The Bourbon King: The Life and Crimes of George
Remus, Prohibition’s Evil Genius. By Bob Batchelor. Diversion Books. $27.99.
It is safe to ask why an author would
write an almost-400-page biography of a man dubbed a “little German
hysteria-peddler” in a sentence written in such a way that the opinion seems to
be that of the author himself, not just the view of one of the people he is
writing about. The answer in the case of Bob Batchelor seems to be that George
Remus, a “tenacious grappler” (among other things), is just so doggone
fascinating that his story asks to be
written and Batchelor cannot but oblige.
It is scarcely an obliging tale. From its
title – an echoing, ironic reference to the powerful Bourbon kings of France,
including “Sun King” Louis XIV – to its standard “what happened afterwards”
conclusion, The Bourbon King proceeds
at a headlong pace that at times goes beyond the cinematic into the realm of TV
advertising (in which a 30-second ad may have more than 30 scenes). In other
words, there is a lot going on in
Batchelor’s book, and the breathlessness of the telling seems to reflect not
only the Prohibition era in which most of the biography is set but also the
overall life of Remus (1874-1952).
It is abundantly clear that Batchelor
neither likes nor approves of Remus or much of anything that Remus did or stood
for, but he tries to place his distaste in context by writing that “while Remus
may have been singularly violent and dangerous, his utter disregard for
Prohibition put him in accord with how much of American society felt about the
dry laws.”
The name of Remus is far less often
bandied about than those of Al Capone, John Dillinger and other Midwestern bad
guys of the Prohibition era. After going through The Bourbon King, some readers are sure to wonder why – especially
readers fond of The Great Gatsby, for
whose title character Remus appears to have been a partial model. Remus was
certainly colorful as well as, apparently, wholly amoral (which is not the same
as immoral, a more arguable word
where Prohibition mores are concerned). He was not always a bad guy: early on,
Remus quit school to support his family as a pharmacist. Later, he became, of
all things, a criminal defense attorney, representing bootleggers in Chicago
and becoming infamous for over-the-top courtroom tactics that saved more than
one criminal from the death penalty. Deciding to get in on the big-money action
himself – Remus had noticed the wads of cash with which his clients paid their
fines and bills – Remus moved to Cincinnati and used his pharmaceutical
knowledge and standing to work his way to the top of the illegal Kentucky
bourbon world. Even during Prohibition, as readers may not realize, alcoholic
beverages were legal – if made and distributed for medical reasons.
Batchelor chronicles Remus’ various
depredations with skill and ever-present antipathy for the man, whose undoubted
business acumen gets short shrift while his criminal activities get extensive
coverage. This is scarcely surprising in light of just how outrageous some of
Remus’ doings were – not only the bribery and the rest of the deep-seated
corruption of which he took advantage, but also the way he actually got away
with murder in what would surely be a highlighted scene in any Public Enemy-style movie. Remus’ second
wife, Imogene, was no angel herself. She deliberately set out to milk him for
all he was worth and was willing to marry him if necessary – but when Remus was
serving two years in prison after a conviction under the Volstead Act, she fell
for a Prohibition agent and managed, with him, to run through most of Remus’
money. Once out of jail, Remus shot her dead – then used his criminal-defense
background to stand up for himself in court, and was acquitted by reason of
insanity. The prosecutor, Charles P. Taft, son of former President and Supreme
Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, never fully recovered from a defeat
that, as Batchelor describes it, sounds almost ridiculously like something from
our current era of celebrity worship and courtroom antics: “Taft got stung by a
strange convolution of sentimentality, cult of personality, duplicity, and
flat-out wrongheadedness on the part of twelve jury members.”
Batchelor’s headlong writing style
sometimes gets ahead of the accuracy of his word usage and sentence
construction: “The years in prison, he secretly worried, had deteriorated his
intellect.” “Polls showed the Mabel Willebrandt was personally popular…” And
the author’s evaluation of Remus is not always clear, beyond the element of
personal dislike: one page refers to Remus’ “history of violence” and “quick,
sadistic temper,” while the next says that “the viciousness of gang warfare did
not suit Remus” and that for him, “the bootleg empire was as much an
intellectual game – for excitement – as anything else.” The near-juxtaposition
of these statements makes Remus seem to have been a more-complicated figure
than the narrative itself ever asserts directly. But perhaps that is inevitable
in a story like this one: the details of the weighted, gold-tipped cane that
Remus carried and often used, and the pearl-handled pistol with which he killed
Imogene, loom far larger than any discussion of the intellect that made it
possible for Remus to succeed so well in several different fields, no matter
how smarmily he did so. The Bourbon King
is by no means the first book about Remus: he has previously inspired both
nonfiction (Karen Abbott’s The Ghosts of
Eden Park, that being the place where Remus shot Imogene) and fiction
(Craig Holden’s The Jazz Bird). But
neither those books nor Batchelor’s seems as fitting a tribute – if “tribute”
is the right word – as an alcoholic beverage that Queen City Whiskey started
making in 2014. It is called George Remus Bourbon. Ironically, however, it is
now made not in Cincinnati, the Queen City where Remus once flourished, or by
an eponymous manufacturer, but by a company called MGP – across the border in
Lawrenceburg, Indiana.
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