An anecdote of Cleo’s continuing dilemma with following the law and being pragmatic at the same time concerns a hunting trip she took to Idaho with friends in 1953. They became snowbound in the cabin for several days. Cleo shot and killed a moose, mistaking it for a deer. Somehow rangers found out about it, and Cleo offered to donate it to a charitable institution. However, because of the circumstances, the rangers allowed her to keep it to feed starving hunters, and at one time she had as many as thirty-five hunters staying and eating at her cabin with Cleo cheerfully playing hostess.
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Although the second marriage ended in divorce, Cleo had by that time become a true entrepreneur in the bootlegging business and continued bringing liquor across the state border. Her education and work ethics made her a powerful player in the bootlegging arena of the Oklahoma criminal underworld.
She once told a friend, “When I invest $10,000 in a load of whiskey, you better believe I drive it myself.” Yet, Cleo with her sweet disposition and educated manners was equally friendly with the local law, and they in turn could not help but like her even though by Oklahoma law she was a criminal. They played cat-and-mouse for several years as Cleo became the largest wholesaler of illegal liquor in eastern Oklahoma earning her the name “The Bootleg Queen”—a name Cleo found distasteful for she did not place herself in the same category as common criminals. Cleo drew a fine line between the transporting of the contraband and the selling of it to the end customer, telling a reporter once, “I never sold a bottle of whiskey in my life. All I did was drive it across the state line. Everybody knows that.” |
AuthorAndrea Chase ArchivesChapters |