MOONSHINER
CA. 1890–UNKNOWN
Lived in Chicago area; Interment unknown
Mary Wazeniak ran a speakeasy in Brookfield, Illinois, near Chicago. One evening, in 1923, George L. Rheaton, of LaGrange, Indiana, bought five or six shots of Mary’s moonshine. He staggered out of the bar, walked about two hundred feet, and fell dead. Chemical analysis during an autopsy indicated that Rheaton died of methanol poisoning. “Moonshine Mary,” as the press dubbed her, was thirty-four years old and a mother of three when she was sentenced to a year to life.
This is what we know of Mary. It’s not much. And to read this, you would think that it was Mary who poisoned Rheaton, but it wasn’t. It was the federal government.
By the mid-1920s, Prohibition’s noble experiment was starting to show great wear on the people for whom it was meant to benefit. Still, alcohol was not that hard to find, as industrial alcohol is a necessary ingredient in aftershave, antifreeze, felt hats, embalming fluid, and fuel. Recognizing this temptation, and as a deterrence, the government routinely altered the chemical composition of the spirit to make it unpotable. The added chemical was methanol, which in trace quantities is present in all fermented beverages and in most distilled spirits—it’s a simpler alcohol molecule, sometimes called wood alcohol—but in concentrated form is highly toxic. As little as thirty milliliters of methanol can blind a person; sixty milliliters is lethal. The federal government, in its wisdom, decided to add methanol to ethanol (the chemical we drink) so that it couldn’t be consumed safely.
And yet methanol has a slightly lower boiling point than ethanol, and some enterprising moonshiners reasoned that the two could be separated through distillation. This is technically true, but difficult in practice, especially at the scale of a bootlegger using copper pots as small as ten gallons. Inevitably, methanol contaminated the ethanol, and people frequently got sick.
Over the Christmas holiday in 1926, for instance, twenty-three people died from methanol poisoning in New York City. The medical examiner, Charles Norris, spoke out against what he called a “national experiment in extermination.” Government officials at the time—and many historians today—explain away such deaths as inevitable, given the country’s ravenous appetite for spirits. But most of the deaths were avoidable. Imagine today’s government, in an effort to reduce drug use, spraying marijuana crops with poison.
These days, people still fear homemade alcohol as something that might blind or kill the drinker. But if it is made from properly fermented sugars, there’s no reason to expect moonshine to contain anything higher than ten parts per million of methanol. This is five to six times less than most commercial alcohol. You would have to drink north of thirty gallons of moonshine to get a harmful dose of methanol, and would die from the ethanol long before that became a possibility.
PHARMACIST, LAWYER, BOOTLEGGER
1876–1952
Riverside Cemetery, Falmouth, Kentucky
IMOGENE REMUS
BOOTLEGGER, DISTILLERY OWNER
1888–1927
Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois
George Remus is the most underappreciated figure in American history.
Remus was the largest American bootlegger in the early days of Prohibition. He was the inspiration for The Great Gatsby. His daughter was a silent-film star. At one point, Remus owned most of the distilleries in the United States. He went to jail for his bootlegging and while in prison his wife started sleeping with the Prohibition agent assigned to his case. The two began systematically stripping Remus of his fortune, in particular his distilleries, while he was stuck in jail. When Remus got out, he hunted down his wife and shot her in broad daylight in a public park, then defended himself at trial, and got himself exonerated, arguing one of the country’s first successful temporary insanity defenses.
Why have we been subjected to so many movies about Al Capone and Eliot Ness when Remus was certainly more psychologically compelling—not as a gangster, but as a slightly dishonest businessman trying to make his way in America through a conviction in his own ability to persuade? Remus bootlegged because he liked money, not booze, and because, though he knew the law, he disagreed with it. He believed Prohibition to be an injustice, a legally untenable overreach of federal power. To him, the only moral truth was that which could be argued in a court of law, and, in the eyes of the unjustly denied dry populace, a jury of his peers, he was a moral crusader. How quintessentially American! George Remus, fat and bald, with no interest in drinking, finds injustice and opportunity in Prohibition and steers it to his enormous financial advantage, only to let hubris and love derail him. The difference between a Remus and a Bronfman (see this page) is thin as paper, but separates the dynasty from the disgraced.
Remus emigrated from Germany with his parents when he was a boy, moving first to Baltimore for a short time and eventually Chicago. He got a job as a clerk in an uncle’s drugstore, went to pharmacy school, and bought the business from his uncle. Still, Remus dreamed of more, and went to law school. By 1900, he had his own practice set up in the Ashland Block building, a modern office tower designed by Daniel Burnham, and a prestigious address shared by famed attorney Clarence Darrow and poet Edgar Lee Masters.
Remus gained early notoriety from the defense of William Cheney Ellis, who shot his wife in the chest and head, slit her throat, and then made a feeble attempt to kill himself. Hotel security found him wearing his wife’s kimono and smoking a cigar, visibly distraught. He confessed to the crime, and indeed had written letters to his children and made calls warning family and friends what he intended to do. Ellis pled not guilty. Remus, confronted with what appeared to be an open-and-shut case, proposed a defense of temporary insanity, an argument that would fail in this case but establish Remus’s reputation as a creative defender, willing to test the limits of legal interpretation in the interest of both his clients and his own renown.
He also applied his imagination to Prohibition law. When the ban went into effect in 1920, Remus sensed an opportunity through a legal loophole. Before Prohibition, when a distiller entered a barrel into a warehouse, he was given a receipt from the government that could be used to redeem the barrel, at which time the tax had to be paid. Distillers, in advance of Prohibition, were sitting on millions of barrels in inventory—or, to be more specific, millions of receipts for barrels in government custody. Remus, anticipating that medicinal whiskey would become a practical loophole for drinkers, started buying up receipts in order to distribute the whiskey as medicine. Prohibition made it illegal to buy whiskey, but not receipts for whiskey barrels, provided one could bottle it as medicinal whiskey. Remus, after all, had gone to pharmacy school and was licensed to distribute medicine. “I was impressed by the rapidity with which those men, without any brains at all, piled up fortunes in the liquor business,” Remus once recalled. “The more I studied the Volstead Act, the more I was convinced of its frailties, and so I decided to get in on the ground floor, strike while the iron was hot.”
On the eve of Prohibition, Remus was also facing some personal difficulty. He had married his first wife, Lillian, in 1899, and the two were raising their daughter, Romola, who, in 1908 was the first actress to portray Dorothy in a filmed adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. Despite this excitement at home, however, Remus was restless. He ran into Imogene Holmes, recently divorced, working in an Evanston delicatessen, where he frequently bought his groceries. He went out of his way to pick them up personally, stopping to chat with Imogene; she went to work for him at his law office, and they began an affair.
In 1919, Remus and Lillian got divorced, and Remus married Imogene and moved to Cincinnati, then one of the most fashionable cities in the country. More important, Cincinnati was within a three-hundred-mile radius of nearly every government whiskey warehouse in the country. Remus bought a mansion in the elegant district Price Hill and furnished it accordingly; he began construction on an Olympic-size Grecian indoor pool, as he and Imogene were both fond of swimming. Remus also built two tunnels under the house, both to store whiskey and as a possible getaway. He also kept a stable for his racing Thoroughbreds, and a farm on the outskirts of town, which became known colloquially as the Death Valley Farm.
Remus purchased two drug companies in New York City and arranged for legal services and connections to federal agents who could grant permits for withdrawals from bonded warehouses. He bought the Squibb distillery, in Lawrenceburg, Indiana; the Rugby distillery in Louisville; the Hill and Hill distillery in Owensboro; and the Burks Spring distillery in Loretto (which now produces Maker’s Mark). Within a few years, he had an interest in Jack Daniel’s whiskey (whose barrels were now based in Saint Louis), the Pogue distillery in Maysville, and the Edgewood distillery in Cincinnati; he had his sights on the Fleischmann distillery. At one point, Remus owned fourteen distilleries in all, and was making, by one estimate, up to twenty-five million dollars annually, or close to four hundred million in today’s dollars. He did this by selling medicinal liquor, robbing his own trucks carrying medicinal liquor, and bribing nearly everyone in the supply chain of police and political oversight to keep quiet.
Remus’s transition from lawyer with an interest in bending Prohibition law to full-fledged bootlegger could probably be traced to the moment when he bribed Jess Smith, a mysterious functionary within the U.S. Department of Justice of Warren Harding’s fantastically corrupt cabinet. Smith and Attorney General Harry Daugherty had grown up together and were very closely linked throughout their lives. (They lived together in many instances.) Smith was known for giving advice on ladies’ fashion, and was particularly close to Florence (Flossie) Harding. Smith and other members of Harding’s political entourage often partied at a “little green house on K Street,” as it would be known. Remus paid Smith at least fifty thousand dollars for immunity from federal prosecution, and this figure would grow to two hundred fifty thousand in later tellings.
In 1923, Remus threw a party. He already had a reputation for throwing good parties. He was known to put hundred-dollar bills under the dinner plates of guests. At one party, each guest got a gold-engraved Elgin watch. But the party in 1923 was certainly one of the greatest in the history of parties. Remus bought the stock of a bankrupt Cincinnati jeweler and gave away the store to his guests: diamond rings for the women, tie clasps for the men. Imogene appeared in an elaborately staged swimming routine, wearing a revealing bathing suit. As the party was winding down, guests were invited to the lawn, where the women in attendance were presented with 1923 Pontiacs. Meanwhile, Remus, sober as always, had slipped away long before, retiring to his library to eat a bowl of ice cream and read a biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Later that same year, Smith either committed suicide or was murdered; shortly after that, Harding himself died of exhaustion, food poisoning, or murder, depending on who is telling the tale. (After Harding’s death, Flossie went home to the White House and started scouring Harding’s office, burning every file she could find in an attempt to protect his reputation.) Remus was suddenly without an ally in government, and within months he was sentenced to two years in the Atlanta penitentiary. He signed over power of attorney to his wife, so that she could continue to run his business interests while he was in prison.
By 1925, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, an assistant attorney general also known as the “First Lady of the Law,” had been hearing rumors of corruption in the Atlanta federal penitentiary. She sent in one of her favorite agents, Franklin Dodge, to investigate. Ironically, Remus had heard of Dodge from another inmate, who thought he might be favorable to Remus and could help him get out early. He wrote to Imogene and suggested that she contact him.
She did, and she was immediately taken with Dodge. Tall and handsome, he seemed nearly irresistible. She met with him at the Atlanta penitentiary while on a visit to Remus, and by one account the two were intimate in the prison, using the warden’s office as a love nest while her husband sat behind bars elsewhere in the building.
Remus was facing serious legal troubles, and it seemed that even if he could get out on parole, he might face deportation on a technicality, or prosecution on other minor charges. To make matters worse, Imogene was using her power of attorney to strip Remus of his assets. Dodge and Imogene began selling warehouse receipts, essentially profiting off of business arrangements that Dodge uncovered as a federal investigator. Imogene herself was under scrutiny at the time, regarding the illegal removal of barrels from the Jack Daniel warehouse. Press reports about Dodge put Willebrandt in a tricky position, and she forced him to resign, though he was never indicted or censured for his actions. When the dust settled, Dodge and Imogene had done their worst. They sold the Fleischmann distillery for eighty-one thousand dollars, and Imogene sent Remus one hundred dollars for his share; she then filed for divorce. In the following days, she and Dodge would begin systematically selling Remus’s distilleries to anyone who would buy, at any price. She also sold Remus’s collection of Washington and Lincoln memorabilia, including a rare signature of Washington valued at three thousand dollars.
Remus realized his best shot at permanent freedom was cooperation. As the Jack Daniel’s case went to trial, Remus entered witness protection and was placed in custody at the same hotel in Indianapolis where Imogene and Dodge were staying. Remus saw Dodge in the lobby and ran to confront him, but was restrained by an associate before he could attack.
At the start of Imogene’s trial, the government sensed that Remus’s testimony against her could be perceived as motivated by vengeance, and, deciding that the case had become too risky, called off the trial. This freeing of Imogene deprived Remus of his public vindication, though he took some solace in the fact that Congressman Fiorello La Guardia, fervently opposed to Prohibition, had begun an investigation of Dodge and Imogene as an example of the depravity associated with corrupt government officials and craven bootleggers.
Remus went off to serve a year in the state penitentiary on nuisance charges. When he got out, he returned to his Price Hill mansion to find the doors nailed shut and windows boarded up. He had to break into his own house, whereupon he found it stripped of its furnishings and artworks—even the chandeliers had been taken. He wept.
The day that Remus was to go to court to finalize his divorce with Imogene, he instructed his driver to go over to the hotel where she was staying. He saw Imogene and her daughter Ruth getting into a taxi. Imogene, noticing Remus, instructed her taxi driver to evade him. So began a car chase, with Remus and his driver forcing Imogene’s car to the curb at the edge of Eden Park. Remus got out of the car, but as he did, Imogene’s taxi drove over the curb and sped away, and the chase was back on. Finally, near the reservoir, Imogene got out of the taxi and ran up a hill. Remus chased her, shouting and swearing as he ran. Eventually he grabbed her by the wrist, pulled out his gun, and shot her in the stomach. Then he dropped her to the ground, still screaming, and ran into the woods. Ruth, who had witnessed the whole confrontation, comforted Imogene and got her to a hospital, but it was too late. Remus turned himself in to police later that day.
Remus opted to serve as his own counsel at trial. He had a tough road, as he had confessed to the killing in broad daylight in a public park. He recalled the case of Harry Thaw, who had killed the architect and “serial seducer of teenage girls” Stanford White in a fit of jealous rage. Thaw pled temporary insanity—successfully. Remus saw an angle.
The trial lasted for a month, in December 1927. The prosecution managed to bungle the case, trying to prove a conspiracy that Remus killed Imogene to prevent her from testifying to Prohibition crimes. Conspiracy was harder to prove than murder, and the prosecution, led by President William Howard Taft’s son, was not compelling. Though three expert medical doctors testified that Remus was sane, Remus turned his closing argument into an indictment of Prohibition. Referring to himself, Remus declared: “If this defendant goes down to oblivion, then it will be as a martyr to that awful mistake. Remus always sold good liquor. Never in the annals of criminology has one defendant been in nine different penal institutions for the violation of one law. This atrocious bit of legislation is making hypocrites of our judges, our prosecutors—of us all.”
It took the jury nineteen minutes to acquit. One juror said they could have finished it in ten minutes and viewed the verdict as a Christmas gift. Oh, Remus!—fond of pinochle and Limburger-cheese -and-raw-onion sandwiches; competitive swimmer, teetotaler, presidential history buff, and confirmed disliker of underwear—he lived the rest of his days in a quiet life in northern Kentucky. He died in 1952.
During his glory days, Remus frequently stayed at the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, while traveling for business. A young Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald also frequented the hotel, when on leave from military service from nearby Camp Taylor. (It is said that he had been thrown out for excessive enjoyment of alcohol.) In The Great Gatsby, his ingénue Daisy marries Tom Buchanan at the Muhlbach Hotel in Louisville, an obvious stand-in for the Seelbach. The possibility for coincidence has long fueled the speculation that Gatsby was based on Remus. Though the two were probably not in the hotel at the same time, a meeting wouldn’t be necessary. Remus was already in newspaper headlines associated with his bootlegging in 1922, about the time the young writer moved to Great Neck, New York, to write about a former pharmacist from Louisville in a shady business who throws lavish parties and whose great love derails him. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, two years before Remus killed his wife. One could argue that if Gatsby was based on Remus, maybe Remus was, in part, based on Gatsby.
CINCINNATI WAS ONCE the most fashionable cities in the United States, and its location, surrounded by fields of grain with proximity to railroads and the Ohio River, made it a hub of distilling until Prohibition.
1. HILLFOREST
Thomas Gaff’s mansion in Aurora, Indiana, now open as a National Historic Landmark, his distillery is now a microbrewery
2. SEAGRAM DISTILLERY
Now called MGP of Indiana, formerly owned by Samuel Bronfman’s Seagram
3. SQUIBB DISTILLERY
Started by Squibb, and run for many years by Lew Rosenstiel of Schenley, now abandoned
4. GREENDALE CEMETERY
Final resting place of William P. Squibb
5. WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON
President for a month, Indian-conflict general, former distiller, and later advocate for temperance
6. FLEISCHMANN DISTILLERY
Charles Louis Fleischmann opened a distillery here in Riverside but after Remus and others gutted its inventory during Prohibition
7. THOMAS GAFF
Disitiller, financier, steamboat builder, is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery
8. CHARLES FLEISCHMANN
Presided over an empire of distilleries, yeast, breakfast cereal, banks, and other enterprises; son Louis, mayor of Cincinnati, is also buried here
9. JOHN A. ROEBLING BRIDGE
Built in 1866, this historic suspension bridge was a precursor to the Brooklyn Bridge, also designed by Roebling, a French engineer
10. LEWIS ROSENSTIEL
Distiller and owner of many brands after Prohibition with his company Schenley
11. EDEN PARK GAZEBO
Location where George Remus shot and killed his wife, Imogene, in broad daylight
12. SIDNEY FRANK
Importer of Jägermeister, creator of Grey Goose, son-in-law of Lewis Rosenstiel
13. GEORGE REMUS
Lawyer, bootlegger, and murderer, is buried in Falmouth, Kentucky, about forty miles south of Cincinnati
