The Formula | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

On Christmas Eve in 1926, the New York Times reported that the shops were crowded. There were more
visitors than usual for the season. And at Bellevue Hospital, limousines had delivered hundreds of gifts for the
patients from the Astor family. And dozens of trucks had arrived full of trees. The newspaper reported that there was,
quote, good cheer at Bellevue. And then, a man came running into the emergency room.
And he's screaming because he believes that Santa Claus has been chasing him for blocks with a baseball bat.
Not long after that, he died. And then another person arrived in the emergency room.
And then another. People are they're struggling to breathe. They cannot see very well.
They're acutely nauseated. They're suffering from terrible headaches. And many of them just collapse. [music] They
simply collapse on the spot and go into convulsions. This is journalist Deborah Blum.
>> [music] >> Hallucinations were were common to this, you know, what I'm going to call this
sort of outbreak. So this was different than [music] than what they'd seen at the hospital before.
Absolutely right. I want to say within that first night, they saw more than two dozen people within several days. It's
tripled. And about a third of those people are dead by the time we get past [music]
Christmas. This started happening in emergency rooms around the city. You know, the numbers start ratcheting
up um in really a remarkable way. And the people come in to emergency rooms around the city. Or, and this is
the other thing that you start to see happening at this time, you start just finding bodies in the street.
By New Year's Day, the refrigerators in Bellevue's morgue were full. And bodies were lined up in the
hallways. Over the next weeks and months, people kept dying. The same thing was happening across the
country. And it was happening because of a plan created by the US government. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
>> [music] >> Eight years earlier, a doctor named Charles Norris and a [music] forensic
chemist named Alexander Gettler had begun to worry that a huge problem was coming.
Charles Norris started seeing the early signs when he began working as the first
official chief medical examiner of New York City >> [music] >> in 1918. Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler had
[music] started noticing reports coming in about people dying after a sudden onset of blindness and then coma.
Both symptoms of having ingested something called wood alcohol. Unlike the alcohol that we normally
drink, which is made up of something called ethanol, wood alcohol, or methanol, can be made by distilling wood.
And with wood alcohol, which has a different chemical formula, what happens when you drink it is that instead of
metabolizing it away to really harmless compounds, our body metabolizes wood alcohol
in a very different way to two very toxic compounds, one of which is formic acid and one of which is
formaldehyde. And one of the really interesting things, if you're drinking wood alcohol
or methanol rather than ethanol, um is that it tastes just the same. You get the same current sort of buzz to
it. Um that buzz disappears faster with wood alcohol. You're going to start feeling
sick faster with wood alcohol, but that's going to take a few hours. You're in this period in which if you think
you're just drinking, you know, the regular good stuff and you're not, you're actually your body is beginning
to metabolize this into some very bad things. And you are really going to start at that point feeling
not entirely in control. Two teaspoons of undiluted wood alcohol, or methanol, can make you go blind.
And as little as an eighth of a cup can kill you. And about 1918, the government is like
sending up warning bonfires everywhere that they're going to make alcohol illegal to drink. And the American
people start figuring out ways that they can ensure that they still have alcohol
at hand. And so, people start setting up little, you know, [snorts] apparatus or stills or ways to ferment,
you know, organic material in their houses. They have backyard stills. They have basement stills. And to make the
alcohol, I'm in New York City. I'm not exactly running out to Nebraska to, you know, harvest a little few golden waves
of grain. I'm going to use the organic material at hand. So, what's that going to be? I could start with, if I have,
you know, a garden, I can distill my garden. But a lot of times people were distilling what they had at hand. And
sometimes it was their furniture. Sometimes it was their shoes. Sometimes they were sneaking into
Central Park and breaking off a few branches and bringing home leaves. They actually
weren't fully informed about just how dangerous this is. They just knew they could make something that would give
them a buzz. So you started seeing the scattering of deaths related to these, you know, home distilling operations
putting whatever into them. Shoes? Yes. They actually I mean, because think about it. It's leather.
It's an organic material. People distill their shoes. And that says something [laughter]
to me about how much they were determined to drink no matter what. What did Alexander Gettler and Charles
Norris think about this coming prohibition? Oh, they were completely against it. And in fact, Gettler was
publishing sort of warning statements in scientific journals in 1918 saying, this is a really bad idea.
People are going to die. Um and and the country is putting itself at risk by doing this. And they never
left that platform. Both of them from the beginning said the people who are going to be most at risk
are poor people without power. And that really mattered to both of them. I mean,
Norris came from a wealthy family, the Norrises who founded Norristown, Pennsylvania. In fact, but Gettler, you
know, was an immigrant. His parents were Hungarian immigrants. And he had [snorts] put himself through, you know,
his chemistry degree by working on a a night ferry. So you see this also infusing their
sense of outrage that this is a program that is going to most harm people who have no voice, little power, and little
money. The night before prohibition went into effect in 1920, there were cocktail parties all around
New York. People dressed up like they were going to a funeral with black top hats and
veils and drank in rooms draped in black fabric with coffins to collect empty bottles.
A lot of people went out and got drunk. >> [music] [music] >> We'll be right back.
To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Before prohibition went into effect, it
was reported that some towns sold their jails. They believed that without alcohol,
their citizens wouldn't commit any more crimes. Chewing gum and grape juice manufacturers predicted a jump in sales.
And the Salvation Army opened bars that served buttermilk. Theaters expected big crowds of former
drinkers looking for something else to do. But after prohibition began on January
17th, 1920, people just kept drinking. Where does the alcohol come from? Well, some of it, like I said, is is home
brew. Um so you have, you know, you have people doing their best to do that. You
have sort of small-scale criminal enterprises making, you know, large they have larger stills.
Um and they distribute their illegal alcohol to illegal bars or speakeasies. Some of these were closets at the back
of stores. So, um but you have these really small, you know, operations quite often brewing up
whiskies that are dangerous. A lot of people got creative to get around the rules of prohibition.
In Oklahoma [music] City one year, a man stumbled into a hospital. He was barely able to walk.
>> [music] >> He told the doctor that he'd strained himself working on a car and had felt
[music] a tingling in his calves. Then he lost control of his legs [music] below the knee.
In some ways, it looked like polio. But the patient didn't have >> [music] >> any of the other symptoms, like fever
and difficulty swallowing. Later that day, [music] another man came in with the same strange paralysis.
By the end [music] of the day, three more patients with the same symptoms had arrived at the hospital.
One of them was a podiatrist and told the doctor that he thought [music] he'd caught this from his patients.
Over the last few days, 65 of them had come to his office with the same symptoms.
He gave the doctor a list. The doctor started interviewing the patients. What was happening didn't seem to be an
infectious disease. >> [music] >> No children had been affected and very few women.
But when the doctor asked the patients if they took any medicine, they all said they took something called
[music] Jamaican ginger, which was usually just called Jake. Jake was an elixir that was supposed to
help with stomach aches. It had a high alcohol content, but it was legal to sell during prohibition, as
long as it contained a certain amount of a very bitter solid material in it, which tasted [music] terrible.
But still, people drank it for the liquor. >> [music] >> Some pharmacists had a back room where
their customers could go drink it with a bottle of Coca-Cola to chase it down. [music]
Jake had been around for a while and no one had lost control of their legs. So doctors thought it must have been
contaminated with something new. Within days, other cities across the country started having outbreaks.
An investigator with the federal government's public health service started analyzing what was left in Jake
bottles. He discovered that they contained a kind of plasticizer, >> [music] >> which attacks the nervous system in the
same way ALS does. Bootleggers had added it to the Jamaican ginger drink, along with castor oil, in
place of the original solids, so that it would taste a little better and still pass a prohibition agent's inspection.
The condition it caused came to be known as Jake leg. There are at least a dozen blues songs
about it. It affected tens of thousands of people. At one point, a drink made with the
alcohol from antifreeze became popular with train hoppers. They called it derail because it got
people very drunk very quickly. It also killed people. And then you also see that the big
Actually, some of them weren't that big, but you know, sort of the criminal gangs
that existed became much bigger because there was so much money in trafficking with illegal alcohol. The Al Capones of
the 1920s, the Lucky Lucianos. And they do this in two ways. One is there's quite a trade in trying to
smuggle in real alcohol across the Canadian border, up from the Caribbean. Um most of that is good alcohol and that
goes to their wealthy clients. That doesn't go to the poor, they're drinking Sterno
and water. There was a cocktail in New York called smoke that was just a water stirred into Sterno.
Um and then the other thing they do is they start stealing industrial alcohol. Industrial alcohol was still being
manufactured. It was the stuff used in things like perfume and cleaning products.
And a lot of it was ethanol, which you could drink. But manufacturers had been adding
unpleasant or even toxic substances to it for years. The government required them to do this
denaturing process. If they didn't, [music] manufacturers would have to pay liquor
taxes. So you see these big criminal enterprises hiring their own chemists to try to detoxify the alcohol to the
best of their ability. They don't really care if it [music] is 100% good, it just
has to be good enough that, you know, not all their clients are dropping dead on the spot, right? And so the
bootlegger chemists are finding all these ways to pull these additives out of the industrial alcohol so that they
can repackage it and sell it and [music] they do that fairly successfully, I think. At
one point during prohibition, like the big I mean, we call them mafia now, but the big criminal gangs like Al Capones
were in total stealing about 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol a year, uh reconditioning it, as it
were, and then selling it, dying it or flavoring it and selling it as various, you know, faux whiskeys. I mean, one of
the things about prohibition is everything was whiskey, right? There was no wine and beer and soft stuff, right?
If you wanted to drink, you drank hard stuff. The bartenders at speakeasies covered up
the taste [music] by inventing new cocktails with strong flavors, like the Bee's Knees with honey and
lemon juice, or the Southside with lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves and seltzer.
One British visitor to New York wrote, "The speakeasies are a remarkable feature of the new American life.
Every time you go for a drink, there's adventure. You go to locked and chained doors.
Eyes are considering you through peepholes in the wooden walls. You sign your name in a book and receive
a mysterious-looking card with only a number on it. There may be a red signal light, which
can be operated from the door, in case of police demanding entrance." I was looking at one description of one
of the speakeasies in New York and they always had a band start to play songs about the police whenever they spotted
the government agencies in in the speakeasy itself. Uh some of the speakeasies would put stuffed animals at
the center of the tables and if the they saw the police, they'd put them under the table so that people knew. But they
would raid. They raided speakeasies all the time. A lot of customers went to jail.
One prohibition agent in New York who called himself the city's champion hootch hunter, came up with all kinds of
ways with his partner to get into speakeasies and collect evidence. One time, one of them jumped into cold
water and the other rushed him into a bar screaming that the man needed a drink before he froze to death.
One of them liked to carry around a barrel of pickles. He said, "Who'd ever think a fat man with pickles
was an agent?" When they arrested an ice cream vendor who sold gin out of his cart, they
disguised themselves as football players. They also pretended to be grave diggers,
fishermen, streetcar conductors, and one of them even pretended to be an opera singer.
He serenaded everyone in the speakeasy before he shut it down. And so they're like doing this sort of piecemeal
prosecution, but that what they weren't able to do was to get at the big centers of sort of
where the industrial alcohol was going and where it was being detoxified because that wasn't so easy to find. And
so even though you have all these showy well-publicized raids, you know, um pictures of people going to jail, uh
they actually weren't making that much of a dent, right? So this is really frustrating.
They're really pissed off. You see them starting to say things like, "You know, these people are choosing to
be criminals. And so since they're choosing to be criminals, we don't owe them any particular support." And so
they decide, since all of their, you know, on-the-ground, boots-on-the-ground enforcement isn't working, that what
they can do is use chemical enforcement to make alcohol so dangerous that they won't drink it.
The US government decided to poison industrial alcohol, which was, you know, the sort of base alcohol of prohibition
at this point. The government started experimenting with adding different substances [music]
that the bootlegger chemists might not be able to remove. And in the summer of 1926,
the New York Times reported that "It is admitted by prohibition [music] enforcement authorities that Washington
chemists are working on more deadly formulas to poison >> [music] >> or denature alcohol so that bootleggers
cannot renature it and thus make it potable." They tried adding all kinds of things,
including kerosene and mercury bichloride. But still the bootleggers chemists figured [music] out how to get them out.
But the government chemists realized fairly quickly that the one poison they can't get out of the alcohol, you know,
this sort of deliberately contaminated ethanol, is is methanol, wood alcohol, and
despite all their best efforts, they really can't get the methanol out into any meaningful amount. And so, in 1926,
the government actually comes up with a formula. It's actually called formula one.
And at that point, you know, the amount of methanol used in industrial alcohol is, you know, 1%, 2%.
It's really small. They ramp it up to formula one requires it being ramped up to 5 to 10%. And at that amount, it
becomes really, really, really poisonous. And the bootlegger chemists are not able to get it out. And the
bootleggers, they just put this on the market. We'll be right back. >> [music] >> By Christmas Eve 1926,
the industrial alcohol the government had poisoned had made its way into people's drinks.
And in New York City, people were showing up at Bellevue Hospital hallucinating, going blind, and dying.
And Norris and Gettler know these people are being killed by methanol, and [music]
they were really ticked off. >> [laughter] >> In [snorts] in the way I think that
people who are public health officials working in a city in which their job is to try to save lives, and the federal
government is taking lives. >> [music] >> I mean, eventually, they they just say
this outright. On December 28th, Charles Norris issued a public statement. The government knows it is not stopping
drinking by putting poison in alcohol. It knows what the bootleggers are doing with it. And yet [music] it continues
its poisoning process, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing
that poison. [music] Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with
the moral responsibility for the deaths that poison liquor causes. A lawyer for the Anti-Saloon League
issued a response and said that anyone who drank at a speakeasy was in the same category as the man who walks into a
drugstore, buys a bottle with a label on it marked poisonous, and drinks the contents.
He said that the government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable when the
Constitution prohibits it. The mayor of New York asked Charles Norris to review the alcohol deaths in
the city. When Norris and his staff analyzed bottles, every single one had wood alcohol.
Norris wrote in his report, "There is practically no pure whiskey available anywhere in the city,
and that there's actually no prohibition. All the people who drank before prohibition are drinking now, provided
they are still alive." This report pretty much says the US government is killing people.
>> [music] >> One Chicago Tribune editorial said, quote, "Normally, no American government would
[music] engage in such business. It would not and does not set a trap gun loaded with nails to catch [music] a
counterfeiter. It would not poison postage stamps to get a citizen known to be misusing the
mail. It is only in the curious [music] fanaticism of prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered
justified." >> [music] >> I think the government, or at least the people who are putting this policy in
place, >> [music] >> originally they thought, I think, that if they just announced that the
government was deliberately poisoning alcohol, people would say, "Oh, I'm not going to drink that. [music]
Why would I risk my life when I might be picking up more poisonous alcohol? I just won't drink." But but to be fair, I
don't think [music] they realized how many people were going to drink anyway. Now, you know, we're talking about uh
media ecosystem. How's this information getting out? The New York Times is covering it, but not everyone it can
afford a subscription to the New York Times. [music] And and, you know, you have a whole class of people who uh
actually can't afford a newspaper subscription. I think a lot of the people who died post this government poisoning
program were people who just didn't know how [music] dangerous it was. They that
information wasn't getting into their communities. They were just trying to get through their days. They were not,
you know, huddled around the radio or reading the warnings published in magazines or the newspapers of the day.
And there are communities that don't trust the government for very good reason. Um so, they also would have not
entirely believed everything they were hearing. [music] And finally, you know, the government, which wants you to quit
drinking, [music] announces that they've made alcohol more dangerous. Well, sure,
>> [music] >> right? Why wouldn't they try that on me? In 1928, Charles Norris issued a warning
[music] to New Yorkers that practically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic.
He did whatever he could to publicize what was happening. He announced every death from alcohol
poisoning. He gave interviews and wrote articles. In one, he wrote, "Our national casualty list for the year
from this one cause will outstrip the toll of the war. These are the first fruits of
prohibition. This is the price of our noble experiment in extermination." And you see some, you know, very strong
reactions, especially at the state level, from state politicians just saying that, you know, this has become
insane, right? You we just can't keep on murdering people. On December 19th, 1930, The New York
Times published an article with the headline, "Poison Alcohol Takes Large Toll."
It quoted the director of the Treasury Department's Bureau of Industrial Alcohol saying that they were receiving
reports of deaths in many parts of the country from poisonous alcohol, namely, [music] industrial alcohol
manufactured under government supervision. Then he announced [music] that they expected to eliminate wood
alcohol from industrial alcohols. I think that there were some folks who at the government level became less and
less comfortable with something that was increasingly being called murder by American newspapers.
And so, they still want to stop people from drinking, and so they started adding other compounds.
Um they did a whole lot of work with different formulas [music] to just make it smell bad and taste bad and try to
put people off it that way. So, they're still trying to do chemical enforcement,
but there's a kind of step back from the idea that, you know, the ultimate chemical enforcement is to make it so
poisonous that the drinkers die. Um the Treasury Department actually had a press
conference [music] and had reporters come in and try some of the, you [music] know, take take shot
glasses of some of the new formulas. You know, people have been drinking for longer than we know that people have
existed. So, to think that a government can just decide you can't drink anymore and that it won't
>> [laughter] >> Yes. That it will work is pretty naive. Agreed. Prohibition lasted 13 years.
>> [music] >> It ended at 5:32 p.m. on December 5th, 1933. >> [music] >> In New York, hotels started rolling bar
carts into lobbies. And Bloomingdale's department store >> [music] >> started selling bottles of port and
whiskey at the moment the news came on the radio. The line went down the [music] street.
>> [music] >> Criminal is created by Lauren Spor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lilly Clark,
[music] and Lena Sillison. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Somenetti.
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at
thisiscriminal.com, where we'll also have a link to Deborah Blum's book, The Poisoner's Handbook:
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On Christmas Eve in 1926, a man came running into Bellevue Hospital in New York screaming that Santa Claus had been chasing him for blocks with a baseball bat. Not long after that, he died. And then another person arrived in the emergency room. And then another. This started happening in emergency rooms around the country. And it was happening because of a plan created by the U.S. government.

Deborah Blum’s book is ⁠The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York⁠ (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301154/the-poisoners-handbook-by-deborah-blum/).

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode 358 originally published March 27, 2026. https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-358-the-formula-3-27-2026

Music in this episode: “Pxl Eventuat” by Blue Dot Sessions “Junaluska” by Blue Dot Sessions “Code 6” by Blue Dot Sessions “Inamorata” by Blue Dot Sessions “House of Grendel” by Blue Dot Sessions “Cigar Singles” by Blue Dot Sessions “Relay 7” by Blue Dot Sessions “Footsteps on Alden” by Blue Dot Sessions “Lenses” by Blue Dot Sessions “Milkwood” by Blue Dot Sessions “Valantis” by Blue Dot Sessions

Brief Summary

Prohibition's alcohol poisoning led to widespread deaths in 1926, revealing government failures and public health crises.

Key points

Christmas Eve 1926. A festive atmosphere turns tragic as patients flood Bellevue Hospital with mysterious symptoms.
The Outbreak Begins. A sudden influx of patients with severe symptoms raises alarms in New York City.
Prohibition's Deadly Consequences. The government poisons industrial alcohol, leading to widespread illness and death.
The Poisonous Experiment. The government believed poisoning alcohol would deter drinking, but it backfired tragically.
A Warning Ignored. Charles Norris warned New Yorkers about toxic liquor, predicting a staggering death toll.
End of Prohibition. Prohibition officially ended on December 5, 1933, leading to a rush for alcohol.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

"Santa Claus has been chasing him with a baseball bat.".

A man arrives at the emergency room in panic.

0:36WatchApr 10, 2026

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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