This gave Cassiday an idea to set up his own little operation, and soon enough, he was running a bootlegging business from a basement office situated in the Old House Office Building. And business was good. According to Cassiday, he would open up shop in the morning and make upwards of 25 deliveries a day to the drunkenest, hypocriticalist politicians on the Hill, hiding the bottles in a leather briefcase that never left his side.
Library of CongressOpposing congressmen still wouldn't cross the aisle, but at least now they would occasionally pass out in it.
Cassiday was never given any problems by security, despite arriving for "work" every morning pulling two suitcases containing "35 to 40 quarts" of the hard stuff -- that is, until 1925, when he was busted for possession of alcohol and banned from the House. His newfound notoriety, however, meant that he immediately found work as bootlegger-in-chief for the Senate. One senator, Cassiday later recalled, would come to refer to him as "the librarian" -- a nickname borne from the fact that this particular senator hid his liquor on the top of a bookshelf. ("He never mentioned liquor to me, but occasionally he would say he could use some 'new reading matter.'")
Cassiday worked diligently in this role until 1930, when he was nabbed and jailed for 18 months. In an interview with The Washington Post, he estimated that he'd catered to 80 percent of the members of the House and Senate, although he never named names. Well, kinda. He kept a client list (as all good criminals do), but this was never made public (despite having been confiscated by the feds upon his arrest), and following his death in 1967, it was incinerated by his wife. Unless she was releasing the trapped souls of alcoholic political ghosts, that seems a tad like overkill to us.
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