Liquid assets: like many manufacturers, modern moonshiners are trying to improve their product's quantity, quality and distribution.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Cover Story

Shadows steal across the lot behind an old church in downtown Benson. A few hours ago, word quietly went out: Meet here at 4 p.m. Now, drivers of a dozen cars mill around in camouflage pants and black or gray T-shirts. All carry guns. They congregate around Jason Godwin.

He's dressed the same and clutches aerial photos. "When we get there, we'll split into two groups," he begins, tracing a plan on the photos with his finger. When he's through, he flashes a flier of a man with a ruddy, creased face. "He's been charged with assaulting a law-enforcement officer before, so don't get hurt."

Now, the cars begin rolling, down East Main past the Kerr drugstore and out of town on a two-lane road, moving slowly like a funeral procession. After 15 minutes, they wheel onto a farm road. Dust rolls behind them. Half veer off, bumping across a field, ducking behind a row of chicken houses and emerging on the far side of a cluster of catfish ponds.

The rest surround a brick house. As the driver jumps out of the lead car, hand on the .40-caliber SIG-Sauer on his belt, a hardlooking woman in a tight T-shirt darts across the yard. "Don't hurt Daddy," she cries. "Don't hurt Daddy!" A sullen man stands in the door.

Over by the ponds, the second group slogs into a thicket of tangled trees and briers. Under a tin shelter, they find propane tanks, plastic vats and copper pipes, still warm. "These guys definitely put some time and effort into this," Godwin says. He swings an ax. Mash gashes from jagged holes he chops in three vats, filling the swamp air with the beery scent of 1,500 gallons of fermenting sugar and grain.

This is Broadslab, a Johnston County crossroads an hour from Raleigh. And this is moonshining, one of North Carolina's oldest and most resilient manufacturing industries. Godwin is an agent with the North Carolina Alcohol Law Enforcement Division, the ALE. The others are agents, too, or undercover cops from sheriff's departments in Johnston and surrounding counties.

While textile, furniture and tobacco manufacturing wane, making liquor survives, sustained by the same market forces as always: high demand, low prices and an ambivalent public. If educated guesses are correct, production could exceed several hundred thousand gallons a year, with a street value of $20 million or more. Enforcement is lax: Authorities concede that a convenience-store clerk selling beer to a kid is more likely to get busted than someone cooking off a batch of hooch for a Philly shot house. State penalties amount to little more than traffic tickets, typically a fine and no jail time. Meanwhile, immigrant laborers are flooding into the state -- new customers for old-fashioned cheap liquor.

Gone, makers and agents agree, is the Snuffy Smith stereotype of a bumpkin with a smoky 50-gallon pot down by the creek, supplying his family and neighbors. "We've destroyed stills with the capacity to make up to 1,000 gallons a week," says Bob Stocks, the supervisor of an eight-county ALE district east of Raleigh, who swats mosquitoes as his agents demolish the Broadslab still. Its output -- 150 to 200 gallons a week -- ranks as small-time. "It's like farming," says Vance Jackson, who retired from the supervisor's job in 1999. "In the '60s and '70s, you could set up and run a little copper outfit for $150. But the last 30 or 40 stills I broke up before retiring, it would cost you $50,000 to $100,000 to set up most of them."

To some, the Tar Heel moonshiner remains a black-hearted home wrecker. His brew makes daddies neglect their families and beat their wives and cheats honest people of taxes for schools. To others, he's a folk hero, a maverick outwitting bureaucrats bent on taking away a man's simple pleasures. Whiskey might be a drug, some say, but it's not crack or heroin.

"You can't go to the liquor store and buy you a pound a marijuana, but you sure can buy you a pint of liquor," says one Broad-slab man, the 54-year-old owner of several successful businesses who admits he tended a still as a teen-ager in the '70s. Last year, he spent six months under house arrest after pleading guilty to federal charges that he helped set one up and laundered money for its operators. "Moonshiners figure it might be a fault because it's against the law, but it ain't a sin."

Neighbors mind their own business in places like Broadslab, where the same families have lived for generations. "Even people not involved in moonshining pretty much accept it as part of the culture," Stocks says. "It's not unusual for families in the area to know about it and remain silent."

This raid stemmed from a tip. Even as it unfolds, a boy, about 8, rides out of a chicken house on his bicycle and asks a stranger, "You looking for the still, mister?" He points the way. But chinks in the wall of silence are rare. Later, as agents haul jugs out of the woods, a girl, 11, wanders up and watches. She smiles shyly through braces. "No, sir. Me and my brother ride our bikes over here, but we don't know nothing about it."

Back at the brick house at dusk, sitting on the steps of a doublewide next door, Lee Register packs a cheek with snuff. His father-in-law, John Manson Tart, 61, is one of the two men accused of running the still. He watches as agents haul out 28 cardboard cases of plastic gallon jugs -- six jugs per case, 168 jugs in all -- to be destroyed. Others search a...