Prohibition history

George Remus.

George Remus was a Cincinnati defence lawyer who realised the medicinal-liquor provisions of the Volstead Act could be operated as a business. He bought distilleries for their federal permits and drug companies to buy from them, then arranged for his own shipments to be hijacked. For about four years he was extraordinarily rich.

A pharmacy counter with apothecary scales, a blank prescription pad and amber glass
Remus bought the distilleries and the drug companies, then sold the whiskey to himself. AI-generated editorial interpretation; not an archival photograph.

The scheme

Every step but one was legal, and that is what makes it worth understanding.

A distillery with a federal permit could make and sell medicinal whiskey. A wholesale drug company with a permit could buy it. Remus bought both ends — a string of distilleries across Kentucky and Ohio, and the drug companies that ordered from them — so the paperwork of each transaction was impeccable and both parties were him.

The illegal step was the last one. Trucks carrying legitimately sold medicinal whiskey from his distilleries to his drug companies were robbed in transit by men who worked for him, and the liquor went to the bootleg market at many times the price. The hijackings were reported. The insurance was claimed. The records balanced.

Death Valley Farm

The operation was run out of a property west of Cincinnati that his people called Death Valley Farm, and at its height Remus is reckoned to have controlled a substantial share of the medicinal whiskey in the country.

He spent accordingly — a mansion in Price Hill with an indoor pool, a party at which guests reportedly received cars, the kind of display that attracts exactly the attention a quiet fraud cannot afford. He called himself the King of the Bootleggers and he was not being ironic.

Prison, and the agent

A ledger, fountain pen and brass bankers lamp on a dark desk, pages blank
AI-generated editorial interpretation; not an archival photograph.

He was convicted of Volstead violations in 1925 and sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. While he was inside, his wife Imogene took up with Franklin Dodge, a former Prohibition Bureau agent who had been investigating Remus, and the two of them set about liquidating his assets.

By the time he was released, the distilleries had been sold, the money was substantially gone, and Imogene had filed for divorce. The combination — the wife and the agent who had put him away — is the part that reads as invented and is thoroughly documented.

The shooting and the trial

On the morning of 6 October 1927, on the way to the final divorce hearing, Remus chased Imogene’s car through Eden Park in Cincinnati and shot her. She died at the hospital. There was no question of who had done it.

He conducted much of his own defence and pleaded transitory insanity. The jury acquitted him in nineteen minutes. The state then tried to have him committed; he fought that too, and won his release in 1928.

He lived quietly in Covington, Kentucky, practising a little law, until 1952.

Why he matters more than the shooting

Because he is the clearest demonstration of what was actually wrong with the Volstead Act. Remus did not smuggle, did not distil illegally and did not need a boat. He read the statute, found the exemption with the softest paperwork, and bought both sides of it.

Every prosecution of him turned on the hijackings, because everything else was permitted. The lesson Congress might have drawn — that a ban with four legitimate exemptions is a licensing scheme with extra steps — was not drawn.

Medicinal whiskey and the prescription loophole

And the novel

F. Scott Fitzgerald met Remus, or met people who knew him, at the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, and Remus is one of the several figures regularly proposed as a model for Jay Gatsby — along with Max Gerlach and others.

It is a pleasant connection and it is not provable. Fitzgerald left no note saying so. We mention it because you will encounter the claim, and because “probably a partial model, along with several other people” is the honest version of it.

What Cincinnati has now

Remus worked out of Cincinnati. We list 3 hidden bars there.

These are not the historic rooms — almost none of them is — and we say so on every listing. They are what the history turned into, which is its own thing worth knowing.

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