Q. How did you become acquainted with her at that time?
A. We were putting on a great drive of washing machines and electric ironers, and she came on to the floor for the purpose of buying one. She was turned over to me, that being my department. It was just being installed under my directions, and I subsequently sold her an ironing machine and a washing machine on the installment plan.
Q. Did she pay for it?
A. She made a few payments, a month or two months.
Q. Who paid the balance?
A. Mr. Remus finished the payment. Not as payments, but he finished it in a lump sum.
Q. Did you ever have any conversation with her during that period of time about George Remus?
A. On several occasions she told me that he was a good guy, that she would get what he had, that she was going to nick him…she said that she was going to “Roll him for his roll.” Those were her words. She told me she would get what he had and she would show him how to get more….She said she would marry him if she had to but that she didn’t want to.
WHENEVER IMOGENE WASN’T AT Death Valley Farm, supervising orders or greeting clients, Remus encouraged her to go shopping for home décor, little trinkets and fixtures that would make their home like none other in the city. She spent afternoons shopping for solid gold service plates and silver cutlery, which she had engraved with the initials “G.R.,” in honor of her husband. On one outing, she spotted a pair of stone lions flanking the doors of an antiques store on Edwards Road and ordered her driver to pull over. Alighting from the limousine, she sauntered inside and, without preamble, demanded to purchase them. Informed by a clerk that the lions were not for sale, she called for a manager and insisted he name a price. Thinking quickly, he gave a number multiple times their true value, hoping that Imogene would be deterred. She was not. Nodding, she retrieved her checkbook—a $100,000 diamond winking from her hand—and blithely wrote a check for $4,000. The lions would stand guard at the mansion’s entrance, bearing silent witness to everything that happened inside.
Nor did Remus spare any expense for her daughter, Ruth, whom he planned to legally adopt. He and Imogene enrolled the thirteen-year-old in the Sacred Heart Academy, an exclusive boarding school in Cincinnati’s Clifton neighborhood operated by an order of cloistered French nuns who, in all likelihood, had no idea who Remus was. For scheduled visits home, the family chauffeur picked Ruth up in a red Pierce-Arrow touring car. Imogene waited in the back seat, reluctant to join the other mothers in conferences with the nuns.
Ruth occupied one of three private rooms and became known for her extravagant possessions: bottles of Guerlain perfume, a genuine muskrat coat, a pale yellow negligee made of satin and trimmed with lace, fit for a bride’s trousseau. She gave her favorite classmates diamond-studded gold and platinum figurines that cost $15,000 apiece. Remus called her “Princess.”
He of course had nicknames for Imogene, too. In addition to “Prime Minister,” he called her his “little honey bunch,” his “bunch of sugar,” the “apple of his eye—not one, but both,” and, simply, “Gene.” Imogene had just one nickname for him: “Daddy.”
Remus had never been so content or busy, nor so certain that his life would continue to roll along at such a pleasingly frenetic and productive pace. He crammed work into every minute of every hour, his self-proclaimed photographic memory cataloguing details he refused to commit to paper. There was always a deal to analyze, a meeting to arrange, a train to catch, back and forth to Chicago, New York, Washington, Columbus, Indianapolis, Lexington, St. Louis, and Louisville. He collected new clients and acquaintances—including, according to lore, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
When he stopped to reflect—a rare luxury, these days—even he found the magnitude and intricacies of his own empire staggering, the way its numerous tentacles overlapped and intertwined, taking from one and giving to the next, a system that began and ended with him. His chain of distilleries and drug companies stretched across nine states, from New York to Kansas, some under his name, some under a pseudonym. His clients included the head of the Chicago mob, Johnny Torrio, who bought thousands of cases of Remus’s Kentucky bourbon and sold it at his speakeasy, the Four Deuces (managed by his ambitious protégé, Al Capone). Even Remus did not know his exact net worth or the amount of money coursing through his system.
Estimates among Remus’s associates fluctuated wildly. Four million dollars, five million, seven million spread across various savings accounts. Deposits that averaged $50,000 a day, in an era when the average salary was $1,400 per year. A $2.8 million deposit for a few months’ work. A yearly gross of eighty million, a net of thirty. Daily sales of liquor that ran as high as $74,000. One rum runner paid for a single $200,000 order in one-, two-, and five-dollar bills; it took Conners four hours to count them. The money came in so fast Remus couldn’t deposit it all, forcing him to carry as much as $100,000 in his pockets at any given time. For a while he considered opening his own bank.
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He continued to meet with Jess Smith for whiskey permits and promises of immunity, paying twenty to thirty thousand dollars at a time, always in cash. With Smith’s assurances he felt at ease to operate openly, even brazenly, “milking” distillery after distillery as fast as he could. He bought the Edgewood distillery in Cincinnati for $220,000, ordered his force of bottlers to get to work, and within five days removed 6,500 cases of Old Keller, 500 cases of Johnny Walker, and 250 cases of Gordon’s Gin. On the morning of the fifth day, Remus’s team finished, put on their coats, and never returned. From the Squibb Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, they removed 15,000 cases in two weeks; and from the Fleischmann in Cincinnati, 5,000 cases and 250 barrels (equivalent to 10,000 gallons) of rye in seven days. At the same time, liquor arrived from far-flung distilleries by the carload, the deliveries so frequent and massive that Remus’s Death Valley storage space quickly began to fill.
He and Conners landed upon a solution. Beneath the floor of the barn, they dug a secret cellar with enough room to hide ten thousand cases at once, accessible through a trapdoor and concealed with hay. Slowly, using a block and tackle, they lowered and raised full barrels of whiskey through the trap. They moved the bottling machine down there for easy access. For a salary of $75 per week, men worked in shifts breaking up and burning the cases, wrapping the finished bottles in newspapers and packing them in the runners’ cars.
The runners came from all over the country. Mary Hubbard, whose husband, Elijah, worked as a night watchman for Death Valley, noted the variety of license plates: Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Missouri, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, California. In the early days came streams of Chevrolets and Dodges and Buicks and Studebakers, many of them used. But the runners soon upgraded to Packard Twin Six roadsters and the occasional Rolls-Royce. To avoid suspicion, they equipped their roadsters with limousine springs, which gave a car weighted down with alcohol the appearance of one merely carrying its passengers. They also brought extra supplies of gas, oil, and water to eliminate stops on the road; there were too many cautionary tales of policemen lingering at filling stations, hoping to detect the odor of whiskey or spot a pile of rifles on the floor.