her and be true to her. He would protect her and her eleven-year-old daughter, Ruth, from all unsavory people and circumstances.
One evening in the spring of 1919, that promise was tested. A local plumber knocked on Imogene’s door claiming he had found the girl’s watch and wanting a $15 reward for its return. Imogene thought that $5 would suffice. An argument ensued.
Remus had always enjoyed confrontation, physical or mental. His stout stature—five foot six and 205 pounds—belied his agility and strength. He boasted of his history as a competitive swimmer and how, as a young man, he’d set an endurance record by spending nearly six hours in frigid Lake Michigan. During his stint as a pharmacist he once argued with a customer who complained that a certain liniment had scalded his chest; Remus dragged the man outside and settled the matter by slapping him in the face. When a group of women gathered at his drugstore to protest his “poisonous potions,” Remus doused them with ammonia. As a lawyer he had a history of attacking opposing counsel and throwing punches over witness testimony, sometimes ending up in a tangle of limbs on the courtroom floor. His hubris was equaled only by a concern that someone, someday, might get the best of him.
Standing in Imogene’s doorway, Remus, wearing slippers, launched himself at the plumber, punched him in the eye, revamped his nose, knocked out a tooth, and chased him onto the lawn.
The plumber pressed charges, and Remus represented himself.
“I acted in self-defense as any red-blooded man with a spark of chivalry would have acted,” he argued. “This ruffian of a plumber was disturbing a lady. He was rough housing, loud mouthed, irrelevant, and immaterial about the premises, and I only forcibly applied a perfectly good and legal writ of ejectment.”
After five minutes of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
His wife, Lillian, filed for divorce a second and final time. In her petition she once again accused Remus of cruelty, claiming that on several occasions he beat, punched, struck, choked, and kicked her. Remus agreed to a settlement reflective of his success: a lump sum of $50,000, $25 per week in alimony, and $30,000 in a trust for their daughter, Romola. He moved out of their home for good, allowing Imogene to defend him in the press.
“He is a perfect gentleman,” she insisted, “and anything his wife says to the contrary is false. The trouble with modern wives is this: They don’t know how to treat their husbands. A husband should be given all the rope he wants…he will never hang himself.”
In response, Lillian made another disturbing allegation. She claimed to the press that Remus, on several occasions, had ended his affair with Imogene, ordering her to stay away from his office and home. But Imogene persisted, following him down Clark Street during the day and lurking outside their windows at night, flashing a gun and insisting that they were meant to be together.
* * *
With a new fiancée, home, and stepdaughter-to-be, Remus once again sought to update his life, discarding any piece of his past that seemed ill fit for his future. He included his career in this evaluation and noticed that his docket had filled with a new type of defendant: men charged with violating the Volstead Act, ratified in January 1920 to enforce the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol to, from, or within the United States. Remus considered the law to be unreasonable and nearly impossible to enforce, and his clients were proving him right, making astonishing profits from what he called “petty, hip-pocket bootlegging.” They paid retainers in cash right away, fanning the bills across his desk, and never complained about fines imposed by the court, no matter how steep. He noticed that their customers were the “so-called best people,” whose primary gripe in life was the difficulty in getting good whiskey. It occurred to him that this demand must be spreading across the country, and that if his clients—“men without any brains at all”—were succeeding, then he himself had “a chance to clean up.”
Seeking to launch a large-scale operation, he scoured the Volstead Act, finding a loophole in Title II, Section 6: With a physician’s prescription, it was legal to buy and use liquor for “medicinal purposes”—a provision he deemed, in a customary flourish of language, “the greatest comedy, the greatest perversion of justice, that I have ever known of in any civilized country in the