FULLY LOADED
A rich bootlegger driven crazy by his fickle wife shot her point-blank — and got away with murder
AT 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 6, 1927, a man walked into the central police station in Cincinnati and informed the officer on duty, “I just shot my wife, and I came to surrender.” The man identified himself as George Remus, but if the police knew they had one of America’s most notorious bootleggers in voluntary custody, they didn’t show it.
After his wife’s death was confirmed, they took Remus to Eden Park to look for the gun, with no success. Later that day, the prosecutor’s office sent a psychologist to Remus’ cell. He happily explained how his wife and her lover “broke up myhome, robbed me of my fortune and doublecrossed the federal government” and assured the doctor he wasn’t insane — but then added, “No man could be perfectly sane and commit the crime that I’ve done.”
It was a shocking fall for the once invincible Remus, as detailed in Karen’s Abbott’s “The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, The Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder that Shocked JazzAge America” (Crown), out now.
Remus was 6 when his family came to America from Germany in 1883. He was barely a teenager when he started working at an uncle’s pharmacy, eventually buying it for himself. Though he proved successful at selling bogus medicines, he grew tired of the pharmaceutical trade after a few years and entered law school. He did even better in his second career,
becoming one of Chicago’s most famous criminal defense attorneys.
By then, he’d married a woman named Lillian Klauf and had a daughter, Romola, but that wasn’t enough for Remus. In 1915, he became enamored with Imogene Holmes, a “dust girl” who cleaned his law offices. He offered to help her divorce her husband, then rented an apartment for her and her daughter, Ruth, just outside the city and began giving her $100 checks on a regular basis (worth more than $2,500 at today’s rates). Four years later, after the affair became public, Lillian filed for divorce.
In June 1920, once they were both free to remarry, George and Imogene eloped to Kentucky. By then, Remus was already deep into the scheme that would make him rich.
At the beginning of the year, the 18th Amendment was passed and Prohibition was formally underway, instituting a nationwide ban on the sale of “intoxicating liquors.” There were, however, exceptions, including one allowing people to buy and sell liquor for “medicinal purposes” with a prescription. Remus still had his pharmacist’s license — so he figured it was just a matter of getting hold of the booze.
He moved to Cincinnati, because the vast majority of pre-Prohibition bonded whiskey in the country was in storage nearby. Next, he started buying up the distilleries. After that, he became a silent owner in several drug companies to buy whiskey from his distilleries, providing legal cover for moving the barrels out of the warehouses. Finally, he put together a gang to rob his own shipments, so the
We felt that Remus had been greatly wronged, that he had suffered almost beyond human endurance. — A juror on the insanity verdict
liquor could be shifted to the black market.
Before long, Remus owned more than one-third of the United States’ liquor supply.
He’d bought a mansion for Imogene when they moved to Cincinnati, and after the renovations were complete, at the end of 1921, he threw an elaborate New Year’s Eve party. Every guest found a $1,000 bill under their dinner plate, the men all got stick pins and gold watches as gifts, and the women each received brandnew Pontiacs.
(Though it has never been confirmed, legend has it F. Scott Fitzgerald based the central figure of “The Great Gatsby” on Remus.)
THOUGH Remus had much of local law enforcement in his pocket, his bootlegging naturally attracted the attention of the federal government. Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who oversaw the prosecution of Prohibition-related crime, assigned Franklin Dodge, a young agent with the Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor to the FBI), to the case. Soon after, a remote farmhouse where Remus hid his stolen whiskey was raided, and agents found thousands of gallons of booze, a cache of firearms and ledgers naming many of Remus’ prominent customers.
It still took months to secure a bootlegging indictment against Remusand take the case to trial, but on the evening of May16, 1922, he was sentenced to two years at the federal prison in Atlanta. He was able to put it off for a year and a half with appeals but began serving his time in early 1924. Imogene visited frequently, often cooking meals for him or cleaning his cell.
Eventually Dodge came to Atlanta.
Remus told Dodge he’d be willing to name the federal officers he’d bribed in exchange for leniency. Dodge said he’d look into it.
The next time Imogene came to visit, Remus ordered her to flirt with Dodge, saying, “Play up to him, because he is the best chance to help me get out of jail.”
Imogene did more than that. Word soon filtered back to Remus that the two were fooling around and brazenly flaunting their relationship in public, while using the power of attorney Remus had granted Imogene to strip him of his fortune, raiding his bank accounts and safe deposit boxes and selling off his whiskey certificates. They even tipped off government officials that Remus had never become an American citizen in a failed effort to get him deported.
Dodge’s improprieties reached the point where Willebrandt forced him to resign. In August 1925, days before Remus’ scheduled release from Atlanta, Imogene filed for divorce.
When John Rogers, a reporter profiling Remus, confronted Dodge about his relationship with Imogene, the former agent insisted he was only helping her in her divorce case, then flexed his arm and dared Rogers to “feel this muscle,” insisting that if Remus came for them, “I could crush him like an egg.”
Remus still had to serve additional jail time back in Ohio. By the time he finally got out in the spring of 1927, Imogene had gutted their mansion, leaving behind a pair of Dodge’s shoes. Friends learned not to mention either Imogene or Dodge around Remus because he would fly into a violent rage. Desperate to recover his money and to “crack [Dodge’s] skull,” he chased the couple all over the country that summer, always just missing them.
THEN, on the October morning the couple was supposed to appear in divorce court, he waited with a driver outside Imogene’s hotel in Cincinnati. When she and her daughter left in a taxi, he had the driver follow them. A high-speed chase into Eden Park ensued. He was able to force the taxi to stop, but Imogene fled. He caught up with her and grabbed her.
“Daddy dear, I love you,” she begged. “Daddy dear, don’t do it!”
Unmoved, he pushed the revolver he’d been carrying into her body and shot her. She managed to run away and found someone to drive her to the hospital, where she died on the operating table. She was 39 years old.
Cincinnati police provided a multi-room jail suite for their celebrity detainee. From there, Remus began preparing for his trial. Although he had insisted when he surrendered to the police that he was sane, he soon declared that he’d been suffering from transitory insanity: “Remus’ brain exploded,” he told reporters. Prosecutors brought in three psychological experts to examine Remus and refute the claim, but a steady stream of defense witnesses attested that while “he was exceptionally intelligent and sane and bright and shrewd” most of the time, when it came to Imogene and Dodge, “he was crazy as a bedbug.” Furthermore, to the dismay of prosecutors, Remus and his attorney were able to discuss what Imogene had done, offering an explanation for why he’d gone mad.
After closing arguments, the judge instructed the jury they could only find Remus guilty (of either first- or second-degree murder or manslaughter) or not guilty by reason of insanity. It took just 19 minutes for them to return the latter verdict, with one juror later saying: “We felt that Remus had been greatly wronged, that he had suffered almost beyond human endurance.”
Prosecutors tried to keep Remus institutionalized, but it only took six months for him to convince the courts that he was sane now and should be released. “I want peace,” he told the appeals judges. “So far as Mr. Dodge or anyone else is concerned, bygones are bygones.”
Dodge wound up spending three years in prison, convicted of perjury in another bootlegging case. And for the remaining 25 years of George Remus’ life, he tried to track down the money and other assets Imogene had stolen from him, with little success.
He was 77 years old when he died in a boarding house of a cerebral hemorrhage.