Agent Randall Toney, shown with a still found in a raid in Henry County, has retired from the Illegal Whiskey Unit. A spokeswoman for Virginia's Alcoholic Beverage Control department says ABC is telling all of its agents to watch for moonshining.

Associated Press | File 2005

Virginia Illegal Whiskey Unit once included agents (from left) Jay Calhoun and Randall Toney, surveillance technician Garry Thomas and part-time agent Don Harris. Harris is the only staffer left. One of the unit's big victories came earlier this decade, when prosecutors convicted more than two dozen people, crushing an operation that produced 1.4 million gallons of moonshine since 1992.

Virginia's one-of-a-kind Illegal Whiskey Unit -- a team of agents dedicated to busting up bootleg stills -- has fallen prey to state budget woes, leaving Southwest Virginia's elusive moonshiners without a full-time, dedicated foe for the first time in decades.

The whiskey unit based in Franklin County, long considered the "moonshine capital of the world," once numbered as many as five agents with expertise in the illicit liquor trade, and their mission -- perhaps quixotic --was to quash moonshining. Now, the team is down to a lone member, and he's a part-timer.

While Southwest Virginia's backwoods distillers might find the situation cause to rejoice, Jennifer Farinholt, spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, which created the whiskey unit in 1985, said the department still feels it can stay on top of moonshiners. The department, she said, is charging all of its agents statewide with pursuing their own investigations.

"This has given us the opportunity to redesign our operational strategies and, in effect, create a force-multiplying strategy which charges all agents with conducting illegal whiskey manufacturing investigations," Farinholt said.

Much of the whiskey unit's work involved sneaking into the woods of the state's back country, staking out still sites and conducting around-the-clock surveillance in hopes that a still's operator would show up. Asked how the area's black market hooch can be policed without the expertise of a fully staffed whiskey unit, Don Harris, 63, the unit's remaining member, said: "That's a good question. You'll have to pose that to Richmond."

Farinholt said the department would not discuss "deployment issues." But another ABC spokeswoman, Kathleen Shaw, reiterated that the agency believes tasking all agents to include illegal whiskey investigations among their responsibilities "is also an effective way to attack the problem." She acknowledged, though, that a budget crunch, not enforcement strategy, is driving the new approach: "As resources become more available or when our budget situation changes, we are interested in more fully staffing these positions, but we currently do not have the budget resources to make a change."

The ABC's whiskey unit has worked across the state but has traditionally concentrated on Franklin, Henry, Floyd, Patrick and Pittsylvania counties. While the work of ABC agents generally involves licensing businesses to sell alcohol and keeping it out of the hands of minors, the whiskey unit agents were experts in the ways of white lightning. They traveled the back roads and bought their lunches at country stores, recruiting informants, mapping bootleggers' distribution networks and learning to spot the telltale signs of increased liquor production in particular areas.

But a series of retirements from the whiskey unit over the past two years shrank the ABC agency's moonshining expertise. Agent Allan Arrington resigned and is now working in Afghanistan, according to his former colleagues. Agent Jay Calhoun retired to take up farming, and agent Randall Toney simply retired.

"We tried to get them to give us some people and train them, but due to the budget shortfalls, it just wasn't there," said Toney, of Gretna, who retired in June. "They don't have the luxury of dedicating themselves to moonshining the way we did."

Toney predicted moonshining operations will once again blossom without a full-time whiskey unit: "There's too much money for them to quit," he said of the moonshiners.

Virginia moonshine sells for about $20 a gallon, and an 800-gallon black pot still averages $2,000 in profits per week, according to the National Liquor Law Enforcement Association, based in Maryland.

One person who said he's not sorry to see the diminished state of the whiskey unit is Amos Law, a retired Rocky Mount moonshiner once known as "The Black Pot King." Law, 73, said ABC agents were responsible for the 33 months he spent behind bars. His moonshining, he said, was not about getting rich, it was about surviving in lean times.

"Back in the day when nobody didn't have any money, the only thing you could do was sawmilling," he said. "I chose to make the moonshine instead of working at the sawmill. Weren't no big money in it. I fed my family and sent them to school."

One of the whiskey unit's biggest victories came at the beginning of this decade, when its work helped federal prosecutors in Roanoke convict more than two dozen people of taking part in the untaxed liquor trade. The raid that led to the convictions, dubbed Operation Lightning Strike, crushed a moonshine operation that had produced 1.4 million gallons of liquor since 1992. And it shuttered a supply store in Rocky Mount that had supplied bootleggers with 12 million pounds of sugar.

Former Franklin County Sheriff W.Q. "Quint" Overton said the federal government's intervention in the area's moonshine business has effectively halted all major trafficking, making the need for a whiskey unit questionable. The past few years have been largely devoid of large moonshine busts.

"I think the whiskey business is something in the past," Overton said. "The drugs pretty much took over. The younger generation is into drugs -- marijuana, cocaine, everything -- they're not in the whiskey business."

But Chris Goodman, the ABC agent in charge of the Roanoke office, said he's seen a slight increase in moonshining in the past few months, possibly due to the recession. "We're starting to see and get more information about some stills," he said. "It appears there's an uptick, and we're trying to address it."