Our Arklahoma Heritage: She was the queen of the Tulsa bootleggers who met her fate at the hands of the Dixie Mafia
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Long before there was a Tulsa King, there was a Tulsa Queen whose life began in a small Logan County community and ended when two members of the Dixie Mafia eliminated her before she could testify before a grand jury investigating a car bombing.
In the dry-state underworld of mid-century Oklahoma, where whiskey moved by the truckload and the law looked the other way until it didn’t, Cleo Epps stood as one of the few women who ran the trade at any kind of scale.
Journalists called her the Queen of the Bootleggers. She hated the title, yet for two decades she controlled wholesale and retail liquor around Tulsa and Sapulpa, importing loads from Missouri and moving thousands of gallons of moonshine while Oklahoma remained bone dry.
She sold to hotels and prominent citizens, carried her own notes on the houses she built with the profits, and kept company with the Dixie Mafia’s hard men. When she finally turned informant against them, they put two bullets in her head and dumped her in a cistern.
She had arrived in Oklahoma from Magazine, Arkansas, in the mid-1920s, still young and already finished with high school at sixteen. The daughter of Richard Mosley Gilbert Jr. and Sarah Daisy Groh Gilbert, she graduated from the teaching seminary in Tahlequah at eighteen and taught in Wagoner and Creek counties.
Students later said she felt more like a mother than a teacher. A short marriage to a Tulsa attorney collapsed over his drinking; she wanted nothing to do with whiskey herself. In December 1936, back in Sebastian County, she married Cecil Epps. He was already in the liquor business. When his alcoholism interfered with deliveries, she took the wheel and the operation.
They divorced in the 1950s. By then the enterprise was hers.
Oklahoma had entered the Union in 1907 as a dry state and stayed that way long after national Prohibition ended. Bootlegging was simply how the state drank. Epps pleaded guilty to bootlegging charges in 1941, 1942, and 1951 because, as she later told a court, she was guilty. In 1966, a federal grand jury indicted her in a multimillion-dollar moonshine case said to pour more than two thousand gallons a month into the Tulsa area.
The conviction was overturned, but the arrests continued. She insisted she only drove the whiskey across the state line and never sold a bottle. Few believed her.
The money bought land and houses. During the Depression, she sat on her front porch and bought pigs for fifty cents, cows for two dollars, and land for ten dollars an acre. She developed housing additions, including the Epps Addition between Sapulpa and the Tulsa city limits, built the houses herself or directed the work, and financed the buyers so they needed no bank.
Neighbors described her as big-hearted, gentle, soft-spoken, and helpful especially to children, yet big and strong, often in workman’s clothes smeared with paint from construction. She looked after her mother, took in a fourteen-year-old runaway from Arkansas who stayed until he finished school and joined the Navy, and was known for making sure people around her had what they needed.
The same profits pulled her into the orbit of Albert McDonald and Thomas Lester Pugh, figures tied to the Dixie Mafia.
In 1970, those two men were suspected in the car-bombing attempt on Tulsa County District Judge Fred Nelson. Dynamite taken from Epps’s farm near Sapulpa was used in the device that critically injured the judge in his driveway. Disturbed by the attack, she agreed to appear before a grand jury.
Word leaked. On the evening of November 12, 1970, she left a friend’s house with McDonald, reportedly to discuss a liquor shipment near 51st and Union. Her pickup was later found abandoned there with her purse inside. She was never seen alive again.
Three months later, in February 1971, her body was recovered from a water cistern or septic tank on abandoned property near 65th Street and Union Avenue in southwest Tulsa. She had been shot twice in the head. A towel with two visible holes was wrapped around her head, and rocks covered the body.
Her nephew Tommy Gilbert spotted one of her shoes nearby, helping lead investigators to the site. Albert McDonald was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life; he later died in prison. Pugh faced other charges connected to the broader violence, including the killing of another grand jury witness.
Her funeral drew a U.S. congressman, judges, and local law enforcement. She was buried in Green Hill Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Sapulpa, Creek County, Oklahoma, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Lot 26, Section A, Space 3.
Official records list her death as November 12, 1970, the day she disappeared. In 2019, Kirk McCracken published Queen of the Bootleggers: The Life and Murder of Cleo Epps.
Born in Magazine, Arkansas, she became the woman who ran liquor in dry Oklahoma, built houses with the proceeds, helped the people around her, and ultimately paid with her life for knowing too much about the men she had once trusted.
