-Caveat Lector- An excerpt from: The Ohio Gang Charles L. Mee, Jr.�1981 M. Evans and Company, Inc. 216 East 49th Street New York, New York 10017 ISBN 0-87131-340-5 218 pps � out-of-print/one edition --[1]-- I. The Handshake IN MIDWEEK, THE last week of May 1921, Jess Smith stood talking to another man just off Times Square, in the Astor Hotel lobby next to the entrance to the American Indian dining room with its crossed spears, peace pipe, snowshoes, horned headdress of a Tlingit chief, buffalo head, moose head. He was forty-eight years old, tall and pigeon-toed, with a florid complexion, heavy lips, black mustache, and loose, floppy cheeks, and he carried his head slightly down, accenting his double chin, as he peered out the tops of his round, owlish spectacles with shifty hazel eyes. He was partial to diamond rings, although his favorite ring was one set with two large rubles and a number of small diamonds. He liked to dress in matching combinations: gray hat, gray tie flecked with lavender, gray gloves, gray tweed suit, gray silk socks, and a gray handkerchief with handwoven gray and lavender threads around the edges. One of his most memorable ensembles was a white linen suit with a purple hatband, purple necktie, purple breast pocket handkerchief, and purple silk socks. When he talked, he sputtered, spraying any near him with saliva, so that those who had no kind feeling for him resorted to the obvious joke behind his back, "Here comes Jess. Get out your umbrella." Before he entered a room, he would fix his tie, pull his vest down smartly, set his cuffs just so, pat down his hair. He was a timid man; tears came to his eyes easily; and he was terribly frightened of firearms. He had been born in a small town, Washington Court House, Ohio, about thirty miles south of Columbus. His father, a clerk in a dry goods store, died when he was three years old, and his mother married again-both of her husbands were named Smith-to a man who was elected sheriff of Fayette County at a time when sheriffs legally pocketed their fees along with whatever else came their way. As a child, Jess was never short of cash. When he graduated from high school, a classmate described him this way: "He is a great sport, takes in all the shows, goes to all the hops, and is a ladies' man in general." After working as an apprentice for several years in a dry goods store, he was set up in his own business by his family, and he became known as the town's Beau Brummell, and no social occasion was felt to be complete-no dance, dinner, or christening- until Jess had arrived in his raiment. Women were said to be especially fond of him. He enjoyed fussing over the right choice of clothes for his clients, and he loved gossip. When he was in his mid-thirties, he fell in love with Roxy Stinson, the beautiful, tall, redheaded, and thrillingly volatile daughter of Mrs. Eldora Stinson, a widow who had moved to town to set up a conservatory of music on the floor above Jess's dry goods store. In time, Jess married Roxy, to the dismay of Jess's mother, who had to move out to a room in the Cherry Hotel on Main Street. After a year and a half-mostly, it was said, because of the trouble Jess's mother made, perhaps because Jess was impotent. Jess and Roxy were divorced. Jess's mother moved back in with her son; and Jess and Roxy resumed their friendship. In the lobby of the Astor Hotel, Jess turned to greet William Orr and another man who followed behind him. Orr, a slim, welldressed man in his late thirties, former midwestern newspaperman, former city editor of the New York Tribune, and former private secretary to Charles Whitman, the Republican governor of New York, had fallen on hard times when the Democrats took over New York with Al Smith. At the moment, he was between political appointments. Orr introduced Jess to John Gorini of the Alps Drug Company, a pharmaceutical establishment in Hell's Kitchen. With the recent passage of the Prohibition laws, drug companies were required to obtain special permits in order to buy alcohol for medicinal purposes. Gorini had applied for a permit to the Prohibition director in New York to buy five hundred cases of liquor. For some reason he had been turned down. Then a man unknown to him, a theatrical agent, had phoned to suggest he get in touch with Bill Orr. And so Bill Orr introduced Gorini to Jess Smith. They did not speak to one another in the hotel lobby. No money passed between them. They shook hands, Jess returned to his conversation, and the others went their way. ===== II. The Little Green House on K Street ACCORDING TO THE butler, Jess Smith called two or three times a week at the greenstone Victorian townhouse, with the little magnolia bush in the front yard, on K Street in Washington. When Smith arrived, he would go directly to a room where he could confer privately with Howard Mannington, a political acquaintance from Columbus, Ohio. Mannington, who had handled some of the smaller campaign funds during the recent presidential election, had arrived recently in Washington-seen off at the train station in Ohio by a friend who said, "You ought to be in a position to get pretty much anything through down there, if it's right." "Hell!" said Mannington, "If it's right, they won't need me." In his late forties, jowly, square-headed, heavy-lidded, thicklipped with a pug nose, Mannington dressed impeccably, if less noticeably than Jess Smith. He was partial to well-tailored suits, a walnut walking stick, and a tiepin of diamonds and sapphires. He had worked for a coal company and a power company, and had eased his way into statehouse politics in Columbus, serving for a time as an assistant secretary of state of Ohio, and as a member of the Ohio Railroad Commission. He was known as a smooth talker, convivial, and, in a general way, as a man "to see." He had no official appointment in Washington. When asked what he was doing in the capital, he would smile disarmingly and explain that he was there "to help the attorney general." >From time to time, liquor was delivered to the house twenty cases at a time in a Wells Fargo Express Company truck accompanied by a revenue man carrying a badge and a revolver, and the gossips told of wonderful parties, such as the one�no doubt imaginary�in which a woman was killed with the slivers of a shattered champagne glass thrown at her by another woman. It was�this much is true�at the little green house on K Street that the money that Gorini gave to an associate of Bill Orr's, who gave it to Bill Orr, was given to Howard Mannington who, in turn, gave Bill Orr the official permits to take back to his acquaintances in New York. The permits cost the liquor dealers $15 apiece. One permit freed one case (three gallons) of liquor. The $15 was for the permit alone. The liquor itself cost extra. Everyone took a cut of the $15: Orr, Mannington, even Gorini took a $1 kickback. >From Chicago, the money came in through H. P. Kraffmiller. From Marietta, Ohio, the money came through Fred Caskey. From elsewhere, the money came in through the constant stream of visitors to the House of Mirth on K Street. The $15 fee covered permits. If, in spite of having such permits, some business associates ran afoul of some naive local enforcement officer, separate fees might be negotiated for immunity from prosecution, change of venue, pardons, or paroles. The Prohibition commissioner, who worked out of the Treasury Department and who was responsible for the enforcement of Prohibition throughout the United States, was Roy Haynes, schoolteacher, editor, and one of the leading "dry" spokesmen in America. Haynes had been mayor of Hillsboro, Ohio, where the temperance movement had begun in 1873, and he was appointed commissioner at the insistence of Wayne B. Wheeler, the leader of the Anti-Saloon League. As it turned out, Haynes's reputation as a man of virtue and integrity did not survive life in Washington for more than a few days. Under his administration, his 1,500 enforcement agents, appointed according to the usages of political patronage, discovered-if they had not already known it-that they could make the equivalent of a year's salary in a month's bribes. Haynes's bureau became known as the nation's finest "training school for bootleggers," and Haynes himself provided Mannington with the permits that Mannington sold. Gorini's first payment for permits was $50,000. During the next three months, he forwarded another $150,000. He understood, Gorini said, that Orr took a cut, Mannington took a cut, and Jess Smith took a cut. He didn't know where the rest went. ===== Ill. The Safe in the Backyard GASTON B. MEANS was a large, jolly, ingratiating man, six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds, dimpled and balding, with a round face and a confidential manner, and a twinkle in his eyes that sometimes suggested a glimmer of madness. He worked for the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI, which was being run by William J. Burns of Columbus, Ohio. Means, as a Special Employee, earned seven dollars a day. On that salary, he supported- somehow- his family in a townhouse at 903 16th Street, N.W., with a staff of three servants and a chauffeur for his Cadillac. The house was, said Means, "peculiarly well located ... with a front and a rear entrance. A lane ran along back of the yard-wide enough to accommodate the parking of a car. My car stood there always�opposite the back gate. This lane or alley twisted a circuitous route that led within a short block to the Department of justice." Means spent most of his time in the basement, which was fitted up with six rooms and a bathroom. The front room was furnished with a mahogany rolltop desk and a swivel chair and two telephones, one confidential, unlisted. Next to the desk was a filing cabinet, to which only Means himself had the key. On the walls were a number of excellent maps, primarily of all the waterfronts of the United States. On one wall was an open fireplace with a white marble mantel-" convenient," Means said, "for burning papers." One room�intentionally dark and disquieting�was set aside as the waiting room; another room was reserved for files; a third, a large and comfortably furnished dining room, could accommodate twenty guests for dinner. The laundry room was equipped with white enamel washtubs- "ideal," said Means, "for ice-packed champagne bottles and liquors and wines." The kitchen was well appointed, with both electric and gas stoves as well as a wood stove. The backyard, however, was the essential point of interest for Means. "We had a back gate that was as strong as the door of a bank vault. Entering this gate (with special key), one was then inside a steel cage-confronted by another gate, equally as strong and opened only by another special key. All around the yard, extending several feet inside the fence-and above the fence some thirty feet, was placed double iron net work, of fine mesh, but thick and strong as the grating protecting a bank. . . . In summer this high iron grating was camouflaged with vines." Means spent a good deal of time in the backyard- arranging flowerbeds around the fence, and digging a square hole, several feet wide, in the center of the yard. "After getting down a couple of feet or so, I had a wooden platform built that fitted into this placewith an open space in the center. Then, I dug down and through that center for twenty feet-and I lowered into this twenty-foot-deep hole a terra-cotta pipe about eight inches in diameter. "That was our bank-our safe deposit vault.... I had a small steel box, which I kept lowered into this pipe by a strong rope." In that safe, Means kept the money that Jess Smith brought to him. "Jess Smith," Means said, "always kept detailed accounts of every transaction. He did this for his own protection and from habits of a lifetime. He had been a merchant. His accounts had to balance every Saturday night. Jess never took a nickel that did not belong to him." At times, Means had as little as $50,000 in the backyard. At one time, he said, he had as much as $500,000 in the backyard. Altogether, he figured about seven million dollars passed through his hands. From time to time, of course, Jess would make a withdrawal and take some of the money home with him to H Street, to the house where he lived with the attorney general of the United States. pps. 23-31 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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