Washington, D.C., February 18, 1930.

A black coop sat idling in the senator's parking lot, exhaust ribbening into the cold.

Down the Russell building steps came a stocky man in a light green fedora, carrying a paper sack that

clinked when he walked, six bottles of gin bound for the car. He never reached it. Two prohibition

agents stepped out from between the parked sedans. One took the sack, the other took the man.

They had been waiting for him three weeks. His name was George Lewis Cassaday, and for

ten years he had run a liquor route through the United States Capitol as reliable as the mail.

By his own accounting, four out of five congressmen and senators bought from him. The man in the

green hat, they called him. Everybody on the hill knew him. Most of them owed him money.

The jig was up. George Cassidy came out of Wheeling, West Virginia, born in the spring of

1892, to a Methodist family so dry it bordered on parched. His mother rode with the WCTU, the

women's Christian temperance union, the foot soldiers of the coming prohibition.

The boy grew up in a house where the devil wore a bottle label. He went to the war. The army put

him in a tank, one of the new machines crawling across the mud of France, and when the shooting

stopped in November of 1918, he came home to a country that had voted itself dry in his absence.

The 18th Amendment passed in January of 1919. The Volstead Act followed in October. By the time

Cassidy mustered out and tried to take back his old job on the Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation

he had fought for had banned every drink he had earned.

He failed the railroad physical, something in his feet, by one account.

He was out of work.

Then a friend, the sort of friend who always has an angle, asked George if he could lay his hands on a few bottles.

Two congressmen, the friend said,

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