The Bourbon King
The Life and Crimes of George Remus, Prohibition's Evil Genius
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The rise and fall of the man who cracked Prohibition to become one of the world’s richest criminal masterminds—and helped inspire The Great Gatsby.
Love, murder, political intrigue, mountains of cash, and rivers of bourbon…The tale of George Remus is a grand spectacle and a lens into the dark heart of Prohibition. Yes, Congress gave teeth to Prohibition in October, 1919, but the law didn’t stop George Remus from amassing a fortune that would be worth billions of dollars today. As one Jazz Age journalist put it, “Remus was to bootlegging what Rockefeller was to oil.”
Author Bob Batchelor breathes life into the largest bootlegging operation in America—greater than that of Al Capone—and a man considered the best criminal defense lawyer of his era. Remus bought an empire of distilleries on Kentucky’s “Bourbon Trail” and used his other profession, as a pharmacist, to profit off legal loopholes. He spent millions bribing officials in the Harding Administration, and he created a roaring lifestyle that epitomized the Jazz Age over which he ruled.
That is, before he came crashing down in one of the most sensational murder cases in American history: a cheating wife, the G-man who seduced her and put Remus in jail, and the plunder of a Bourbon Empire. Remus murdered his wife in cold-blood and then shocked a nation winning his freedom based on a condition he invented—temporary maniacal insanity.
“The fantastic story of George Remus makes the rest of the “Roaring Twenties” look like the “Boring Twenties” in comparison.” ―David Pietrusza, author of 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The roaring '20s glisten with vice and danger in this fast-paced portrait of prolific bootlegger George Remus, from biographer Batchelor (Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel). The son of German immigrants, Remus (1874 1952) quit school to support the family as a pharmacist, then became a criminal defense attorney notorious for his dramatic courtroom tactics and defense of the "elite of crime" in Chicago. In the 1920s, Remus moved to Cincinnati and, using his knowledge of the medical industry and the loophole allowing whiskey to be distributed for medicinal purposes, worked his way into a near monopoly on the Kentucky bourbon trade in the Midwest with expansions along the East Coast. He divorced one wife, married another, made vast sums of money, bribed officials in the attorney general's office, was arrested for violations of the Volstead Act, got convicted, and served two years in prison during which time his second wife fell in love with a high-ranking Prohibition agent, and the two of them spent and lost most of Remus's millions. Remus shot her dead, defended himself in court, and was acquitted by reason of insanity. Batchelor's action-packed narrative both entertains and informs with its tales of the corruption of President Warren G. Harding's attorney general, the bootlegging trade, and the public's oscillating views of Remus and Prohibition in general. Larger-than-life characters take the reins of this story, a rip-roaring good time for any American history buff or true-crime fan.
