Our feature OKI Wanna Know is where you turn when AI can't answer your question. This week, we soak up some of Cincinnati's bootlegging history with WVXU's Bill Rinehart.
Courtney Kleier of Bellevue has a question about the "King of the Bootleggers."
"I'd like to know about George Remus. I know a little about his history but I'd like to know about his house that used to be in Cincinnati," she says. "Does it exist anymore? Is there any part of the property? And is it legal for me to go look at it?"
Before we talk about the mansion, we should talk about who George Remus was, because he was definitely a character. In 2019, there were not one, but two books about him.
Bob Bachelor was living in Cincinnati when he wrote his. Today, he teaches at Coastal Carolina University. The book The Bourbon King tells the tale of George Remus, the German immigrant who became a pharmacist, and then a lawyer in Chicago around the turn of the 20th century.
Bachelor says Remus was a criminal defense attorney.
"He eventually found himself, when Prohibition began in Illinois, defending a bunch of small time bootleggers, and the proverbial light bulb went on over his head," Bachelor says. "He said, 'If these small timers can make thousands, then with my genius, I can make millions.' "
Remus got into some trouble in Chicago, and moved.
"When George Remus came to Cincinnati he built and extended a nationwide empire built on the sale of illegal alcohol, primarily bourbon," he says. "He became the unofficial mayor of Newport, which was the original Sin City. He kind of taught Newport how to be corrupt."
Crime was paying off for Remus. Bachelor says no one knows for sure how much money he had, but there are estimates ranging from $10 million to $150 million in the 1920s.
"In our money, if some of those high estimates are true, he certainly would have been a billionaire. Maybe a billionaire many times over."
As the filthy rich are wont to do, Remus bought some property on Hermosa Street in West Price Hill. Fire insurance maps from 1922 show his estate reached from the east side of Hermosa to Greenwich Street, and from Rapid Run Pike to West Eight Street.
Bachelor says the Lackman family had already built a house on the land, but George had to put his touch on it.
"He didn't necessarily gut it, but kind of, and he put in a pool that was allegedly lined with Rookwood tile, and it was an indoor pool because George was a big swimming fan," he says. "Some say that this house was a model for what [F. Scott] Fitzgerald had for Gatsby's house in The Great Gatsby."
Bachelor says there are pictures of the interior and the exterior, but they really don't do it justice.
As for visiting the home, he says unfortunately, photos are just about all that are left. Just about.
Anderson Township blacksmith Jordan Graff says he was hired to restore the gates that stood at the Remus driveway.
"When that mansion was demolished I was told the gates were gifted to Elder High School, and Elder High School put them at their back entrance, and this probably would have been in the '50s or '60s."
Graff says after the gates at Elder were replaced, his client acquired them, with plans to install them somewhere on the West Side. Graff's looking for a photograph of the gates to confirm their origin.
There are a few photographs in the Cincinnati Hamilton County Public Library's collection, showing the ballroom, bedrooms and, as Bachelor points out, the pool.
"There are rumors that there have been pieces of his tile pool found, when people are mowing the grass and all that," he says. "I never actually, when I lived in Cincinnati, I never had the courage to go there and just try to dig around because most people in Cincinnati don't want you just aimlessly digging around in their backyard."
Price Hill Historical Society says they have some souvenirs: a dining room set and chairs from the Remus estate. But a spokesman says they're not from the mansion.
Bachelor says there are other Remus relics still around.
"At the Mt. Adams Bar & Grill, they have a bar back that they say was owned by Remus, but we're not sure if it came out of a speakeasy that Remus owned, or out of his mansion."
Bachelor says Remus's third wife started selling off pieces of the estate, after he killed his second wife, which is a whole other story.
"Every aspect of George Remus' life becomes increasingly more bonkers to the point where it's almost unbelievable."
The house was torn down in 1934, but the pool survived until 1940.
Remus and his third wife Blanche eventually moved to two houses he owned in Covington, where he had a stroke in 1950. He died there in 1952. Bachelor says the two houses still stand, and still look like they did then.
Remus is buried in Riverside Cemetery in Falmouth, Kentucky.
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