Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (16 page)

Because only a small proportion of the cases removed from the distilleries ended up as medicinal whiskey, Remus needed a halfway house where the whiskey in the multigallon drums and barrels could be discreetly repackaged and bottled. Remus and Conners first went into partnership with “John Jew” Marcus, a member of the Cincinnati underworld, but this did not last. Remus wanted to preserve his respectable image, and suspected Marcus of cheating him. It was Conners who came across an isolated farmhouse in Westwood, a rural Cincinnati suburb, enabling Remus to move into the really big time, handling huge quantities of liquor while keeping everything under his personal control.

Death Valley Farm, as it was renamed, was off the beaten track, accessible by a single dirt road and virtually impossible to find unless one knew how to get there.
²
Its owner, George Dater, a bachelor, had tried his hand at making homemade wine, but nobody would buy it. Dater’s assistant, hired by Remus as caretaker, was George Gehrum, “a little, rat-faced, shifty-eyed individual
³
who lived in perpetual fear of his wife, a young woman of vigorous propensities and a taste for strong drink.” She had four unruly children and ran the farm.

At first Conners paid Gehrum $100 a week to store liquor there. But when the cases arrived, Gehrum panicked, and told him to clear out and take his whiskey with him. Eventually, Remus made him a rental offer he couldn’t refuse. The farm was entirely remodeled. Several large cellars were built, housing storage rooms and an underground bottling plant. A block and tackle system was installed to lower barrels into the cellars. Two men were hired full-time, whose sole job was to break up the wooden cases containing the three-gallon jars that came from the distilleries.

Remus turned Death Valley Farm into a fortified enclave. He installed floodlights and hired a permanent contingent of armed men to guard it. Conners found a mobile polling booth on wheels and turned it into a sentry box at the gate entrance, staffed twenty-four hours a day by two armed men. They had a buzzer to activate a warning signal in the main building whenever anyone approached the farm. Another buzzer turned on the floodlights installed on the main building’s second floor, illuminating the entire area.

These security precautions were essential. To bona fide bootleggers such as Remus and Conners, the real enemy was not the army of
bureaucrats and Prohibition Bureau agents, but hijackers. Although a convoy of Remus’s liquor did fall into their hands once, no “pirates” ever succeeded in breaking into Death Valley Farm, though they tried. One night in 1920, an armed gang did manage to creep up to the gate undetected. They fired volley after volley into the building, expecting its inhabitants to flee or surrender. Remus’s men fired back, with devastating effect, and the gang left, taking their casualties with them. Although the battle went on for some time, no police ever showed up. There was a tacit understanding, on all sides, that encounters such as these were part of a private war between bootleggers and hijackers, not the responsibility of the police.

The sheer size of Remus’s operations required him to expand in other directions. He hired a Cincinnati-based American Express employee, Harry Stratton, to act as his shipping manager, who began moonlighting for Remus while holding down what his American Express employers believed was a full-time job. It was a lucrative arrangement for all concerned: Stratton moved Remus’s liquor, crated up and bearing innocuous labels, all over the United States by “American Express” for several months — until his official employers discovered what he was up to and fired him.

This compelled Remus to set up his own delivery system. He bought twenty trucks, and had them armor-plated and redesigned to carry crates securely, without risk of contents breakage. This alone cost him $20,000 — over $200,000 today But once they left Death Valley Farm, the “pirate” predators were on the lookout for them, so he also purchased a fleet of fast cars: six armor-plated Marmots, and Packards, Locomobiles, Dodges, a Cadillac, and a Pierce-Arrow to carry squads of heavily armed men to accompany the trucks and fend off possible attacks. There were also “runners,” whose fast cars were designed to carry whiskey, on a fixed-fee, per-case basis. Because Prohibition Bureau road patrols were on the lookout for sagging springs, their chassis were reinforced. At one stage, Remus even invested in some railroad cars.

Eventually, the traffic became two-way: carefully selected bootlegger middlemen from all over America (including faraway Texas, Florida, and California) were allowed to enter Death Valley Farm in their own vehicles, to carry away their merchandise themselves. The private customers even arranged for barter deals. Those driving in from
the north, for instance, came with champagne and scotch whiskey smuggled in from Canada, departing with rye and bourbon. Remus’s organizational talent turned Death Valley Farm into a huge liquor supermarket. Soon, he acquired five similar “halfway houses” in other parts of the country.

As a routine precaution (for he knew law enforcement patrols were watching out for suspicious-looking trucks and cars), the trucks were hosed down, washed, and waxed while the whiskey was being loaded and paid for, so that when they left the farm they looked brand new. Ever attentive to detail, and eager to keep his “respectable” bootlegger clientele, Remus provided the truck drivers with beds, meals (cooked by a reluctant Mrs. Gehrum, who complained that her employer was far too generous), and even free whiskey tots.

While at first Remus’s modus operandi was so foolproof it attracted little attention, the scale of his operations was such that local and regional Prohibition directors rapidly became aware that only a fraction of the withdrawals from his newly acquired distilleries ended up as medicinal whiskey. In return for a fee — usually $3,000 per permit issue — they looked the other way. “I never handed over the money personally,” Remus told the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
.

Usually the go-between was the politician who had got the official his job. In that case, he sometimes got more out of it than the official himself. ... a greedier lot of parasites never existed. ... A few men have tried to corner the wheat market only to find that there is too much wheat in the world. I tried to corner the graft market, but I learnt there isn’t enough money in the world to buy up all the public officials who demand their share of it.

Among the “parasites” were many local politicians who attended his parties. Government store keepers, known as gaugers, were also systematically bribed. An unofficial “permit” market eventually sprang up all over America, with the high-level connivance of Washington-based politicians. Blank forms, already signed, made their appearance. A standard fee, Remus later reported, was $42,000, but for that money he could withdraw unlimited quantities of liquor from distilleries he did not even own, as well as government-run bonded warehouses. There was also a traffic in practically undetectable forged blank “B permits,” as the authorizations were called.

The area around Death Valley Farm was regularly patrolled by mounted police, who were fully aware of its activities. “We never paid the police, there were simply too many of them,” Conners told the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
, but “a couple of mounted police came every day. We gave them a couple of quarts a week and $10 or $15 spending money. They also had a few customers of their own in town. We let them have the stuff at $80 a case.”

Prohibition agents knew about Death Valley Farm, but the amount of protection paid turned it into an “off limits” area. One day, Conners later told the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch’s
Paul Anderson, two Prohibition agents blundered into the farm, apparently by mistake. They quickly realized they had made a spectacular catch. Conners immediately phoned their superior in Cincinnati, who apologized for the intrusion and asked to talk to them. “They were supposed to be looking for stills down the road,” he told Conners. After the phone call, they were apologetic. Conners offered them a drink, then another. Eventually Conners sent them on their way with a thousand dollars each and a quart of rye. “They were so drunk I was afraid they wouldn’t be able to drive back to town, and offered to have one of my men act as driver,” he said.

The Cincinnati police were just as venal. “Several city detectives were working for us on the side,” Conners told Anderson. “Each one would dig up a few customers — saloons or private parties. The detective would give us an order, tell us how much to deliver, and what to collect. Sometimes the detective would go along on the truck when the delivery was made. This would protect the truck, and assure the buyer he was getting protection and wouldn’t be raided.”

Altogether, Conners said, there were over a thousand salesmen on the force, working for Remus. In other cities, in other circumstances with other bootleggers, the situation was much the same.

The Cincinnati detectives did not cost Remus much, but in spite of his exceptionally well-organized legal front, his expenses were enormous. (Al Capone, a much smaller operator than Remus as far as liquor was concerned, later told investigators that bootlegging was a losing game: “Too many overheads.”) At every level, in every state where his whiskey ended up, Remus parted with enormous sums to keep the government, the Prohibition Bureau, and the police off his back. He later estimated that half his gross earnings were spent in bribes. Since,
at the peak of his activities, Remus was grossing about $40 million a year, this meant that $20 million went into the hands of corrupt officials. The pattern was the same all over America, whether law enforcement officials were dealing with whiskey certificate bootleggers such as Remus or with the more adventurous rumrunners. Remus told Anderson that in his entire career he only came across two people who turned down his bribes — and they were, in time, to contribute to his downfall. One was Burt Morgan, the Prohibition director of Indiana, who “could have had $250,000” to look the other way. The other was Sam Collins, the Kentucky Prohibition director, whom Remus offered $100,000 simply to quit his job and take up a far more remunerative appointment as the manager of a soft-drink plant. As state Prohibition directors, Morgan and Collins earned $4,600 a year each. With his mixture of showmanship and genuine panache, Remus would later pay tribute to the “untouchables.” “You didn’t sell out; I want to shake hands with you, sir,” he told Collins when he met him.

Remus was not the only victim of Collins’s integrity. John Lang-ley, the Indiana State congressman who had appointed Collins Prohibition director in the first place, and expected him to be an obedient pawn, found this out to his cost. Collins had him indicted for protecting bootleggers and taking their bribes. But Morgan and Collins were remarkable exceptions to the rule.

Remus’s money “sweetened” not only poorly paid officials but senior members of the Harding administration, including the very man charged at the highest level with upholding the law — the attorney general himself. Prohibition and all that went with it — corruption, bribery, the complicity of the very people supposed to fight it — can only be understood within the wider political context of1920s America and the iniquitous Harding administration as a whole.

P
rohibition was part of a far larger scandal — the scandal of the Harding presidency. Warren Gamaliel Harding was, if not the worst, certainly the weakest, most indecisive president in American history. This need not have been disastrous — America faced no major external threats between 1920 and 1923 — had not the start of Prohibition coincided with the beginning of his presidency. As it was, “the Harding Administration was responsible in its short two years and five months for more concentrated robbery and rascality than any other in the whole history of Federal Government.”
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Harding was not an evil man, nor was he, personally, exceptionally corrupt by the standards of the time. The abysmal record of his administration was partly due to a “character flaw” inherent in the man — his excessively good-natured, amicable disposition. A former colleague in his early days noted that “he wanted to be everybody’s friend ... a small town play boy.” His entourage was well aware of his craving to be liked and exploited this weakness to the hilt, knowing that he was too dependent on his friends to deal with them
harshly even when their corrupt practices led to public scandals. Many judges and law enforcement officers, including those dealing with Prohibition, took their cue from what they saw happening at the top.

The cronyism of the Harding administration was such that for as long as he was in office the white-collar criminals known as “the Ohio gang” who had grown up with him and become his intimate friends knew they were immune from prosecution, that Harding would protect them from the rigors of the law. Harding’s own belated realization of the extent of their corruption in all likelihood contributed to a physical and mental collapse leading to his sudden, early death. His ineptitude could not possibly be ignored, even by political allies out to praise him posthumously. At a Harding Memorial Association meeting in June of 1931, President Herbert Hoover, in a singularly ambiguous eulogy, noted that

Harding had a dim realization that he had been betrayed by a few of the men whom he had believed were his devoted friends. It was later proved in the courts of the land that these men had betrayed not only the friendship of their staunch and loyal friend but that they had betrayed their country.

Harding grew up in the small town of Marion, Ohio, where his father, an unsuccessful homeopathic doctor, earned a supplementary income as a small-time junk dealer. Even as a boy, Warren was hail-fellow-well-met, easy-going — a gregarious youngster who preferred billiards, poker, and small-town gossip to books, but was smart enough to make a good living. His first job — as editor of a small, local paper, the Marion
Star
— suited him perfectly.