The Insanity Plea

I promised a few more details about the life of George Remus here, before the presentation at the Price Hill Historical Society on October 7. Well, Remus was never arrested or charged with bootlegging, but he was convicted of tax evasion and spent a year in a federal penitentiary near Atlanta. Stories are that he had maid service and fresh flowers every day in this cell there. When he came back, he found that he had been betrayed by his wife, Imogen. She had taken up with the federal agent who had investigated him for tax fraud, and together they had sold the distillery and all the movable objects in the house. No one seems to know what happened to the money, but she filed for divorce, and on the day that the divorce became final—coincidentally, 82 years ago tomorrow, on October 6, 1927—Remus chased down her cab when it left the courthouse and shot her dead in Eden Park. He threw away the gun he used, and it was found the next spring near the gazebo during a children's Easter egg hunt. Remus served as his own defense attorney, and the prosecuting attorney for the city was Charles Taft, son of President William Howard Taft. Remus was the first lawyer to ever use a plea of insanity to successfully avoid being convicted on a murder charge. He was sent to a mental institution in Lima, but was out within a year, using evidence from his own trial to prove his sanity. When Remus was released from the asylum, he came back to the Cincinnati area and married again, living in relative obscurity in Northern Kentucky until he died in the 1950s. He is buried in a cemetery in Falmouth, Kentucky. But his fame lives on locally as well as nationally—was Remus the inspiration for “The Great Gatsby”? Tune in next time (I sound like an old radio serial, which reminds me, that would make a good subject for a blog) to find out more.

Price Hill's Bootlegger

Next Wednesday, October 7, I’m going to be showing a presentation that the Delhi Historical Society has created about George Remus at the Price Hill Historical Society. Remus was an infamous resident of our neighborhood who lived in Price Hill during his brief but successful bootlegging career in the 1920s. People who remember his mansion talk about the covered swimming pool, the elaborate furnishings, and the horse barns. Remus’s base of operations for bootlegging was also on the west side, located in a big, undeveloped area on Lick Run (now Queen City Avenue) called “Death Valley.” Remus was born in Germany and came to Chicago as a child. He went to work as a pharmacist’s assistant when he was about 14. By the time he was 19, he owned the pharmacy, and then he went to law school and was a practicing lawyer by age 24. He was very successful, specializing in criminal law. When he saw how much money some of his clients were making in bootlegging when Prohibition was enacted, he decided to study the Volstead Act to find the loopholes that would allow him to make big money, too. He relocated to Cincinnati because it was more centrally located, and he was already quite wealthy when he moved here, so he bought the mansion in Price Hill and entertained lavishly as he began his bootlegging operations. He had a fleet of trucks to deliver the product and he owned a distillery that had closed at Prohibition where he made alcohol “for medicinal purposes.” At the height of his success, Remus is said to have employed 3,000 people and spent $20,000,000 in bribes to local police and officials—but his bootlegging profits have been estimated at anywhere from $45 to $75 million. (I’ll tell you more the next time I post a blog entry.)