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| Agent Harold V. Mooring |
They tried to act like casual customers as they entered a pool hall where bootleg liquor was reportedly for sale. Later, Whitney told reporters that “Mooring had been recognized” as soon they entered. Thus, “their chances of finding anything incriminating were slight.” Their mission frustrated, the agents left. Whitney crossed the street, then he and Mooring headed one direction while the third agent went the other way.
The third agent was apparently out of sight when a car stopped beside Mooring. Two men jumped out and and began beating him. Then a shot rang out and the agent went down. The attackers leaped back into the car, which sped away. Before he passed out, Mooring identified his attackers as Elmer Todd and H. H. “Gimpy” Smith, proprietors of a Cosmopolis cigar store. The sheriff immediately arrested the two. Neither carried a weapon and they vehemently denied firing any shots. They did admit to the beating attack, but their motive never made it into the news.
Mooring, who had been hit in the back, remained unconscious through the night. Still, the next day, doctors announced that he was “much improved” and should recover fully. They did not attempt to remove the bullet. Mooring never saw who shot him, but assumed it was Smith, presumably because Todd was in front of him. However, the story proved to be far more complicated than that.
Harold Vincent Mooring was born around 1880, in a southern district of London. He joined the Royal Navy as a teenager, but was discharged in less than two years. (The reason is unclear, being hand-written and unreadable on his digitized papers.) After that, he spent several years at sea with civilian vessels before arriving in San Francisco in August of 1910.
Within two years, he had found work in Seattle as a chauffeur. His listing in the City Directory included a wife, Maude, and by 1915 the couple had two children. Harold now made a living as an auto mechanic. The family spent a couple years near Centralia before returning to Seattle in 1922.
And some time during that year, Mooring became an agent for the U.S. Prohibition Unit. One of Harold’s first assignments was to go undercover in Spokane. Leads he generated resulted in the arrest and conviction of several members of a liquor ring in that city. He did not, however, appear as a witness. In fact, his name did not show up in newspaper reports until he was shot.
Here we must make a few “educated guesses.” At some point, Mooring was probably assigned to go undercover in the Grays Harbor area, already known as a destination for the boats of rum runners. Of course he would be recognized right away, as Whitney said. That was the whole point … to be known as “just one of the boys.” But the habitués of the pool hall must have been shocked to see him standing next to Whitney, the well-known “dry law” enforcer.
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| Agent William M. Whitney |
But Whitney was far more interested in politics, having been active in the Republican Club at Ohio Wesleyan. In Washington, he became heavily involved with state party politics, and even ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress in 1916. Four years later, Whitney earned some favors helping elect Wesley L. Jones to the U.S. Senate. But Bill also got caught in a messy scandal involving his attentions to a married woman. Thus, Jones gave the full Director position to another crony, who promptly made Whitney his chief assistant to do the real work.
Another educated guess suggests that a phone call from the pool hall brought down some physical punishment on the informer. Although Mooring ended up shot, there are no reports that the two suspects were ever prosecuted for anything. If they struck a plea deal, it was not weighty enough to make the news.
Eighteen months passed. Mooring’s name now appeared in newspaper reports, so he was probably not doing as much, if any, undercover work. Then, on April 2, 1925, a headline in the Seattle Times read, “Harold V. Mooring, U.S. Dry Agent, Dies.” He had become ill while on a moonshine raid in rough country about twenty miles southeast of Olympia. An autopsy gave the cause of death as pneumonia, and blamed the bullet from the earlier shooting as a “contributory” factor.
With that as a basis, authorities reopened the investigation into “who shot agent Mooring?” Recall that nothing serious had happened to the two attackers. The sheriff’s office reported that the only weapons that could be linked to the two were both .32-caliber revolvers. The sheriff also retained criminologist Luke S. May, handing over to him the .38-caliber revolver used by Bill Whitney on the day of the shooting. The slug from Mooring’s body would be available the next day.
I was unable to retrieve a full report on this case from the Luke May Papers, so we do not know much about what he discovered. The slug was indeed .38-caliber, but perhaps too distorted or altered by time to provide a definitive result, either positive or negative. Whitney never explicitly stated that he had not fired his gun, although he tried to leave that impression. Of course, he also never said he had fired.
However, Prohibition enforcers were notorious for their “when in doubt, shoot” approach, as in the Ernest Emley case. Thus, seeing his agent in trouble, Whitney quite possibly tried to help, and hit the wrong target. In the end, we can never know. But if Mooring was indeed hit by “friendly fire,” he was neither the first Prohibition agent, nor the last, to go out that way. The widow continued to press for further action, but a look back at the case in 1927 noted that nothing further was ever done.
Around 1931-1932, Maude began spending time in California. Thus, in the spring of 1932, daughter Vivian married a field craftsman employed by the Southern California Edison Company. Sidney Mooring would have been eighteen years old that same spring, so he probably joined the army shortly after that. In 1935, he was stationed at Schofield Barracks, in Hawaii, and returned stateside in December 1936.
Afterwards, Sidney became a professional photographer. Thus, in 1940, he owned a photography shop in Wenatchee, Washington. At that time, Maude also worked there as a photographer. However, she did not follow when he moved the business to Seattle around 1942, and was in California by 1948. She passed away May 2, 1957 in San Francisco.
| References: Norma H. Clark, The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington, University of Washington Press, Seattle (1965, 1988). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| “[Mooring Wounding, Death, and Afterwards],” Kennewick Courier, Seattle Times, Seattle Star, Spokane Chronicle, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington (March 1914 – August 1927) |
| Photo credits: Harold V. Mooring, Officer Down web site. William M. Whitney, Gazette-Journal, Reno, Nevada (May 28, 1930). |
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