For nearly five years, Berkeley County Sheriff S. Duane Lewis used his spare time to research the men who enforced the laws and those who broke them during the county’s raucous decades of moonshining, political corruption and murder.
Probing into past crimes and the people who investigated them showed Lewis how history repeats itself. From the late 19th century until 1970, Berkeley County had as much violent crime then as it has now, said Lewis, a Berkeley County native raised in a law enforcement family.
“[Crime] was just not reported like things are reported today,” he explained. “We see violence all over the place, and people think, ‘Lord have mercy! What is the world coming to?’ It has always been there. We just didn’t know a lot about it.”
To prove his point, Lewis and his former criminal justice professor at Trident Technical College, Danny Crooks, tell stories of the county’s sheriffs who hunted the criminals in Lawmen and Lawlessness: Historic Cases of Corruption and Murder. They will talk about their 424-page book filled with historical photos on June 28 during the Daniel Island News Authors Series at the Daniel Pointe Retirement Community on Daniel Island.
The sheriff and Crooks spoke openly to the Charleston City Paper about their book, published in May of this year by Palmetto Publishing in Charleston. They stopped the interviews, however, when asked why the book does not mention the race of the lawmen, the criminals and those who were hanged for murder.
The book explores the lives of about a dozen sheriffs who served from 1882 to 1970. It’s a history of the elected sheriffs who tried to keep the peace with limited county government support in a sprawling impoverished county that once stretched from Holly Hill, Summerville to just south of McClellanville. Prior to 1895, Mount Pleasant was Berkeley’s seat of government, and the county line even extended to Edisto.
The book also chronicles notorious bad guys who committed unspeakable blood-chilling crimes, such as bootlegger Jeremiah Wright’s 1920s reign of terror. Twice convicted of murder, Wright was twice pardoned by South Carolina’s governor. He later shot a man five times in front of witnesses, but that case was subsequently ruled self-defense. Violence was so bad that the county was nicknamed “Bloody Berkeley.”
“The book is an effort to cut through the rumors and innuendos of these tales to set the record straight as to what really happened,” said Crooks, a historian and former law enforcement officer.
Lewis’ collaboration with Crooks began as a project for the Berkeley County Museum in Moncks Corner a few years after he was first elected in 2015 as the county’s 16th sheriff. The museum wanted a display on former sheriffs. As a result, Lawmen and Lawlessness gives readers startling insight into the county’s violent past.
Moonshine wars
Moonshine-making began in South Carolina’s colonial era and continued until after the Civil War, which decimated the state’s economy. The 1893 Dispensary Act, which gave the state total control over the making and distribution of spirits, was the spark that ignited the county’s moonshine industry. The combined effect of the Depression and Prohibition raised the temperature on the making of shine.
The county’s economy and geography made Berkeley the “perfect storm” for moonshine, Lewis said. Before World War II, the county was very poor, he said. “People were hungry, and they did what they had to do to survive,” the sheriff added.
The proliferation of camouflaged moonshine stills in the dense pine forests and desolate Hell Hole Swamp that straddles the Berkeley-Williamsburg county line led to rival gangs that met in bloody clashes. One of them occurred May 8, 1926, near train tracks that cut across Moncks Corner’s main street. When the shooting stopped, three men lay dead.
In graphic detail, Crooks and Lewis described the shotgun blast that hammered Sam McKnight’s chest, sending “his body spinning around like a marionette. Blood spattered across the dirt as he tumbled. Ben [Villeponteau]’s second barrel blast tore into McKnight’s back, blowing more bone and flesh out of his chest.”
Moonshine in Berkeley County even got the attention of Chicago gangster Al Capone who had the “liquid gold” smuggled in railroad cars to the Midwest during Prohibition.
Paying for the crime
On April 11, 1890, Charles Simmons stepped up on the gallows to pay for killing a merchant at his Edisto store. A News and Courier reporter asked Simmons if he was guilty. “Yes, sir, and I am satisfied to die. I think I have received my just and due reward.” The reporter then asked Simmons why he killed the merchant. “I killed him because I thought I would get some of his money. I did not get any.”
Lewis and Crooks also described the execution of Oscar Simmons, convicted in the March 5, 1893, ax murder of a German immigrant and his wife at their home in Lincolnville. On Sept. 1, 1893, Johnson, dubbed the “Lincolnville Butcher,” and Henry Ewing, who killed a prostitute, were hanged. The writers describe the black gallows at the jail yard in Mount Pleasant, the black hoods over the heads of the condemned and the weights used to snatch their bodies up to snap their necks. However, the writers omitted one vital detail, the men’s race. When asked to comment why they do not reveal the race of the people who were executed, Lewis and Crooks declined to comment further. The book also does not mention the race of the lawmen or other elected officials.
Johnson and Ewing were Black. If Lewis and Crooks thought their book would be criticized for reporting that White sheriffs presided over the executions of Black people during the county’s Jim Crow era, they were wrong, said Dr. Bernard Powers, professor emeritus of history at the College of Charleston.
Race and corruption
Powers said race is one of the essential features of corruption and lawlessness in Southern history. “Race was manipulated to separate Black workers and White workers to the disadvantage of both and to undermine the unionization effort in the South,” he said. “Every White person was schooled to see himself or herself better than the highest-achieving Black person.”
Most White Americans believe slavery has no relationship to the present status of people of African descent, who lag behind in the quality of their lives as compared to their White peers, said Powers, director of the college’s Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston.
“White people are misguided, and these authors have missed the opportunity to correct their miseducation.”
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