TALES OF THE BOURBON KING

Episode Three: "The Last Man in the Water"

Lake Michigan. August 1907. Five hours into a brutal ten-mile swimming marathon, George Remus is the last man in the water.

Most competitors have been pulled out — delirious, hypothermic, nearly drowning. Remus is still out there, treading water, eating sandwiches from a boat. Race officials finally drag him out. Not because he's in danger — a reporter described him as "still in first-class condition." They pull him out because the race is over and he won't stop.

This is Episode Three — where you understand who George Remus actually was. The courtroom theatrics, the poison stunt, the empire he would build during Prohibition — none of it makes sense unless you grasp this: George Remus did not know how to quit. He was constitutionally, psychologically incapable of it.

This episode traces that refusal back to its roots. Growing up poor in Chicago's German immigrant neighborhoods. Watching his father spiral into alcoholism. Taking over as family breadwinner at fourteen, working his uncle's pharmacy. Sleeping in the back. Studying at night. Building two pharmacies by twenty-one. Putting himself through law school while running both stores.

The same endurance he brought to Lake Michigan — refusing to be pulled out until someone dragged him into a boat — would make him a legend. It would make him one of the most feared attorneys in Chicago. It would make him rich beyond imagining during Prohibition. And it would destroy almost everything he touched.

A physician who examined Remus later wrote: "He is emotionally unstable. He is devoid of normal emotional reaction." That diagnosis cuts to the heart of the man who would become the King of the Bootleggers.

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TALES OF THE BOURBON KING -- Episode 2

Imagine you are in Chicago in the early 1910s in a packed courtroom. The defendant is a wife-killer. The prosecution has an airtight case. The murder weapon — a bottle of poison, skull-and-crossbones clearly visible — sits on the evidence table.

Then George Remus stands up, walks over, picks up the bottle, and drinks it. Every last drop.

The jury watches in horror, certain they've just witnessed a man kill himself in front of them. Remus sets the empty bottle back down and finishes his closing argument as if nothing happened.

Fifteen minutes later, the jury returns. Not guilty.

What nobody in that courtroom knew was that Remus had been a pharmacist for more than a decade before becoming an attorney. He knew exactly which antidote would neutralize the poison. He'd mixed it that morning. He'd drunk it before walking into court. The skull-and-crossbones was real. The danger was manufactured. Every gasp in the room was calculated.

This is Episode Two — where we meet the mind that will build the bourbon empire. Not the bootlegger yet. The attorney -- like a Johnny Cochran of the early Twentieth Century. The courtroom tactician who understood that juries don't convict people they think are smarter than them.

By the time his legal career hit full stride, Remus was earning $45,000 a year as a criminal defense attorney — when the average American home cost $4,500. He specialized in capital cases, keeping murderers off death row through brilliance, theatrics, and a willingness to exploit every loophole.

His most famous case was the defense of William Cheney Ellis, a Cincinnati socialite who murdered his wife in a Chicago hotel room in 1913. Four bullet wounds. A knife. Blood everywhere. Ellis was caught at the scene. The death penalty seemed inevitable.

Remus built a defense around temporary insanity — the idea that discovering his wife's infidelity had pushed Ellis beyond rational thought. He found medical experts to testify about psychic epilepsy. He coached Ellis to faint dramatically at key moments.

The verdict: guilty, but only 15 years instead of death. "A complete victory," Remus told reporters.

What he couldn't have known was how much he would need that defense framework later — for himself. The temporary insanity argument he built for Ellis would become the spine of his own murder trial fourteen years down the road.

George Remus was born in 1876 in Friedeberg, a walled city in Prussia. His family brought him to America when he was five. They moved from city to city, chasing work his father could never keep. By fourteen, George had dropped out of school and gone to work at his uncle's pharmacy — supporting his parents, his sisters, and his brain-injured younger brother.

That pharmacy counter is where it begins. Where a boy learns to read people. Where he figures out what they need and how to give it to them.

Next episode: The pharmacy years. The immigrant grind. The moment George Remus realizes the law is just another kind of chemistry.

Tales of the Bourbon King is written and produced by Bob Batchelor, Assistant Professor at Coastal Carolina University and author of The Bourbon King: The Life and Crimes of George Remus, Prohibition's Evil Genius.

TALES OF THE BOURBON KING -- "Awash in Red"

Cincinnati. Eden Park. October 6, 1927. A single gunshot tears through an Indian summer morning, and the most sensational criminal case of the decade begins.

This is where the story of George Remus ends — and where Tales of the Bourbon King begins.

In this episode, I take you inside the final act before walking you back to the beginning. To understand what happened in Eden Park that morning, you need to understand everything that came before it: empire, betrayal, and obsession. You need to understand George Remus.

At his peak, Remus was worth what would be hundreds of millions of dollars today. He owned distilleries across Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. He controlled the largest illegal whiskey operation in American history—roughly 15% of all bonded bourbon held in warehouses nationwide during Prohibition.

He threw parties at his Cincinnati mansion where guests drove away with diamond jewelry and new automobiles as party favors. He bribed federal agents, police officers, and politicians so systematically that he had a personal philosophy for it: every man has his price. Find it. Pay it. Move on.

Remus was also a brilliant attorney—one of the top criminal defense lawyers in Chicago before he ever touched a drop of bootleg bourbon. He understood the law better than almost anyone alive. He understood juries better still. Before Prohibition handed him the greatest business opportunity in American history, he was already a legend in the courtroom.

And then, in just a few years, Remus lost everything. His empire was seized by federal agents. His remaining assets were stripped and sold.

His wife, Imogene, took up with the federal agent assigned to bring Remus down—a man named Franklin Dodge—and the two of them plundered what remained. Remus went to federal prison. He came out nearly penniless, consumed by a rage two years in the making.

On the morning of October 6, 1927, Imogene was on her way to a divorce hearing. Remus was waiting outside her hotel with his driver, watching. What happened next shocked a country already well acquainted with his name.

Episode one of Season Two opens on that morning: two cars careening through Eden Park, the confrontation at Mirror Lake, the single shot, the dying woman rushed to Bethesda Hospital.

Thirty minutes after he pulled the trigger, George Remus walked calmly into Cincinnati's First District Police Headquarters, sank into a chair, and said: "Lock me up. I've just shot my wife."

This is the story I've spent years living inside. I'm Bob Batchelor —Assistant Professor of Communication, Culture, and Media at Coastal Carolina University, and author of The Bourbon King: The Life and Crimes of George Remus, Prohibition's Evil Genius, published by Diversion Books. The book draws on court transcripts, federal records, and archives from across the country. Tales of the Bourbon King is the podcast adaptation: the full story, told in episodes short enough to binge on a long drive and rich enough to reward every listen.

Over the course of this series, we'll follow Remus from immigrant boy to King of the Bootleggers. We'll watch him build an empire and watch it fall. We'll trace the love triangle that destroyed what law enforcement couldn't. Later, we will sit in the courtroom as Remus, representing himself, attempts the most audacious legal gambit of the Roaring Twenties.

Every episode ends on a cliffhanger. Every episode is grounded in the historical record.

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