Satisfaction for $15. Bootlegging syndicates, reported Mathis, are so well entrenched "that a police officer who is too diligent in enforcing the liquor laws in the best dry areas can lose his job." In one county, he found, a $4,500-a-year sheriff was offered $18,000 for protection. In another he discovered bootleg liquor stores that guarantee payment of customers' fines if they are arrested with their purchases within a three-mile "safety zone." Said Mathis: "Gangsterism is a fact."

Bootleggers reap from 200% to 300% on their investment, have bombed judges' homes, killed hostile liquor-law enforcement agents, machine-gunned rivals. One ex-convict named by Mathis supplies a liquor empire in dry counties from nine state-licensed liquor stores in wet areas. In Lubbock, Texas' biggest dry city (pop. 150,000), more than 4,000 bootleggers ply a $15 million annual trade, openly advertise their wares with such slogans as "We Can Satisfy Your Every Need" (the satisfaction costs up to $15 a fifth).

Who's Bootlegging? By this week, as the series drew to a close, Mathis' expose was drawing three letters of protest for every letter of praise. Most influential critic of the series was the Rev. Texas Gulp, Baptist minister and peripatetic protagonist of the state's leading prohibitionist society, Dallas' Texas Alcohol Narcotics Education, Inc. Culp said that he would demand space in the Post to present the dry side of the case; critics of the series also insisted that the expose must have been bootlegged into the paper without being checked by the publisher. Publisher of the Post: Oveta Culp Hobby, first (1953-55) U.S.Health, Education and Welfare Secretary and sister of Prohibitionist Texas Culp.

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