On January 29, 1930, Dominic Tarro walked out of a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois, a free man. He was never seen alive again.Four months later, his body was pulled from the Sangamon River — bound hand and foot with bailing wire, beaten, shot, and left in the water that had been swallowing the bodies of bootleggers and inconvenient witnesses for the better part of a decade. The federal case against the most ambitious illegal alcohol operation in Illinois history collapsed without a single conviction. Nobody was ever charged. Nobody ever will be.
This is that story.
Benld's Booze Gang is the true account of what Route 66 actually was in the years before the tourist brochures got hold of it — a criminal highway, a supply line, a corridor of violence running through the flat agricultural heartland of central Illinois between Chicago and St. Louis. It is the story of Dominic Tarro, an Italian immigrant's son who built a grocery store, then an illegal supply network shipping industrial quantities of corn sugar and yeast to the largest secret distillery in the state, then a ten-thousand-square-foot dance hall that became one of the most celebrated entertainment venues in the Midwest. And it is the story of what happened to him, and to the building he left behind, and to the daughter who inherited it and ran it for twenty-one years and was murdered on Valentine's Day 1976 returning home with the night's receipts.
Along the way, it is the story of:- The No. 5 Mine still — two thousand gallons of illegal alcohol produced every single day, disguised as a coal mine in the Illinois woods
- Al Capone's shadow over the cornfields — and the question of whether he was ever actually there
- The Shelton Brothers and Charlie Birger, whose gang war produced armored trucks, the first aerial bombing on American soil, and the last public execution in Illinois history
- The federal prosecutors who built a fifty-defendant conspiracy case and watched it die with their star witness
- The Coliseum Ballroom, where Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Ike and Tina Turner all performed — for nine straight decades — until a Saturday night fire in 2011 took everything the Sangamon River had left standing
Route 66 turns one hundred years old in 2026. The centennial will be celebrated with nostalgia and chrome and the comfortable mythology of the open road.
The Devil's Highway tells the story that the kiosks and the tourist maps leave out — the story of what this road carried in the dark, who it made rich, who it made dead, and what survived when the music finally stopped.
Meticulously researched from federal court records, contemporaneous newspaper archives, FBI files, and the oral histories of the people who lived it. The road knows what it carried — even if it cannot say.
