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Philip Spiess
Not to interrupt (which is to say, "split") the latest flow of thought here (is half a heaven a "split infinity"?), but on the eve of New Year's Eve it seems incumbent upon us to review and remember the dubious and meteoric career of Cincinnatian George Remus, who made a "splash," shall we say, on the Cincinnati scene in the 1920s.
Background: George Remus, born in Berlin in 1874, moved with his family to Chicago at the age of five. By the age of fourteen, he was working in his uncle's pharmacy to help support his family, and by nineteen he had graduated from the Chicago College of Pharmacy and was a certified pharmacist; by the age of twenty-one, he had bought the pharmacy, and shortly thereafter he expanded the business. In other words, he was a young man who knew how to mix up "medical" things in jars and bottles.
However, Remus then attended the Illinois College of Law, and by 1904 he was a practicing lawyer, being admitted that year to the Illinois Bar. In this capacity, he gave evidence of the turns his future career would take by specializing in defending criminals, especially those accused of murder. He became very good at this, indeed famous, earning vast sums in the process. He was, in short, successful and wealthy -- and a Chicagoan.
The Story: But then Fate took a hand in Remus's future proceedings: national Prohibition of alcoholic spirits reared its ugly head in the United States as the states ratified the 18th Amendment and the related statutes came into law as the Volstead Act. When Prohibition officially began on January 17, 1920, Remus, ever astute, noticed that his criminal clients were getting quickly wealthy in the illicit liquor trade, and he decided to get in on the game himself, using his excellent knowledge of the law to keep himself out of trouble. He memorized the Volstead Act word for word and studied those loopholes whereby he could purchase pharmacies (under his pharmacist's license) and distilleries to sell "bonded" liquor to himself under government licenses for medicinal purposes. His employees would then steal his own liquor from him so he could sell it illegally (at much higher profits than just selling it for medicinal purposes). But Chicago's gangsters, allied with Al Capone, began crowding him out of the business.
It is at this point that George Remus moved to Cincinnati, away from the gangs of Chicago: he had discovered that 80% of America's bonded whiskey was located within a 300-mile radius of "the Queen City" (if you studied 8th-grade Social Studies with Mr. Meredith, you learned that the 19th-century Cincinnati brewing and distilling industries were the direct result of tri-state corn production, which, in turn, was also the fodder by which Cincinnati became "Porkopolis"; if you didn't study with him, think Kentucky Bourbon production and National Distillers and Cincinnati's breweries -- described on this site at Post #3114 -- and Lawrenceburg, Indiana, home of Seagrams, now MGP Industries). After arriving in this lush alcoholic paradise, Remus proceeded to buy up most of the whiskey manufacturers. In three years, Remus had accrued $40 million, working with his trusted assistant, George Conners, and he owned many of America's most famous distilleries, including Fleishmann's, a purchase which included 3,100 gallons of whiskey.
George Remus then settled into Cincinnati for the long haul (so to speak, given his trucking requirements): he purchased Death Valley Farm, located in the Western Hills, from George Gehrum, and quickly developed a home and fortified distillery there. To all appearances (this was the 1920s, after all), the farm was accessible only by a dirt road, but the actual distillery was located at 2656 Queen City Avenue. The alcohol was first distilled on the top floor of Remus's home (sometimes described as "the attic"); then it was carried by a dumb-waiter to the basement, where a trap door led to a tunnel 50-100 feet long and six feet below ground. Remus's bootlegger employees would move the finished product down the tunnel to a waiting car, whence it lit out for sales sites and speak-easies further afield. Thus other area communities, such as Newport, Kentucky, began the illicit serving of alcohol at the small -- and secret -- gambling casinos which opened up with that purpose in mind. Tradition says that Remus's Death Valley Farm was the only location in the Cincinnati area to be secret enough not to be raided by the Feds, although a raid by rival hijackers of liquor took place in 1920, but Remus's armed guards, led by John Gehrum, ran them off with a heavy volley of gunfire.
Thus, in a quick amount of time, George Remus earned the epithet, "King of the Bootleggers." He and his second wife, Imogene (Remus's daughter by his first wife Lillian, Romola Remus, played Dorothy Gale in Hollywood's 1910 first-ever filming of The Wizard of Oz), threw lavish parties for the Cincinnati elite at his Western Hills mansion, nicknamed "the Marble Palace." In 1922, for example, one hundred couples were invited, the men receiving diamond stickpins as gifts and their wives receiving brand-new cars; in 1923 each female guest received a brand-new Pontiac.
But Wait! There's More!: But now Fate enters the picture once again: by 1925, Remus's schemes for beating and defrauding the government started to turn sour; he was indicted for thousands of violations of the Volstead Act and was convicted by a jury that took under two hours to reach its conclusion. He was given a two-year federal prison sentence, which he served in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. While in prison, Remus confided to another inmate that his wife Imogene had control of his money. The inmate happened to be an undercover Prohibition agent named Franklin Dodge. Instead of reporting this information to the government, Dodge resigned his job and began an affair with Remus's wife. Dodge and Imogene liquidated Remus's fortune and hid as much of the money as possible; they even tried to have old George deported, and, that failing, they tried to hire a hit man for $15,000 to rub him out. Thoughtful as always, Imogene gave her imprisoned husband a mere $100 of the multi-million-dollar nest-egg that he had created. She then filed for divorce.
By this time, 1927, George Remus was out of jail, and, on the way to court to finalize the divorce, Remus directed his driver to chase the cab carrying Imogene and her daughter through Eden Park, finally forcing it off of the road. Remus jumped out and fatally shot Imogene in the abdomen in front of that well-known Eden Park landmark, the Spring House Gazebo. At Remus's trial for murder, the prosecutor in the case was Charles P. Taft II, son of the former President and Chief Justice, and later mayor of Cincinnati; Remus defended himself, pleading temporary insanity, and the jury deliberated only nineteen minutes before acquitting him. The State of Ohio then tried to commit Remus to an insane asylum, since the jury had found him insane, but the prosecutors had defeated themselves by their previous claim that he could stand trial for murder because he was not insane.
End of Story: After all of this brouhaha, George Remus lived out the rest of his life quietly in Covington, Kentucky; he died in 1952, and is buried with his third wife, Blanche, in Riverside Cemetery in Falmouth, Kentucky. He was known by friends and associates as always referring to himself in the third person. Having purportedly met George Remus in a Louisville hotel and having been captivated by his larger-than-life personality, F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly (according to some) based his character of Jay Gatsby in his novel The Great Gatsby (1925) on Cincinnati's own George Remus.
You just can't make these things up. [Example of Barbara Kahn Tepper's caveat on split infinitives?]
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