Modern-day moonshiners in NC mountain barn busted with white lightning
In a barn in the North Carolina mountains, a group of men distilled illegal moonshine, federal prosecutors said Friday, as a fifth man pleaded guilty in a white-lightning distribution ring ran out of Wilkes County.
The history of moonshine (a high-proof liquor — essentially an unaged whiskey) goes back to the early days of the colonies in the United States and Wilkes County gained a reputation as “the moonshine capital of the world.” With Prohibition, in the 1920s, demand grew for illegal homemade alcohol and moonshine made by bootleggers. For close to a century, moonshine stayed in the shadows but legal production is growing in popularity as licensed distillers market flavored and white whiskey as moonshine.
But making moonshine without a license is illegal. In recent years, North Carolina law enforcement agencies have ramped up enforcement to shut down moonshine stills.
Clifton Ray Anderson Jr., a 47-year-old from the Wilkes County farm community of Boomer, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Charlotte to possession of an unregistered still and conspiracy to defraud the United States of excise taxes on distilled liquor, including the interstate transportation of untaxed liquor.
“I was punished for not ratting on people,” Anderson, who is free on bail, told The Charlotte Observer on Saturday.
Anderson said he didn’t want to comment further about what he meant by that, because he didn’t want anything he said to adversely affect his sentencing.
“I’m the distiller,” Anderson said of his role in the ring. “I’m the one who made it.”
“What I can say, and I said this in court, is, I tried to help the poor people out in this community, at Christmas and other times. A lot of people are poor and they don’t even get food stamps up here. That’s the whole reason I was doing this. I don’t need the money. I farm seven days a week” as a cattle farmer.
Prosecutors said Anderson leased a Wilkes County barn for $500 a month to illegally produce more than 9,000 gallons of untaxed liquor from April 2018 to September 2020.
He leased the barn from Gary Matthew Ray, a 53-year-old from Roaring River in Wilkes County who previously pleaded guilty in the case, court records show. Roaring River is about 80 miles north of Charlotte via Interstate 77.
Ray, along with 76-year-old Wilkesboro resident Roger Nance and 75-year-old Hamptonville resident Huie Kenneth Nicholson, drove the moonshine to Virginia, according to court documents.
They delivered the moonshine to 71-year-old James Patterson of Dinwiddie, Virginia, to sell and distribute, prosecutors said.
The ring cost taxpayers over $100,000 in federal and state excise and sales tax revenues, court records show.
Ray, Nance and Nicholson previously pleaded guilty to the same conspiracy charge as Anderson, while Patterson previously pleaded guilty to distributing untaxed moonshine — the moonshine distilled by Anderson, according to court documents
Anderson was released on bail after his guilty plea. His sentencing date hasn’t been scheduled.
The conspiracy and illegal-still possession charges each carry a sentence of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Wilkes County is where the late NASCAR icon Robert Glenn “Junior” Johnson Jr. out-sped deputies in his days as a moonshiner in mid-1900s.
This story was originally published February 5, 2022 at 10:32 AM with the headline "Modern-day moonshiners in NC mountain barn busted with white lightning."