"About one hundred feet north of the reservoir in the center of the vast park, now bright with autumn foliage, Remus' powerful limousine gradually moved ahead of the taxi and began crowding it to the curb. To avoid a collision, the cab driver pulled to a stop, When Ruth began opening the cab door on the right side as if to get out, her mother pushed her back into the seat and opened the door on the left side. Her husband, directing a stream of epithets against her, reached the door just as Imogene opened it. Grabbing her by the wrist and shouting 'I'll fix you! I'll fix you!' he pulled her down from the running board. As he drew her close to him, she noticed that he held in his left hand a small, pearl handled revolver which he had once given her for protection .
'Oh, Daddy, you know I love you!' she cried. 'You know I love you! Daddy, don't do it! Don't do it!'
Pressing the revolver against her belly, Remus pointed it upward and fired one bullet. His screaming wife fell to the pavement. His stepdaughter, Ruth, having emerged from the car, ran up to him, grabbed him by the coat lapels, and cried, 'Do you realize what you're doing?' Looking at Ruth but speaking almost to himself, he said of his wife, 'She can't get away with that.'" 1.
So it went in Cincinnati's Eden Park right near the Gazebo that autumn day on today's date, October 6 in 1927, when the Bootlegger George Remus (above) killed his wife in the presence of her daughter, Ruth. Some accounts have Remus calling Imogene a
"Decomposed mass of clay", but the basic fact of his having murdered his wife was never disputed by anyone. What was in dispute in court was Remus' state of mind at the time of the killing. Was this man, dubbed
"the King of the Bootleggers" by some, who was nevertheless a lifelong teetotaler, a sane man at the moment he committed murder or not? This was the central question at his trial which lasted for just over a month, and held the whole country in thrall, as the son of the former President of the United States, and this paunchy bald little man battled over what was then a new idea in American courtrooms: the insanity defense.
The Rise of George Remus
One could hardly conjure up a more quintessentially American
"rags to riches" story than that of George Remus. Born on November 14, 1874 in Berlin, Germany, his family immigrated to America in 1879, settling in Chicago. George did well in school, but he had to drop out at the age of 14 to support his family when his father became disabled. He worked at his Uncle's drug store and soon
learned the pharmacy business. He got a Pharmacology degree at age 19 by lying that he was 21. He soon owned the store, and did well enough that he was able to buy another store. But the drug business bored him so he took night classes in law, finished a three year course in eighteen months, and became a lawyer in 1900. In that same year, he married his first wife Lillian with whom he had his only child, a daughter, Ramola (right, circa 1927). Remus had a flourishing practice in criminal law, becoming quite well-known for his flamboyant style in the courtroom. This earned him about $50,000 a year, a tidy sum, but nothing compared to what his clients were making by their violations of the Volstead Act: the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - the national prohibition law which went into effect in January, 1920.
George Remus Turns to Bootlegging
He had his sights on something bigger in life than merely security.
"Remus liked being a lawyer; he enjoyed the prestige and the public notoriety. But deep inside himself, George Remus was a material man, and he saw that a few of his clients were getting very rich from bootlegging... (and) they were of marginal intelligence. It led him to consider what the monetary possibilities in the liquor trade were for someone with a high degree of demonstrated intellect, someone such as himself. Later in his life Remus would say about his bootlegging clients, 'I was impressed by the rapidity with which these men without any brains at all, piled up fortunes in the liquor business. I saw a chance to clean up.'" 2.
So George Remus read the Volstead Act very carefully - from a lawyer's perspective. And he found that it did not touch any of the millions of gallons of liquor already produced before the Act went into effect. Further, this liquor could legally be used for "medicinal purposes". And he found that 80% of such liquor was located within a 300 mile radius of Cincinnati. The key was to buy up as many of these
distilleries as he could. So in
1920, Remus set up shop in Cincin- nati. He had by this time divorced his first wife and married a pretty young secretary named Imogene Holmes, who had a daughter, Ruth from a previous marriage. He set up a distilling operation on the west side of town on the Dater farm which covered about 100 acres to Queen City and La Feuille Ave. This became known as "Death Valley Farm" because there were hired guns covering every foot of the road into it (above). It was used to distill liquor and also to gather in the liquor which Remus had bought from other distilleries using government permits and phony authorizations from his own drug companies. He would buy the booze, have his convoys hijacked by his own men, who would then bring it to Death Valley for "redistribution". He was in effect both the buyer and the seller.
Remus Finds Success, Fortune... and Jail
"Remus was to bootlegging what Rockefeller was to oil." - St Louis Post-Dispatch 3.
Of course all of this required help from above. Remus began paying huge bribes to Federal officials for access to the necessary permits to buy his liquor. And he even went to Washington D.C. to buy the cooperation of the U.S. Justice Department in the form of bribes totaling over $250,000 to one Jess Smith who was a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General. Smith assured Remus that no matter what happened neither he nor his men would ever go to jail. With millions in cash pouring into his coffers Remus became "The Man". He began to speak of himself in the third person;
"Remus was in the whiskey
business, and Remus was the biggest man in the business." 4.
And he began living large. He bought a home in the Price Hill section of the city on Hermosa Ave. (above) and filled it with the finest furniture, carpets, paintings, and books that he could find. Gold door knobs, a huge swimming pool with Rookwood Pottery linings, and the finest plants and landscaping. At that time, it was the largest private home in the U.S. that was not located on either the East or the West Coast. And he and his wife had only the finest clothes. Remus had always longed to be in a higher social bracket, so he had many a lavish party at his Price Hill Mansion. One such soiree' was the legendary New Years Eve gathering on Dec. 31, 1921 in which every guest was given diamond stickpins and (allegedly) crisp new thousand dollar bills for party favors. And for the ladies: a brand new Pontiac automobile for each one of them. Such was his repute for ostentatious living, that he is said to have been the inspiration for the title character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel,
"The Great Gatsby". But Remus also made himself very popular with the common folks by hiring the men for his trucks, allowing the neighborhood boys to swim in his grand pool, and handing out lavish tips for any service done him.
"... he was a teetotaler, his perspective on liquor unaffected by personal tastes or unclouded by personal habit. He cared only about the money, and his care was rewarded. In one year Remus deposited $2.8 million into one of his many bank accounts -- the equivalent, in 2009, of more than $32 million." - Daniel Okrent 5.
But this could only go on for so long. Remus had bought out distilleries throughout the Midwest, and also had bought off cooperation from federal officials. Eventually he ran into a couple of solid, staid officials who were not available at any price. A shipment coming from the Squibb Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana brought him under the eyes of Burt G. Morgan. Morgan found so much of the booze going to
Remus' Death Valley Farm that he raided the place, and found thousands of gallons of liquor, as well as business records and lots of Remus employees. With this evidence and with the vigorous prosecution brought by Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Remus and his confederates were convicted of 3,000 violations of the Volstead Act. And Remus found that his ace in the hole, Jess Smith was useless. Smith, who was facing corruption charges himself committed suicide on May 30, 1923. So on January 24, 1924 George Remus went into the Federal Prison in for 2 years in Atlanta Georgia after giving his beloved wife, Imogene power of attorney over all of his business and legal affairs. This proved to be a huge mistake.
Imogene Remus and Franklin Dodge
As his days in prison wore on, Remus got antsy. His conditions there had gone from Hotel-like from bribes he paid to prison officials to regular prison conditions after the corrupt warden was sacked by Mrs. Willebrandt. Remus put Imogene in touch with a man whom he had heard could be dealt with: Franklin Dodge, the Justice Department's
"Ace of Investigators". But instead of helping Imogene (below) clear
the way for her husband's release, this
"Ace" began having a torrid romance with her. And the two of them managed to liquidate all of Remus' empire, selling off the distilleries, the Government permits, everything. They used the cash for themselves, and sent Remus divorce papers shortly before his release, sending him into a huge spiral downward of anger and depression. When he was finally released on April 26, 1927, and he returned to his Price Hill Estate, he found that it had been stripped of everything... every stick of furniture, every painting, every plant. Only the books were left piled on the floor, and a cot, a table and chair. He was of course, stunned. He became obsessive about stopping Imogene and Dodge. And this of course led to the scene in broad daylight wherein as detailed above, he shot her dead. She was 38 years old.
Remus Goes on Trial for Murder
"She who dances down the primrose path must die on the primrose path. I'm happy. This is the first peace of mind I've had in two years." - George Remus on killing his wife, Oct. 6, 1927. 6.
This hardly sounds like a man who was insane. But in the trial that began on November 14, 1927, that was exactly what Remus sought to do: prove that he was insane at the time he shot his wife, and might possibly still be insane. Remus, conducted his own defense with assistance from the former D.A. Charles Elston. Opposite them were prosecutors led by Charles P. Taft II, scion of political royalty in the U.S.; his father was former U.S. President, and sitting Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, William Howard Taft.
"Remus," he said,
"has committed a cold blooded murder, and I have no doubt that he will be executed for it." 7.
But no amount of maneuvering, or witness
badgering could keep the trial from a parade of witnesses who either did not remember anything useful towards Taft's contention of an organized conspiracy, and thus sanity, or did recall only helpful details for the defense. Remus' driver that morning, George Klug could remember nothing useful. Nor could the waiter who served Remus the night before. And Harry Truesdale even reported that Imogene had tried to hire him to kill Remus for $15,000. The defense presented character witnesses among whom one was the legendary Clarence Darrow who knew Remus from his days as a lawyer in Chicago. Darrow testified that while Remus was an emotional fellow - somewhat unstable - his reputation had been good. Pressing him further, Taft got an unequivocal endorsement of Remus' reputation from Darrow:
"In my opinion it was good. I never heard it questioned so I'll say it was good."8. And Remus himself several times went into convulsions and had to be removed from the courtroom. As newspapers from all over the country, and a packed courtroom looked on the jury on Dec. 20 took less than 30 minutes to acquit Remus on the grounds of temporary insanity, the first successful use of that defense in American courtrooms.
"He had such a rotten Christmas last year, lets make him happy this year." 9. said one of the jurors. Clearly, Remus' popularity with the common folk of Cincinnati had payed off.
Epilogue
This writer believes that given his obsessive-compulsive behavior from the very moment that he first heard rumors that his wife was having an affair with Franklin Dodge, a very creditable case could be made that George Remus
was in the grip of what would today be called an irresistible impulse to kill his wife and end his mental torture. But clearly, the forgetful witnesses, and Remus' own histrionics in the courtroom helped him in being acquitted by a jury that was obviously very sympathetic to him to begin with. Whatever the case, Remus kept the loyalty of his own daughter Ramola who stood by him throughout the trial and of the average citizen who viewed him as a generous (if not totally law-abiding) man who had been done wrong by a greedy wife and her lover. George Remus tried to get back into bootlegging but found that the Al Capone-type violence of the business had long passed him by. He went into Real Estate, before re-marrying and dying in relative obscurity in a Covington, Kentucky home on January 20, 1952. His fabulous estate in Price Hill was demolished in 1934. The one portion of it which survives is the wrought iron gates to the Mansion property which now serve as the back gates to nearby Elder High School on Panther Court. 10. Below is pictured his grave in Falmouth, Kentucky, minus the wings on the angelic figures which somebody knocked off a long time ago....
Notes:
1. - Coffey, pp. 216-217.
2. - Cook, pp. 24-25
3. - Burns
4. - Ibid
5. - Okrent p. 198
6. - Cook, p. 120
7. - Rosenberg, cover
8. - Cook, p. 155
9. - Ibid, p. 168
10. - Hotchkiss, pp. 10-11
Sources:
"King of the Bootleggers - A Biography of George Remus" by William A Cook, McFarland and Co. Inc., North Carolina, 2008
"The Long Thirst - Prohibition in America: 1920-1933" by Thomas A. Coffey, W.W. Norton and Co. Inc., New york, 1975
"The Cincinnati Crime Book" by George Stimson, the Peasonhall Press, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1998
"Remembering Remus in Price Hill" by Julie Hotchkiss, and Joyce Meyer, Edgecliff Press with the Price Hill Historical Society and Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2011
"The American Gladiators: Taft -vs- Remus" by Albert Rosenberg and Cindy Armstrong, Aimwell Press, Hemet, California, 1995.
"Prohibition" a film by Ken Burns an Lynn Novak, Episode Two, PBS, 2011
"Last Call - The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent, Scribner, New York, 2010
he day has come--the day of fate. Before this morning's sun sets, the destinies of this republic, so far as depends on human agency, are to be settled for weal or for woe. An inevitable choice is this day to be made by the American people, between a policy carrying salvation or a policy carrying ruin to the nation. On the one hand is war, tremendous and terrible, yet ushering in at the end every national security and glory. On the other is the mocking shadow of a peace, tempting us to quit these sacrifices, and sink again into indulgence, and yet sure to rob us of our birthright, and to entail upon our children a dissevered Union and ceaseless strife. "
