Tar Heel revenue agent bamboozles bootleggers and talks his way into the movies.
This book is more or less a biography of the legendary Garland Bunting, an officer with the Halifax County A.B.C. Board for more than 30 years. The North Carolina Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission controls the sale, transport, manufacture, and consumption of alcohol in the state. His job was to find and prosecute people making or selling liquor illegally.
Bunting did this both in the traditional sense, staking out moonshine stills in the woods and swamps, waiting for the operators to come and fire them up, and working undercover to buy alcohol from illegal sellers.
Undercover work was where he really shone. One of the most accomplished revenue agents in North Carolina history, he was able to talk his way into bootlegger dens and out of dangerous situations with equal ease.
Imaginative, Blustery, and Occasionally Poetic
The book, written in 1985, is something of a time capsule, but the story remains relevant, and its subject, Garland Bunting, is timeless. I enjoyed the book immensely, learned a few more details about moonshine and bootlegging, and found the character fascinating. I must also confess to experiencing more than a little nostalgia. At the time it was written, I was graduating from NC State, about 90 miles from Bunting’s home base in Scotland Neck.
Moonshine was Wilkinson’s second book, at the time of this post he has written 11, and has been on the staff of The New Yorker since 1980. He is a polished writer with an eye for detail and it shows in how he describes Bunting, his possessions and his hometown. He uses a description of Bunting’s backyard to introduce the ordered disorder that defines so much of the man.
“Garland parks six cars fanwise in his yard. Three are his own: a station wagon, a small pickup with a box in the bed for carrying dogs, a van he came by in a dog trade; and three belong to the county—a sedan for his day-to-day work, a fairly new pickup which he often takes into the woods and an old pickup seized in a liquor deal.”
“Usually Garland has four or five coon dogs. They live in identical houses set in a row, like cottages at the seaside, and have paced to a polish the ground within the limits of their chains.”
Bunting’s undercover style might best be described as blending in by standing out. Selling fish was one of his go-to tactics whenever he was dispatched to a new town in search of bootleggers.
“I had a box on the back of a ‘fifty Ford where I iced down fish and a platform beside it where I could stand up and play my guitar and dance and holler, ‘Fish man, fish man!’ What I was doing was getting known. Then, if I went later to a bootlegger’s house to make a buy, he knew the fish man, or he’d heard of him.“
The book has a tight narrative, is superbly edited and is an easy read. If you have an interest in moonshine, bootlegging, the rural south or the 1980s, you will find it entertaining and in places astounding.
As far as weaknesses go, it is a bit uneven and a short book. The first few chapters are the strongest, giving us a vivid picture of Bunting and Eastern North Carolina, the ways and means of the moonshine business, and introducing bootleggers and the hazards of dealing with them, including buckshot and owl’s head revolvers. The chapters about Bunting’s background, family and wife help complete the portrait of the man but do drag a bit. The book is 153 pages, say 40,000 words. It can be read in a day. It leaves you wanting more. 4 Stars
From Book to TV to Bull Durham
After the book came out in 1985 Garland Bunting became something of a celebrity and was seen on TV shows like “West 57th”, “Good Morning America,” and “Late Night with David Letterman.” You can watch his Letterman appearance on YouTube. These appearances led to him getting small roles in movies in the late 1980s as a radio announcer named Teddy in Bull Durham and as a political crony called Doc Ferriday in Blaze. Bunting passed away in August of 1995, he was mentioned as assisting in a raid on a moonshine still in an article in the Nashville (N.C.) Graphic in March of that year, but then he didn’t seem like the type to retire. Wilkinson, A. (1985) Moonshine a life in pursuit of White Liquor. New York: Knopf.
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