Cassidy’s first brush with the 18th Amendment, which introduced Prohibition in the United States, occurred while sailing. During World War I, he served in the 321st Tank Regiment and returned home from France. On the transport ship, soldiers were given voting tickets: it turns out that while they were fighting, lawyers back home had come up with an idea to ban drinking. Of the two thousand people, only 98 voted. Cassidy also voted “no.” Although, ironically, he hardly drank. George grew up in a family of devoted abstract artists. “My mother was a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and my father had been sober for 32 years before his death. And because I had such an example of sobriety in my childhood, I never drank systematically,” George Cassidy would later write in his confession. Returning from the front, he joined the ranks of the 40% of suffering war veterans. World War I . unemployment. Cassidy was trying to get back to his old job as a railroad brakeman. The job was long outdated and required strength, skill, and dexterity. Standing in a moving train car, you had to control the braking of a particular section of the train. George’s health deteriorated at the front, and he was fired from his job – no gratitude from society. At the same time, a friend suggested that the desperate veteran do something simple and amusingly cynical: sell a few bottles of liquor to members of Congress, who, as you know, themselves voted for prohibition. In the summer of 1920, I met this friend in the lobby of the old Varnum Hotel in Washington. He introduced me to two representatives of the Southern states. They asked if I could provide them with things. It was my first deal on Capitol Hill. And these were the first members of Congress I ever met. How the business of supplying illegal liquor to Congress worked. Then you can imagine the complex, risky and secret work: an agent network, complex precautions, dangerous connections. rating buyers, leaders… But in reality, none of this happened. Everything was depressingly stupid and simple. Capitol Every day, Cassidy came to the Congress building with bags full of whiskey, gin and other drinks. At the entrance, no one even thought to check: in those days, admission was free, if you explained which congressman you were going to visit. After that, George calmly and simply delivered the packages to the recipients. I went into the office, shook hands, gave orders and moved on. As a rule, 20-25 orders came out per “shift”, on especially busy days – up to 50. Cassidy quickly became one of the board members. At first, he worked only with representatives of the lower house of Congress. The people there were simple, democratic. George himself later recalled that he was often invited to have a drink, chat, sing songs, tell jokes. Many even offered advice on how to run an underground business, often sound advice. “A representative from the Midwest once said to me, ‘George, listen, did you ever think it would be a lot easier to get supplies into the building in bulk? distribute them from a base of operations inside?'” Cassidy soon got a private office right in Congress. It was enough to knock on a special room with a special knock – and before you was the best bar in all of Washington. There the bootlegger stored alcohol, there was his headquarters, from where he distributed alcohol in simply obscene quantities. At least 80% of the members of the legislature were his clients, and he spent more time in the building than most of them. His casual clothes and signature green fedora made him one of the most recognizable “workers” of the lower house. Everyone knew George as “The Man in the Green Hat.” Cassidy has many funny memories of those times. For example, representatives of the northern states preferred Scotch whiskey, bourbon and cognac, while representatives of the southern states preferred Moonshine, that is, simple moonshine. Apparently, he was influenced by homesickness. In his free time, the smuggler attended parliamentary hearings, observing the debates: “Being an ex-military man, I was naturally interested in the laws on soldiers’ awards and compensation for veterans.” But most of all, he was amused by discussions about Prohibition, where hypocrisy reached the point of absurdity: “I heard members of the House of Representatives and the Senate make compelling arguments in favor of the fact that Prohibition was well observed. But I knew what packages were regularly delivered to their offices!” The most difficult thing was to deliver elite liquor, which was so loved by the deputies of the northern states. Cassidy personally drove it from New York to Washington. Often traveling by train. There is a story about how he was almost caught on one trip, but the people around him did not hand him over to the police – people were clearly not on the side of the law. “One day in the waiting room at the station, I threw a suitcase with contraband on the floor so hard that the bottles broke. As I walked along the lobby to the train, a passerby smirked: “Hey, you look like you have a leak in there!” I had no choice but to continue walking faster than everyone else to the train. I climbed into the toilet and threw out the broken bottles. Most of them were safely sent to valuable clients on Capitol Hill. Arrests, promotion to the Senate and a very stupid enemy. For 5 years, Cassidy went to Congress as a job, the members of the lower house did not dry up, life went on as usual. However, the same 20% of abstractionists, for whom the Man in the Green Hat was a thorn, formed the so-called “subcommittee of dry congressmen”. They organized a deal and caught the smuggler with alcohol in his bag. As a result, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison and banned from ever appearing in the Lower House building. Cassidy even appeared in newspapers under the same nickname as the Man in the Green Hat. … But the arrest only benefited him! As soon as he was expelled from the lower house of parliament, the gates to the upper house, that is, the Senate, opened. There were different people, different requests, but the pattern remained unchanged. Even the ratio remained the same: soon 80% of senators became the smuggler’s clients. It turns out that he got a promotion! But the senators almost never interacted with him directly, sending secretaries to him. So another 5 carefree years passed. But Cassidy also made enemies in the Senate. Again, the same story: a committee of specialized deputies decided to enlighten him. To do this, an agent was brought into the Senate – a 20-year-old federal man named Roger Butts, who was supposed to discredit the smuggler. However, the guy turned out to be not very smart. George immediately realized that this was a fake guy and refused to supply him with alcohol. Then Butts played out a brilliant (as it seemed to him) scene: he got drunk right in the Senate, pouring bourbon down his throat in front of everyone, and then made a scene and sang songs in his office. With this, the agent wanted to show that he was one of them – a drunkard and a violator of the Prohibition. It was impossible to come up with anything more stupid. Cassidy himself remembered that he still would not work with an idiot who got drunk on the job. All the agreements Butts came up with invariably failed, and then he resorted to an old as time method – betrayal. He bribed or intimidated one of the senators, a trusted client of Cassidy, who placed an order and handed the smuggler over to the feds. This time, the main supplier of Congress could not get away and went to prison for a year and a half. But what a time he spent! Cassidy did not spend a single night behind bars: after twenty-four hours he went home to have dinner and sleep, and in the morning he was back in prison again, shaved, fresh, dressed in a clean jacket. During this year and a half, he published a series of very successful articles in the Washington Post, in which, without naming names, he told the American people how their legislature drank heavily during Prohibition. Soon after, the same agent Roger Butts published his own articles in the same newspaper, which did not refute, but supplemented Cassidy’s words. ), Cassidy lived a simple and honest life: he got a job in a shoe factory in his native Pennsylvania. In 1933, Prohibition was repealed, and the smuggling trade faded into oblivion. George rarely talked about the old days; even his son admits that he learned almost nothing from his father about the fun years in Congress; Cassidy was not much of a drinker either: he never drank anything strong, except for the occasional bottle of Pennsylvania Yuengling after work at the factory. He died in 1967, leaving behind a memory of himself as a drunk. phlegmatic, good-natured man. But Roger Butts, who imprisoned him, became famous: he made a career in the CIA, participated in the “Bay of Pigs” operation, trying to overthrow Fidel Castro, but, as you understand, unsuccessfully.
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