The slaying of Prohibition agent Robert Gary quickly caught the attention of state officials who swept into the city 24 hours later to begin a series of raids that left many of the Hamilton’s cafes in wreckage.
“There are more barred and steel doors in cafes in Hamilton than in any city of its size in the state,” said Samuel A. Probst, deputy state prohibition commissioner when he arrived in Hamilton to launch a drive to have such doors taken from cafes, either by persuasion or force.
As Probst and his men gathered with Morris Shuler’s Seven Mile agents to begin the raids, he said if anyone initiated gun play, they had orders to shoot to kill.
State officers found their first steel door at the Crystal Café at Central Avenue and Walnut Street. State agent Arnold Skinner said that when officers arrived at the Crystal they saw several men leaving, locking the front door behind them. Police broke down the front and used a heavy iron bar to force open a steel-lined door at the back. There was no liquor, but Skinner said he believed there had been liquor there.
At the Dunlap Café, 338 Court Street, a few doors from where Gary was shot to death, state men are said to have been resisted by George “Fat” Wrassman, proprietor. Wrassman, standing over six feet, four inches and over three hundred pounds, was a known tough. He’d been acquitted on a robbery charge in Middletown and held there on an Indiana indictment of unlawful possession of dynamite, but released when no Hoosier officers came to pick him up.
There were eleven men in the raid, and Skinner was the first to go in the front door, only to find himself looking down the foot-long muzzle of the revolver in the equally large hands of George “Fat” Wrassman.
Skinner kept his head and did not pull his revolver, but ordered Wrassman to put his down. Surprisingly, the big man did.
Skinner picked up the heavy gun.
“I’ll have to handcuff you,” Skinner said.
“There aren’t enough men here to do that,” Wrassman said.
That started a free-for-all fight, Wrassman tossing dry agents like flies, his giant fists protected by brass knuckles when they tried to handcuff him. With Wrassman shouting curses in every direction, the prohibition men finally wrestled him to the ground after several sharp blows to the head softened his resolve, but Fat continued to curse the officials even as he lay flat on his huge stomach with the handcuffs behind his back.
The back door in the Dunlap Café, lined with one-half-inch steel, proved to be was tougher to break down than the Crytal’s. Police eventually gave up on battering it down to get into the back room and went through the partition wall instead. The room was empty, but there was evidence that liquor had been dumped and an unknown number of men made a get-away. Wrassman continued to curse the whole time they trashed the place.
Police arrested Wrassman on four charges–carrying a gun, currying metal knucks, pointing a firearm and assault–and placed him in the county jail.
He was fined $40 for that melee.
No liquor was found in any of the cafes they raided.
Probst assured Butler County Sheriff Epperson and Hamilton Chief of Police Frank Clements that he realized what they were up against and promised all possible aid by state officers. “You have some tough characters to deal with here,” he said.
For all of his glad-handing while he was in town, Deputy Prohibition Commission Probst had a quite harsher tone when he got back to Columbus on Monday, laying the blame for Gary’s murder on the door of Hamilton police, saying the inefficiency of the department “has resulted in a reign of terror in Hamilton with bootleggers holding sway.”
“Bootleggers in Hamilton are in open rebellion against the law and will resort to murder to carry out their trade,” he scolded, then promised “There will be no let-up until Hamilton has been cleaned-up.”
Mayor Howard Kelly said he was all in favor of shutting down the liquor trade in Hamilton, but he couldn’t do it on the resources he had available.
“When the prohibition law became effective, it added 75 percent more duties on the police department,” he said. “With the present force we have been unable to meet the situation. At times I have had to be satisfied with a house crew of nine men and until the time that revenue from taxes will permit an increase in the force, we shall continue to have a force inadequate to cope with the situation. I have revoked licenses without effect. I have closed places without effect. I have asked for state aid without effect and now I am asking for padlock proceedings.”
He pointed out Fat Wrassman’s Dunlap Café as a prime example. The man had never been issued a license, but opened up his shop with its iron doors anyway.
Wrassman was linked to Cincinnati bootlegger George Remus and was suspected in a litany of crimes all over Southwest Ohio. Before his story would end, he would have two murder acquittals on his record and never convicted of anything other than liquor violations.
“Out of all his escapades ‘Fat’ emerged unhurt physically and with a whole skin as far as conviction was concerned,” wrote the Evening Journal.
Other than Skinner, Wrassman’s chief nemesis was Joe “Dutch” Schaefer, a detective working for the Hamilton County prosecutor’s office, who was constantly on his trail. Wrassman was frequently heard to boat, “I’ll wipe out that dirty Dutch bastard.” When Schaefer heard of this, he said he accepted the challenge.
Wrassman had been a railroad man like his father, who used to take him on runs from Hamilton to Indianapolis. He had “a smile as expansive as his mountainous bulk,” the Evening Journal said, “with a smile, a joke and a back-slap for all he met.” He moved to Hamilton in 1918, when there were still local option laws. Indianapolis was dry; Hamilton wet. When he’d go from Hamilton to Indianapolis, he started carrying quarts of whiskey with him to sell to his friends.
When prohibition hit, Fat quit the greasy, back-bending railroad job and went all in with the liquor racket. It didn’t take long for the law to catch on. Wrassman and his wife lived in a modest bungalow on Hudson Avenue, where she kept a neat house and he kept a 100-gallon still in the basement. When police raided the house in March, 1923, it took trucks to haul it and 75 gallons of high-quality moonshine away. “Biggest and best seized to date,” police bragged as they hauled Fat off to jail. Wrassman moved his family to Ross Avenue, and when police raided that house later in the same year, they commented that his new still was even bigger than the first.
His craft included the transporting of good “red liquor” as well as making his own moonshine and at some point he added the art of the yegg (safecracker) to his repertoire. He was found not guilty of robbing the H.A. Glenn store in Middletown in March, 1925, and was suspected in a Connorsville, Indiana, heist that June, but had an alibi. Wrassman was also the primary suspect in the robbery of the Butler County Courthouse in January, 1926.
After the showdown with Skinner, Wrassman moved further south to Cincinnati. Though he steered clear of Hamilton for much of 1926 and 1927, he was occasionally seen at the Hotel Lee and at a café on South Fifth Street, and always had three men with him as bodyguards. His merrymaking trips to Hamilton often ended up in brawls and sluggings.
Wrassman was credited with the June, 1927 shooting of Glenn Hiatt, alias Harrington, and Jack Parker at the Superior Fishing Camp, and was linked up with the slaying of Thomas Concannon, July 6, 1927, at the Five Mile House, Rapid Run Pike, a “good beer” joint on Race Street.
Toward the end of May, 1929, Wrassman and one of his men came to Hamilton to party at the Hotel Lee, but the soiree broke up when a Dayton man took a bullet in the shoulder and his pal ended up in Hamilton police headquarters. Wrassman and his entourage slipped away, but the heat was great, so he turned himself in a few days later. The Dayton men would not talk, forfeiting $100 bonds by failing to appear at a hearing and Wrassman walked out of municipal court a free man.
Schaefer wanted Wrassman for several shootings at fishing camps and had been trailing him closely. The detective was returning to Cincinnati at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, June 11, 1929, after a late-night trip to a Newport fishing camp along the Licking River when he spotted Wrassman’s automobile, a brown sedan, parked on Opera Place between Race and Elm, now the site of Cincinnati’s convention center.
Dutch called police headquarters for back-up, Captain of Detectives Walter Fricke, and the searched the car but did not find anything except a few steel saw blades and other tools of the yegg–but no guns, so they knew the big man would be armed.
Then Schaefer saw two men on the south side of the street, leaving the Canton Chop Suey House, about 100 feet away. Wrassman was carrying food in his left hand. Schaefer stood in the shadows with his hat pulled down on his forehead, but Wrassman recognized him anyway and shouted, “I’m going to kill you, you dirty bastard!”
Wrassman walked toward Schaefer and Schaefer walked toward Wrassman in a classic showdown stance, Fricke standing nearby, watching closely should Wrassman pull his gun. But he did not draw his weapon. He was already holding it in his right hand. When they were about 35 feet apart, Wrassman began shooting. He fired twice before Schafer sprang into action, and his revolver barked five times as Fat continued to hurl lead. The men walked boldly toward each other as they shot. Fricke called it “the most remarkable show of courage I ever hope to witness.” When they were but 10 feet apart, Wrassman crumbled to the sidewalk, falling on his gigantic stomach. All five bullets hit the prodigious mark, but all six of Wrassman’s shots missed.
“You got me at last, Dutch,” he murmured as he turned his head toward Schaefer.
“I’m sorry, Fat,” Schaefer said as he holstered his revolver and took Wrassman’s, noting that they both carried the same type of pistol. “It was you or me.”
There was a tense moment as a half-dozen or more men, thought to be members of Wrassman’s gang, gathered anxiously around the scene of the shooting, trigger fingers itching. Fricke worried that there might be more trouble if these fellows decided to take out their revenge right away, but they began to disperse as more police arrived.
His death marked the end of a bitter rivalry between the gangster and the detective.
Schaefer accompanied Wrassman’s body to General Hospital, and an hour later got a phone call there. “You,” said a mysterious voice. “You’re marked.”
Undertakers created a a specially-made, extra-large casket to accommodate Wrassman’s enormous frame. It took eleven pall bearers to get the huge casket in and out of his modest home on Evanston Avenue, where more than 250 people mingled in the yard while the family of George Wrassman held private funeral services inside.
Even though they weren’t officially posted as guards, there were several Cincinnati police detectives in the crowd. Hamilton Chief of Police John C. Calhoun forbade any Hamilton police to go there. The police presence caused a fair amount of tension, and reporters on the scene said there was an expectation that “anything could happen,” though nothing did.
Next month: A group of Hamilton thugs attempt a shakedown of the Pelican Club in North College Hill, sparking another string of murders.