GEORGE REMUS

“The King of the Bootleggers”

Part 1: Origins

A German child in an American drugstore

George Remus was born in Germany in the mid-1870s — sources give conflicting dates of November 1876 and November 1878, in or near Landsberg, to Frank and Marie Remus. The family emigrated, arriving in the United States on June 15, 1882, departing from Norway aboard a ship rendered as the “Fifington,” and after brief stops in Maryland and Wisconsin they settled in Chicago by 1885.

The defining fact of Remus’s childhood was that his father could not work — illness or injury left the household dependent on the boy. By age 14, George was supporting the family at his uncle’s pharmacy. This is the origin of the two traits that would define his entire life: an early, ferocious work ethic, and an intimacy with chemistry, distillation, and the medicinal uses of alcohol that would later make him the most dangerous man in Prohibition America. He understood, before almost anyone, that whiskey was simultaneously a vice and a federally sanctioned medicine — and that the boundary between the two was a paperwork problem.

He was good at the work. He graduated from the Chicago College of Pharmacy at 19, became a certified pharmacist, and bought his first drugstore at 21. He married Lillian Klauff on July 10, 1899 (some accounts give July 20, 1899), after what is described as a quick courtship. Within five years he had bought a second store.

Then, characteristically, he got bored. The pharmacy hours were long and the ceiling was low. By about age 24 he had decided to become a lawyer — and he did it the hard way, working and studying at once.

Reinventing himself as a criminal lawyer

Remus attended the Illinois College of Law (later merged into DePaul University College of Law) and was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1904. He specialized in criminal defense — especially murder — and became locally famous. The case that made his name was the highly publicized William Cheney Ellis murder case in 1914, in which Remus pioneered what he called the “transitory insanity” defense, the direct ancestor of the modern “temporary insanity” plea.

This is the single most important irony in the entire Remus story: the murder defense that would one day save George Remus from the electric chair was invented by George Remus himself, thirteen years before he needed it. He did not stumble into temporary insanity in 1927. He authored it in 1914.

By his own account — and the figure is repeated everywhere but hard to verify — Remus was earning around $500,000 a year by 1920 (roughly $8 million in modern terms). He was a courtroom showman, theatrical, vain, given to referring to himself in the third person (“Remus did this; Remus believes that”), a verbal tic that real witnesses and later writers found unforgettable.

The day the law became an opportunity

The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in January 1919; the Volstead Act — drafted by the Anti-Saloon League’s Wayne Wheeler and named for House Judiciary chairman Andrew Volstead — was passed to enforce it, and Prohibition began on January 17, 1920.

Remus, watching from the defense table, noticed something his colleagues missed. His criminal clients — the bootleggers he was defending — were getting rich faster than he was, and they were stupid. “I was impressed by the rapidity with which those men, without any brains at all, were making fabulous sums of money,” he is widely quoted as saying.

So Remus did what no one else thought to do: he read the law. All of it. He memorized the Volstead Act and went looking not for ways around it but for the doors it had deliberately left open. He found one. The Act permitted alcohol for medicinal purposes, sold by prescription through licensed pharmacies, and it permitted the existence of “bonded” whiskey — liquor distilled before Prohibition and warehoused under federal seal, which could legally be withdrawn under government permit for medicinal sale.

The loophole was elegant and total: if you owned the distillery, owned the pharmacy, and held the federal withdrawal permits, you could legally move enormous quantities of whiskey out of bonded warehouses — and then simply steal it from yourself.

Cincinnati, and Imogene

Remus relocated to Cincinnati, Ohio, for a cold, strategic reason: roughly 80 percent of America’s bonded whiskey lay within a 300-mile radius of the city. He was moving to the supply.

His personal life moved with him. He had taken on a legal secretary, Augusta Imogene Holmes (née Brown), a young divorcée with a daughter named Ruth. The affair ended Remus’s marriage to Lillian Klauff in 1920, and Remus and Imogene married in Newport, Kentucky, in June 1920. Imogene is the second protagonist of this story — not a footnote. She would hold his power of attorney, run his empire while he was imprisoned, take a federal agent as her lover, strip her husband to (allegedly) his last hundred dollars, and die for it.

A notable detail: Remus’s daughter from the first marriage, Romola Remus (1900–1987), had been a child film star — she played Dorothy Gale in L. Frank Baum’s 1908 The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, working directly with Baum. It is a strange and useful grace note: the bootleg king’s daughter was, briefly, the first Dorothy in the history of Oz on film. Romola stood by her father through the murder trial.

Part 2: The Operation at Scale

The scheme, mechanically

The Remus machine had four moving parts, and its genius was that each part was, on paper, legal:

Acquire the distilleries and the permits. Remus bought up whiskey manufacturers across the Cincinnati region — “most of” them, by most accounts — and with them the federal permits to withdraw bonded whiskey for “medicinal” sale. He is credited with owning many of America’s most famous distilleries, including the Fleischmann Distillery. Within two years, sources claim, he had “bought and sold a seventh of the bonded liquor in America.”
Acquire the drug companies/pharmacies. These were the legal destination for the whiskey — the medicinal outlet that justified the withdrawal permits.
Move the whiskey legally out of the warehouse — then hijack it. This was the masterstroke. Remus’s own employees would “hijack” his own liquor trucks in transit, after the whiskey had been legally withdrawn for medicinal sale, so the product vanished from the legitimate paper trail and reappeared on the black market at a vastly higher price. The robberies were staged. The thieves worked for the victim. The risk was thus laundered: every step was defensible in isolation, and the actual crime — diversion to the illegal market — happened in the gap between two legal events.
Run a private army to protect it all. In less than three years, with his “trusted number-two man George Conners,” Remus is said to have made $40 million and employed about 3,000 people.

“Death Valley Farm”

The physical heart of the operation was a fortified distillery known as the “Death Valley Farm,” in Westwood, Cincinnati, which Remus purchased from a man named George Gehrum. The detail is vivid: the outside world believed it was reachable only by dirt road; the actual distillery sat at 2656 Queen City Avenue; alcohol was distilled in the attic and lowered by dumbwaiter; and a trap door in the basement opened onto a tunnel roughly 50 to 100 feet long and about 6 feet underground. It was a respectable-looking farmhouse hiding a vertical bootleg factory and an escape tunnel.

Newport, Kentucky, across the river, and other small towns became “drinking towns” where gamblers opened casinos to serve the patrons — the wet satellite economy the empire generated.

Bribery, the Ohio Gang, and the price of protection

An operation this large could not survive on cleverness alone; it survived on protection money paid into a corrupt federal apparatus. The Harding administration’s Justice Department was riddled with what became known as the “Ohio Gang” — the cluster of politicians and operators around President Warren G. Harding, several of whom became enmeshed in financial scandals (Teapot Dome, and “apparent malfeasance at the U.S. Department of Justice, some of which ended in prison terms and a suicide”).

The “suicide” was Jess Smith, the bagman and intimate of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, found dead in 1923 — a death entwined in the era’s pay-for-protection bootlegging graft. What is firmly established by the period’s politics is the environment: a Justice Department whose enforcement of Prohibition was for sale, presided over by men some of whom went to prison and one of whom died by his own hand.

Crucially, this protection failed Remus. He paid, and he was still prosecuted — a point that is the seed of his later rage and paranoia. The contrast with the incorruptible side of the same government is sharp: Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the U.S. Assistant Attorney General from 1921 to 1929 — “the First Lady of Law,” nicknamed “Prohibition Portia” — handled Volstead Act prosecutions and federal prisons. She is the on-the-level counterweight to the Ohio Gang’s rot.

The wealth, the Marble Palace, and the parties

Remus did not hide his money — he wore it. He built a Cincinnati mansion nicknamed the “Marble Palace,” complete with an indoor pool, and threw parties that became legend:

A New Year’s Eve party (December 31, 1922) for one hundred couples drawn from the region’s most prestigious families. As parting gifts, Remus gave each man a diamond stickpin and each man’s wife a brand-new automobile.
A June 1923 party — thrown even as his legal troubles were mounting — at which he reportedly gave each of the fifty female guests a new car.
A 1923 birthday party for Imogene at which she appeared in a daring bathing suit with aquatic dancers, serenaded by a fifteen-piece orchestra.

He was also, the record notes, a “gracious host” whom local children saw as a fatherly figure; some played on his estate. The juxtaposition — a man giving away fleets of cars and indulging neighborhood children while running staged hijackings and bribing the Justice Department — is the heart of the character. He genuinely seems to have wanted to be loved, and to have believed his wealth made him untouchable and good.

Scale, in summary

The shape of the Remus empire is solid history: he industrialized a legal loophole into the dominant whiskey-diversion operation of early Prohibition, centered on Cincinnati’s bonded-whiskey concentration, fortified at Death Valley Farm, protected by bribery, and displayed in conspicuous, almost compulsive generosity. The numbers ($40M, 3,000 men, “a seventh of America’s bonded liquor,” $500K legal income) are the part to handle with care: they originate substantially in Remus’s own legend and contemporary sensational press, and are best treated as the claims of the era.

Part 3: The Unraveling

Prosecution and Atlanta

Remus’s faith that his legal knowledge made him bulletproof collapsed in 1925. He was indicted for thousands of Volstead Act violations, and a jury convicted him in under two hours. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison and served his time in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. The man who had built his fortune on the law’s loopholes discovered that the law could close them.

Franklin Dodge — the agent in the next cell

In Atlanta, Remus met an inmate he came to trust and, fatally, confided in. He told this man that his wife, Imogene, held control of his money. The “inmate” was not an inmate at all. He was Franklin L. Dodge, Jr. (1891–1968), an undercover Bureau of Investigation agent (the forerunner of the FBI).

Dodge was no minor functionary. He was a celebrated agent: he had cracked the “Savannah Four,” a bootlegging ring led by Willie Haar, and was conducting an undercover investigation of Albert Sartain, the corrupt warden of the Atlanta Federal Prison — an investigation that got Sartain removed and convicted. He was inside that prison doing legitimate, dangerous work. Then he met Remus, learned where the money was, and made the decision that turned this from a crime story into a tragedy.

The affair and the looting

Dodge resigned from the Bureau and began an affair with Imogene Remus, who held her husband’s power of attorney over his vast holdings. Together, Dodge and Imogene began liquidating Remus’s assets and hiding as much of the money as possible. They sold the Fleischmann Distillery. By the accounts, Imogene left her imprisoned husband only $100 of the multimillion-dollar empire he had built.

This is no longer purely a tabloid claim, and that matters for the case’s credibility: the controversy became a matter of public record when Congressman Fiorello La Guardia — the fierce anti-Prohibition voice from New York — read records of these transactions onto the floor of Congress in March 1926, citing them as an example of how bootlegging profits were corrupting law enforcement. The looting of George Remus by a former federal agent was debated in the United States Congress. That is a documented, datable fact.

Escalation — deportation, and a contract on his life

Imogene and Dodge did not stop at money. They attempted to have Remus deported (he was, after all, German-born). When that failed, they allegedly paid a hitman $15,000 to murder him. The would-be assassin backed out — by the account, he feared being double-crossed, and instead warned Remus of the plot.

Picture Remus’s state of mind: in prison, betrayed by the agent who befriended him, stripped of an empire, threatened with deportation, and informed by a hired killer that his own wife had paid to have him murdered. By the time he walked out of Atlanta, he was a man assembled entirely from grievance.

The divorce

In late 1927, Imogene filed for divorce. The proceedings were the trigger.

Part 4: The Aftermath

Eden Park, October 6, 1927

On the morning of October 6, 1927 — the day a final hearing in the divorce was to occur — Remus, riding with his driver, had the car chase the taxicab carrying Imogene and her daughter Ruth through Cincinnati’s Eden Park. Remus’s car forced the cab off the road. Remus jumped out and shot Imogene in the abdomen in front of the park’s Spring House Gazebo, in front of horrified onlookers. The wound was fatal.

The setting was a beautiful public park, a morning crowd, a chased taxi, a daughter in the car, and a gazebo by a reflecting pool.

The trial of the year

The murder trial ran for about a month and made national headlines. The cast:

Prosecutor: Charles Phelps Taft II, age 30 — son of Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft and brother of future Senator Robert A. Taft. He had lost his last big case against another bootlegger but was seen as a rising star (he would later become Mayor of Cincinnati, “Mr. Cincinnati”).
Defense: Remus represented himself, assisted by attorney Charles Elston. The bootleg king, the famous criminal lawyer, stood as his own counsel in his own murder trial.
For the defendant, personally: his first wife Lillian and daughter Romola stayed by him.
Against him: his stepdaughter, Ruth, testified against him and depicted Remus as an abusive husband.

Remus’s strategy was the one he had invented in 1914: he pleaded transitory/temporary insanity, building the defense around his anguish at Imogene and Dodge’s betrayal — making the dead woman and the former federal agent the villains of his own murder trial. He put Prohibition, corruption, and adultery on trial instead of himself.

It worked, devastatingly. The jury deliberated only nineteen minutes before acquitting him. Some accounts of the trial record jurors essentially endorsing the killing as a husband’s understandable response — a measure of how completely Remus had reframed the case.

The asylum paradox

The aftermath produced a genuine legal absurdity. Because the jury found Remus insane, the State of Ohio committed him to an asylum (at Lima). But the prosecution had already argued — backed by three well-known psychiatrists — that Remus was sane and therefore triable for murder. Their own prior position destroyed their ability to keep him locked up. Remus was released from the asylum after only about seven months. He had beaten the state twice with the same contradiction.

Decline and death

The empire was gone, the wife was dead, and the legend deflated into a long, quiet anticlimax. After release from the Lima institution, Remus served for about six years as an informal tutor to the Cincinnati lawyer William Foster Hopkins. He moved across the Ohio River to Covington, Kentucky, where he lived modestly for some twenty years “without incident.” He married a third and final time, to his longtime secretary Blanche Watson, and ran a small contracting firm, Washington Contracting, until a stroke in August 1950. He spent his last two years in a boarding house and died on January 20, 1952.

Franklin Dodge, the agent who had taken his money and his wife, suffered no comparable fall: out of the public eye, Dodge lived the rest of his life in Michigan, worked for the Michigan Liquor Control Commission after Prohibition ended, eventually married, and died in 1968, buried in Lansing. The injustice — the bootlegger ruined, the corrupt agent comfortable — is itself a theme.

Legacy

George Remus is the archetype of the Prohibition-era figure who weaponized the law itself, distinct from the gunmen (Capone, et al.) who simply broke it. His story has been told most fully in Karen Abbott / Abbott Kahler’s The Ghosts of Eden Park (2019), William A. Cook’s King of the Bootleggers (2008), and Bob Batchelor’s The Bourbon King (2019). He survives in popular memory as the (unproven) “real Gatsby,” as a fixture of Cincinnati lore, and — fittingly — his name now adorns a real revived bourbon brand, “George Remus Bourbon.”