Hey there, it's your host ed helms.
Here.
Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April twenty ninth. It's called Snaffo, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups, and you can pre order it right now at snaffoodashbook dot com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book. It's got all the wild disasters spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker.
I am also going on tour to celebrate that's right. I'm coming to New York, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and my hometown Los Angeles. So if you've ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q and A or dramatically read about a kiddie cat getting turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance again. Head to snaffoo dashbook dot com to pre order the book and check out all the tour details in day, or just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay,
that's it, on with the chaos. This is Snaffoo Season three formula six. Previously on Snaffoo. The head of prohibition Enforcement cracked down on bootleggers.
Mabel Walker Willebrant was a very serious woman, and she woke up every day. The first thing she did was takeing an ice cold bath.
World War One soldier George Cassidy became the top bootlegger to Congress. He was a dapper dude.
You would have thought he was a general of the most powerful army in the world or something.
And as deaths from alcohol began to rise, American drinkers kept right on drinking.
The acceptance of risk that came with prohibition at these levels is kind of horrifying, but it was there, and it was real.
On an November afternoon in nineteen twenty two, Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willibrandt takes a trip to the Capitol Building. I imagine her with a bulging briefcase, maybe a couple of clerks scrambling along behind her trying to keep up. They're carrying everything she needs for the case she's about to argue. She climbs the stone steps and crosses into the shade of white stone columns, then enters a red
carpeted two story chamber with a domed ceiling. It's the old Senate Chamber, which in nineteen twenty two was home to the Supreme Court. And today Mabel is presenting her case before the nine Supreme Court justices. It's her big moment. The gallery is packed for a court case that's made national news, the United States versus George Remis. So far, prohibition enforcement wasn't going so well. It wasn't going well in the liquor capital of America, New York City, where
the bodies were piling up at Alexander Getler's lab. And it wasn't going well in the nation's actual capital, Washington, d C. Where speakeasies were popping up on every corner and business was booming for the bootleggers, and no bootlegger was making a bigger profit than George Remas. Remis wasn't just a bootlegger. He was a lawyer and a pharmacist too, a trifecta that made him one of the richest men
in America. Since the start of Prohibition, Remus had been building an illegal alcohol empire that rivaled al Capones, which made him the target of Mabel Walker Willebrandt. When she faced George Remas in court. Mabel was determined that this would be a turning point in her war. Remus was a big fish, and Mabel was going to gut him. With the whole nation watching, I'm Ed Helms and this
is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw ups. This season a dark tale from the heart of the Prohibition era Formula six, how prohibitions war on alcohol went so off the rails the government wound up poisoning its own people. Today, we'll follow Mabel Walker Willebrandt in Washington, d C. As
she faces one formidable challenge after another. Her bosses are drunks, her agents are incompetent, and she's about to realize that across the government and even within her own Department of Justice, she can't trust anyone.
She was a lone warrior.
That's historian and author Dan Grint.
And she really had an uphill battle for a bunch of reasons.
As you may remember, Mabel was surrounded at her job by straight up drunks, starting with the President.
Harding drank a lot. Harry Dougherty, the Attorney General, who was the immediate boss to Mabel wille Brandt, he was a a drunk and be corrupt.
And again, like we said before, the guy leading the Treasury Department and supervising the Prohibition Bureau owned a whiskey company. So when it came time for Mabel to do some basic stuff like higher clerks for legal research, well, she hit a wall.
She didn't have much in the way of financial support. And one of the things that was indicative of the attitude of the dryes is that they passed these laws but gave no money for enforcement.
She didn't have anywhere near the manpower she needed to stop the alcohol coming across two borders and sixty thousand miles of open coastline.
The fact that they were only twenty six hundred prohibitionations covering the entire Canadian border, the Mexican border, and both coasts, it's ridiculous.
And as for that army of agents, even that man power was quickly dwindling. Hundreds of agents were being dismissed around the country for brazen corruption, and even the ones who weren't corrupt were pretty much useless. Sure they were given guns and cars, but little or no training to do the actual job.
Someone said about the Canadian border, you know you can't stop a liquid from leaking through a dotted line that dotted line on the map.
So what could Mabel actually do from behind her barge sized mahogany desk in Room five oh one at the Department of Justice.
Well, she had the power to bring indictments, the.
Power of the courts, and as you may remember, her job was to work with the bespectacled accountants at the IRS, a group of agents supremely qualified to crack down on inflated tax deductions, but maybe not so much collecting the evidence of illicit bootlegging.
Open up IRS, No one's here.
Oh shit, Look there's a whole case of shar truth.
We should collect that.
Can't let good evidence go to waste.
I like the way you enforced the law. But Mabel was undeterred, and in the fall of nineteen twenty two, she decided to get creative. She came up with a plan to round up every last bootlegger, and she was gonna start by going after the biggest bootlegger of all, George Remis.
Yes, you're under arrest for violating Title two of the Volstad Act.
You ever watch Boardwalk Empire When the show's writer creator Terry Winter began researching George Remis. He couldn't believe what he found.
Here's Terry George Ramis one of the craziest stories here, Like an incredibly successful defense attorney becomes like the biggest bootlegger ever.
You're making a mistake. No, can't do this. Limis doesn't get arrested. In the show, Remis is a large, bald, rich weirdo who, yes, you heard it right, refers to himself in the third person.
And he's like, like, if I made that up, you'd got like, come on, and this absolutely all happened.
Yeah, all of that's true, including the third person thing. His parties were so over the top that people think he may have been the inspiration for the Great Gatsby.
The whole city packed into automobiles and all weekend, every weekend ended up at Gatspie's.
In nineteen twenty two, no one in America owned more of the illegal alcohol trade than Remus. At one point, he controlled thirty percent of the liquor making its way into America.
Because he had bought up a whole bunch of huge rick houses full of whiskey.
That's historian Garrett Peck. Remus's warehouse stored twenty five million dollars worth of alcohol, which he sold and distributed using a prohibition loophole from ad sintle alcohol.
And then he'd bribed people so he could have three or four times as much as that he could distribute, and he was legally allowed to. So he made a fortune, yeah, despite by being able to sell alcohol without any taxes on it.
Since Remus did all the illegal selling without paying taxes, obviously, Mabel saw an opportunity. Maybe she could actually use tax law in her favor. He could exploit loopholes in prohibition law, but maybe she could finally bust Remis through the unforgiving tax code. And this wasn't just about Remus. She wanted to send a message to all of the bootleggers across the country. One way or another, she was coming for them. With those black robed justices staring down from their tufted
leather thrones, the room can be an intimidating place. But for Mabel, Nah, She's unflappable, so cool in the courtroom that people joke she has ice in her veins. All that is to say, Mabel is tough, and it was a good thing too. The new York papers lined up against her in their coverage of a Supreme Court hearing.
One newspaper reported that Mabel wasn't quote exactly pretty because her features were quote too large and too serious for that, and she suffered from a quote suggestion of plumpness, which is what I might call a suggestion of shitty, misogynistic journalism. And to top it all off, they couldn't even get her job title right. One paper called her the woman assistant of the Attorney General, but she's actually assistant Attorney General. These things matter. Just ask Dwight shrut.
I am now sempi, which is assistant.
Sense assistant to the sense.
That's pretty cool, assistant sense. Mabel wasn't shy about her disdain for how she and other women in the working world had to deal with what she called girly girly stuff. She once sat down for an interview with a literary magazine called The Smart Set, basically the nineteen twenties version of an Instagram Live.
A boy must do the job well and develop personality. A girl must do the job well and develop personality, plus break down skepticism about her ability walk the type rope of sexlessness without loss of her essential charm make the hard choice between giving up children and home life in order to advance or having them in the face of increased prejudice.
So when Mabel faces down bootleggers like George Remus in court, she knows the guy in front of her isn't her only opponent, but she's undaunted. She's got to get shit done, and now before the Supreme Court, she makes a stirring case. Where other prosecutors might have overlooked tax law as a hammer, I mean, let's be honest, it's pretty boring, obscure stuff. Mabel saw nothing but potential. Her approach was ingenia and her arguments impassioned.
The tax penalties outlined in internal revenue laws are highly important in the enforcement of prohibition. The government isn't giving it stamp of approval to an illicit business by taxing them. An illegitimate business should not be exempt from paying taxes that legitimate businesses should pay. They must pay up too.
George Remas he was making a fortune because he was selling liquor without paying taxes on it. This was bold. No one had the audacity or imagination to prosecute any major crime figures for income tax evasion, but Mabel determined. Unflinching, Mabel decided that if it was going to take tax law to enforce prohibition, then so be it. After arguments concluded and the Justices began deliberations, Mabel was on edge
because this trial clearly wasn't just about Remus. This was about all the fat cat bootleggers in a Mana America, including a fella named Willie Harr, remember him, leader of the massive bootlegging operation the Savannah Four down in Georgia, and also captain of the vaunted and audaciously meta recreational baseball squad, the Bootlegger Team. Well, Harr and his whole gang were anxiously following Remis's trial from Savannah, knowing that
their fate was tied to Remises. This is because Mabel had also charged Harr with the same crime, having determined the Savannah Four owed two million dollars in unpaid taxes from their illegal bootlegging. If the Supreme Court ruled in Mabel's favor and decided bootleggers had to pay taxes, well, that could be the ballgame for Horror and the Bootlegger team. Of course, a few days later, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes renders the court's decision. First, some bad news for Mabel.
Remus's arrest in this case had occurred a year earlier, in October nineteen twenty one. The tax statutes that Mabel was resting her entire case on they had passed a month later in November, so Remus is exempt. The law Mabel was trying to slap onto him didn't even apply. She missed her shot by a month. For now, Remus was still a free man. That might seem like a setback for Mabel, but she's a creature of the law.
She knows that hidden under the surface of a defeat, victories can be one piece by piece, and in this case there was a surprise twist. Even though Remis got out on a technicality, the Justice is decided that Mabel was actually right. In addition to all their other crimes, bootleggers also owed taxes on their ill gotten revenue, and if they didn't pay up, it was another mark against them, one that came with serious jail time. And that decision
reverberated all the way down to Savannah. And that is a win for Mabel because she sees the potential of this ruling to dramatically change prohibition enforcement. So even though George Remis is acquitted, Mabel emerges from the old Senate Chamber ecstatic. Think about this. She's having trouble locking up bootleggers because it's virtually impossible to catch them red handed, but this gives her a whole new angle of attack.
If she can prove they've been doing business and not paying taxes on the income, she can lock them up without ever having to enter a keg into evidence boom. And even though Remis had just gotten off the hook, he was bound to keep bootlegging, and he probably wasn't going to just start paying taxes, so it wouldn't be long until Mabel would see him in court again. Investigating,
Mabel can feel the tide beginning to turn. I can picture Mabel now striding out of that capital with a bouncing her step, bursting with pride, which is sadly ironic, because somewhere across town, a man is strolling along carrying a suitcase with a smile. He tips his green hat to the people he passes. He's on his way to make a delivery and casually undermine everything she's fighting for. This green headed fellow would be George Cassidy, merrily strolling
through the halls of Congress. Because business is good, George is averaging two dozen deliveries a day. A bottle of sweet red Vermouth to a congressman, two bottles of red star Gin to a junior senator, a case of Duncan Harwood's Canadian whiskey for the house speaker. Yep, those are some big ass suitcases that George hal's around. His delivery's done. He now takes the stairs down to the basement and
finally arrives at an unassuming door. George takes out his keys, unlocks the door, steps in, and flips on the lights. The windowless room has a mahogany poker table, swivel chairs, and lots and lots of bottles of booze. Welcome to George's office, you see. A few months ago, one of George's clients, a congressman, hooked George up with an office which quickly became the warehouse for some of the best
liquor in town. Not that his clients could tell the difference between a McCallan eighteen seventy eight and at George's bathtub nineteen twenty two. These politicians may have considered themselves connoisseurs, but they had no idea. They were just drinking a cheap blend with some food coloring. At the time, only George himself knew just how much water he was using to cut the imported alcohol. The congressman start marching in. One of these men of high taste is one of
George's most loyal customers. When he walks into George's tavern, hopefully in a straight line, his colleagues joke, get out the corn and put up the rye. He's known around the Capitol as a bottle of day man. George serves him a tall glass of his special elixir all the way to the brim and the crazy thing. Rumor had it that he was one of the most eloquent speakers on the House floor.
I would like to make an inquiry to the Senate for the purpose of understanding just the scope of this resolution.
John Nance Garner. He would later become Speaker of the House and then Vice President of the United States under FDR. Add this guide to the list of lushes that surrounded Mabel Walker Willebrandt as she tried to do her job. Back in George's office, the boys are getting comfortable this fully operational speakeas he is home to a secret congressional drinking club. They even have a name for themselves, the Barflies Association or BFA for short. Washington sure loves a three letter bureau.
We had a whole closet full of alcohol there he'd sell to everyone, and also that people could come down and play cards with him. Mind you, this is a guy with a third grade education, and yet he was enormously charming.
That's Garrett Peck again.
He was on a first name basis with all these different congressmen and they liked him. He knew how to put all the congressmen at ease. They had to sit there and talk politics. They could just come down and shoot the breeze with him and play some poker.
At George's office. The nights are late. Sometimes George comes home, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes the party continues elsewhere outside the Capitol, like on this particular night, as we followed George from the House Office building to a Victorian townhouse on a tree lined just blocks from the White House. This is K Street and the house is made of green limestone with one big magnolia tree out front. It has a
nickname the Little green House. Every night, the Little Greenhouse is full of men smoking, playing poker, and you guessed it, drinking. There's always plenty of liquor on hand, the best stuff, thanks to cases streaming in on wells fargo wagons driven by armed guards. The regulars were men in high places, George's lawmaking pals, sure, but also the Prohibition Commissioner, the
Attorney General, and even on occasion, the President himself. George didn't supply the Little Greenhouse, but he was a welcome guest, along with several of his bootlegging compatriots, including the most notorious bootlegger of all, the bald guy in the resplendent suit, George Remus. The Little Greenhouse was where guys like George Remis could ask for favors, like for a big stack
of permits that gave them access to some booze. You see, under prohibition law there were still allowances made for a few kinds of alcohol. It was permitted for sale for religious ceremonies and medical purposes as long as you had a permit. And there was one regular at the Little Greenhouse who had bags stuffed with those permits and could fix it up for bootleggers. He was, in fact, one of George Remas's pals. He was the man with black wire glasses and a bushy mustache standing in a corner
of the room. It was a face that Mabel Walker Willebrandt would have known well because he was a doj man named Jess Smith. See. Jess was the right hand man of the Attorney General, a fixer for the entire Department of Justice, and his office was literally next door to Mabels. And Jess was always happy to oblige the fellows he met in the Little Greenhouse. It seemed like
Jess almost relished undermining Mabel's work. He was happy to give out permits and even make promises of immunity to loads of bootleggers like Remus, happily handing him wads of cash in return. But all this wheeling and dealing was about to catch up with Jess Smith, and it was only a matter of time before Mabel caught wind of all his shenanigans. In May of nineteen twenty three, a few months after her big legal win, Mabel Walker willebrand had big plans. She was going to take a vacation,
and she deserved it. Mabel was still on cloud nine over her Supreme Court win. She wrote to her parents.
It was a gorgeous victory and one of which I am prouder than of anything I've done so far.
And months after the Supreme Court decision, Mabel actually went after George Remas again, and this time she ailed him on the tax evasion charges. This case had been a simple one conviction in no time flat. Yep, George was headed to the slammer, and not only him, Willie Harror had been convicted of breaking tax law too. Willie was also going to prison. It had taken some careful maneuvering and some patience, but Mabel had lined him up and knocked him down. So she was in a mood to celebrate.
Her bags were packed. She was headed west for a few days of R and R, you know, a little me time in those ice baths. Mabel was just about out the door when her phone rang, the Attorney General on the line with news about her colleague Jess Smith. Oh yeah, that guy at the office with the weird mustache. What about him could possibly warrant a call from the Attorney General? Well. She recalls that the Attorney General and Jess are pretty buddy buddy. They even share an apartment
at the Wardman Park Inn. It's the swank kest place in town, with its white gloved bell hops, chandeliers the size of Merry Go rounds, and gold plated atrium. It was a hotel hotspot and home to DC's upper crust, a place for meetings and soares would go on into the night. He tells her that in the wee hours of last night, May nineteenth, nineteen twenty three, a gunshot
rang out across the hotel's sixth floor. It came from a corner suite, the Attorney General's own apartment, the very one he shares with Jess Smith, as fate would have it, Directly below Darty's sixth floor suite lives the director of the fed's brand spank anew Bureau of Investigation, which is the predecessor to the FBI. Moments after the gunshot, the director of the bureau is on the scene with I'm
assuming a very bad case of BedHead. The bureau director enters the suite to find a body twisted on the floor. The man on the floor is wearing black rimmed glasses and a bushy mustache. It's not Attorney General Dharty. The guy is in his pajamas, lying on the blood soaked carpet. There's a hole shot through his right temple, and his head is in a garbage can a top ashes of burned papers. The man isn't famous, he isn't even a politician, and his death is quickly ruled by the Bureau director
as a suicide. But things don't really add up, like how on earth could a man shoot himself and have his head end up inside a wastebasket. Why was the weapon a gun, missing from the scene when the cops arrived, And why was Jess carrying around his will in his pocket to be magically discovered by police hours later like a gift on Christmas Morning To an analytical mind like Mabel's. The pieces weren't adding up until as the dig deeper into Smith's stuff, they discover evidence that Jess Smith may
have been at the center of something quite criminal. Turns out, Smith was carrying a long list of bootleggers from across the country. George Remis Yep, he was on there. Also, Jess Smith had something that was a little unusual for an employee of the Department of Justice. Wads and wads of cash back at the DOJ, Rumors are flying around the office about what exactly was behind Smith's quote unquote suicide.
Maybe Smith and someone at the Department of Justice had a falling out, and maybe Smith threatened to expose the corruption that was going on behind closed doors. Maybe George Remis was getting back at Smith after his arrest. A hit job by a big bootlegger wouldn't be out of the question. Now. Mabel and Jess, they weren't tight, even though Jess's office was right now to hers at the DOJ.
She knew that Jess pushed papers and dealt with permits, but she didn't know what Jess did with those permits, and Mabels certainly didn't know that Jess was chummy with George Remis. Her mind was reeling after the phone call, Attorney General Dharty summoned Mabel to his office. He was probably smelling a bit suspicious himself after a late night at the Little Greenhouse. Was that a hint of oak
aged corn whiskey under the reek of cigar smoke? I imagine him dramatically spinning around in his chair to pass along some unfortunate news. Yes, it was true. Jess was in the pockets of every big time bootlegger in America, running his operations from out of his DOJ office right next to Mabels. Not only that, Jess was involved in another totally different but equally massive bribery scandal for completely different crimes. Turns out there was a lot of corrupt
under that mustache. Yep. Darty admitted to Mabel that the DOJ was one big old shit show, which is why he said he would totally understand if Mabel wanted to hand in her resignation, And as you can probably imagine, Mabel went bananas. Vacation totally canceled. Basically, while she had been fighting Remus in court, her office neighbor had apparently been at Remas's beck and call, and now Darty was
asking her if she wanted to step down. Mabel had no intention of quitting, and she told her boss exactly that her war was just beginning. She had her Supreme Court win, and she had this too. George Remis was headed to a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, so was Willie Harr, the country's biggest bootleggers were going down, and Mabel was going to make sure both were going to do hard
time like any other criminal. As Remus was making furious attempts to get his conviction overturned, Mabel went straight to President Coolidge to smash Remus's hopes, writing, I am.
Of the emphatic opinion that no respite should be given George Remas or any of the defendants convicted with him. George Remas and his group of co conspirators are defiant, dangerous law breakers. He has exhibited a rare ability to surround himself as seemingly respectable and unimportant citizens while he
hides behind their operations. In my opinion, it would be a grave mistake to treat these defendants in any manner differently than the thousands of offenders convicted of much lesser crimes under the liquor laws.
She got her wish. Remus was locked away behind bars in Atlanta, Georgia. But then one morning a few months later, Mabel got a call from an agent down south. He had a little update on how her pal Remas was doing down there in Atlanta. Turns out, old Georgie Remas was doing pretty good. Sure George Remas was technically in prison, just in the part of the prison that was more like I don't know Versailles. Thanks to his connections, George was living like Marie Antoinette. He had his own quarters,
his own kitchen, his own private bath. He dined separate from the rest of the inmates except for one guy. To add insult injury. His dining mate was Willie Harr. Remas and Harr were dining each night on linen tablecloths with fresh floral centerpieces, and playing games of high limit poker with a minimum bet set at fifty dollars. Their section of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary would soon have its own nickname, Millionaires Row, and within two years, both men
would be out to pick up right where they left off. Now, as Mabel sank into her ice cold bath in her DC apartment, she couldn't help but think of George Remas dining on steak, chomping on a cigar, having the last laugh. No matter how hard she was trying, she was really losing her fight with the bootleggers. Not only were her colleagues at the Justice Department worthless in supporting her, they were actively undermining her at every turn, and that's when
the Ice Queen finally cracked. Doing things by the book at the Department of Justice wasn't getting the job done. Arrests convictions not only were they heart as hell to get, they hardly meant anything when the consequences were well luxurious. The Ice Queen's head was cold, but it was also clear if she was ever going to get American bootleggers and drinkers to respect the law, she was going to have to take new measures, more extreme measures. The consequences
for breaking prohibition law would have to hurt. It's next time on Snaffoo. He loved to show off.
If you could have the opportunity to show off his sharp shooting skills, he would. There are rumors that he would shoot apples at the top of people's heads. Governor recognized the fact that if we're going to have prohbission agents, we need people that are fearless. Richard Hart was somebody who fit that to a tee.
Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Albert Chin and Carl Nellis, with additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from Stephen Wood.
Tory Smith is our associate producer. Our story editor is nicky Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Callopoly and a kimmedy Ekpo. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing, music and sound design by Ben Chug Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. The music by Dan Rosatto. The role of Mabel Walker will Brandt was played by
Carrie Bische. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Ryzak