Lady Hooch Hunter

It's 1921 on Lower Folsom Street in San Francisco. The streets are thronged with people, sidewalks so crowded and chaotic that an older woman draped in a threadbare plaid shawl is all but invisible as she melts into a nondescript relay. What happened next sounds like something straight out of Hollywood, but this is no movie, and that was no timid old lady in that plaid shawl.

Her name was Daisy Dell Simpson, and that doorway led into one of San Francisco's seediest bootleg establishments. Daisy was an undercover federal agent, and this is Prohibition, that wild chapter in American history when we thought that promoting virtue was as easy as outlawing booze. Boy, were we in for an ugly surprise, and so were the five rough and tough bootleggers that Daisy backed up against a wall and held at gunpoint.

Just another day at work for one of the baddest bad girls that no one seems to have ever heard of. Let's fix that. Prohibition was such a weird and terrible and frankly hopeless idea that it's hard to believe it really happened, but it did happen, and in the biggest possible way, with an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 18th Amendment.

It was ratified on January 16, 1919, after nearly a hundred years of tireless campaigning by the temperance crowd. The temperance movement saw alcohol as the catalyst for everything reckless and ruinous and godless in American society, and to be fair, excessive consumption of alcohol was a problem for sure in 1800 when the movement began.

Back then, there were no laws regulating the age at which a person could consume or purchase alcohol, and by 1830, the average American man 15 years and older was throwing back more than seven gallons per year of the stuff. Temperance activists blamed alcohol for rampant violence, domestic and otherwise, and argued that drunkenness led to poverty.

They made a strong case that intoxicated men were very bad news for women and children. Drinking was seen as a moral failure, and alcohol as an invitation to immorality, debauchery, violence, untimely death, and social collapse. So much for happy hour, right? Women were drawn to the temperance movement in droves. Long before women even had the right to vote, they were protesting outside saloons, rallying their church congregations, and marching in the streets, all in the name of banishing the demon rum from American life.

Because alcohol abuse could be so terribly destructive to families, this was an issue that was considered the rightful domain of women, those keepers of virtue, decency, and restraint. It was a good fit for the churches, too, since drunkenness also defied the Christian values of prudence and chastity and humility. Temperance took off, embraced by the middle class as a cure for all the ills of what they saw as a dangerously degenerate society.

Now the Civil War did cost the movement some momentum, but if there's one thing we know about the culture wars in America, it's this. People never get tired of minding each other's business. And with the Civil War behind us, the temperance crowd finally got the hero it craved. Her name was Carrie Nation, and her first husband, bless his heart, was a drunk.

He was also a doctor in the Union Army, and that trauma might have contributed to his self-medicating, but it was all more than poor Carrie could endure, and marriage did not survive. In time, though, she remarried and wound up in Kansas, where she was ticked off to no end by the way that state failed to enforce its laws regarding alcohol.

As luck would have it, though, God came to Carrie Nation one night in a dream and said, hey, girl, hey, you need to get you to Kiowa, Kansas, and smash up a saloon. Obedient and God-fearing woman that she was, Carrie followed the Lord's orders, and then kept following them to the next decade. And it wasn't just saloons she took axes and hammers and hatchets and rocks to, she went after pharmacies as well, because back then, doctors actually prescribed alcohol to treat all sorts of ailments.

Carrie Nation was like, oh, no, you don't count pharmacists, and smash, she tore the place up. Carrie was arrested more than 30 times, but this self-described bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus was like, whatever, lawman, I answer to a higher authority. And you already know who won that one, Carrie Nation, because as more and more people rallied to her cause, more and more pressure was applied to state and federal lawmakers.

And then, boom, boom, they ratified the 18th Amendment, and with the stroke of that pen, the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, and even exportation of intoxicated liquors was prohibited in these United States. Merchants had one year from the date of ratification to consume or sell or dump their stores of booze.

Private citizens, and this is interesting, were permitted under the law to keep their stash of alcohol and enjoy a little nip in the privacy of their own homes, which probably seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time. But it did fail to take human nature into account, because like for starters, humans are social creatures, and relegating any kind of nightlife to the home was doomed to fail.

Second, making a thing forbidden often serves only to make it more alluring. And third, the 18th Amendment created the single greatest opportunity for organized crime since people were invented. So now it's 1920, and businesses have had their mandate at one year to offload their booze, and it's time to enforce this truly idealistic and insane legislation.

The whole 18th Amendment prohibition shebang was known more casually as the Volstead Act, named for that earnest buzzkill who championed it, Minnesota State Representative Andrew Volstead. And enforcement of the Volstead Act was not easy, as you can imagine. Local, state, federal, it didn't matter which level of government tried.

Americans for the most part refused to comply and go dry. President Herbert Hoover handed the job of enforcement off to the Internal Revenue Service. This is how agents who pursued bootleggers, those were the people making and selling illegal booze, that's how they got the excellent nickname, the Revenuers. Against this backdrop of the righteous screaming for demon rum to be canceled, and the criminal element licking chops at the prospect of all the illicit profits to come, a rebellious, headstrong young girl was chafing against the rules and restrictions of small town life and her birthplace of Whitman, Washington State.

They called young Daisy Simpson a juvenile delinquent. Details on that so-called delinquency are scarce, but we do know that she was 16 years old when she took off for San Francisco and married a man named Percy Sinkins. By 1910, Daisy was 21, living with her husband Percy in the big city and starting to get into real trouble.

By 1917, Daisy had problems with both drugs and alcohol, and she ran with a wild crowd. The marriage to Percy was floundering, though, spoiler alert, it must have been true love because even divorce couldn't keep them apart. We've got more on that story, but first, Daisy has to save herself from herself. Which she did, she cleaned up and dried herself out and got a job in law enforcement in San Francisco, of all the things, right?

She worked as an investigator fighting prostitution with her youthful beauty and her killer street smarts. She proved herself to be a real asset. By the time World War One kicked off, Daisy had joined the Moral Squad of the San Francisco Police Department, honing her natural talents for drama, disguise and deception. Her main assignment?

Catch whoever was responsible for selling liquor to soldiers stationed at the Presidio Army Post. Newspapers reported that in 1917, Daisy was on assignment at an illegal operation near the Presidio when she was recognized, cover blown, surrounded on all sides. You know what Daisy did? She shot her way out of that little jam.

When police arrived on the scene to make arrests and shut the place down, her revolvers were still smoking. Daisy Simpson's rep as a fearless law dog was cemented. No surprise then that the Internal Revenue Prohibition Unit in San Francisco scooped her right up and on September 6th, 1921, Daisy Dell Simpson became one of only 12 female Treasury Department prohibition agents in the entire United States.

And they needed all 12 of their lady agents as they were known back then. Why? Because bootleggers and gangsters knew that male agents were far less likely to detain, never mind rough up, a female suspect. Bootleggers used to pay women just to ride along on deliveries because they knew that law enforcement was reluctant to even stop a car if there was a female on board.

And female bootleggers? Oh yeah, there were plenty of women in the game and they too knew just how to play it. They'd conceal the booze on their person and then mock male agents, daring them to grab or touch or search their bodies. It was crazy. But when the revenue agent was a female herself, not only did it make apprehending female suspects easier, it was an entrapment wet dream when it came to the male perpetrators.

So while Daisy Simpson did have an office at the Treasury Building in San Francisco, her real workplace looked very different. When it came time to clock in, Daisy had it for a speakeasy. Speakeasies were illegal bars and saloons, basically private clubs. They got the nickname speakeasy for how a patron had to utter the password very quietly to be allowed in.

Speakeasy, so the cops can't hear you. And the speakeasy represents one of the most massive changes that prohibition had on American culture. Check this out. Prior to the enforcement of the Volstead Act, most of the country's saloons catered only to men, no girls allowed. But the prohibition era speakeasies put an end to gender-based cocktail discrimination.

Suddenly, both men and women were breaking the law together, downing glasses of illicit hooch, listening to music and gasping, even going so far as to dance with each other. And while some speakeasies were little more than dingy sellers, others were big, splashy ballrooms with live bands. And you know who saw the opportunity to rake in buckets of money by operating all these speakeasies?

Gangsters. In fact, the mafia owes the Volstead Act a thank you note, and also maybe one of those edible art fruit baskets, because it was prohibition that created the market for bootleggers. And it was bootleggers who created the opportunity organized crime needed to expand and consolidate its dark and insidious power.

Heads up, all you Godfather and Sopranos fans. Go ahead and raise a now legal glass to the Volstead Act, without which you'd probably have been denied so much of your mafioso viewing pleasures. How cool would it be if we could time travel back to one of those prohibition era speakeasies and watch Daisy work? You never had to look too hard to find a speakeasy.

They were pretty much the worst kept secrets in town. The mob liked to bribe local cops to look the other way, and those same cops would often let the gangsters know if the feds were sending agents in for a raid. Those raids were never about nabbing the customers, it was the speakeasy owners the law was after. This is why some of the biggest and fanciest establishments went to all sorts of clever lengths to hide the booze from the feds.

One New York City hotspot even had a chute concealed behind a false wall at the bar. All the barkeep had to do at the first sign of trouble was push a hidden button and whoosh. The specially designed shelves holding the liquor would release the bottles into the chute where they'd plunge to the cellar below and smash. Leaving only broken glass and the heady scent of all that hooch swirling down the drain and rushing into the city's sewer system.

Pretty genius, right? Daisy would sidle on into the targeted speakeasy, often in her home base of San Francisco, but also in cities all over the country, including New York, Baltimore, Milwaukee, even Al Capone's Chicago. Typically, she'd go in wearing one of her many disguises. She was famed for her chameleon-like abilities.

The press of the day would breathlessly compare her to Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, a pair of gentleman prohibition agents famed for their use of disguises and their rather showy methods. For example, Einstein and Smith routinely planned their bus to suit the convenience of the newspaper reporters who followed their every move.

They were publicity hounds, but they were also great cops. They racked up nearly 5,000 booze arrests, could claim credit for the dumping of more than 5 million gallons of illegal hooch, and they boasted a conviction rate of 95%. The tabloids loved Izzy and Moe, and they saw Daisy Simpson, who they dubbed the Lady Hooch Hunter, as a kind of bombshell kid sister to prohibition's two most colorful celebrity agents.

Daisy would spend several evenings in a speakeasy, or occasionally the target might be a hotel or a restaurant playing fast and loose with the rules laid down in the Volstead Act. She'd get the lay of the land, bide her time, and then pounce on those who made the mistake of serving her an alcoholic beverage. Where Daisy often went wrong was with her methods.

More than one judge was forced to dismiss the charges she'd brought against a perpetrator because her arrests too often crossed the line into a legal entrapment. And to the frustration of her bosses in the Treasury Department, Daisy tended to go after pretty low-level offenders. What the feds wanted were the kingpins, the major bootleggers, the moonshiners, the gangsters in charge.

They didn't care so much about the bellboys, the pharmacists, the random citizens sneaking around with a jug of bathtub gin. Even in the driest accounts or the courtroom documents, you can read between the lines and you just know, you can tell, that for Daisy Simpson, being a federal prohibition agent was more than a job, it was an adventure.

One of her favorite tricks was to collapse outside a speakeasy. She'd fall ill on the street and when a bartender would rush out with a restoring draft of whiskey to help revive her, out comes the badge, she'd arrest him. She pulled the same stunt in hotels, ringing the front desk to report that she was feeling ever so unwell and was there by any chance a pharmacy nearby?

Then she'd pull out her badge and slap handcuffs onto the poor hotel employee, unlucky enough to deliver the requested medicinal alcohol to her room. And the story we opened with? Daisy disguised as a poor elderly woman, heading into a bootlegger's den on Lower Folsom Street in San Francisco? Not her biggest bust, but one of her most legendary.

Daisy slipped through that nondescript doorway into a room that was dark and smoky and crowded with drinkers. Throwing off her tattered plaid shawl, Daisy whipped out a pair of revolvers and bellowed at the five bootleggers present to get up against the wall. From her waist dangled multiple sets of handcuffs, shiny in the dim light and jangling.

Indifferent to the threats and curses being snarled at her from the five bootleggers in front of her, newspapers at the time reported she never even broke a sweat. She just demanded that someone ring the police. Daisy was that ballsy, that brave, that good at her job. San Francisco Police Captain Charles Goff praised her, saying that Daisy Simpson was, quote, the best shadower this city has ever known, a terror to liquor sellers and the nemesis of San Francisco's criminal underworld, end quote.

Not bad for a former juvenile delinquent who'd had her own struggles with drinking and drugs. But Daisy, always ahead of her time, made no secret of those struggles. She used everything she'd ever learned from them in her new life as a prohibition agent. She was known to slip into the drug den she'd once frequented as a customer, adopting what the press described as the droop and twitch of the opium eater.

Once inside, though, the seemingly frail junkie shed that disguise, transforming into the swaggering, brave lady agent. Sliding her gun from its hiding place in the folds of her dress, handcuffs cinched at her waist, Daisy took them down. No one ever saw it coming. No one expected justice or consequences to arrive in such a lovely, feminine package.

It was an incredibly dangerous job, and Daisy took risks. She was shot in the line of duty, taking a bullet to the right shoulder during a raid in October 1923. And here's the thing about that. She took herself to the U.S. Marine Hospital in San Francisco, and then flatly refused to explain to anyone but her immediate superiors how or why she'd been shot, never mind who pulled the trigger.

Daisy was on the ball. And even though she refused to talk, the incident still made news all across the country. She was a household name, written up in papers from Great Falls, Montana, to Gaffney, South Carolina, Los Angeles to New York, Texas to Rhode Island. In an era of notorious names and wildly melodramatic arrests, Daisy Dell Simpson grabbed headlines the way she grabbed bootleggers, and America couldn't get enough.

But though Daisy and her 11 lady prohibition agent sisters had succeeded in kicking the door down and proving that women were capable of doing the job, they were still seen as something of a novelty. Despite their accomplishments, the women didn't have the same opportunities as their male peers doing the same job. And while Daisy Simpson had taken heat for focusing on busting low-level offenders, she'd also racked up some major achievements in the cause of erasing alcohol from American life.

It was Daisy Simpson, prohibition agent, who supervised the dumping of more than 8,000 gallons of California wine. Oh, excuse me. I'm suddenly feeling emotional. 8,000 plus gallons of Napa Cab? Rushing down the sewer? Girl, no! Stop! No! Okay, deep breath. She did what she had to do. Okay, let's jump to 1925. Women now have had the right to vote since 1920.

Oh, yeah, sure, it took Congress 42 years to get that done, but whatever. An official at the San Francisco Treasury Department, Daisy's employer, remember, decided for reasons lost to time that females could no longer work as field agents. And with that one bureaucratic decision, Daisy and her 11 sister agents had their careers completely undone.

It's an understatement to say that Daisy was disappointed. Furious fits her better. And I'm guessing that heartbroken probably also applies. Because when you look at Daisy Simpson's life, it seems pretty clear that her work as a prohibition agent was a kind of salvation. You wonder, how many times did she sit in an opium den or a bootlegger saloon, watching the people who weren't there for a casual good time, but to escape themselves in a fog of intoxication?

Did Daisy sometimes think, there but for the grace of God, go I? Daisy had saved herself, redeemed herself, and proven herself, only to be swatted down and blocked from the work she loved for no reason other than her gender. She wasn't made for a desk job, and she knew it. That's why in 1925, Daisy Simpson resigned her position as a prohibition agent for the Internal Revenue Service and surrendered her badge.

The rowdy and sensational career of the Lady Hooch hunter was over. Things went badly after that. Daisy had already been suffering some health issues. She was said to be depressed, both by her divorce from Percy Sinkins, and by the loss of her career and reputation. After years of staying clean, she relapsed and again began using illegal narcotics.

Daisy was in Texas using a fake name when she was arrested for receiving drugs through the mail. They locked her up in an El Paso jail cell. No one came forward to help her make bail. No family, no friends, not even her estranged husband, Percy. Can you imagine the shame of it? The crushing grief of finding yourself so utterly alone, and on the wrong side of the law you once so proudly upheld?

Somehow, Daisy Simpson arranged to have a gun smuggled into that jail cell in El Paso. Scrawling a note to her former husband, she spoke of that shame. She called him the only one I ever depended on. Then she took the smuggled revolver and shot herself in the abdomen. And once again, Daisy Simpson was headline news all over America.

And the news was dire. She wouldn't expect it to survive. She was taken to a nearby hospital where emergency surgery was performed. With reporters clamoring to see her, all visitors were denied. Only Daisy's sister was permitted to sit vigil. Not even the U.S. Marshal was allowed into the room. The legendary two-gun woman was dying, and not at the hand of a mobster bootlegger, but at her own.

Now the night is a-growing long, and I'm all on some song. Is this or anyone else, the story would probably end right here. But this is Daisy Dell Simpson we're talking about. She was a survivor. She was resilient. And, you have to say, lucky, too. She'd had a lot of luck along the way. Maybe even a guardian angel, who knows?

Because she survived that gut shot, that tragic and awful suicide attempt. The press had a grand time with this latest melodramatic plot twist in the life of their favorite girl, Dry Sleuth. Americans munched down their morning cornflakes while reading lurid tales of her shame and heartbreak, her tawdry fall from grace.

There were stories of physicians in San Francisco under investigation for supplying her with the narcotics that fed her addiction, stories that rehashed her now-legendary exploits and arrests. And all that publicity, however excruciating it may have been for her, is very likely the biggest help she could have received.

Because when, against all odds, Daisy survived that suicide attempt, and that was no small feat, given that the bullet was reported to have careened through her liver and lodged in her spine, the justice system showed her compassion. Daisy was given a suspended sentence, and then weakened and weary, Daisy Simpson slipped into a much quieter, more private life.

She returned to California, and we're about to witness one of the few, although actually it might be the only happy ending Daisy Simpson ever experienced. On a warm August afternoon in 1932 in Santa Rosa, California, Daisy remarried Percy Sinkins. One year and 114 days later, Congress ratified the 21st Amendment, repealing the 18th and ending Prohibition.

Now it did take Mississippi another 34 years to fall in line, but that's another story. Prohibition was a spectacular failure. The cost of enforcement, $300 million, plus the loss of tax revenue, $11 billion. It was bad enough. Add in the staggering job losses, as breweries and distilleries were forced to close down. Restaurants failed.

Legal saloons were shuttered. Thousands of Americans died during Prohibition from drinking bad or tainted alcohol. On the bright side, there was at least a 10% decrease in cases of cirrhosis of the liver, so there's your glass half full of sketchy moonshine. Daisy and Percy had just over eight years together before Daisy passed away on November 4, 1940.

The San Francisco Examiner published a brief obituary where she was described only as the beloved wife of Percy A. Sinkins. There was no mention of either her astonishing career or her tragic undoing. By 1940, Daisy Dell Simpson was already well on her way to being forgotten. I only learned of her existence when I paid a brief visit to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas.

What was supposed to be just like a little touristy time killer on the way to the airport turned into something that stuck in my head and would not let go. A single placard on the museum wall, a single photograph of a striking young woman, her life and achievements boiled down to a short paragraph that revealed nothing, leaving you to wonder, who is this?

Why have I never heard her name? Prohibition, costly misadventure that it was, had an enormous impact on American culture, shaping the very life that you, yes you, are living today. Downside, of course, it laid out the red carpet for organized crime. Back then, Al Capone was raking in about $60 million a year on the sale of illicit booze to the thousands of speakeasies he controlled.

Do you know what that kind of spending power is worth in today's dollars? It's close to $800 million. What? Yeah. For criminals and bootleggers, you bet that kind of cash was worth risking being blinded by bad hooch, being shot at by rival gangs, or being raided by the revenuers. On the upside, Prohibition invented the cocktail bar, and the cocktail, for that matter.

Prohibition invented the concept of dating, as we now know it, because suddenly young men and young women had a place to go and things to do. Throughout the Roaring Twenties, people weren't just openly disobeying the liquor laws. They were busy casting off all the old norms while they did it. We think of the flappers of that era as reckless, frivolous party girls.

But they were so much more than that. They tasted real freedom, served up alongside that taste of illicit gin or whiskey or champagne. And freedom? Freedom is the most intoxicating thing of all. That, more than anything, is who Daisy Dell Simpson was. She was free. At a time when there were so few options for women, when something so basic as the right to vote was controversial, Daisy Simpson refused to be fenced in.

Not by the world, and not by her own demons. The girl sleuth, the dame of a hundred disguises, the two-gun woman, the lady hooch hunter. Her freedom was loud and bold and fearless, and so terribly brief. The obituaries say that she died of natural causes. She was only 51. Too soon! But I guess a lifetime struggle with addiction, and a couple of gunshot wounds, must surely have taken a toll.

And though she had reunited with her beloved Percy, she lost everything else. Reading her obituary, I can't help feeling that Daisy Simpson died wearing her final disguise. Anonymous, suburban, housewife. Today, fewer than 15% of all federal law enforcement officers are women. But once upon a time, there were only 12.

Here's to you, Daisy Dell Simpson. You were a real badass and a true trailblazer. And we can all drink to that. Next time on True Weird Stuff. Taxidermy can be a lot of things. It can be a mounted deer head with a big rack of antlers. It can be a badger in a wedding dress. It can be a frog riding a motorcycle. What it cannot be is the severed foot of a man that you snipped off with scissors without asking permission on the next True Weird Stuff.

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