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  PRAISE FOR

  THE GHOSTS OF EDEN PARK

  “In The Ghosts of Eden Park, historian Karen Abbott gifts us with a story of sex, madness, and murder in Jazz-Age America that is as intoxicating as a hit of bootlegged bourbon. In Abbott’s hands, truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s also a hell of a lot more thrilling. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.”

  —SUSANNAH CAHALAN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire

  “A stellar achievement…Like a skilled bartender in an underground speakeasy, Karen Abbott expertly blends superb storytelling with immersive historical detail to create a heady cocktail of bootlegging, betrayal, and blood-dark passion. So vivid is the world she conjures that I could viscerally taste the whiskey and smell the sweat—and hear the gunshots too. The Ghosts of Eden Park has that bittersweet brilliance of all great books: Though I couldn’t stop turning the pages, I never wanted it to end.”

  —KATE MOORE, New York Times bestselling author of The Radium Girls

  “The Ghosts of Eden Park is a story so strange, so salacious, it nearly defies belief. Exquisitely crafted and expertly rendered, this book weds high drama to rigorous scholarship. Karen Abbott has mastered the art of telling true stories as riveting and suspenseful as fiction.”

  —LINDSEY FITZHARRIS, bestselling author of The Butchering Art

  “Abbott’s meticulous research is matched only by her lyrical prose and uncanny knack for creating cliffhanging tension. You cannot look away from the page, as she brings a silver-tongued bootlegger, a maverick female prosecutor, and a host of bizarrely compelling characters to life, illuminating a pivotal chapter in American history. Karen Abbott is the master of historical suspense.”

  —DENISE KIERNAN, New York Times bestselling author of The Girls of Atomic City and The Last Castle

  “Karen Abbott triumphs again with The Ghosts of Eden Park, an atmospheric Prohibition-era page-turner, so redolent with ambition, dark passions, and suspense that it reads like a TV box set. Once you pick this up, you will binge-read it to the end!”

  —HALLIE RUBENHOLD, bestselling author of The Five

  Copyright © 2019 by Karen Abbott

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Abbott, Karen, author.

  Title: The ghosts of Eden Park : the bootleg king, the women who pursued him, and the murder that shocked jazz-age America / Karen Abbott.

  Description: New York : Crown, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019016196| ISBN 9780451498625 (hardback) | ISBN 9780451498632 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Remus, George, 1878–1952—Trials, litigation, etc. | Trials (Murder)—Ohio—Cincinnati—History—20th century. | Uxoricide—Law and legislation—Ohio—Cincinnati—History—20th century. | Alcohol trafficking—United States—Biography. | United States—Social conditions—1918–1932. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Criminals & Outlaws. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical.

  Classification: LCC KF224.R47 A23 2019 | DDC 345.771/02523—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019016196

  ISBN 9780451498625

  Ebook ISBN 9780451498649

  Frontispiece photograph and Part I opener photograph (this page): Library of Congress

  Part II opener photograph (this page) and Part III opener photograph (this page): San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Elena Giavaldi

  Cover photograph: © 2019 Richard Jenkins

  v5.4

  ep

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part I: The Pursued and the Pursuing

  All the Rope He Wants

  Testimony of Marie Remus

  The Circle

  Life Has Few Petted Darlings

  Testimony of A. W. Brockway

  Daddy

  Mabelmen

  Testimony of Carlos Clapper

  A Man’s Home Is His Castle

  Tear the Heart Out of Washington

  Testimony of Emanuel Kessler

  A Terrible, Terrible Scream

  Testimony of Emmett Kirgin

  A Middle Finger of Unusual Prominence

  Dynamite

  Testimony of Henry Spilker

  The Brainstorms

  Testimony of George L. Winkler

  The Wielders of the Soap

  The Ace of Investigators

  Testimony of Frieda Schneider

  Vigor and Vim Unexcelled

  Testimony of Olive Weber Long

  A Disturbance in Room 902

  Catalyst

  Testimony of Oscar Ernie Melvin

  Part II: Careless People

  A Bolt from the Blue

  Testimony of Orin Weber

  Not Mrs. Remus Any Longer

  That Social Pervert, That Social Leper, That Social Parasite

  Testimony of John S. Berger

  None the Worse for It

  A Pearl-Handled Revolver

  Testimony of Julia F. Brown

  A Ghost at the Door

  Testimony of Imogene Remus

  Don’t Let Him Catch You Asleep

  Testimony of George Conners

  No Quarter

  Testimony of William Hoefft

  The Hitman

  Testimony of Ethel Bachman

  Blood on the Primrose Path

  Testimony of Ruth Remus

  What a Beautiful Morning It Is

  Part III: The Colossal Vitality of His Illusion

  The Smiling Charlie Taft

  Remus’s Brain Exploded

  The Loosest Kind of a Tongue

  High-Class Gentlemen

  Alienist No. 1

  Conspiracies

  Alienist No. 2

  A Blank About Everything That Happened

  Alienist No. 3

  The Arch-Conspirator of All Ages

  Déjà Vu in Price Hill

  Sun in Scorpio

  Very Emotional, Somewhat Unstable

  American Justice

  Probate Court Testimony of George Remus

  The Unfortunate Woman

  A Hammer to the Angels

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  By Karen Abbott

  About the Author

  The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby
that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

  I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at; I am not what I am.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Othello

  AS STRANGE AS THIS story may seem, this is a work of nonfiction, with no invented dialogue. Everything that appears between quotation marks comes from a government file, archive, diary, letter, newspaper article, book, or, most often, a hearing or trial transcript. One transcript in particular, which numbered 5,500 pages in total, allowed me to accurately depict detailed scenes and entire conversations and to reveal characters’ thoughts, gestures, personalities, and histories. For the sake of brevity, some trial testimony has been condensed. A comprehensive list of endnotes and sources (including for each line of dialogue) appears at the end of the book.

  Reckoning, 1927

  HE HAD BEEN WAITING for that morning, dreading it, aware it couldn’t be stopped. An hour ago he was eating breakfast and now here he was, chasing her through Eden Park. The sun, strong for the season, bludgeoned through his fedora and inflamed his bald head. His silk trousers whisked against his skin. He heard the swish of his wingtips through the grass, the rasping of his breath. On the road nearby a brigade of cars clamored in the rush hour traffic. The throaty engines, the blaring of horns, the people determined to be someplace else. Exhaust fumes burned in his nostrils. Somewhere behind him were his own blue Buick and his driver, abandoned. He’d learned she wanted to kill him. His brain had wandered to a shadowy land, somewhere between sanity and madness.

  For two years he had not been right. Friends and associates would attest to the difference, a stark split between then and now. He had long referred to himself in the third person, but such declarations became more frequent; there seemed an odd detaching, as if part of him had crept outside of his skin. With the slightest provocation—just a single, specific word—his face purpled and his features knotted into a ghastly cartoon. He spoke of a halo hovering above his head, whispering to him, marking him wherever he went. He described shooting stars only he could see, their tails imprinting bright, lingering bolts inside his closed eyes. He rambled incessantly about love and betrayal and revenge. He embarked on nationwide searches, hoping to validate every suspicion that tumbled through his mind. He announced, with unwavering conviction, that people from all corners wished him dead: gangsters in St. Louis, a certain woman federal official in Washington, D.C., and—worst of all—his wife, Imogene, who had razed his world to the ground. His Little Imo, his truest and sweetest, his Prime Minister, his centipede, his monkey, his gem; how would he ever forget those old, dead endearments from their past? He just wished to talk to her, he’d insist. Maybe he could stop what she had set in motion. He had little time left.

  And there she was, finally, close enough to touch.

  She sprinted faster, her black silk dress like a waving flag. He accelerated, everything but the sight of her falling away. They were even now, face-to-face beneath a gazebo, the autumn air just beginning to darken the leaves. He heard her voice, a sound that once upon a time made him mad with a boundless and wild joy. Between them rose a glint of silver and cream: a pearl-handled revolver.

  The crack of the bullet shook the birds from the trees.

  THE HOUSE SEEMED OUT of a Bavarian fairy tale, rambling and turreted, laced with gingerbread cornicing and columns arched like sharp, imperious brows. It was the finest house in Price Hill, the finest neighborhood in Cincinnati, perched high above the Ohio River and its basin of residents and commerce: the downtown business district, the black families in the West End, and the German immigrants in Over-the-Rhine, where Prohibition forced breweries to sell root beer in the hope of surviving the law. Already he envisioned what his “dream palace” would become. A Roman garden, a baseball field, a heated pool, a library stocked with books—presidential biographies, the epic poems of Homer and Milton, tomes of mythology and obscure science that would testify to the surprising depths of his mind. In this house he would once again become someone new, a superior version of himself. In this house the world would come to know his name.

  George Remus would be forty-four years old that November of 1920, and had spent the first half of his life gathering momentum for the second. He was the embodiment of the new decade, a harbinger of its grandest excesses and darkest illusions. He endeavored to become the best in the country at his chosen profession—a profession that could not have flourished so dramatically in any other era, nor become so swiftly obsolete. As America reinvented itself Remus would do the same, living in rabid service to his own creation, protecting it at all costs.

  The cornerstone of this creation, the fulcrum that would allow him to pivot and rise, was Augusta Imogene Remus, formerly Augusta Imogene Holmes. Imogene, as she preferred, was thirty-five, with dark hair and eyes and a voluptuous figure better suited to the bustles and billowing sleeves of decades past. They’d met five years earlier at his office in downtown Chicago, where Remus had been one of the city’s preeminent defense attorneys and Imogene a “dust girl,” sweeping the floors and tidying his desk.

  She’d confided in him about her divorce, which had been plodding along painfully for years as she and her husband separated ten times before finally going to court. Remus could commiserate. He, too, had suffered marital strife. Lillian—his wife and the mother of his teenaged daughter, Romola—once filed for divorce charging “cruelty,” “pure malice,” and a habit of “coming home early in the morning.” They had subsequently reconciled, but their union remained tenuous.

  Imogene saw her chance.

  Remus accepted her as a client and promptly fell in love. He told Imogene everything, sharing long-buried tales of his past, the quirks and compulsions that shaped him now. He recounted his first memory: the journey from Germany to Ellis Island in 1883, when he was six years old, traveling with two sisters and a mother so beleaguered that, when questioned by immigration officials, she couldn’t recall the names of four other children who’d died. In America they reunited with Remus’s father, Franz (since anglicized to Frank), and settled in Chicago. Remus remembered his father coming home drunk from the corner saloon and evolving, week by week, into a mean and abusive alcoholic; he vowed that he would never drink a drop of alcohol.

  When Frank developed rheumatism and could no longer work, Remus quit the eighth grade to take a job at his uncle’s pharmacy on the city’s West Side, earning $5 per week. As his father’s rages worsened, Remus moved into the pharmacy, sleeping on a cot in the stockroom, going for months at a time without seeing his parents and siblings. He called himself a “druggist’s devil boy” and in this role experienced a valuable revelation: He could sell anything to anyone under any circumstance, no matter how outrageous his claims or unorthodox his delivery.

  At age nineteen he bought the drugstore from his uncle for the charitable price of $10, and during his years in the business he peddled all manner of dubious concoctions: Remus’s Cathartic Compound, Remus’s Cathartic Pills, a Remus “complexion remedy” containing mercury, Remus’s Lydia Pinkham Compound—presumably Lydia’s own legendary cocktail, for the relief of menstrual pain, wasn’t sufficiently potent—and his specialty, Remus’s Nerve Tonic, consisting of fluid extract of celery, sodium bromide, rhubarb, and a dash of a poisonous, hallucinogenic plant called henbane. Although he’d never finished his courses at the Chicago College of Pharmacy, he convinced his customers to call him “Doctor Remus.”

  When he switched careers and became a lawyer, he brought this salesmanship to his practice. He used the courtroom as an arena, leaping and pacing and prowling the length of the jury box. During the cross-examination of his clients he tore at his remaining rim of hair, sobbing and howling with abandon. Poignant episodes from history lent drama to Remus’s closing arguments; one judge was moved to tears by his description of Abraham Lincoln’s stint as a
bartender. Detractors derided him with a nickname, “the Weeping, Crying Remus,” but admirers coined one of their own: “the Napoleon of the Chicago Bar.”

  In one famous case, Remus defended a husband accused of poisoning his wife. Throughout the trial he kept the poison in question on his table, in full view of the jury. During his closing argument Remus raised the bottle aloft and swiped it slowly across the air, so that the jury got a clear look of the skull and crossbones on its label.

  “There has been a lot of talk of poison in this case,” he said. “But it is a lot of piffle. Look!”

  As the jury gasped, he swallowed the poison and continued with his closing argument, aware that they all expected him to drop dead. When he didn’t, the jury returned with an acquittal. Only later did Remus reveal his trick: Drawing on his pharmaceutical background, he had first ingested an elixir that neutralized the poison.

  * * *

  —

  In this same way he sold himself to Imogene Holmes. He would handle her divorce, and she needn’t worry about his fee; in fact, she could quit her job as a dust girl and money would be no concern. He would pay the rent on her apartment in Evanston, north of Chicago, and spend more time there than he did at home with his wife. He would give Imogene allowance money, $100 checks to spend as she wished. He would rescue her from “the gutter” and “make a lady out of her.” He would adore her and be true to her. He would protect her and her eleven-year-old daughter, Ruth, from all unsavory people and circumstances.