A happy reunion of moonshiners and ABC agents who worked to put them out of business
By Bill Lohmann
July 31, 2017
VIRGINIA – Years ago, the arrival of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents on their doorstep would’ve been an unsettling development for Merle and Earl Corbin.
But when those lawmen showed up Saturday, the former moonshiners invited them in for apple dumplings.
And to wash it down?
Nothing stronger than iced tea.
All agreed this get-together would have been a lot different 50 or 60 years ago.
“Quite a bit,” John Wright said with a laugh. Wright’s a retired director of enforcement for the ABC board.
I wrote in January about the Corbins, 82-year-old twins from Varina who were big-time bootleggers in the 1950s and ’60s. Soon after the piece was published, Wright contacted me, as did Bobby Watkins, a retired ABC agent who arrested the Corbins in 1963 at an illegal still in the woods in King and Queen County.
“Everybody talked about the Corbin boys,” Watkins said of the brothers’ reputation among agents and other bootleggers. “You’re kind of thinking of them as big, bad guys, but when we caught them, they were just as meek and mild and as nice as they could possibly be.”
Which backs up what Merle told me months ago and said again Saturday:
“We never had no argument with (agents). If we were caught, we were caught. Just be nice about it.”
The men all wanted to get together to reminisce, so Earl’s daughter, Cheryl, arranged the reunion of sorts at her father’s home for Saturday afternoon.
Wright, 75, drove in from Amherst, where he lives, and brought along Buddy Driskill, 62, retired special agent in charge of the ABC’s Lynchburg office. Watkins, 83, came from his home in Tappahannock. Cheryl Corbin made the apple dumplings, and Watkins’ wife, Barbara, brought brownies, and we all sat around the kitchen table chatting amiably as if long-lost friends had finally found each other.
“I hadn’t seen them for 54 years,” Watkins said. “I just wanted to see if they were still here.”
I asked if he remembered when he last saw them.
“March 26, 1963, at 12:10 a.m.,” Watkins said as everyone laughed.
Watkins and other investigators had been bedded down in the woods in their sleeping bags, waiting for daylight so they could destroy the unattended still they had discovered. Just about midnight, though, the Corbins showed up. Arrests were made. It was a bad night for the Corbins, but a good night for the law. Plus, as Watkins recalled, the Corbins had brought in eggs and bacon for the next morning, so when the sun came up — and after the Corbins had been carted off to jail — the remaining investigators had quite a feast.
“I had a good time,” Watkins said of his work as an agent.
The thing is, so did the Corbins.
“I wouldn’t have missed it for nothing,” Merle said.
The respect from both sides was evident. Everyone was just doing their jobs, he said.
Added Earl, “We got along with all of them.”
The Corbins are identical twins — though born a few minutes apart on different sides of midnight, so they don’t share the same birthday — who looked so much alike in their younger days that many people, sometimes even their own kin, couldn’t tell them apart. The confusion over who was who came in handy in court occasionally, too.
They were into the illegal distilling business in a big way, though it was always Merle — the older of the two — who was more involved in the manufacturing of untaxed liquor. Merle never married, but Earl had a wife and children, and he didn’t much like living in the woods for weeks at a time to tend to a still. He also didn’t care much for the notion of going to jail and not being able to support his family.
Despite the illegality of what they were doing and the risks involved, the Corbins took pride in their work. They were constantly trying to stay a step ahead of the law. Whenever agents found and destroyed one still, the Corbins simply moved to a new location deep in the woods and set another. They developed a solid business model, selling carloads of moonshine at a time — the cars being reconfigured so they could carry up to 36 cases of 12 half-gallon jars of liquor made from elaborate operations they built from scratch in the middle of nowhere.
“Man, it looked like a small factory,” Earl said of the stills. “We were like scientists. People liked it, and they didn’t know how to make it.”
They made whiskey from 1953 until 1969.
“I ain’t done nothing illegal in my life except make liquor for 16 years,” said Merle, who served time in state and federal correctional facilities. Earl never spent more than a night in jail, and he said that was enough to convince him to get out of the business.
Merle reiterated at Saturday’s gathering that he got out of the business in 1969 — Earl “retired” years earlier after the Watkins episode in King and Queen — because of the growing popularity of illegal drugs. When their sales went down, some bootleggers got into the drug business, but Merle wanted no part of it.
Through all their years of making liquor, the Corbins never took more than a taste for quality control. In fact, they don’t even like the taste of liquor.
“It was made to sell, not to drink,” said Merle, whose day job for decades was running a trucking business.
The brothers decided to talk publicly about their long-gone moonshining days in part because Earl was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer last year, and they wanted to share their story while they’re both around. Earl is hanging in there, and he said he’s feeling pretty good, considering everything.
On Saturday, they swapped stories and chatted about mutual acquaintances — law enforcement, bootleggers and at least one informant who squealed on the Corbins (“Oh, yeah,” said Merle, recognizing a name, “a rat from way back.”)
Driskill was curious to hear how the Corbins ran their operation after spending his entire career in the western part of the state.
“The ones I fooled with went to a lot more lengths to keep from getting caught,” Driskill said. “They’d take bulldozers and build caves and put cemeteries over top of (stills) and dig up under a trailer and put stills under it. You pull up into the driveway and all you saw was a house, trailer, a lean-to and a boat. The only way they got caught was when they had to get rid of the spent mash, and they got lazy and dumped it into the creek.”
Wright said the meeting represented a “dying breed” from another era in terms of both law enforcement and bootlegging. He wanted to gather as much information as he could from the Corbins so he can develop a more complete picture of “what it used to be like because I’m here to tell you it’s not like that today.”
To that end, Wright brought a clipboard full of questions for the Corbins:
“When was the first time you remember seeing moonshine, and who had it?” (Merle: About 1950, and it was a man who lived on Charles City Road.) “How many customers did you have?” (“All of Richmond and most of Philadelphia.”) “Did you ever pay anyone to put your still on their property?” (“Every time.”)
Wright stumped Merle when he asked, “During your 16 years of making liquor, what’s your ballpark estimate of how much you made?”
“Oh, Lord, I wouldn’t have a clue,” Merle said.
At which point Watkins piped up from across the table: “600 gallons a week. I did know that.”
Everyone laughed.