Jerry Mullins: Out of the Mines to Fight Prohibition

 

The caricature that opens this post pictures one of the “prominent men of Montana”  whose career took him from laboring in the earth as a youthful miner to running a successful Butte liquor house and brewery and later heading up the fight against the forces of Prohibition in “The Bonanza State.”  His name was Jeremiah “Jerry” Mullins.

Mullins was born in Quebec, Canada, in August 1838 of Irish immigrant parents.  His father, Daniel Mullins from County Cork, immigrated to North America in 1846 at the outset of the Irish potato famine.  After a period in Massachusetts, Daniel went to Canada to work on the Canadian Grand Trunk Railway.  Jerry’s mother, Mary Mahoney, was born in Ireland and brought to Canada as a child.  The parents married there.  They would have nine children, of whom Jerry was the youngest. 

By the time Jerry Mullins reached school age the family had relocated to Marquette County, Michigan, where he attended elementary school.  His education ended when he was fourteen, forced by family circumstances to go to work.  “He subsequently earned his first money by driving a horse, receiving a dollar a day wages,”  according to a 1913 biography. “…His first permanent employment was as a day laborer on the Canadian Pacific Railroad.”

When he reached 21, Mullins, pulled by the lure of gold, left his Michigan home for the Black Hills of South Dakota.  The greatest days in Black Hills mining history had come three years earlier in 1876, when a team of four men discovered a gold bearing outcropping near present day Lead, S.D., staked a lode claim, and named their new mine the Homestake. They had located a part of the most significant gold vein in American history.  Thousands flocked to the area; many like Mullins were too late to experience a golden harvest.   After laboring in the soil there for two years, in 1881 Mullins moved 520 miles west to Butte, Montana, and resumed his mining efforts.

Those activities may have been more fruitful.  After five years in mining he found sufficient resources to open a saloon on the east side of Butte’s Main Street, shown here.  This venture proved unsuccessful and after only a year Mullins abandoned the role of saloonkeeper and, as his biography put it:  “The ensuing four years was variously employed….”   Among occupations, he served two years as deputy sheriff of Silver Bow County.   Even then Mullins’ talents were becoming increasing evident to himself and residents of Butte.

Thus, it probably surprised no one when John A. Stromberg who ran a store on the corner of Arizona and Platinum Streets featuring “whole fruits, produce, wines, liquor and cigars” took Mullins on as a partner.  The new enterprise, Stromberg, Mullins Company ditched fruit and vegetables and became entirely a liquor house, also selling bar equipment and supplies, and boasting an adjacent saloon.  Shown here as it looks today, the company’s chief location was known as the Stromberg-Mullins Building.

Artifacts from Stromberg, Mullins are rare.  An exception is a bar token advertising Lemp beer, the product of the W. J. Lemp Brewing Company of St. Louis.  The token is believed by collectors to have originated in Butte where Stromberg, Mullins Co. represented the brewery.

Meanwhile Jerry Mullins was having a personal life.  In August 1893, at the age of 35, he married Katherine O’Neil, a woman of Irish heritage, born in Michigan and according to records was 17 when they wed.  A year later their daughter, Mary Leona was born.  She was their only child.  By now prosperous, Mullins moved his family into a modest one story house at 510 West Galena Street in Butte.  Then he set about remodeling it extensively.  He added a one story extension and second story.  Today the house is on the historic register for its curved glass parlor bay, original Victorian interior, including a double staircase, an ornate support pillar, maple floors, and original light fixtures.  Mullins left his personal mark on the residence, carving his name in the granite doorstep and initials in the beveled glass above the door.  Shown here, although the exterior facade has been changed, the house interior is much as Jerry and Kate left it.

Mullins took a strong interest in local and state politics, active in the Democratic party organization in Butte.  He was elected from the Sixth Ward to a two year term on the City Council and followed with second term, named by his peers as Council President in City Hall, shown here. During this same period, he left Stromberg to open to his own saloon/liquor store and in 1904  joined with other Butte locals in starting a new brewery called the Tivoli Brewing Company.  Mullins was secretary treasurer and his saloon described as the main distribution point for wholesale and retail beer customers.

While Mullins may have been growing ever more wealthy from his liquor and brewery revenues, the forces of prohibition were accelerating in Montana as well as throughout the Nation.  Some brewers and beer distributors were employing a strategy that decried the evils of whiskey, allying themselves with the “Drys,” but insisting that beer was akin to “food” and should not be banned.  Alarmed, leading voices in the liquor industry, recognizing that the argument was damaging the entire effort at staving off bans on alcohol, created an organization called the National Protective Association.  It operated through a network of state units.  

As an individual who was involved with both liquor and beer, Jerry Mullins was a natural choice to be chosen president of the Montana Protective Association.  Traveling throughout the state advising on local issues, he became a widely recognized figure.  Thus it was no surprise when Mullins was selected among 100 Montana residents to be chosen for a caricature in the 1911 book, “Cartoons and Caricatures of Prominent Men of Montana,” — the picture that opens this post.  Mullins was the only “whiskey man” depicted.

In the end, Mullins efforts to beat back the forces of prohibition were futile.  On December 31, 1918, a year before the imposition of National Prohibition, Montana went “dry.”  Mullins was forced to close his saloon and witness the demise of the Tivoli Brewery after 14 years in operation.  Earlier he had taken a financial setback as the president of a mining company headquartered in Butte, capitalized at $1.5 million in 1914 dollars.  A mining journal reported the company owned the Ultamilla gold mine near Helena, Montana but was “in debt and idle.”

Whether it was these twin setbacks or other causes, Jerry and Kate moved to Seattle, Washington, the home of their now-married daughter.  There Mullins health declined because of heart problems.  In a weakened condition, he became a victim of a flu epidemic and died in January 15, 1923.  He was 64 years old.  On his death certificate his wife Kate gave his occupation as “hotel proprietor,” although I can find no record of his having been thus engaged.  After a funeral Mass in Seattle’s St. James Cathedral, he was buried in Calvary Catholic Cemetery, below. 

 

Over his lifetime Jerry Mullins, an immigrant’s son with limited schooling and a miner’s beginning, by dint of intelligence and effort in the alcoholic beverage trade had risen in business and political recognition to become one of Montana’s most prominent men.

Note:  This post was assembled from a variety of reference materials.  Principal was the book, A History of Montana, Volume 2,  published in 1913. Page 1167.“Cartoons and Caricatures of Prominent Men of Montana,”  was published in 1911 by J.C. Terry, artist and publisher.  

Augustus Goodwin and a Wife’s Yen for Royalty

 Augustus Franklin Goodwin was a wealthy Boston merchant, CEO of a large chain of specialty grocery stores that featured at least thirteen brands of his proprietary whiskey.  Despite his success, Augustus found his socialite wife enamored of European royalty to the point of dumping him for a hereditary count.  The photo here is of Frances Thorley Goodwin, subsequently known widely to New York society as “Countess von der Palen-Klar,” a designation as questionable as the origins of her second husband’s title.

Unlike most of the “whiskey men” whose stories are told on this site, Goodwin was born into wealth and privilege.  His father, Manning Goodwin, was a gentleman farmer and merchant in New York.  Augustus, an only son, was given a good education and set on a vocational path as a businessman.  Early in his career, he became engaged to Frances Thorley, the daughter of Charles and Mary Thorley, a wealthy family living at a fashionable address on upper 72nd Street, Manhattan.

When Augustus and Frances wed the newspaper record of their nuptials described the extravagant nature of the occasion, reporting:  “The bride who was given away by her father, wore a white satin gown, with court train, and bodice and sleeves of Brussels point lace  Her diamond necklace was a gift of her father….Mrs. [Mary] Thorley was in white silk,embroidered and wore emerald and diamond ornaments.”  A mere 800 guests attended the reception following the wedding. 

 

A rising star in the East Coast business world, Goodwin was tapped to be the president of a speciality grocery chain in Boston called the Ginter Company.  A 1901 city directory listed three locations in the city, 236 Tremont, 2 Union and 163 Summer.  Under Goodwin’s guiding hand by 1905 the number of Ginter stores had risen to five in Boston and a sixth outlet in nearby Roxbury, Mass.  By 1915 the company would boast 14 stores in Boston proper and a similar number in the suburbs.

A key to Goodwin’s strategy for expansion and success was selling liquor under proprietary labels.  They included the following whiskeys:  "Actor Rye,” “Aquinas,”  “Banquet,”  ”Benton Rye,” "Glen Adir,” “Harlequin,” "Kangaroo Rye,” “Mentor,” “Promenade,” "Radcliffe Rye,” "Royal Wikstaf,” ”Sexton Rye,” "Sonata Rye,” and "Westford Rye.”  Unlike other liquor sellers, Goodwin trademarked a number of his most popular labels.  After Congress tightened the trademark laws in 1904, he registered Promenade Whiskey in 1905;  Harlequin, Mentor, and Royal Wikstaf in 1906, and Glen Adir in 1907.

Goodwin’s Ginter Company did not own a distillery but may have been dictating recipes to “captive” distilleries that contracted their entire output to the Boston chain.  Ginter likely was receiving the product by the barrel and devising the labels for the brands.  The bottling might have been done “in house” or contracted out.  So long as supplies of liquor were adequate to meet sales demands, the system was efficient and resulted in considerable profits.  Shown below are Ginter Co. ceramic jugs that also likely carried whiskey.

Coming from a Manhattan society background Frances Goodwin may have found Boston too provincial to her taste and chafed to return to “The Big Apple.”  After the birth of the Goodwins’ first and only child in 1909,  Augustus, perhaps as a way of mollifying his wife, agreed to a major remodeling of their mansion home at 130 Commonwealth Avenue, in one of Boston’s most elegant neighborhoods.  

The costly remodeling included rebuilding the front façade in a Beaux Arts design, eliminating a bay window to the east of the former entrance, and centering the entrance.  Significant interior remodeling adjusted floor levels and modified room arrangements.  Shown here are plans for the remodeling and the building as it looks today.  

Despite her husband’s exertions Frances was not satisfied.  She had developed a yen for royalty in the person of Count Adolphe J. von der Palen-Klar, living in Brooklyn, possibly under modest circumstances.  Adolphe’s family is said to have achieved nobility in 1799 when Emperor Paul the First of Russia, for reasons unknown, gave Peter Ludwig von der Pahlen and all of his descendants the rank of count.  Some members of the family also emigrated to Sweden where they formed part of  “unintroduced” nobility," i.e.. second class royals.  Adolphe inherited the family coat of arms, a somewhat chaotic design perhaps indicating a complicated ancestry.  How the Count got to Brooklyn and what he did there mattered little to Frances who had enough family money for them both.  

She divorced Augustus and subsequently married Adolphe on November 16, 1927 at the American Church in Paris, France.   After a honeymoon they returned to live in New York.  Frances quickly snatched onto the title of “countess,” however murky its origins.   Adolphe moved out of Brooklyn for lodgings with his new wife at one of upper Manhattan’s swankiest buildings, 920 Fifth Avenue.  Shown here, this limestone-clad building in the Italian palazzo-style, was designed by the noted luxury apartment architect J.E.R Carpenter and constructed in 1922.  It became the residence of movie star Gloria Swanson and other notables. Today a condo apartment there costs in excess of $13 million — no mortgages, thank you, just cash on the barrelhead. 

New York newspapers frequently ran items recounting the couple’s activities: “Count and Countess Adophe J. Von Der Palen-Klar gave a dinner last week at their home, 920 Fifth Avenue, in honor of the Grand Duke Boris of Russia, first cousin of the late Tsar, and the Grand Duchess.” “Count and Countess Adolphe J. Palen-Klar gave a dinner last evening at the Regis roof garden….”“[Four names]…were among the luncheon guests of Countess Adolphe J. von der Palen-Klar at the Ritz Carlton yesterday.”  Now clothed in royalty, Frances Thorley had arrived at the pinnacle of Gotham’s social set.

Meanwhile back in Boston, Augustus Goodwin was busy running the Ginter Company and indulging his hobby as an owner/breeder of thoroughbred racehorses, including the steeplechase jumper shown above.  He also found a second wife.  She was Julia E. Folsom, a Massachusetts-born woman six years younger than he.  Julie had had an earlier marriage and a child.  The 1930 federal census found the couple and the daughters of each living together in Hamilton, a rural suburb of Boston.   Shown here, Julia has the look of someone willing to abide a rich husband without a title.

Augustus Goodwin by that time likely had retired from the Ginter Company. In 1925 the business had merged with two other outfits to form a major new grocery chain known as First National Grocery, with stores spread throughout New England and into New York State.  Moreover, the advent of National Prohibition had ended all sales of alcohol and the whiskey brands that Goodwin had so carefully nurtured would be heard from no more.  

Goodwin’s love for horses was his undoing.  In July 1934, he dressed in his riding outfit and drove from his Hamilton home to the nearby stables where he kept his horses, mounted one and rode off.  Somewhere along his journey the horse threw him to the ground.  Goodwin may have died almost instantly.  The cause was recorded as “fracture at base of skull.”  Age 61, Augustus was buried in the Hamilton Cemetery.  Julia died in 1951 and lies an adjacent grave.

In New York,  the countess died in 1944.  The count followed four years later.  Both are interred in the Von der Palen-Klar mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.  Thus ended the saga of a Boston grocer and whiskey merchant and his errant wife who fancied a title more than tea bags and royalty over rye whiskey.

Note:  This post was gathered from a wide range of sources. Of major importance were genealogical sites.  Photos were gleaned from the Internet.  As often occurs, it was seeing Gintner Company whiskey bottles that sent me on a search for their origin and finding Augustus Goodwin and the Countess.

Ladner Bros. Wrote a Tale of Four Cities

 

Brought to the United States from Germany in 1889 by their parents while they were still minors, Frank and Carl Ladner went on to create a wholesale and retail liquor enterprise that stretched from Montana to Illinois and produced a quantity of whiskey jugs that command significant prices from avid collectors.  The brothers are pictured here in maturity, Frank, the eldest, on the left.

After arriving in America the family initially settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the father, Franz Henry, found employment.  After six years, the Ladners moved in 1895 to nearby Red Wing, Minnesota, known for its quality potteries.  There Frank with the help of Carl founded the Ladner Brothers Saloon and Wholesale Liquor Company on the city’s Main Street.  The business apparently was a success.  With local potteries doing a booming business at the time, many of their workers had a taste for alcohol.

The Red Wing potteries also provided the Ladners with containers for their wholesale whiskey.  As shown here, the jugs ranged in size from one to five gallons, all bearing similar labels.  The Ladners were not distillers but were buying whiskey by the barrels, likely from distillers in Peoria and other Illinois locations, decanting them into smaller quantities and selling the product to saloons in Red Wing and the nearby Twin Cities, as well as pouring it over the bar in their adjoining saloon.  

Meanwhile, both men were having personal lives.  While still in St. Paul, at 19 Frank married.  His bride was Ellen “Nellie” Cain, a woman born in Minnesota of Irish immigrant parents who was slightly older than he.  During the next 10 years the couple would have six children.  Then sorrow struck as Nellie died in November 1905.  Left with children ranging in age from eleven years to a toddler, Frank remarried 18 months later.  His bride was Anna Koester of Red Wing.  They would go on to have four more children.  Carl, age 22, in September 1899 married Mary Straiger, of German descent in Red Wing.  They produced seven children.

For unexplained reasons, during the early 1900s the Ladners sold the liquor business to concentrate their energies on the success of their saloon.  Five years later Carl ceded his interest in the Ladner saloon to Frank and headed 300 miles west up the Mississippi River to Aberdeen, South Dakota.  There he opened a saloon and liquor store he called Aberdeen House.  Indicating that his leaving Red Wing had been an amicable separation, Carl named Frank as a partner. A photograph exists of this establishment.

Moreover, Carl continued to buy his liquor containers from Red Wing.  Selling at wholesale to Aberdeen saloons, he once again was buying “raw” whiskey from distilleries, delivered it to him in barrels by water and rail.  He was decanting it into jugs and selling it to the saloons, restaurants and hotels of Aberdeen.  As shown here the jugs ranged in size from a single gallon to two and five gallons. 

Like many liquor house proprietors, Carl was generous with his giveaways to his best customers.  Below are to examples of gifted shot glasses.  Note that like the sign on his saloon/liquor store, they advertise “Cream Pure Rye,” his house brand, likely blended on the premises. At the holidays he also gave away one-half pint decorative jugs of whiskey “Compliments of Ladner Brothers.”

Carl also was expanding the reach of the brothers’ liquor business, opening a branch office in Miles City, Montana, 360 miles west of Aberdeen, then still a “wild west” town.  Advertising as “Ladner Bros. Wine and Liquor Merchants,”  Carl installed F. C. Schubring, a local of German heritage as his resident manager.  Schubring, according  to Miles City records, hired another Schubring, possibly his son, as a porter.  Carl also is recorded operating a satellite saloon in James, South Dakota, a rowdy railroad hamlet 12 miles from Aberdeen.  Right is a jug bearing the Miles City logo.

Amid this expansion, the specter of prohibition was looming larger and larger.  Local option laws bit by bit eliminated the ability of the Ladners to sell their liquor in surrounding communities.  South Dakota went completely “dry” in 1917, followed by Montana in 1918.  With foresight Carl had seen this strong movement in the upper Midwest to a ban on alcohol.  He closed up the Ladner Brothers operations in Aberdeen and Miles City and moved to Chicago.

For a time Carl managed a Coca Cola plant there but “whiskey was in his blood”  and with a friend from Red Wing days he established a new Ladner Brothers liquor house and cafe in The Windy City. Located at 207 West Madison Street, as shown above, it featured large signs, including one in neon, advertising the house brand, “Cohasset Punch.”  

The company’s flagship whiskey now became “Ladner’s Old Reserve.”  No longer was Carl mixing up whatever whiskey he could buy on the open market and selling it in generic jugs.  This new enterprise allowed the Ladners to arrange for a distillery to prepare whiskey from a Ladner recipe and bottle it with a proprietary label.  Below is a photo of the interior of the Chicago establishment, showing the bar and plenty of Old Reserve on the shelves.  That is Carl Ladner standing far right. This profitable enterprise came to an end in 1920 with National Prohibition.

Meanwhile in Red Wing, Frank Ladner also was coping with the emerging “dry” era.  With the coming of World War I and wartime restrictions on alcohol, he could see the demise of his liquor business.  Moving to groceries, Frank’s saloon became “Ladner’s Cash and Carry and Delivery Store” featuring fancy goods, ice cream, a soda fountain, and “soft drinks of all kinds.”  Nary a bottle of booze in sight.  

Back in Chicago Carl pivoted to the bottling trade, specializing in soft drinks and sparkling waters.  He died in 1947 at age 70 and was buried Calvary Cemetery of suburban Evanston, Illinois.  Frank lived to be 84, dying in 1956.  He was buried in Red Wing’s Calvary Cemetery.  Both men had seen the end of National Prohibition in 1934 but neither apparently was tempted once again to enter the whiskey trade that had sustained them and their families for so many years.  We are the beneficiaries of their signature Red Wing pottery jugs and the story of an enterprising immigrant family.

Notes:   This post has relied heavily for information on a 1995 publication entitled “The Red Wing Collectors Society Convention Supplement, Volume XI,” editor Chuck Drometer.  A number of the photos used are from a Ladner Family Flickr site on the Internet.   This material has been supplemented from other internet sources.

 

Whiskey Men & “Murder Most Foul”

 Foreword: In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the ghost of the poisoned king of Denmark tells his son of his killing, terming it, “Murder most foul.”  Whiskey men have been involved in homicides that might be similarly described, as bystander, victim or perpetrator, as related in the brief stories to follow.  The three incidents are linked by the reality that justice was not done in any of them.

The whiskey jug displayed here bears the stamp of a man whose life became entwined with the murder of the New Orleans police chief;  the arrest of colleagues, including his brother,  and the largest lynching of white men in the history of America.  He was Antonio Patorno, politician, militia captain, saloonkeeper and liquor dealer. 

Whatever sense of satisfaction Paterno felt as a leader of a significant portion of the Italian community in New Orleans, the year 1890 would change everything.  New Orleans was undergoing a period lawlessness, corruption and unrest.  On the night of October 15, as the New Orleans police chief, David Hennessy, was walking home he was gunned down on the street.  As he lay dying he is reputed to have whispered, “The dagoes did it.”  A mass arrest of Italian-Americans and Italian migrant workers followed.  Many were Paterno’s friends and adherents.

From his position of leadership, Patorno vigorously argued against the arrests.  At the same time he deplored the Hennessy murder.  He told a Daily Picayune reporter that as a New Orleans citizen and merchant he would do all in his power to “support and protect the honor and welfare of the city.” Among those taken was his brother, Charles, who is said to have had a strong resemblance to Antonio. 

After a New Orleans jury failed to convict the first nine men on trial, a lynch mob broke into the jail and shot on the spot or took out and hanged eleven men, all Italians.  They included those tried and acquitted, those on whom the jury had deadlocked and others who were awaiting trial. Only eight of the nineteen arrested survived the lynch mob.  Among them was Charles Patorno.

The lynchings caused an international incident.  The Italian ambassador demanded that the U.S. government take action to protect Italians and provide restitution.  There were rumors of war between Italy and the U.S.  The threat passed when President Benjamin Harrison ordered a U.S. government award of $25,000 (equivalent to over $600,000 today) to the families of Italian citizens who had been lynched.  The perpetrators of the lynchings went free.

When National Prohibition arrived in 1920, Leo Salamandra, a successful and wealthy Trenton, New Jersey, liquor dealer still had thousands of bottles of valuable whiskey on premises — but was forbidden to market it legitimately. For months he anguished about what to do.  Late in 1921 Salamandra determined to sell the stash to a gang of New York bootleggers.  It cost him his life.

Through intermediaries, likely fellow Italians, he made contact with a New York City gang headed by Meyer Lansky who ran a prominent bootlegging operation.  Salamandra presumably made a deal to sell 51 cases of whiskey to the gangsters, worth in today’s dollar more than $600,000.  The conspirators agreed to the liquor handoff near Kingston, New Jersey, about 14 miles north of Trenton. There the money was to be turned over.  

On the night of February 13, 1921, with Salamandra and a brother following in their automobile, a truck carrying the whiskey set out from Trenton for the rendezvous.  The liquor dealer apparently was apprehensive about the deal as he and associates were armed with pistols. As they neared Kingston about three a.m. suddenly a Cadillac touring car with four men in it — hired by Lansky — pulled up beside them, pistols drawn, and forced both the truck and Salamandra’s car off the road.  A gun battle ensued. Leo Salamandra was shot five times at close range and died on the spot. 

His killers were never brought to justice. The dots connected back to Meyer Lansky.  Brazenly, Lansky shortly after the killing personally drove from New York City to New Brunswick with cash to bail out two implicated gang members.  The official investigation into the events that fatal night has been characterized by one observer:  “There was lots of lying…by both sides and the truth was never fully determined.” 

When describing Lemuel ”Lem” Motlow, the nephew of Jack Daniels and eventual owner of Daniels’ distillery, a company website mentions his service in the Tennessee legislature and his reputation as a businessman, concluding that he was “known to be a fair and generous man.”  What it fails to mention is that in 1923, Motlow, shown here, shot and killed a man in cold blood and got away with it by playing “the race card.”

Whether Lem was a habitual drinker seems unlikely but the stress of suspicion and a court appearance in St. Louis on charges of bootlegging early on March 17, 1924, may have encouraged him that afternoon to drink heavily with friends.  Drunk and packing a pistol, Lem boarded the Louisville & Nashville night train returning to Tennessee and the now-shuttered Jack Daniels Distillery.   

Tired, Motlow headed for a Pullman berth.  A black sleeping car porter named Ed Wallis asked Motlow for his ticket.  When Motlow was unable to produce one, Wallis refused him a berth.  Motlow became enraged at being balked by a person of color.  Hearing their argument, Conductor Clarence Pullis, who was white, tried to intervene.  As the train slowly made its way through a downtown tunnel toward the Mississippi, Lem reached for his pistol, apparently to shoot Wallis.  In his drunken state, he fired two shots, one errantly, the second striking Pullis in the abdomen.

Taken off the train, Pullis died in a local hospital, leaving his widow and two minor children.  Motlow was charged with murder.  St. Louis newspapers gave the story front page treatment.  Local sentiment ran high against the Tennessee distiller.  As a wealthy man Lem had ample resources at his disposal.  He hired a phalanx of top lawyers as his defense team.  They built their case on Wallis being black.  

No subtlety attended the defense making race the issue. In closing arguments one of Motlow’s lawyers declared:  “There are two kinds of (blacks) in the South. There are those who know their place ... and those who have ambitions for racial equality. ... In such a class falls Wallis, the race reformer, the man who would be socially equal to you all, gentlemen of the jury.”  The all white, all male jury took little time in bringing a verdict of “not guilty.”  The foreman told reporters:  “We didn’t believe the Negro.”  Jurors shook hands with Motlow as he left the courtroom on December 10, 1924 — a free man. 

In each of these three cases “murder most foul” went unpunished. All the killers went free.  Only one perpetrator was tried and by virtue of a racist defense, acquitted.  Not only was justice “blind” in each incident, it was entirely absent.

Note:  Longer vignettes on each of these whiskey men may be found on this site:Antonio Paterno, September 2, 2018;  Leo Salamandra, November 10, 2019; and Lem Motlow, November 26, 2019.