The 'King of the Bootleggers' made $40 million, lost it all to the undercover agent who stole his wife — then shot her and walked free in 19 minutes.
George Remus was a German immigrant who became a certified pharmacist at 19, owned his own drugstore at 21, then abandoned it all for law school. As a Chicago criminal defense attorney, he pioneered the 'transitory insanity' defense and was earning around $500,000 a year by 1920 — a fortune he was about to make look small.
When Prohibition began, Remus studied the Volstead Act like a legal brief and found its fatal flaw: distilleries and pharmacies could still produce bonded liquor for 'medicinal purposes' under government license. So he bought the distilleries, bought the pharmacies, and had his own employees hijack the liquor in between for illegal sale.
Remus moved to Cincinnati because 80 percent of America's bonded whiskey sat within a 300-mile radius of the city. Within two years he had bought and sold one-seventh of the entire bonded liquor supply of the United States, amassing $40 million in under three years and employing some 3,000 people.
His parties became the stuff of legend. At a 1923 birthday party for his wife Imogene, featuring aquatic dancers and a fifteen-piece orchestra, and at other galas, guests went home with diamond stickpins — and at one 1923 party, each of fifty female guests received a brand new car.
Convicted of thousands of Volstead Act violations in 1925, Remus made the worst confession of his life in prison: he told a fellow inmate that his wife controlled his fortune. The inmate was Franklin Dodge, an undercover Prohibition agent — who promptly resigned from the government, began an affair with Imogene, and helped her liquidate the empire.
Dodge and Imogene sold off Remus's assets, including his prized Fleischmann Distillery, and left the imprisoned millionaire exactly $100. They even hired a hitman for $15,000 to kill him — but the assassin, fearing a double-cross, tipped off Remus instead.
On October 6, 1927 — the very morning their divorce was to be finalized — Remus had his driver chase Imogene's cab through Cincinnati's Eden Park, forced it off the road, and shot her fatally in the abdomen in front of the park's Spring House Gazebo.
At trial, Remus defended himself using the transitory insanity defense he had invented as a lawyer years earlier. Prosecuted by Charles Phelps Taft II — the 30-year-old son of a sitting Chief Justice and former president — Remus was acquitted after just nineteen minutes of jury deliberation.
Ohio tried to commit him to an insane asylum after the verdict, but prosecutors had spent the whole trial arguing he was sane, and the gambit collapsed. Remus was free within seven months and lived out a quiet life in Kentucky until his death in 1952.
Remus is sometimes credited as an inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, and Glenn Fleshler portrayed him in HBO's Boardwalk Empire — complete with his real-life habit of referring to himself in the third person. His daughter Romola, meanwhile, had her own claim to fame: at age eight she played cinema's very first Dorothy Gale in a 1908 film of The Wizard of Oz.