Gettin’ Jacked
How a local plumber became one of Tennessee’s most-wanted bootleggers
ELIZABETH ULRICH
Randy Piper dips his head into a fermenter the size of an aboveground swimming pool and inhales deeply. The sour mash that bubbles like lava inside—a slushy mix of corn, rye, barley malt and water—looks a lot like cornbread batter. But it reeks of beer and vomit, much like the soggy carpet of a frat-house basement.
Still, Piper emerges with a smile. “God, that’s beautiful,” he says. “Take a whiff.”
On a good morning, Piper swears he can smell the sour mash from his home up on the hill as it wafts in on a cool breeze from the Jack Daniel’s Distillery. With his slicked-back hair, black button-down shirts, pointy-toed boots and mirrored sunglasses, he doesn’t seem like much of a down-home country boy. But this man loves his Tennessee sippin’ whiskey.
As he trudges through the distillery grounds, a tree-lined slice of heaven just outside of Lynchburg, he talks over the tour guide to explain the process that separates Tennessee whiskey from plain old bourbon. He peers deeply into a vat with a 10-foot-deep layer of sugar maple charcoal, which the whiskey seeps through, drip by drip, to mellow.
Without warning, he lifts the lid and flutters it violently to release the fumes from a 140-proof whiskey that will take about 10 days to mellow to the 110-proof liquor store variety. Piper wouldn’t dream of traipsing down the metal steps and out of the old building without letting that potent liquor burn his nostrils just a little.
Piper gets a little giddy around the stills. From the spring that produces the cool, pure water that is the root of the famous liquor, to the blackened trees surrounding the distillery, this is the source from which his passion flows, well, like whiskey.
That whiskey—and more importantly, the history, legend and lore behind it—have consumed his life for the better part of a decade. He points to the soot-colored trees around him, the ones that sway like drunken men in the wind, and explains that they’re blackened from base to branch because the whiskey fumes cause them to mold. Piper says that, in the old days, agents would look to such trees to help them suss out moonshiners cooking up batches of white liquor in beat-down barns in the Tennessee backwoods, where whiskey flowed from the foothills—cheap, powerful and unlawful.
For the last six years, he’s committed such facts to memory, not to mention collected Jack Daniel’s memorabilia like a man possessed. When he bought two souvenir shops from a local a few years back, he acquired the beginnings of a stellar collection of Jack bottles.
He’s amassed quite a bit more since then—some say the largest collection of bottles and trinkets in the world—but he’ll only admit to having the most museum-worthy mess of items in Tennessee. With boxes, shelves and display cases brimming with special-etched glasses, corkscrews, cardboard cutouts of the men who have served as master distillers, bottles of decades-old whiskey and on and on, Piper has become quite the celebrity around these parts.
He gained even more notoriety last fall. In October, a team of sheriff’s officers and agents from the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Commission (ABC) swooped in on a stunned Piper, who sat on a stool greeting customers in one of the two cramped souvenir shops he runs in Lynchburg’s sleepy town square.
Piper doesn’t know if agents were expecting some sort of speakeasy raid that hearkened back to Prohibition and the Al Capone days in Chicago. But he does know what they found: 2,400 bottles of collectors’ whiskey spread out on display shelves that hung above T-shirts and other piddling souvenirs at the two shops, and a whole mess of boxed bottles gathering dust in a handful of storage units around town. In the course of a few hours, he says they confiscated nearly $600,000 worth of his collection.
Piper is no Capone. Nor is he a backwoods moonshiner selling homebrews out of the back of a pickup truck. He’s a plumber from Goodlettsville, a simple man with a passion for Jack Daniel’s—a love of whiskey so deep that the mere thought of someone taking a swig from one his decades-old bottles makes him sick. He doesn’t collect them for the drinking. He doesn’t sell and trade them for the drinking either.
Piper will tell you what any collector would: Whether it’s a Barbie or a bottle of Jack, if you don’t take it out of the box, if you don’t break the seal or ditch the original carton, it’s worth more. And like any other collectors, folks like Piper buy, sell and trade bottles because they’re on one simple quest, and that’s to acquire more and more.
But to the ABC, Piper’s just another common criminal. He’s a modern-day bootlegger selling liquor without a license, and there’s nothing that’s going to change their minds about it. He’s not the first Tennessee collector to unwittingly go the way of the red-handed moonshiner, and he certainly won’t be the last. Such confiscations are very lucrative for the ABC because if they have their way—and they usually do—they’ll own (and, of course, sell and profit from) the collection before the case even hits court. Just ask Piper, who has been dragged through the media mire and painted as a criminal only to have the ABC turn tail and offer him a deal to call the whole thing off—after they make some money off his collection. Monetary incentive aside, the whole damn thing doesn’t make much sense, especially to Piper. “Everybody’s first reaction [to my story], without exception, is, ‘Haven’t they got better things to do than this?’ And I don’t know.”
Piper started his collection about six years back. As Piper family lore has it, the whole thing began when Piper bought a bar table crafted from the copper of a former Jack Daniel’s still. His wife, Renee, teasingly said, “That sure is a nice bar. Too bad you don’t have any whiskey to put on top of it.” And the rest, as the family says, is history.
On this particular spring day, as he opens the door to his Goodlettsville home and two giant, smelly dogs take to harassing any warm lap in the house, Piper sits at a chair next to that famed bar and says, “If you lick on the copper, you can still taste the Jack Daniel’s in it.” Renee rolls her eyes.
A few feet away, Piper has Jack Daniel’s commercials playing on a clunky big screen television. He convinced someone at the distillery to compile a whole slew of ads onto VHS tapes for him. As someone on the soundtrack plucks away at a twangy guitar, an old man with an “aw-shucks” Andy Griffith accent tells the quaint story of Lynchburg and the man who put the little town on the map.
Piper points to empty bottles that line the shelves along the ceiling of his family room. The Piper family photo sits between old whiskey jugs and pictures of parents and grandparents in uniform who died in battle. These are the things Piper holds close to his heart.
There doesn’t seem to be an end to what interests him. The man gets as worked up about a rare Jack Daniel’s corkscrew worth about $75 as he does about a bottle worth $9,000. Still, it’s difficult for Piper to express the lure of Jack Daniel’s collecting.
“I don’t know if it’s because it comes from this little dry county in Tennessee or because it’s the oldest registered distillery in the United States from 1866,” he says. “Or the people that’s been involved with Jack Daniel’s, like Frank Sinatra. The list is just as broad as it is long.”
Maybe it’s because Jack Daniel was a self-made man who came from nothing. Daniel grew up in the backwoods of Tennessee with more siblings than he could count on both hands, and he started brewing his own whiskey in his early teen years after his father died. The man who didn’t stand much taller than 5 feet built a whiskey empire.
It’s something that Piper can relate to. He’s built an empire of his own, as the plumber to the stars in Nashville. But the humor that lies in being a plumber named Piper seems to be lost on the man whose pipe-working magic has made him a bit of a legend, particularly among the wealthy of Belle Meade. In fact, Piper is proud that his well-heeled clients trust him with the keys to their estates.
And Jack Daniel’s backwoods upbringing isn’t all that foreign to Piper either. He grew up in Goodlettsville as the kind of boy who thought playing at the old city dump was simply the thing to do. He would often whittle away his afternoons at the landfill, digging up bottles from the dry Tennessee dirt. He called the practice “pickin’ bottles” back then. He was too young to know it, but at the age of 10, he had already started a lifelong collector’s quest.
Today, those boyhood treasures occupy two shelves in his Goodlettsville basement, where the bottles are neatly divided by color. Tucked away on a low shelf to the right, you’ll find a box of baseball cards. Just looking at the brown, greenish-blue and dingy white bottles clustered on those shelves, it’s hard to imagine a man more passionate about the little things. “I never got rid of nothing, whether it was guns or coins or whatever,” he says. “And if I’ve got more than one of something, I don’t mind trading it for what I ain’t got.”
It’s that boyhood longing to embark on a storybook pursuit, to experience the thrill of the hunt and the intermittent triumphs that come with a good find, that still drives Piper. “It’s like a quest. Everybody’s trying to find as many different items as they can. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the whiskey, it has to do with Jack Daniel’s himself.”
The best way to bust an illegal distillery is track down every possible lead. It’s not uncommon for liquor agents up and down Appalachia to camp out in sleeping bags to keep close watch on a barn in the boonies. It’s a Prohibition-era practice that isn’t lost on higher-ups at Tennessee’s ABC. But ABC executive director Danielle Elks won’t reveal the intel that led her agents to Piper’s quaint storefront. She’ll only say that her agency received information that Piper was selling liquor without a license.
It’s possible that ABC agents staked out the stores for months as Piper sold commemorative ball caps and bottles of Jack Daniel’s barbecue sauce to the tourists who filter through the town’s idle streets. One of Piper’s store clerks says ABC officials sauntered into the shop on several occasions before the raid and asked to buy a bottle of whiskey. She told them they didn’t have any for sale.
Piper had bottles lined wall-to-wall in the store, just gathering dust on the rugged, oak-colored shelves that mimic the color of the brewing barrels that give Jack its signature amber color and subtle caramel flavor. Along the splintering ledges that line the ceiling sit several signs that simply read, “Not for sale. Display only.” Piper says the signs were there long before the ABC came knocking.
Piper’s attorney, Raymond Fraley Jr., has heard rumors that ABC agents had the stores under surveillance for nearly a year. If it’s true, it must have been one long year for an unlucky ABC agent. Piper’s stores, Sully’s Gifts and Cowboy Jack’s, sit in the middle of a Mayberry-esque town square where an eventful afternoon features a sighting of a tour bus that’s too big to maneuver around a horse-drawn carriage, which some local yokel named the “Lynchburg limo.”
That investigation came to a head last October during the annual Jack Daniel’s International Barbecue, a celebration that draws collectors and whiskey fans from around the world. People descend on the small town and head to the distillery, where the famous men who have overseen the brewing process—men aptly named “master distillers”—sign bottles of Jack and other memorabilia. The folks at Jack Daniel’s know they brew quite the collector’s item. And judging from the thousands of followers who wait for hours under the hot sun to glean a signature or two, that culture isn’t bad for business either.
Unfortunately for Piper, the barbecue is also his busiest sales day of the year. Store owners in Lynchburg live by one simple saying: If you don’t make your sales during the barbecue, you’re screwed. Once the tourists filter out after the big day, the town will be dead for months.
At about 1 p.m. on Oct. 27, Fraley says officers approached a German tourist as he walked out of one of Piper’s stores with a bottle of whiskey. The bottle bore the signature of Frank Bobo, a former master distiller, which made it worth the $350 the German reportedly paid for it. Otherwise, it would’ve just been another, run-of-the-mill bottle he could’ve bought with a fistful of $10s at any liquor store.
ABC agents and law enforcement questioned the man outside of Piper’s brick-faced storefront. He said he bought the bottle from Piper. It’s at this point that the story gets a little murky. The straight-talking Piper gets tight-lipped when asked about the German and that $350 bottle. Piper’s attorney suspects that the bottle came from a barn behind Piper’s store—not from one of the store’s display shelves. Piper says he isn’t sure how the sale went down that day—or if the transaction occurred at all—because he was tending to the tourist hustle and bustle taking place in the store.
At any rate, it doesn’t matter much. ABC agents had all they needed to take Piper down. Clearly, they don’t exactly enforce the selling liquor without a license law with much discretion. Customers weren’t flocking to his stores to drink; they were there to buy Jack Daniel’s merchandise and look at an old bottle or two. But that’s too fine a point for state authorities to consider.
Even though ABC agents did not have a warrant to search his stores, Piper allowed them to come in and seize his collection anyway. He just figured it would be best to get back to business quietly. Being the kind of man he is, Piper took it upon himself to box up the liquor for them. In fact, he enlisted Renee and a few other friends and fellow collectors to help him do the agency’s dirty work.
When ABC agents ran out of the inventory sheets they used to keep track of all those bottles—apparently, that alleged year of intel didn’t yield much info and the agency grossly underestimated what they’d be taking from the collector—Piper and his crew made copies on the store’s rundown fax machine.
When the ABC couldn’t fit all of Piper’s collection into the pickup trucks they’d brought along should they catch him in the act, they had to borrow another one from the sheriff’s department down the road. The agents then hit the barn behind the store and several storage units around town to seize the bulk of Piper’s prized collection. Nearly $600,000 worth of what he’s amassed over the years now sits in a vault somewhere in Nashville.
Then, on Piper’s 48th birthday, a Moore County grand jury slapped the man with four criminal indictments. They charged him with selling liquor without a license, possession of untaxed whiskey, storage of whiskey with the purpose of sale as well as receiving and transporting alcoholic beverages. When he got a call from the sheriff’s department with news of his impending arrest, Piper simply left his house and drove down to the Moore County Jail to check himself in.
He says the woman in charge of booking was having trouble, so he booked himself. “I helped her get my fingerprints and the whole nine yards,” he says. Then he waited in the booking room for Renee to return from the bank with $25,000 in bail money in hand. Piper has since paid $1,700 to settle the tax issue. It was easier and more cost effective than fighting the tax man in court.
Piper still doesn’t quite understand why or how he fell into this mess. In his mind, he’s selling the bottle, not the liquor inside it. It’s the label that’s worth the money, or perhaps the signatures on it. Break the seal, drink the whiskey, and you’ve guzzled most of the bottle’s value in the process. Once the cap has been twisted, there’s no way to tell what kind of whiskey sloshes behind that glass. Like shoving a handful of wildflowers in an ancient Egyptian vase, or taking a collectible Stormtrooper out of the box to let a toddler douse it in mud, cracking open the bottle just doesn’t make sense.
The whiskey-minded folks in Lynchburg will tell you that the German didn’t drop all that money on a bottle just so he could take it to his hotel room and sip on it. “Certainly no one is going to spend $350 for an autographed bottle and drink it,” Fraley says. “You could buy the same bottle at a liquor store for $50. That’s one of the bases of our arguments. This is collectible whiskey and not for people’s consumption.”
If Piper would’ve just put the bottle up for auction on eBay, he probably could’ve avoided this whole mess. Type in the words “Jack Daniel’s” on the site’s search engine, and you’ll find all sorts of collectible items. Belt buckles, shot glasses and lighters, not to mention full, unopened bottles of that Tennessee whiskey. The latter of the postings contain a legal disclaimer, of course, usually something to the effect that the “value is in the collectible container, not the contents” and that the liquor is most definitely not intended for consumption.
The online auction site is an integral part of whiskey collecting, especially because international bottles are difficult to come by. But your average, all-American bottles have quite the draw as well.
On the day of the barbecue, the biggest tourist day at the distillery and subsequently the day Piper’s stores were raided, the Jack Daniel’s distillery sold a reported 1,300 bottles of whiskey—many of which people presumably bought for the purpose of getting a signature that would help them turn a profit. Why would they mill around in a line for hours otherwise? “Less than four hours after the signing, the bottles were on eBay,” Piper says. “One of the bottles that sold for about $30 that day auctioned off on eBay that very night for $115.”
If that’s the crux of the argument, Elks doesn’t want to hear it. She’s got the conviction of a teetotaler, and the way she sees it, Piper’s no different from a no-good mountain man stirring the devil’s brew in a barrel. In fact, when she met with the Scene to discuss Piper’s case, she compared the plumber to the infamous Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, a moonshiner the ABC nabbed three months back in a joint effort with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Sutton, an East Tennessee man so bone-thin and rickety it’s a wonder he could even carry a gallon of whiskey without snapping in two, became quite the celebrity in the world of moonshine after he wrote a book titled Me and My Likker and made an appearance on the History Channel, where he talked about his operation. Given Sutton’s brazen efforts to flaunt his success—and a criminal record that dates back to the ’70s—it’s not exactly surprising that authorities seized more than 1,600 gallons of moonshine that he made and bottled in Tennessee and North Carolina.
Elks smiles proudly as she shows off a photo of a gaunt man with sunken eyes and an untamed beard. She says Sutton brewed the untaxed alcohol in his barn in three stills ranging in size from 500 to 1,000 gallons—liquor that he then sold for anywhere from $15 to $100 a gallon. As with Piper, state authorities charged Sutton with the sale of liquor without a license. And in Elks’ eyes, the men are equal in their crime. “It all boils down to the same thing: selling alcohol without a license,” she says.
States such as Nebraska, Ohio, Indiana and Minnesota, to name a few, have laws on the books that distinguish the collecting and selling of bottles from the selling of liquor. Tennessee isn’t there yet. The current law doesn’t address collectors specifically. In fact, the law hasn’t changed much at all since shortly after Prohibition ended. “Until the legislature wants to make an exception, we have to enforce the law,” Elks says. In her eyes, there simply is no room for discretion.
Piper is deeply hurt by all this legal trouble. He says he’s never been on the wrong side of the law before. After the bottles were seized, he stayed away from his stores for a while. It was a good four months before he spent time there again, and even then, it was just to do his chores.
Before the raid, he spent hours on eBay every night, looking for good finds. Renee says he didn’t get back on the site until after Christmas, if that soon. “He was totally numb for a period of time,” she says. “He couldn’t function properly. It cost him work because he couldn’t think about nothin’.”
Now as he walks through his home to showcase his collection, he calls it “barren” and “embarrassing.” He says much of the same about the storage unit behind Sully’s Gifts. It was a long time before he could even step foot in it. He says the empty room—and all those empty boxes—just made him sick. “It’s numbing, I tell you. Numbing. I’ve been knocked out of the saddle.”
“It’s like part of you is amputated,” Piper says, which sounds about right. The way he and his wife talk about his collection, it’s as if that chunk sitting in the vault of some Nashville building has become somewhat of a phantom limb. Piper looks around for parts of his collection—still feels that they should be there—and Renee has to remind him that they’re gone. “He’s a collector at heart,” she says. “It got to be so big for him.”
Turns out, Piper is not just far from a bootlegger, he’s a pretty sensitive guy, though he would never admit to as much. To borrow one of his own phrases, Piper is just one “good feller.” If he really was some whiskey bandit, it would stand to reason that the folks at the distillery would lock up the bottles when he came around. Instead, they greet him with warm hugs, ask about his wife and pour him a glass of lemonade.
So it comes as no surprise that his neighbors, friends and trading buddies across the ocean are pitching in what they can into a legal defense fund set up at the Farmer’s Bank in Lynchburg.
Some of them are just pissed off something fierce, especially by the thought that even a single ounce of Piper’s collection may be poured down the drain. Aside from the criminal case, there’s the matter of an administrative hearing in which the ABC will fight for the rights to keep Piper’s 2,400-bottle collection.
The ABC could sell some of it, give a few of the less lucrative bottles back to Piper and pour the rest down the drain or stick it in a museum. According to state law, any bottles that have been opened or are leaking will go the way of the sewer. That just breaks Piper’s heart. “You wouldn’t dare pour it in a glass, much less down the drain,” Piper says.
If the ABC does think of Piper as some social scourge, the agency’s next move doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. After all that big talk about Piper’s bootlegging ways, Elks seems tickled by the notion of calling the whole thing off and giving Piper a sweetheart deal where the district attorney drops the criminal charges and the ABC gets in on the profits. After all, she says her agency will get 10 percent of anything sold at auction. Given Piper’s nearly half-million-dollar estimate of the collection’s worth—not to mention all the media attention those bottles have garnered—the ABC payoff could be substantial.
Fraley says he has been meeting with District Attorney General Charles Crawford to settle the case, and he’s optimistic that it will all be over soon. He says the terms are still in the air, but the likely scenario is this: The state will keep some of the bottles, and in return, will give Piper a small portion of the bottles. It’s not exactly generous considering that all of the bottles are already rightfully his.
What would Piper get out the deal? Well, aside from an escape from all this legal muck, Fraley says the state will most likely grant Piper a pre-trial diversion. Essentially, they’ll drop the charges if Piper keeps his hands clean for a probationary period that should span a year or so.
The decision is up to Piper at this point. And he isn’t exactly thrilled with the deal. The bottles may just be dollar signs in the eyes of the ABC, but Piper gets emotional with thoughts of relinquishing even one. After all, he had no intentions of ever parting with most, if any, of the bottles the ABC snatched that day. “My collection was not for sale to start with, so why would I give my stuff to them?” he says. “I haven’t got much that I’d part with that easily.” Still, he’ll probably take the deal. It’s not like he has many other options.
This wouldn’t be first time that the ABC took the money and ran. Two days before Piper’s bust in Lynchburg, the agency conducted another raid at a Nashville hotel. The way Elks tells the story, agents got another mysterious, anonymous tip that a few shady characters rented out a joint room at the Holiday Inn off of Briley for the sole purpose of selling bootlegged whiskey. Elk’s version of the tale conjures images of sketchy, drunken men cowering down in some seedy hotel room selling stolen bottles to customers rapping on the hotel-room door with a secret knock in hopes of nabbing a cheap bottle or two.
She says an agent was able to infiltrate the hotel room, pay a cover charge and then obtain liquor by the drink as well as buy a few bottles. The ABC raided the joint, confiscated 300 to 400 bottles and issued citations to two men, a Tennessee resident and a man from Illinois. “I think that’s what happened,” she tells the Scene.
But photographs and witness accounts of the event tell a different story. The ABC didn’t conduct some sort of speakeasy raid on a dark, seedy hotel room. What they did bust in on, however, was a party for the Tennessee Squire Association, a group of Jack Daniel’s collectors and aficionados, some of whom are closely affiliated with the distillery itself.
In fact, some of the famous master distillers are members—so was Frank Sinatra. And so is Piper. You’ve got to be nominated by a current squire to join. Former master distiller Jimmy Bedford nominated Piper.
What does a squire do? The best answer is a whole lot of nothing. The group is more of a fellowship than anything else. Sometimes squires get letters in the mail instructing them to mow their lawns or telling them that their cows are out. Most importantly, all squires get a membership card complete with an unofficial deed to one square inch of land at the distillery.
Piper is registered for plot No. g70590 in The Hollow, where the famous iron-free springwater used to make the whiskey flows. His membership card outlines the building blocks of the simple life he and his fellow squires aspire to: “May they always ride an easy-walking horse, sleep ’neath a rain-tight roof, and eat high on the hog every day of the year.”
Piper’s photos of the event clearly show that the gathering took place in a hotel ballroom brimming with balloons, decorated tables and plenty of middle-aged to geriatric good old folks mingling and doing the kind of stuff that people usually do at a catered dinner—eat and drink. There was indeed a bar at the event, but it was manned by a hotel bartender selling liquor by the drink. And the Illinois man was allegedly selling commemorative bottles.
But the ABC agents and the Metro police they put on the case didn’t exactly react accordingly. Piper says he was just pulling into the parking lot of the hotel to enjoy the festivities when the law came crashing in. “It was like something off of The Untouchables,” he says. “When they swarmed in around us in the parking lot, I thought, ‘My God.’ I didn’t know if someone had gotten killed in there or what.”
Renee was already inside when she says police ran into the ballroom like a SWAT team and barricaded the doors. “I overheard one of the cops call into dispatch and say, ‘This is not at all what we were told it would be,’ ” she says.
Not long after Elks told the Scene that the raid took place in a hotel room rather than a ballroom, she called to say she was wrong. It doesn’t matter much anyway. All of that dramatic flair was a means to a successful end for the ABC. Rather than spending the money to fight the agency in court, the two men who were issued citations that day struck a deal with the ABC, which offered both a pre-trial diversion. The men agreed to forfeit the liquor to the state, which will in exchange auction it off, make a bit of dough and drop the charges if the men don’t act up during a short probationary period.
Sound familiar? It just makes you wonder: If the ABC did have so much beef with collectors such as Piper, why wouldn’t they fight to ensure that these collectors are prosecuted for their dirty bootlegging ways?
That’s why people in Piper’s neck of woods just don’t trust the ABC. It’s hard to put much stake in a self-funded agency that profits from issuing fines and selling confiscated goods with no apparent incentive to use discretion, even with guys like Piper.
As Piper doles out free samples of whiskey-infused beef jerky and chocolates that hold pools of Jack in their sweet bellies, locals trickle in and out of the store to say hello and talk a little trash about who they see as the real villains—the big-city ABC suits sitting in air-conditioned offices in downtown Nashville.
An old man trying to squeeze his broad flannel-clad shoulders through the rows of Jack Daniel’s T-shirts and shot glasses in Sully’s grumbles about Piper’s problems. “It’s got everyone around here on pins and needles,” he says, grabbing at his prickly gray whiskers. “It’s not like he’s trying to pull something—collecting is just a big deal around here.”
Out on the porch in front of the store, a frail woman sways back and forth on an old rocking chair. Her face is trickled with lines that lead to a mouth drawn firmly into an angry pout as she spits out a few conspiracy theories about who put the ABC on Piper’s trail.
Truth be told, the case has the locals rattled. Piper is certainly not the only man in town who has made money from his collection. And there are scores of locals who have saved up a lifetime of bottles to cash in come retirement time.
“There’s people been in it a lot longer than I’ve been in it,” he says. “There are people around here who have moved their collections out of their house because they’re scared [the ABC] is going to knock on their door and come in their house. A lot of people down there have a bunch of old bottles.” And if Piper has learned anything from all this mess, it’s how green-eyed the ABC can get over the dollar signs floating around in those antique bottles.
Even if Piper gets a portion of his collection back and escapes criminal rebuke, there’s no stopping the ABC from striking again—and Elks admits as much. The prevalence of Lynchburg’s collecting culture isn’t lost on Elks and her agency. She says there could be more busts in the works. “We’ll investigate any information regarding the illegal sale of alcohol,” she says, and then quickly adds what is becoming her catchphrase. “The purpose of this agency is to enforce the law as it’s written.”
Even though his brush with the law cost him a good bit of money, time and heartache, Piper says he just can’t shake his fixation with Jack Daniel’s. Glass by commemorative glass, he’s slowly getting back into the swing of things. Now, he can look back on the whole fiasco with an “I can’t believe all this happened to little ol’ me” grin and get on with life.
He still thinks that Lynchburg, the town seeping in all of that Jack Daniel’s lore, is where he and Renee are meant to be. As Renee puts it, he can’t work on his knees tinkering with pipes forever. And going the way of the whiskey seems just as good of a retirement plan as any.
Renee says Piper has got to slow down eventually. And with its Mayberry charm, Lynchburg—which, according to the bottle, has a population of 361, soon to be 363—just seems like the kind of place where a man with a country boy’s heart can stop and finally take a deep breath. Especially if the air’s got a tinge of that Jack Daniel’s sour mash.
