The illicit liquor trade thrived equally within the borders, owing to the staggering quantities of pre-Prohibition alcohol available across the country: More than five hundred distilleries had boasted an annual output of 286 million gallons of spirits of all kinds; more than 1,200 breweries had produced hundreds of millions of gallons of beer. How easy it was to pinpoint loopholes in the law and exploit its exemptions, to re-create your own home as a small-scale distillery, to deliver your product to thousands of thirsty customers through any subversive means. The term bootlegger, originally applied to liquor dealers who concealed flasks in their boot tops while trading on Indian reservations, grew in popularity and scope. Now anyone could be a bootlegger, and boots were far from the only vessel employed.
Amputees hid booze in their hollowed wooden legs. Women tied pints to each string of their corsets. Barbershops stocked whiskey in tonic bottles on their shelves. A raid on a soda parlor in Helena, Montana, uncovered squirt guns with a two-drink capacity. Farmers hid stills in goat barns, cowsheds, and cesspools, with entrances through tunnels. Professional bootleggers, worried about a glut in the market, dropped the price of a pint from $4 to $2.
Competition in the liquor trade was surging—and violence along with it. In Chicago, longtime gangster James “Big Jim” Colosimo was executed in his own restaurant. In Douglas, Arizona, four agents were shot within a week. In Cincinnati, whiskey pirates preyed upon the bootleggers, confrontations that erupted into gun battles and resulted in a significant number of deaths. For Willebrandt to be successful, she would need public support, a force of incorruptible “dry” agents, and a sustained stretch of good luck.
Willebrandt had only one discernible shortcoming, joked President Harding at the conclusion of their meeting: her youth. Laughing, she assured him that she would soon outgrow it.
* * *
Her office was dominated by a gleaming mahogany desk the size of a barge, upon which sat a candlestick phone and a rubber stamp facsimile of her signature—a useful tool, considering her wild, erratic scribble, whose sloping trajectory across the page suggested overindulgence of the California clarets she so loved and missed. She unpacked notebooks, legal pads, leather-bound reference tomes with gilt edges and butter-hued pages. On the wall behind her swivel chair she hung a quote by Cotton Mather: “There has been an old complaint that a good lawyer is seldom a good neighbor. You know how to confute it, gentlemen, by making your skill in law a blessing to your neighborhood.”
Her personal staff of six—three attorneys, two stenographers, one secretary—stopped by to introduce themselves. They gave her a nickname: “The Queen.” Her salary was $7,500 per year, the same amount paid to members of Congress. In long biographical articles, reporters called her the “pretty and young” lawyer and wondered if she would disprove “the age-old adage that woman is governed exclusively by the emotions and not by logic.” She insisted to them that women should not be appointed to public office solely because they were women; such a policy would be unfair to the public generally and to women in particular. “At the same time,” she clarified, “I am enough of a feminist to hold the opinion that there is no professional or public duty which a woman is not capable of performing.”
Willebrandt would learn quickly that bootleggers represented just one facet of the challenge ahead. The other, just as daunting, was politics. None of her bosses had much interest in waging the war on liquor alongside her, from President Harding on down. If they had, a woman just out of law school with no prosecutorial experience would hardly have been their first choice.
During his career as an Ohio senator, Harding was dry in name only, a position adopted solely to avoid the enmity of the Anti-Saloon League. He believed that Prohibition was futile and, unlike Willebrandt, declined to follow the spirit of the law by abstaining in his personal life. One of his first acts as president was to have $1,800 worth of liquor—all purchased before January 16, 1920—transported from his home on Wyoming Avenue to the White House. Although Harding maintained decorum in the White House’s public rooms, he served it openly upstairs during frequent card games with his friends and appointees, including Harry Daugherty and his assistant, Jess Smith.
The secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, whose department housed the Prohibition Bureau, was an avowed wet who openly loathed the 18th Amendment. Before its ratification the banking mogul had invested millions in the liquor trade, even purchasing the Old Overholt rye distillery, said to produce America’s oldest brand of whiskey. Prohibition Commissioner Roy Haynes, a Harding appointee and the country’s preeminent dry spokesman, personally ensured that poker parties at the “Little Green House on K Street”—a Victorian townhouse occupied by fellow members of the president’s “Ohio Gang”—had plenty of liquor on hand, often sending cases in Wells Fargo wagons driven by armed guards (Willebrandt called Haynes “a politician in sheep’s clothing”). Jess Smith visited the Little Green House often, as did numerous bootleggers who needed favors from the federal government, including the withdrawal permits that allowed access to pre-Prohibition whiskey.
Even though Smith’s desk was so close to her own, Willebrandt had no idea what he did during the workday or what sort of work he aimed to do. She did know that after Daugherty’s wife, Lucie, went to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital for arthritis treatment, the attorney general and Smith had moved in together, sharing a suite at the Wardman Park Hotel. As far as Willebrandt could tell, Smith seemed to be a “kind of half servant and half glorified valet” who ran errands, buying railroad tickets for the attorney general and carrying his briefcase. Daugherty himself told Willebrandt, “Oh, don’t pay any attention to Jess. If I have any directions for you, I will give them to you. There is a telephone on my desk and I will reach you.”
Her first assignment, passed along by Daugherty, came in the form of a telegram. Its author was James R. Clark, an Ohio-based federal district attorney who described an “almost unbelievable condition” in Cincinnati. Although his office had successfully prosecuted a number of Prohibition cases, they were now facing “one of such magnitude and so far-reaching” that they needed Washington’s assistance. A thorough investigation by capable agents would, in his opinion, “stamp out in this community the so-called ‘Whiskey Ring.’ ”
Willebrandt opened a brown folder labeled “Department of Justice: Mail and Files Division” and slipped the telegram inside. She would soon scrawl one word across the folder, underlined with a heavy hand: REMUS.
Q. What was your business before you were a farm manager?
A. Assistant buyer for Carson, Pirie, Scott & Company at the store at State and Madison.
Q. When did you first become acquainted with [Imogene Remus]?
A. I would say 1917, without being positive. The last year of the war before the Armistice was signed.