The History of the Dawson Gang: Bootleggers, Bank Robbers, and Alabama's Most Notorious Outlaw Family

The History of the Dawson Gang: Bootleggers, Bank Robbers, and Alabama's Most Notorious Outlaw Family

Former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley once called Willie "Dewitt" Dawson "a remarkable person in many ways" - a strange kind of compliment for a man who put the word "Kingpin" on his own license plate.

Pleasant "Plez" Dawson was the first of the family to settle in North Alabama's hill country in the early 1800s. Times were hard, and moonshine was money. By the time his great-grandson Dewitt came of age, the family trade had grown into something far bigger: bootlegging, counterfeiting, illegal gambling, and a loose confederation of professional bank robbers that the FBI - not the family itself - named the Dawson Gang.

Through the 1960s, 70s, and into the 1985 case that finally brought it down, the Dawson story runs straight through the wider Southern underworld of its era: the Dixie Mafia, the State Line Mob, Sheriff Buford Pusser's own violent feuds, and a still-unresolved 1975 double murder three states away in Greenville, South Carolina. One Dawson brother did time for murder. One ran narcotics. One robbed banks from Alabama to North Carolina before the age of twenty. And one, decades later, turned the family name into a legal distillery.

This is that history - moonshine to bank robbery to indictment to legacy - told straight from the public record: court decisions, contemporaneous news reporting, and the long-form journalism of researchers who spent years tracking it down.

This is a short read - a focused narrative history rather than an exhaustive volume - so we'd encourage you to read the sample before buying. We're confident it'll be time well spent, but you know your own reading preferences best, and the sample is the fastest way to check the fit before you commit.