birdwatcher

ROCKY MOUNT, Va. -- It was so quiet out in the country, the officers didn't want to make a sound. Lying in the woods, huddled in sleeping bags, they couldn't use their cars or even turn on a light.

The moonshiners might see them.

The officers, from the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, had been pursuing a prominent local businessman for years. At last, a tip had led them to a distillery. Silently, from across the road, they watched who came and went. They sneaked in a surveillance camera. The moonshiners had counter-surveillance cameras of their own.

The cat-and-mouse game that played out less than four hours from the nation's capital culminated in a raid in which ABC officials, joined by sheriff's deputies and federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, burst into a barn on the rural property and found four large silver-colored pots used to make moonshine -- cheap, powerful, illegal whiskey.