-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]-- XXII. Corruption "MY DEAR JOHN," Charles Hayden, of Hayden, Stone & Company of Boston, wrote to Secretary of War John Weeks: Ordinarily I would hate to bring these matters to your personal attention, but the way the general situation has been developing in the last six months 'it seems to me that everything that can be done by co-operation between bankers and the Government to inspire confidence in a legitimate way should be done, and that is why I feel a perfectly clear conscience in giving you this little additional bother. The bother of which Hayden spoke was a claim that the government had against the Wright-Martin Aircraft Company, of which Hayden happened to be a director, for receiving $5,267,467.75 more than it should have during the war in payment for Hispano-Suiza airplane motors. Weeks, the former Bostonian, replied: My Dear Hayden: In view of the steps that have already been taken, I am convinced that the proper procedure is for the company to come in before the Air Service section and make their showing. Whatever decision may be reached by the Air Service section you should understand is not conclusive. Not only is the approval of a higher officer required, but even if that approval is obtained, there is a further appeal to myself. pps. 135-136 ===== XXIII. Bribery and Corruption ON THE FOURTH of July 1921, Ned McLean gave a party at his house on I Street for President and Mrs. Harding, Secretary of State Hughes, Daugherty, several ambassadors, and a crowd of senators and representatives. The I Street house was a grand pile, occupying half a block, with a ballroom that could accommodate several dining tables, each a hundred feet long, and with a living room that, at Christmastime, had ample space for a three-story-high Christmas tree. Barberini tapestries decorated the walls of the ballroom, and Evalyn Walsh McLean liked to have masses of flowers about the house. The high point of the party was the screening of a movie that had been rushed to Washington by one of Ned's functionaries, Jap Muma�a movie of the prize fight that had been held two days before at Boyle's Thirty Acres in New Jersey between Jack Dempsey, then the heavyweight champion of the world, and the French contender Georges Carpentier. Dempsey won by a knockout, and the guests were wonderfully enthusiastic about the film. In the chitchat that followed, someone mentioned that it was too bad that people all over the United States could not see the movie. In fact, it had been illegal for McLean to have the film. Almost a dozen years before, when the black fighter Jack Johnson beat the white fighter Jim Jeffries, a law was passed to prohibit the transportation of fight films across state lines�to prevent the "humiliating spectacle of a white man beaten by a negro" from getting around. Daugherty, always quick to spot a loophole, remarked that the law only prohibited the transportation of films; it did not prohibit their exhibition once they had gotten across the state lines. He told Jap Muma that Muma should get hold of an old friend of Daugherty's from Ohio, Alfred Urion, "one of the greatest little men you ever met in your life." Muma and Urion ought to be able to work something out, Daugherty thought, and "if you put this across," he said to Muma, "you ought to get a big cut�not less than fifty per cent." The idea Urion and Muma worked out was simple. Urion came up with the names of some lawyer friends in the states where the film could be shown for a good profit. These men would take the rap for bringing the film across state lines. It would be fixed that each of these men would then be fined the lowest possible amount, and then the movies could be shown. They would be shown first, for free, to an American Legion audience, or some war veterans' organization. Then, it would be arranged to have some newspaper reporters alerted so that they could raise a stink in their papers against the ban on the film. Then the film would be released. In New York, it was arranged to show the film first at a hospital for disabled soldiers on Staten Island. (William Orr was able to lend a hand for the arrangements in New York, for which he took a 20 percent cut.) The United States attorney in New York then prosecuted the makers of the film and fined them $1,000 each. Newspapers printed editorials in favor of showing the movie (Orr's old contacts with newsmen helped in this). Then the movie was released. It turned a quick profit in New York of $75,000, and went from there to twenty-one states, making a profit, altogether, of about a million dollars. pps.138-140 ===== XXIV. Jess Smith Returns to Washington Court House ONCE EVERY TWO or three weeks, Jess Smith would board the train with his two heavy black leather suitcases for the long trip back to Washington Court House. He carried no money in his suitcases: they were filled with his clothes and bottles of bootleg liquor for his personal use. He carried the money, and sometimes stocks or bonds, in a money belt around his waist, sometimes as much as $75,000 in thousand dollar bills. Roxy waited for him faithfully in Washington Court House, and whenever he hit town, he had a bottle of whiskey for her and some hundred dollar bills or some five hundred dollar bills. Sometimes he gave her some shares of stock, some White Motors stock, or some Beaman G. Dawes Pure Oil Company stock; sometimes he gave her candy or flowers, and they often went on long rides together just as though they were courting. The gossips of Washington Court House did not lack for subject matter when it came to discussing the independent ways of Roxy Stinson-Smith-Stinson, and, among other things, they marveled at the utter faithfulness of Jess and Roxy toward one another. Jess told Roxy of "the doings in Washington," as she called them, and especially of stories about his friend Harry Daugherty. Harry was "the first thing we talked about," Roxy said, "and the last thing.... Jess Smith was a great admirer of Harry Daugherty all his life long. I think he was his ideal." Jess took the money along to Mally Daugherty, Harry's brother, who had become something of a community leader in Washington Court House. He was a tall, strongly built man, with enormous vitality, and an ability to work long hours that impressed all his fellow townspeople. He never left Washington Court House; he married a girl from the town; and he enjoyed the confidence of his neighbors. He often pitched into community enterprises, taking on the duties of chairman of one civic cause or another. During the war, he had been chairman of the Fayette County War Chest and had whooped it up with gusto, never failing to meet the county's quota for Liberty Bonds-and naturally feeling appreciative when the local draft board found it did not need to call his son to active service. Jess put the money in Mally's bank. As Jess squired Roxy around the hometown, he loved to tell her about where he had been with "Warren" (he dropped the president's first name every chance he got, in New York, in Washington, in Washington Court House, even with Roxy), and what sort of deals were going on. He told her how he had been asked to join the Metropolitan Club in Washington, how he was listed in the Social Register now, how he had an office right in the justice Department, how senators called him "Mister," how people came to him begging favors, how he and Harry kept a ticker-tape machine right there in the justice Department, and how Jess would follow the market, take the latest quotations into Harry's office, where they would decide to put some money into one stock or another. As one of the members of the Ohio gang is rumored to have grumbled, "She knows enough to hang us all." Jess loved the excitement of Washington. He would stand, Mark Sullivan said, "on the curb of what was then one of the great crossroads of Washington, the corner of Fifteenth and H streets, location of the old Shoreham Hotel; two blocks to the south the White House, with Harding in it; one block to the north the Department of justice, with Harry Daugherty presiding. Smith would stand on the Shoreham corner, his head up, his features eager and happy, his coat lapels spread back, his thumbs in the armholes of his vest. To an acquaintance across the street he would call, 'Hey there, come on over.' Always his greeting was the same, 'What d'you know?' " Roxy could tell for herself that Harry had come to depend on Jess. If Jess lingered too long in Washington Court House, Harry would begin to send telegrams asking him to come back, saying that he missed Jess and needed him. Harry had trouble sleeping without Jess in the same room-just as Jess had trouble sleeping unless someone were in the same room with him. Roxy sometimes resented having Jess's attention taken from her, but she understood. "They lived together," she said. "They were intimate friends, and Jess adored him.... He lived for him, he loved him. He had not been in Washington more than three or four months until he said, 'I am not made for this. This intrigue is getting me crazy. If I could just come home, but I am in now and I have to stand by Harry."' Just what Jess was "in" he sometimes did not exactly say. He could be evasive, or barely suggestive, at times. Sometimes he seemed nervous, even somewhat frightened, by the deals he was in, but it was too late to turn back, even if he had brought himself to think about turning back. Whatever he was in, he was in over his head. On one of Jess's visits to Ohio, in the lobby of the Hotel Deschler, he paused to say hello to George Remus, a Cincinnati pharmacist who was known as "the King of the Bootleggers." pps. 141-144 ===== XXV. The King of the Bootleggers GEORGE REMUS HAD grown up on the northwest side of Chicago where, when his father was taken ill, he went to work at the age of fourteen for an uncle who owned a drugstore. George was a stocky, muscular boy, a fast talker who spoke with a trace of a German accent and who tended to use words that were a little longer than he could comfortably pronounce or smoothly work into his sentences. He was a bright boy, though, and within five years he had managed to buy his uncle's drugstore. During the next five years he bought a second drugstore, acquired a pharmacist's license, an optometrist's certificate, had an affair with a customer, married her, had a child with her, attended night school, and became a lawyer. By 1920, he was making $50,000 a year as a criminal lawyer, having an affair with a young divorcee named Imogene who worked in his office, and looking around for something else to do. Several of his clients, taking advantage of the laws that had been passed recently in Congress, were bootleggers, and Remus figured that if they were smart enough to make small fortunes, then he was smart enough to make a big fortune. Nor did Remus have any moral objections to alcohol or to getting around a law he considered foolish, although he was himself a teetotaler. Remus understood the law, and he understood the drugstore business; so he understood at once how to obey the law to the letter in buying and selling liquor for medicinal purposes. He also saw that a number of slow-witted distillery owners did not understand how to get around the Prohibition laws, and that he could buy their distilleries at bargain prices. He would then be both seller and buyer. "He had calculated," according to Thomas Coffey, "that 80 percent of the bonded whiskey in the United States was stored in government-controlled warehouses within three hundred miles" of Cincinnati. And so he divorced his wife, married Imogene, and moved with Imogene and her daughter by a previous marriage to Cincinnati. He was wild about Imogene, and she was in love with him. They worked together in their new business, and they made money faster than they could properly keep track of it. Remus had saved up $100,000, and he put $10,000 down on a distillery and deposited the rest in the Lincoln National Bank, to impress the bankers with his resources. Within four months, with bank financing, he was in the drug business, had formed a few corporations to receive the liquor his distilleries would sell; had bought a ten-acre estate, was negotiating for the purchase of several more distilleries, and had invited forty-four men to his office one day�including politicians, Prohibition agents, and federal marshals�and had given each of them an average of $1,000 as an introduction to his friendship. By the end of the year, he owned stills in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. He had hundreds of employees, still workers, truck drivers, armed guards for his trucks, people to manage a bottling works and storage facility at Death Valley Farm, northwest of Cincinnati. He was in a business whose bookkeeping was necessarily so sketchy that he had to keep track of the operation in his head, and the business was expanding so rapidly that he could only estimate the total volume. In his first year, he moved perhaps three-quarters of a million gallons of liquor. Altogether, he was embarked on an enterprise that would gross something on the order of $50 million. He bought some of his permits from Jess Smith, meeting Jess from time to time�at the Deschler Hotel in Columbus, at the Commodore or the Plaza in New York, at the Claypool in Indianapolis. He could not remember just how many permits he got from Jess, but he figured Jess must have given him permits for at least 250,000 cases, paid for on a sliding scale of $1.50 to $2.50 per case, roughly $500,000 at a minimum. Remus made only one mistake. Impatient with all the government red tape, he went ahead and released some liquor from his warehouses without benefit of permits. Realizing that he was risking a different sort of trouble for this activity, and for general purposes of protection, he made another deal with Jess Smithentirely apart from his payments for permits. For occasional payments of $50,000, which added up over a period of time to an additional $250,000 or $300,000, Remus bought immunity from prosecution. He might be bothered by a naive Prohibition agent from time to time, but he need not worry. If a charge led to an indictment, the fix was in. Remus hadn't a worry in the world. pps. 145-147 --[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! 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