I LOVE THE THEORY THAT IT MUST BE LEGAL BECAUSE COPS ARE DOING IT: The rise and fall of the Jack Daniel’s committee: How D.C.’s police lodge made thousands selling whiskey online.
The lodge’s leaders were buying Jack Daniel’s whiskey, engraving the bottles with a police-union logo, then reselling them online at the marked-up price of $80. They’d been overwhelmed with orders.
“$38,000 has been collected, just on PayPal,” said Marcello Muzzatti, a retired D.C. police officer and the lodge’s past president, according to a recording of the meeting.
One of the few non-police officers in the room spoke up.
“Is this, like, legal?” said the woman, who union leaders said was a paralegal.
“Yes. Absolutely,” said Andy Maybo, then the lodge’s president, who made the recording and shared it with The Washington Post.
The Jack Daniel’s committee was a go.
Over the next three years, the D.C. lodge — a group of active and retired police officers, working from a clubhouse near the FBI Field Office — sold more than 3,000 bottles of whiskey to people across the country, according to internal lodge documents and interviews with lodge leaders.
But the sale of hard liquor is tightly regulated — the shipment of hard liquor even more so. And The Post could find no evidence that the lodge ever obtained the permits required to do what it did: sell liquor by the bottle, and ship it across state lines. . . .
The story of the Jack Daniel’s committee suggests how police unions can occupy a bubble of perceived impunity, right next to the law. Even now, some involved in the liquor sales say they’re not convinced they were improper.
“If it was ever against the law, we would never have done it,” Maybo, the former lodge president, said in a recent interview. After all, he said, the whole thing was done by police officers, in front of police officers. “I would imagine that if I’m doing something illegal, if the FOP were doing something illegal, somebody would have said that. And it went on for years.”
Experts in alcohol law said the Jack Daniel’s committee’s actions appeared to be a clear-cut violation of the law in D.C. and multiple states.
“These are cops?” asked Michael Brill Newman, who leads the alcoholic-beverage team at the firm Holland & Knight.
“That’s selling alcohol without a license, and it’s a crime,” said Will Cheek III, a Nashville attorney specializing in liquor regulations.
Illegal shipment of liquor is a misdemeanor or even a felony in some states. But legal experts said it’s rare that anyone faces jail time for illegal alcohol sales.
Instead, offenders typically face civil penalties, like a fine, a lawsuit or a revocation of an existing liquor license — which could be devastating to the financially shaky D.C. lodge.
What they did should be legal in my opinion, but boy oh boy it’s really not.