True-crime ‘Eden Park’ chronicles Cincinnati’s Bootleg King
If you crossed the thorough, historical fact-finding of Jill Lepore with the poison-pen tea spillage of Jackie Collins, you would most likely end up with Karen Abbott.
The journalist and author has made it her thing to go back in time and put a focus on women who, though they may not be known as beacons of feminist trailblazing, knew who they were and did what they did their own damn way. Her first three books — “Sin in the Second City,” the Gypsy Rose Lee bio “American Rose” and the titilating Civil War tome “Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy” — were basically about defiant dames who often used sex as both a weapon and a marketing tool.
Her latest, “The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, The Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America” is less about you-go-girl individuality and more about a very crazy moment in American history. This rise and fall of a bootlegging king may seem like a departure for Abbott. But considering how it’s set in an era of early-20thcentury, high-society rebelliousness, filled with sex, intrigue, ambition and a whole lotta gossip, this is right in Abbott’s wheelhouse.
The bootlegger is George Remus, a German immigrant and successful Chicago attorney who decides to literally kick all that law stuff to the curb and become an illegal liquor magnate. Thanks to a loophole in the Volstead Act (aka the act that established Prohibition in the U.S.), he went on to buy distilleries and pharmacies so he could sell bonded liquor “for medicinal purposes.” Although he was a lifelong teetotaler, Remus wasn’t averse to committing illegal acts. After all, this is a man who ran a pharmacy when he was a teen and sold a lot of questionable products. (He made sure no one complained about it; when a man did complain of a liniment burning his chest, Remus pulled him outside and slapped the taste out of his mouth.)
Eventually, Remus — who owned 35 percent of all the liquor in the country within a year — moved to Cincinnati, where he became the toast of the town. He would throw lavish parties at his mansion, including a New Year’s Eve bash where $1,000 bills were stashed under guests’ dinner plates. Now, if Remus sounds like the kind of real-life character that would populate that HBO bootlegging period-piece drama “Boardwalk Empire,” keep in mind that Remus was a character on that show for a couple of seasons. (That’s where Abbott learned about him.)
He also had a ride-or-die chick by his side — or so he thought. He married divorced mom Imogene Holmes in 1920 and made her a crucial member (he referred to her as “his Prime Minister”) of his empire, especially once Remus began doing jail time for violating the Volstead Act. Though many Prohibition agents were out to take Remus down, the one who truly did the most damage was Franklin Dodge, and that’s mostly because he began an affair with Imogene that made Remus literally lose his mind.
Unlike Abbott’s previous books, “Ghosts” isn’t a story with flawed but still sympathetic heroes. The main people involved aren’t prizes: Remus is basically a self-centered, possibly sociopathic brute who didn’t mind putting hands on his wife or others if he didn’t like what they had to say, while his wife is mostly characterized as a dangerously deceptive figure and her lover is simply a petty, corrupt flimflam man. The closest thing to somebody you can root for is Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the first female U.S. assistant attorney general (and Remus archnemesis), who pretty
much spent the ’20s fighting both Prohibition and rampant, condescending sexism.
Though Abbott claimed she had a fun time researching this subject (she reportedly had 85,000 pages of notes when she was done), I was kind of put off by why this recorder of historical girl-power would devote more than 300 pages — dispensing scenes and situations as she usually does, with all the amusingly unsubtle, can-youbelieve-this-honey raciness of a wineguzzling, society gal dishing the latest dirt at a brunchy get-together — to such a sordid, unrepentant tale.
It wasn’t until I got to the bat-guanocrazy last half, where the former attorney ends up representing himself in a circus of a murder trial, that I got the sense that this is Abbott spinning a tale that both displays her knack for chronicling fact-based, throwback tawdriness and gives our true-crime-obsessed culture something it can snack on.
We live in a time when true-crime podcasts are all the rage and “Making a Murderer” is always ready to watch on Netflix. The fanciful “Ghosts” may not be as completely morbid and grimy as some of your more downand-dirty, criminal accounts, butu it’s still filled with money, power, greed, murder, women you shouldn’t trust and the men who foolishly do anyway. Basically, it’s a story as American as apple pie.
‘The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, The Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America’ By Karen Abbott Crown, 432 pages, $28