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Bonkers Crimes and Criminals In History

Khalid Elhassan February 7, 2020 32 min

Thomas Blood - Royal Academy of Arts — Colonel Blood Stealing the Crown Jewels. Royal Academy of Arts

37. The Hillbilly Mafia War That Featured Homemade Tanks and Aerial Bombings

In 1913, Charlie Birger, born Schachna Itzik Birger to a Jewish family in Russia, settled in a coal mining region in rural Southern Illinois. It was a “dry” part of the state, but local rules did not eliminate drinkers’ thirst. So Birger forged an alliance between hill people who manufactured booze in illicit stills and the miners who drank it and set up shop as a small-time bootlegger and pimp.

When Prohibition arrived in 1920, Birger graduated from a two-bit to a major bootlegger, with a network that stretched from Florida to the Canadian border. A ruthless operator, he crushed the local Ku Klux Klan – not out of any noble motives, but because they impeded his bootlegging operations. Whatever his motives, crushing the KKK made Birger a local hero, until things went haywire when he fell out with his business partners. The ensuing conflict was fought with homemade tanks and aerial bombings.

Also Read: The Daily Life of a Bootlegger During Prohibition.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.