The Bootlegger

By: J.T. Conroe

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

It’s 1936, the middle of the Great Depression. Ed Egan, grieving widower and the number two man in a Chicago Irish American gang, reluctantly returns to his hometown, the hard-hit, vice-ridden, brutally exploited copper mining city of Butte, Montana. He was sent there by his boss, partner, and childhood friend to determine if their third partner, also a childhood friend, has been embezzling money from the partnership’s criminal operations in Butte. Egan’s orders are to kill the third partner if his hot-headed boss’s suspicions turn out to be true. Egan is sure they are not true, but in order to keep the situation under his control, he dutifully begins an investigation of the Butte operation.

He soon encounters his former girlfriend, tantalizing as ever, in a roadhouse and gambling den owned by the partnership. She is from a very wealthy Butte banking family, and she is convinced that her father, who supposedly committed suicide following the stock market crash of 1929, was, in reality, murdered. She pleads with Egan to help her find the murderer. He is sure that hers is a lost cause, but he reluctantly agrees to help in spite of the fact that she had broken his heart just before he left Butte for Chicago back in the early 1920s.

Now he finds himself playing the unfamiliar role of a private detective in the gritty city of his youth that was the scene of the partnership’s early bootlegging successes when it became known locally as the Cartello. Hoping simply to put both his boss’s and his former girlfriend’s suspicions to rest, he quickly learns that he has gotten himself into a far larger, more complex, and more perilous situation than he had originally anticipated.

This is a story inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 “Continental Op” novel, Red Harvest.