Meet the Real Forrest Bondurant, The Man Who Inspired ‘Lawless’

Meet the real Forrest Bondurant, the man who inspired Lawless (2012), and the moonshine kingdom of Franklin County, Virginia that made him. Tom Hardy played him as an indestructible outlaw fighting corrupt lawmen. The real Bondurant brothers paid into that same crooked system for years. Behind it all stood the Great Moonshine Conspiracy, a racket run not by the moonshiners, but by the law itself. In this video you'll learn: How Forrest Bondurant survived having his throat cut, and why Franklin County called him the Rasputin of the hollers The Great Moonshine Conspiracy that pulled $5.5 million in whiskey taxes out of one county (about $120 million today) How Commonwealth's Attorney Charles Carter Lee, a grandnephew of Robert E. Lee, sat at the top of the racket The "granny fee": how the sheriff and his deputies made the county's moonshiners pay for protection The Maggodee Creek bridge shooting of December 19, 1930, when deputies shot Forrest and Jack Bondurant Why the deputy who handled the money was gunned down 17 days before his court date The 1935 trial in Roanoke, rumrunner Willie Carter Sharpe on the stand, and the verdict that let Carter Lee walk free The jury tampering convictions and the court files that vanished without a trace What Lawless got right about Forrest, Howard and Jack Bondurant, and what Hollywood changed Matt Bondurant turned his family's story into the novel The Wettest County in the World, and Hollywood turned the novel into Lawless. But the film gives you clean outlaws against a corrupt system. The truth is darker: a whole county on the take, a prosecutor running the racket, and three brothers who bled for refusing to keep paying into it. Between Forrest and Carter Lee, who do you think Hollywood got closer to the truth on? Tell us in the comments. Subscribe to Gangsters Untold for the true story behind a classic gangster movie every week. #ForrestBondurant #Lawless2012 #TrueCrime