Alcohol production and sales was banned in the United States on January 17, 1920, under the Volstead Act. Prohibition went into effect and criminals like Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Bugsy Siegel scented opportunity! And went on to make a fortune out of Americans’ unwillingness to part with their spirits.

You don’t hear of too many women in the rum-running trade but there were a few here and there. Mary Wazeniak ran a speakeasy out of her home in Brookfield, Illinois, near Chicago.

Mary was a 34-year-old widow and mother of three from Poland and the first woman in Illinois convicted of selling moonshine that caused the death of someone. The press nicknamed her Moonshine Mary.

The circumstances are as bland as possible. George L. Rheaton drank several shots of Mary’s moonshine at 15 cents each one day in 1923. Afterwards, he stumbled out of the speakeasy and collapsed in the street, stone dead.

Rheaton’s death was an accident. Mary was a bootlegger (or a “lady bootlegger” like the woman in Hamilton County Jail in Grievous Deeds). She may have been a very nice person, or she might not have been, but it’s highly doubtful she wanted anyone to perish after drinking her moonshine. It couldn’t have been in her interest to kill off her clientele.

But the autopsy indicated that Rheaton had indeed died of methanol poisoning, as a direct result of drinking Mary’s moonshine.

Methanol contamination of ethanol was a common hazard for people who ran stills to produce moonshine. It wasn’t unusual for people who drank “bathtub gin” to get nerve damage, go blind, or even to die after drinking these concoctions.

Mary was tried, convicted, and sentenced to “one year to life.” Any way you look at it, it was a pretty vague sentence.

Mary was shackled after this photo was taken and imprisoned in Joliet, an infamous prison where Richard Loeb was housed until his murder by another inmate.

I couldn’t find any more information. about Mary’s fate in the digital records the prison has made available.