In 2012, at Cannes, a film about bootleggers from backwoods Virginia received an ovation that lasted nearly ten minutes. Budget — 26 million dollars, box office — 54.4 million. The screenplay was written by Nick Cave, directed by John Hillcoat, and starred Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Jason Clarke, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman, and Jessica Chastain. But the strangest thing about “Lawless” is neither its cast nor its ovation. The phrase “based on true events” is not a marketing sticker here. It is, literally, a family archive: novelist Matt Bondurant wrote about his own grandfather and two great-uncles — men no one needed to invent.
It all began not with the film, but with the novel “The Wettest County in the World” (2008, Scribner). The Russian distributor retitled the film “The Drunkest County in the World,” and in that mildly funny shift, the whole point was lost. “Wettest” puts the emphasis on geography and economics: a county where whiskey ran like a river, not one where people simply drank. The novel’s author is Matt Bondurant, grandson of the youngest of the three brothers. He did not make up his characters; he deciphered what he had heard as a child around the family table.
The title “wettest county in the world” was bestowed on Franklin County, Virginia, by journalist and writer Sherwood Anderson — the very classic of American prose, author of Winesburg, Ohio. He found himself in those parts during Prohibition as a reporter — and left behind a phrase that became a stigma, a brand, and eventually the title of the novel.
The heroes are the Bondurant brothers: Forrest, Howard, and Jack. The author’s grandfather was Jack, the youngest. The family traces its lineage back to Jean Pierre Bondurant, a Huguenot who fled to Virginia from religious persecution in Europe. The irony of that genealogy: a descendant of refugees seeking religious freedom was, two hundred years later, running whiskey around the federal treasury.
Locals considered the three men “indestructible” — because all of them survived. Shootouts, stabbings, raids. The novel is built on two storylines: the brothers’ chronicle in the 1920s and 1930s, and 1934, when Anderson comes to the county to gather material for an article. The New York Times Book Review called the style “lyrical” — despite a plot that makes “the reader feel ill”: dismemberment, sadism, and everyday lawlessness in all its raw force. Why not write a memoir? Because there were none, as Matt himself explained in an interview with The Guardian: “There was no tradition of documenting their lives. No diaries, memoirs or letters.”
Sherwood Anderson deserves a paragraph of his own, if only for the ending. The man who gave the county its “wettest” title worked in these parts as a journalist and turned a local story into a national one. He is also a character in the novel: in Anderson’s storyline, Bondurant showed how a legend is born from conversations around a fire.
Anderson died on March 8, 1941, at the age of 64 — he disembarked from the cruise ship Santa Lucia in Colón, Panama, and died in a local hospital. Doctors diagnosed peritonitis: internal injuries caused by a swallowed toothpick. By an irony of fate, he is buried in Virginia, in the town of Marion, beneath the epitaph “Life, not death, is the great adventure.” The man who gave the county its nickname was left forever in its soil.
Now for the legal part — and it can go toe-to-toe with any thriller. Prohibition in the United States was repealed in December 1933 — but that was precisely what laid the groundwork for the trials. All the moonshine distilled in Franklin County over the years had been made without paying federal excise tax. By law enforcement’s logic, this was not “past and forgotten” — it was an ongoing crime: a conspiracy to evade taxes. The exact same scheme that put Al Capone behind bars.
In February 1935, a Franklin County grand jury indicted 34 people. Estimates of the scale vary: retellings mention as many as 80 people in the entire “case” and unpaid taxes totaling around 5.5 million dollars — astronomical money in Depression-era America. In the summer of 1935, 20 defendants went to trial; among them was the sitting county sheriff, Peter Hodges Sr. He pleaded guilty — an almost unimaginable case: a sheriff in the dock for the very crime he was supposed to stop.
Then came a detail any screenwriter would envy: the jury refused to convict the others until the court acquitted county prosecutor Aubrey Lee, who was also implicated in the case. The prosecutor was acquitted — and only then did the jurors return 17 guilty verdicts. The press of the time also wrote about another absurd episode: jurors were allowed to “examine the physical evidence.” A jug of moonshine. They sampled it.
And a few months before the trial, on March 4, 1935, deputy sheriff Thomas Jefferson Richards — a key prosecution witness — was murdered. The killing remains unsolved to this day.
American jurisprudence had a sequel ready: the main conspiracy turned out to be not in the market, but in the courtroom. In 1946, a separate trial was held — over jury bribery in that very 1935 case. More than two dozen people were charged, and nearly all of them — 22 people — were convicted. That is, eleven years later it emerged that the 1935 verdicts had been “bought” in both directions.
The final and harshest twist: the records of the trial itself vanished. Files, transcripts, testimony — all gone without a trace, sometime around the 1950s. A reward of 1000 dollars was offered for their recovery — to no avail. In the 1990s, retired attorney Keister Grier conducted his own investigation and wrote the book “The Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935” — it remains one of the main pillars for historians. Where justice could not reach, amateur historians did.
The film’s most famous scene is almost a retelling of family legend. In a fight at Forrest Bondurant’s own gas station diner, his throat was cut “from ear to ear.” According to the family legend, he walked nearly 10 miles through the snow to the hospital, holding his neck together with his hands. The shootout on the bridge over Maggodee Creek in 1930 is real: even then, newspapers were writing about the “Bondurant brothers” as a “notorious gang with a dangerous reputation.” Matt’s grandfather was still alive when his grandson learned of it from archive clippings — and, by the author’s own admission, he still regrets not asking him about it in time.
The film’s main antagonist — Guy Pearce’s sadistic federal agent Charlie Rakes — is a composite fiction: the real pressure did not come from a single brute with a farmer’s haircut, but from courts, taxes, and murdered witnesses. Cave and Hillcoat, by their own account, deliberately moved away from noble “Americana” toward something “raw, brutal, and punk.” The soundtrack — Nick Cave and Warren Ellis — was recorded by the two of them, with their own hands: not the “respectable” Americana demanded by the genre, but something deliberately rough and exposed.
The moonshine still had to be delivered. Along the muddy roads of Appalachia, at night, with federal agents on their tail — bootleggers built cars on production chassis that could do an unimaginable 120+ miles per hour. That is how the driving culture that gave rise to NASCAR was born: many of its first racers learned not on the track, but behind the wheel of a van loaded with “white lightning.”
One final touch — Junior Johnson, NASCAR legend. His father, Robert Glenn Johnson Sr., was a professional bootlegger: sentenced to 63 years in prison, he served about twenty. Junior himself was caught in 1956 for operating an illegal moonshine still and spent about a year in a federal prison in Ohio — but he was never once caught behind the wheel with a load in his life: later, he monetized that skill legally on the track. In the mid-1960s, Tom Wolfe made him the hero of the essay “The Last American Hero” — and in doing so finally fused the bootlegger myth with the myth of the high-speed track. On December 26, 1986, President Ronald Reagan pardoned Junior for his 1956 conviction. “I couldn’t have imagined anything better,” the racer said at the time.
The most astonishing thing in this story is not the shootouts. It is that the bureaucratic machine that managed to conduct the trial of the century failed to preserve its own documents: the records evaporated, and with them went the possibility of checking everything down to the last page. The story survived only because it was told: orally, in families, around fires. Then the grandson of one of the brothers sat down and wrote it all out — and the novel became the only packaged version of the family archive.
I read a Roanoke Times clipping from March 8, 1991, thirty-five years after publication — and, fittingly, the body of the article had to be decoded: the site’s archive hides the text behind a robot-blocking substitution cipher. A story about concealment that has to be cracked with code. The symmetry is almost perfect: what bureaucracy “lost,” the internet archive deliberately hides, and only what people passed to one another in words survives. Everything else — film, paper, transcripts — dissolved.