Bunting's record (and the fact that in 37 years as a law enforcer he's never been wounded) has made him a legend in rural Scotland Neck, where he lives with his wife, Colleen, 49. (Their daughter, Joan, 23, is a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa.) Now a hardcover book, Moonshine (Knopf) by Alec Wilkinson, expanded from a New Yorker article, has brought him national attention. Nevertheless, says Bunting, "I haven't noticed that too many violators recognize me." In the following account, Bunting (whom the county pays $20,000 a year for his vigilance) describes his life as what generations of rogues have labeled "the wrong man."
I guess you can say I've been in law enforcement all of my adult life, first as a country policeman who'd sit up in a tree on a Saturday night to see what was goin' on in the whole town, then in the service with the military police. For the past 26 years I've worked undercover all over this state. I know this country as well as any man livin' in here.
There's some people who see me as a sort of backwoods Superman, a man who just couldn't be killed, but that's just a myth that came up around me in my younger days. Some of those real suspicious rural people even said I carried a black cat bone and sold out to the devil. Word got around, "You can't burn him up" and "Bullets'll bounce right off him," and that if I put the mouth on them [give them a warning], they might as well give up and write their will. I've been shot at lots of times, more than 60 times on one mornin' on one still, but they never hit me. The way I see it, it could have been divine intervention protecting me. I put a lot of my trust in the Lord. I always have and I always will until my last light goes out.
I was raised poor on a farm where we were all the time rotatin' the crops, like tobacco, peanuts, cotton and other things. I learned how to work early and work hard. I trapped in the swamps, catchin' muskrat and mink when I was a boy.
That's where I got my spendin' money from. I'd attend my trap lines in the mornin' and have what I caught skinned and stretched before school. That's one thing that helped my memory for my work today, rememberin' where my 60 traps were on that mile and a half of swamp line, which stump and which log and which stream each one of them was at.
I just love the woods. I love to get out there when I'm stakin' out a still and smell that wild fern and that swamp. It's a feelin' that you can relax better than any place in the world. I think it has to do with not bein' around people with their minds workin'. I'm just as safe out there as a dead pig in the sunshine. Snakes, bears and all that don't bother me. All I gotta do is use my God-given judgment, and I can outwit any of those critters.
Whenever I know there's liquor bein' sold illegally in an area, I go check those woods. You see, in order to set up a still, the moonshiners have got to carry in copper, sugar and all their equipment. They've got to make some kind of trail, and even if they try to cover it up, I've got it. When I go into the woods for a stakeout, I sometimes stay on it as high as two weeks. Usually there are from three to five of us, and we spread out but come together once in a while. I just sit there and wait, sleep on a log or a stump and read my Bible, quote my Scriptures and just keep my mind occupied. I kinda settled on the First Psalm that says the way of the ungodly shall perish from the earth. I also keep some other sayings in my pocket and when I'm stakin' out a still I get them out every once in a while. Some of my favorites are "They who conquer are those who believe they can" and "Why should you die before your time?"
Then one night you hear a truck comin', most times around 2 in the mornin', and it'll pull up to the mouth of the still. Then a man comes down the path with a light goin' every which way to see if anybody's been in there. If everything seems all right, you hear jugs and jars comin' off that truck and several more men come down the path. Then you hear the boiler doors open. And all that time we're just waitin' for them to get it goin' good. About then you can hear the leaves around our young agents' feet start to shake. They don't know what's gonna happen. Then we move in there fast and take them any way we can. Surprise is the name of the game. And before we leave there, we blow that still up with dynamite.
You wouldn't believe the places you can find stills other than the woods. I've found them in hog pens, cornfields, houses, even in trucks movin' down the road.
There've been times I've caught women moonshiners. They were operatin' the still with men, movin' jars and jugs around, so they're just as guilty as the men are. Some of them are hard to apprehend. The only kind of woman that'll claw and fight you is a drunk. A drunk woman is the worst thing I ever tangled with. I just can't go on one like I can a man. I try to keep from hurtin' her. I was raised that way, and when you try to keep from hurtin' some of them while they're tryin' to kill you, you've got a bad situation. I've seen them bite officers all up the side of the neck. I'd about as soon as look down a shotgun barrel as a fightin' drunk woman.
I've used lots of disguises in trackin' down moonshiners. I peddled fish, swept streets, worked in sawmills and carnivals, you name it. I've done it to get in with them. Rural people are just plain leery of strangers. If they see somebody just hangin' around who ain't got something interestin' to talk about, they wonder, "Who is he?" So what you had to do was go into the population and become one of them. When I'm a coon hunter, I put on old coveralls, an ordinary shirt coat, cap of some kind, and I go in those woods lookin' for a lost coon dog. After they see me a few times, they think I'm nothin' but an old coon hunter. When they start sellin' in front of you, you've got it made. Then I try to buy a gallon for myself and usually there's no problem. But I never stop with one gallon. I go back and buy another. Then I say, "Look, your whiskey is so good, can I get a truckload?" In the meantime I try to find out where he's gettin' it, who's makin' it for him. And once I get all that information, I order all I can and pay him off with a badge.
I think it was about my second campaign as an undercover agent when I went into this little town up in the foothills and made a lot of buys off these tough, overall-wearin', rifle-totin' bootleggers. I bought off them, talked to them and got my evidence right and took them in. Their case was set two weeks later in court. I got up there a little ahead of schedule that day, and when I got there, the courtyard was full of people minglin' all over. I wondered what big was goin' on and so I asked somebody. He said, "Haven't you heard? Some flatlander has come in here and bought liquor off these overall-wearin', rifle-totin' bootleggers, and he's got little enough sense that he's goin' on the witness stand and testify against them, and we're here to see them shoot him right out of the witness chair." Now, don't you know that was kind of encouragin' for a young man just startin' out as a revenue agent? But I just went in and testified, and nobody pulled any guns.
Don't think none of us get scared about what's gonna happen to us, because we do. I remember once when I was on an undercover by myself in strange country I got so concerned I left the cabin where I was stayin', took my sleepin' bag and my Scriptures and slept in the cemetery. I thought it was the less likely place anybody would come and look for somebody. But they didn't look for me.
My wife, Colleen, has never worried about me. If she has, I didn't know about it. I told her when I married her, "I'm gonna hunt and police the rest of my life, and you can worry yourself to death and worry me to death too, or you can just relax and take it day by day and see what happens." Another thing, she's got a true, abidin' faith in her maker. So my wife never asks me where I'm goin' or where I've been, just if I've had anything to eat.
The most tragic thing that ever happened to me in my whole life was when our son, Carey Jackson Bunting, died in a bicycle accident when he was just 8 years old. I asked my Lord what I had done to deserve such punishment 'cause I always tried to do what I thought was right. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't gamble. If it hadn't been for my faith I don't know if I could have stood it. It was worse than death.
Back in the '60s and '70s, runnin' stills and makin' illegal whiskey started goin' down in North Carolina, partly 'cause we had such strong law enforcement and partly 'cause sugar was high and marijuana farmin' was comin' in. In my opinion marijuana in the South is a bigger money crop now than tobacco. And though I've spent more years trackin' down the moonshiners, I am right on the trail of these marijuana growers. I watch them closer than I do a moonshiner. I know I'm dealin' with a much worse fella 'cause a lot of them are usin' their wares and are crazy and feel like they can kill you and float right on away and nobody will ever see them. They're goin' after a different customer than the moonshiner, after innocent people, little children. I hate to say so, but I got no use for one, and if I have to kill him in law enforcement, I don't think I'll have as much worry with it as with some other people. So he better not get in my way. But the makin' and sellin' of liquor seems to me to be pickin' up 'cause the government just raised the tax on liquor. If a man can buy bush whiskey half as cheap as store whiskey, he will. An alcoholic don't care. He'll drink anything.
A lot of people don't know what goes into still liquor and maybe it's better that they don't. If they're makin' sugar whiskey, it's made up of sugar, meal, malt and water. If it's rye whiskey, you put rye in place of the meal. They put it in a barrel, mix it up and let it rot. Small-timers don't put in no colorin', but they put in rubbin' alcohol or Clorox to strengthen it up. Lead salts come into it from where the joints have been soldered on the copper pipin'. Then there's all kinds of things floatin' in those stills, like snakes, possums, birds. Animals go in there when the mash is fermentin' and start drinkin'. They get drunk and fall in. Drinkin' that stuff will kill you, no doubt about it. The moonshiners tell me they don't make it to drink. They make it to sell.
As revenue agents, we work just like spies in a war, but it's a whiskey war and a marijuana war instead of a fightin' war. I always felt like my work was a worthwhile thing. I can remember as a small boy seein' those men go up to those bootleg joints and spend money that was needed for their families, and somehow I just accumulated a thought that I was helpin' to try to make a well-ordered society.
You might say my job is a regular old raw life, nothin' all that interestin', but catchin' a moonshiner takes bein' sort of shrewd, bein' persistent and bein' dedicated. In other words, likin' it. Sometimes I work 60 to 80 hours a week and more when I'm on a long still watch, and I got the word of bein' a workaholic. But I just say everybody's gotta be somewhere. So I'm there.
- Contributors:
- Jane Sanderson.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
