Moonshiners are the easiest lot of suckers on earth, according to James Pope Mixon, a young white man just out of State’s Prison, who tells this newspaper just how easy the Moonshiners are. For more than six months during the summer and fall of 1918, Mixon, an ex-service man, operated out of Norfolk as a fake revenue officer, holding up Moonshiners all over Northeastern North Carolina. From Norfolk bootleggers Mixon would get the names of distillers in these Northeastern counties and the location of their stills. He would also inform himself as to about when certain stills would make a run and how much money he could expect to find on the person of the man operating the still.
Knowing just where he was going and about how much liquor and money he would find, Mixon would come into North Carolina in a Ford touring car and was more expert at finding his man with the goods on him than our revenue officers and sheriffs are. When he found his victim, he would throw back the lapel of his coat revealing a revenue officer’s badge, while with the other hand he displayed a real business-like looking gun. But instead of arresting the Moonshiner, he let him off by taking his liquor and what cash he had, as so many real revenue officers are suspected of doing. Sometimes with as much as 50 or 60 gallons of Hootch and a roll of money, Mixon would make his way back to Norfolk where he sold the hootch and blew in the proceeds, having a high old time until ready to make another raid. And the beauty about his game was, his victims never squealed. He acted so much like a revenue officer and di just what the average moonshiner expected a revenue officer to do, that the distiller kept his loss to himself and made another run of hootch. It was a great game while it lasted. Mixon says he operated first and last all over Currituck, Camden, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Chowan, Gates and Tyrrell Counites.
But Mixon says he was tired of playing it alone and took in company. He engaged three other young fellows, Tommy Saunders, Edward Parr and Lewis Pennington, representing himself to them as a revenue officer until he had gotten them into the business. Mixon says that Saunders, Parr and Pennington gummed his game. Taking it all as a great lark and under the influence of liquor the four soon began to engage in all sorts of larcenies and robberies, not confining themselves to the Moonshiners and Bootleggers. They robbed an old Negro near Snowden statin in Currituck County and then went down to Maple, in the same county, and held A.B. Snowden up for his roll of money. These robberies of honest citizens brought them to grief and the bunch were arrested on Dec. 18, 1919.
The arrest of the quartette, following a series of startling hold-ups and robberies in Currituck, created a sensation at the time. So high did feeling run in Currituck that the prisoners were brought to this county for safe keeping and were held in jail here until the September 1920 term of the Superior Court in Currituck.
Pennington and Parr eventually got out of the scrape upon representation that they were innocent parties to the robberies, but Mixon and Saunders were found guilty and sentenced to the penitentiary; Mixon for two years, Saunders for nine months. Mixon says he will never go back to the old life, but is anxious to face the world and make good as a useful citizen. He does not appear to regret his raids on the Moonshiners, but is sorry he got into the robbery of honest citizens and he says he is determined to make good every dollar, every penny and every item of legitimate merchandise he ever took from honest people. He says the true extent of his robberies has never been known, many people never having made an outcry or complaint, but that he remembers every one of them. Mixon says he would never have come to grief had he confined himself to holding up Moonshiners and Bootleggers.
Mixon Made Over
Mixon showed up in Elizabeth City yesterday looking like a new man. Mixon says he was released by order of Governor Morrison this week, having made an excellent prisoner and made some money for himself while serving his prison sentence.
Mixon says that his prison experience relieved him of a deadly drug habit and made him a stronger man physically, mentally and morally. He says prison conditions are by no means as bad as they might be and while there are many things in the system to reform, he found the men in charge of state prisoners kindly disposed and helpful to the prisoner who appreciated kindness and helpfulness. Mixon says he leaves prison with the highest respect for the State and with good feelings for everybody. He called upon Solicitor Ehringhaus who prosecuted him and was glad to see the Solicitor. Mixon says he is on his way to Watertown, N.Y., where he has a wife and child. He says he will return to North Carolina and among other things he expects to do is help organize a Prisoners’ Aid Society in North Carolina in co-operation with state officers and prison officials. Mixon says that 85 per cent of the men in North Carolina prison camps can’t read or write and that the state will never make progress in fitting its law breakers for useful citizenship until the educational handicap of this unfortunate class is finally removed.
Front page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Friday, March 10, 1922
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