Julius Moyse & His “Back Sheep” Cousin

Imagine yourself in the shoes of a successful Cincinnati liquor dealer named Julius L. Moyse, plagued with a “black sheep” first cousin who bore an identical name.  Born in the same Mississippi town, the two were bound to be confused in the public mind.  The "bad" Julius L. Moyse, passing bad checks and perpetrating scams, spent his life in and out of jail, That Julius also wedded nine women over his lifetime, frequently using phony names while committing serial bigamy.

Whiskey man Julius was born in 1864 in Summit, a small town in Pike County, Mississippi He was the son of Rosalie and Isadore Moyse, a immigrant from France who ran a dry goods store in Summit.  An eldest child, Julius would soon be joined by two younger brothers, Alphonse, born in 1866 and Edward, known as “Eddie” in 1868.  They were followed by five other siblings.

By the time he was 16, Julius had finished his schooling and was recorded in the 1880 census working as a clerk, almost certainly in Isadore’s emporium.  For much of the next decade he appears to have been employed in Mississippi. In March 1890 he wed Flora Aaronson in Summit.  Flora was native of New York who was 21 at the time of their marriage. Their only child, Ayleen, was born nine months later.

By early in that decade the Moyse family had moved north to Ohio, settling in Cincinnati, a city in which making, buying and selling whiskey was a major industry.  There he established a liquor house called Moyse Brothers, located at 62 Main Street, and involving his brothers Alphonse and Eddie in the management.  Neither brother was on site.  Eddie was deployed to operate a New Orleans branch at 829 Canal Street and Alphonse remained in Summit, presumably marketing whiskey in Mississippi.

Moyse Brothers advertised as “Distillers of Kentucky Whiskies” but in fact were wholesale dealers and “rectifiers,” that is, blending products purchased from true distillers and mixing it to achieve a desired flavor, color and smoothness.  Julius then bottled the resulting whiskey and sold it in bulk to saloons, restaurants and hotels. 

Those customers might be gifted with shot glasses advertising “Old Metropole,” the flagship brand of Moyse Brothers.  Best customers might be given a silver plated teapot bearing the Old Metropole name  This object was meant to be placed on a bar containing tea or water, allowing drinkers to mix it with their liquor.

The liquor house appears to have been success from the start, expanding to new quarters at 228 East Fourth Street in 1901, moving five years later to 422 West Fourth, and finally to 328 East Third Street.  With his growing wealth, Julius was able to move his small family into a commodious home at 310 Rockdale Avenue in Cincinnati, shown here.  The 1910 census found Julius, Flora and Ayleen living there with two Irish servants, Nora Hughes, a cook, and Nora Diskin, a domestic.

Meanwhile elsewhere The Other Julius L. Moyse was carving out an entirely different life for himself.  The son of Isadore’s brother, Leon, he was born in Summit in 1879.  Why he was given a name identical to his older cousin has not been explained.  By the time he was fifteen years old The Other Julius was already getting into trouble.  Vicksburg newspaper accounts reported him scamming  money and passing bad checks in 1894.  That same year he was jailed in Marshall, Texas, for posing as a relative of a candy manufacturer and swindling the company.  It was just one of many guises The Other Julius would adopt over his lifetime.

Three years later he was in Decatur, Georgia, as the purported member of a New York City law firm come to town to defend a man accused of murder.  Then he showed up in Memphis claiming to be C.L. Young of the Metropolitan Opera, NYC — until the real C. L. Young confronted him.  In 1898. Perhaps trying to carve a new identity, the Other Julius enlisted in the U.S. Army for the Spanish-American War as a private.  He is pictured here in military uniform.  

The experience sent him on a new identity path as Lieutenant Moyse.  That took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he cashed some bad checks and ran out on his hotel bill.  Caught and charged, he spent several months in a state prison farm, shown below.  There followed years of his scams.  In Birmingham, Alabama, The Other Julius was a Catholic priest; in Muscogee, Oklahoma, the son of the governor of Virginia; in Parsons, Kansas, a drug salesman; in Milwaukee, the son of Louis Kavanaugh, treasurer of the Kuhn, Loeb New York financial house.  Press reports would indicate that frequently those charades were unsuccessful and The Other Julius spent time in jail.

He appears to have fared better in his efforts to woo and wed women of some wealth, marrying an estimated nine over a period from approximately 1900 to 1920.  Ruggedly handsome and charming, The Other Julius first moved to the altar in New Orleans under the guise of Captain J. E. Clarke.  The bride was Bertha Warnken (also given as “Werken”) a 20-year old woman from a wealthy Dayton, Ohio, family.  Within several weeks, his fraud was exposed and he was arrested for impersonating a government officer.  After a trial that drew national press attention The Other Julius was convicted and sent to prison.  Bertha divorced him.

That initial experience did not deter The Other Julius.  Usually under an assumed name he continued to find brides, sometimes under circumstances of bigamy. There followed, perhaps not in exact order, Mable L. Rea, Eva May Kamana, Dollie Harris, Ethel Weaver, Florence H. Bamberger, Iseal Fay Smalley, Hoyette E.Roberts, and Virginia J. Bolding.  Three of them are shown below: from left, Florence Bamberger, Isael Smalley and Bertha Warnken.  A uncertain number of children also resulted from several of these unions.

Meanwhile back in Cincinnati, Julius Moyse, given the extensive press coverage, must have been painfully aware of the exploits of his namesake cousin.  The Other Julius had made Cincinnati the scene of one or more of his schemes, using the Moyse name.  The prospect of confusion was an ever present possibility.  

Not that Julius had been entirely squeaky clean in his business dealings.  In June 1912 the company was hailed into the Federal District of Southern Ohio for having shipped in interstate commerce a quantity of peach brandy that was judged under the Pure Food Act to be “adulterated and misbranded.”  He pleaded guilty and was given a “slap on the wrist” fine of $25.  Evidently Julius did not learn the lesson.  In March 1915 he was hauled again into the same court for adulteration and misbranding a shipment of apple brandy sent from Ohio into Louisiana.  This time when he pled guilty, the judge fined him $300 (equiv. $6,500 today) and court costs.

Moyse Brothers also figured in a 1907 state legislative investigation of the South Carolina State Dispensary, the governor’s attempt to control all sales of alcoholic beverages.  The system quickly had become a source of corruption, including kickbacks to officials from liquor dealers.  Although all purchases required the signature of two directors, Dispensary Director John Black personally had gone to Cincinnati and on his own bought 600 cases of liquor from Moyse Brothers, worth $125,000 ($2.75 million today.)  Black failed to testify, pleading illness and leaving the state.  The clear implication, never proved, was a kickback to Black by Moyse.

When statewide prohibition was enacted in Ohio in 1916, Julius shut the doors on Moyse Brothers and moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where he died in 1958 at the age of 88.  He is buried there.  The Other Julius preceded his cousin in 1934, dying at 55.  At that time he appears still to have been married to Wife #9.  He lies buried in a cemetery in Ofuskee County, Oklahoma, a state where he had lived for more than two decades.

Notes:  The material for this post has been drawn from a range of sources, the principal one being the highly candid ancestry.com website maintained by descendants of the Moyse family.  The illustrations of “The Other Moyse” and three of his wives are from the same source.  Two prior posts have dealt with the South Carolina Dispensary, Nov. 20, 2013 and July 4, 2020.