Criminal - The Formula

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

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. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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before nine. My head hurts. Any mighty tools to help with this plight? Aha! Barb made her move. She opened Canva and got in the groove. Well, creating Canva sheets. Create 50 signs, paper suburban streets. Done in a click, all complete. Sweet. Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at Canva.com. On Christmas Eve, in 19, In 26, the New York Times reported that the shops were crowded. There are 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 struggling to breathe. They cannot see very well. They're acutely nauseated.

They're suffering from. terrible headaches, and many of them just collapsed. They simply collapse on the spot and go into convulsions. This is journalist Deborah Blum. Hallucinations were common to this, you know, what I'm going to call this sort of outbreak. So this was different than what they'd seen at the hospital before. Absolutely right. I want to say within that first night they saw more,

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 Christmas. This started happening in emergency rooms around the city. You know, the numbers start ratcheting up 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 U.S. government. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Eight years earlier, a doctor named Charles Norris and a 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 in 1918. Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler had 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 a way 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, is that it tastes just the same. You get the same sort of buzz to it.

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 have 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 so they can ensure that they still have alcohol at hand. And so people start setting up little, you know, 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, you know, 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, and you know, because think about it, it's leather, it's an

organic material. People distill their shoes, and that's something to me about how much they were determined to drink no matter what. What did Alexander Gettler and Charles Norse 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. 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 Norris, who founded Norristown, Pennsylvania.

But Geller, you know, was an immigrant. His parents were Hungarian immigrants, and he had put himself through, you know, his chemistry degree by working on a night ferry. So you see this also infusing their sense of outrage. 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. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

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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 homebrew. So you have people doing their best to do that. You have sort of small-scale criminal enterprises making, you know, they have larger stills, and they distribute their illegal alcohol to illegal bars or speakeasies.

Some of these were closets at the back of stores. But you have these really small, you know, operations quite often brewing up whiskeys that are really dangerous. A lot of people got creative to get around the rules of prohibition. In Oklahoma City one year, a man stumbled into a hospital. He was barely able to walk. He told the doctor that he'd strained himself working on a car and had felt it tingling in his calves. Then he lost control of his legs below the knee.

In some ways, it looked like polio. But the patient didn't have any of the other symptoms like fever and difficulty swallowing. Later that day, another man came in with the same strange paralysis. By the end 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 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 patient. What was happening didn't seem to be an infectious disease. 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 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 terrible. But still, people drank it for the liquor. Some pharmacists had a back room where their customers could go drink it with a bottle of Coca-Cola to chase it down. 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. Which attacks the nervous system in the same way ALS does. Bootleckers 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 were so much money in trafficking with illegal alcohol. The Al Capone's of the 1920s, the lucky Luciano's. 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. 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. There was just a water stirred into sterno. 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, 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 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 they do that fairly successfully. I think at one point during Prohibition, like the big, I mean, we call the mafia now, but the big criminal gangs like Al Capone's were in total stealing about 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol a year, reconditioning it, as it were, and then selling it, dyeing 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 by inventing new cocktails with strong flavors, like the bees' knees with honey and lemon juice, or the south side 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 peep holes 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 speakeasiesies. in New York, and they always had a band start to play songs about the police whenever they spotted the government agencies in the speakeasy itself. Some of the speakeasies would put stuffed animals at the center of the tables, and if they saw the police, they'd put them under the table so that people knew. But they would raid. They raided speakeas all the time. A lot of customers

went to jail. One prohibition agent in New York who called himself the city's champion Hoochunner came up with all kinds of ways with his partner to get into speak-easies 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 gravediggers, 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 center. 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 raids, well-publicized raids, you know, pictures of people going to jail, 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 U.S. 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 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 enforcement authorities that Washington chemists are working

on more deadly formulas to poison or denature alcohol so that bootleggers cannot re-nature it and thus make it potable. They tried adding all kinds of things, including kerosene and mercury bichloride. But still the bootleggers chemists figured 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 methanol?

What alcohol? And despite all their best efforts, they really can't get the methanol out to any meaningful amount. And so in 1926, the government actually comes up with a formula. It's actually called Formula One. And at that part, 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 1 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. Support for criminal comes from Bombus. This new here is the perfect time to. upgrade your sock drawer with Bombus. I can't think of many better ways to motivate yourself to go on a morning walk before work or on a run or to the gym than a new pair of comfortable, thick, high-quality socks to put on before you head out the door. Bombas socks are made to support

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash criminal. Go to Shopify.com slash criminal. That's Shopify.com slash criminal. 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. Norris and Gettler know these people are being killed by methanol, and they were really ticked off, right? 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.

I mean, eventually they just say this outright. On December 28, Charles Norse 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 it continues its poisoning process, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison.

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 doesn't, 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 U.S. government is killing people. One Chicago Tribune editorial said, quote, normally no American government would engage in such business. It would not and does not set a trap gun loaded with nails to catch a counterfeiter. It would not poison postage stamps to get a citizen known to be misusing the mail. It is only in the curious fanaticism of prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.

I think the government, or at least the people who are putting this policy in place, Originally, they thought, I think, that if they just announced that the government was deliberately poisoned alcohol, people would say, oh, I'm not going to drink that. Why would I risk my life when I might be picking up more poisonous alcohol? I just won't drink. But to be fair, I don't think they realized how many people were going to drink anyway. Now, you know, we're talking about a media ecosystem. How's this information getting out? The New York Times is covering it, but not everyone can afford a subscription to the New York Times. And, you know, you have a whole class of people who 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 dangerous it was. 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. So they also would have not entirely believed everything. they were hearing. And finally, you know, the government, which wants you to quit drinking, announces that they've made alcohol more dangerous. Well, sure, right? Why wouldn't they try that on me?

In 1928, Charles Norse issued a warning 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 very strong reactions, especially at the state level from state politicians, just saying that, you know, this has become insane, right? We just can't keep on murdering people. On December 19, 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 industrial alcohol. alcohol manufactured under government supervision. Then he announced 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, was 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. They did a whole lot of work with different formulas 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 the ultimate chemical enforcement is to make it so poisonous that the drinkers die.

The Treasury Department actually had a press conference, and had reporters come in and try some of the, you know, 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, that it will work is pretty naive. Agreed. Prohibition lasted 13 years. It ended at 5.32 p.m. on December 5th, 1933.

In New York, hotel started rolling bar carts into lobbies, and Bloomingdale's department store started selling bottles of port and whiskey at the moment the news came on the radio. The line went down the street. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.

Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Sillison. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at This Is Criminal.com, where we'll also have a link to Deborah Blum's book, The Poisoners Handbook, Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age, New York. You can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.

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