At about 6 p.m. on the evening of Saturday, November 21, 1925, Butler County Coronor Hugh Gadd, moonlighting as an officer of Seven Mile Mayor Morris Y. Shuler’s liquor court, met up with brothers Bob and Fred Gary at the YMCA to discuss their plans for the evening. Shuler had told Gadd earlier that the Donkey Club, 328 Court St., had installed a steel door and was selling liquor in the back room. So the three men first went to that café and stood near the rear door listening. They heard voices quoting prices for drinks and half-pints.
They went around front and saw three young men coming out the door and stopped them at the corner of Court and Third. One man had a bottle of liquor in his pocket, so the agents took the trio to Sheriff Luther Epperson’s office. The young men would not say where they bought the liquor, but because the prohibition officers had seen them exit the Donkey Club, they were able to get a warrant to search the place.
Upon reaching the Donkey Club at 7:45 p.m. Fred Gary circled down a passageway to the east of the cafe building to a rear door. He looked in the peep hole and saw three men in putting white liquid into bottles. When he rapped on the door and demanded admittance, a voice on the inside shouted: “You come in here and I will pour some hot lead into you.” He stood back and kept an eye on the door.
In the meantime, Gadd and Bob Gary went in through the front door. Alabama Wells, co-owner of the cafe, was behind the bar. There were ten or twelve men in the room. Gadd saw two men he did not know go through a steel plated door behind the bar into a back room.
Gadd said, “I asked Wells if he was in charge and he said he was.”
The Donkey Club had formerly been owned by Bob Schief, who was murdered outside the Hotel Lee on Woods Street, but had been purchased by Olney Wells, known around Hamilton as “Alabama,” his home state. Orphaned as a toddler, he was reared by relatives, and when he turned 15, took up the trade of a molder at in Ensley, Alabama. He came to Hamilton to work in the foundries here before he joined the army, and returned at the start of Prohibition, but began working in the cafes instead of the foundries. The Donkey Club was not his first venture, and he had paid fines in the Mayor’s courts of Seven Mile and Morning Sun in Preble County.
The Coroner noticed as he read his search warrant to Wells, the men in the café, getting the drift of what was about to go down, began exiting the front door, but no one came out of the back room. Soon, Gadd reported, it was just the two officers and Wells.
“I gave him the search warrant to read,” Gadd said. “Wells said to me, ‘There is a word in this warrant I can’t make out,’ and I told Wells that the word was ‘structure’.”
About that time the telephone rang, and Wells set the warrant on the bar while he answered it. “Graham’s not here,” he said, then hung up and the cab driver Tincher came in for a pack of smokes. Wells gave him change for his quarter while Gadd explained the meaning of “structure.” Then the phone rang again and Alabama took the call while Bob Gary and Gadd waited.
Wells stayed behind the bar, Gadd walking up and down in front of it, chewing gum rapidly and seeming to be nervous, according to one of the men who peered in through the front window, his hands ducking in and out of his pants pockets.
Finally, Wells said, “If you are looking for whiskey, then go ahead and search.”
“I was waiting for you to finish your phone call so you could open up the steel door,” Gadd said.
“Why don’t you just search behind the bar?” Alabama asked.
“Because the whiskey’s in the back room.”
Then chaos erupted.
Gadd said that Gary walked toward the steel door behind the bar and in line with the peep hole when he saw Wells reach for his gun.
“Gary’s back was to Wells,” the coroner said. “When Wells pulled out, his revolver and started to shoot. Gary walked behind the bar and within about eight feet of Wells and the way it looked to me that Robert Gary turned his head and about that time a shot was fired by Wells… and Gary fell back on the bar.
“I tried to get my gun out about the same time Wells was getting his out,” Gadd said, “but I didn’t get it out until after Gary had been shot. Wells reeled and shot twice at me and the second shot hit me in the left hand, entered at the second joint of the index finger and about two inches back of the knuckle joint.
“Every time Wells shot he would duck under the bar and would bob up and down to fire again. He shot about five times.”
Gadd said that he was only able to get off one shot, then his Colt .45 revolver jammed.
“Then there were two or three more fellows ran in the front door with guns. I hit Wells on the head with my gun and as I did he fell on the bar. I took Wells’s gun off the bar and put it in my pocket and I then stepped around to where Gary was lying on the floor.
“I noticed that Gary did not have a gun in his hand. I reached under his coat and removed the gun from his holster.”
While Gadd and the cafeman were clinching, police officers, deputies, and detectives swarmed into the cafe.
Around back, Fred Gary tried to force the door, but found it heavily barred and impossible to move, but was working on it when he heard the shots, seven in all: Three quick ones, then a pause, then two more, then two more. The last shot, he would say, was louder than the others. He went running down the alley, around the corner and to the Donkey Club’s front door. He knocked and detectives let him in.
“Where’s Bob?” he asked the coroner.
“Bob’s been killed,” Gadd said and pointed to the spot behind the bar where he lay.
He went around the corner and saw his brother. “That is my brother, men,” he said bitterly. “Who shot him?”
“That man there,” Gadd said, pointing at Wells who was sitting in a chair, bleeding.
“Why did you shoot my brother?” Fred Gary asked.
Gary would later that Wells answered, “I don’t know,” but the detectives on the scene said that the only thing Wells would say after the shooting was that he wanted an attorney, former prosecutor and ex-Congressman Homer Gard, who earlier in the year helped get a directed not guilty verdict for Todd Messner and Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent, alleged killers of Bob Scheif, former owner of the Donkey Club.
Gary put handcuffs on Wells as Butler County Sheriff Luther Epperson came to the scene. By this time, the café was crowded with dry agents, police officers and detectives, then the police ambulance arrived.
Gadd handed a .38 Colt revolver to the sheriff, saying it was the one used by Wells. The barrel was still warm. There were six empty shells in its chambers. Epperson picked up a loaded .32 automatic that was laying on the counter.
Sheriff Epperson led a search of the premises. No alcohol was found, neither in the front nor the rear room behind the steel door, but there was a loose floorboard, and under the floorboard was a funnel attached to a hose leading to a drain into the sewer system.
***
At Alabama Wells’s trial, Warren laid out the defense: Gadd fired the fatal shot, not Wells. The defendant took the stand himself and told his side of the story publicly for the first time.
He said he was friendly with the officers and there was no hard feelings on his part. “I told the officers to help themselves and search. And Gary came around the end of the bar and came toward me. Gadd was a little north and east of the bar where I was standing. Gary Came toward me. He was rather tall, with a menacing looking face, and he came with his arms outstretched. He got close to me and I retreated. My gun was in a drawer. After Gary came close he said, ‘Come on! I’ll get you!’ Gadd fired point blank and struck Gary. Gadd has his gun in his left hand and he seemed to point it at me. Gary was very close to me.”
“Did you see Gadd shoot?” Gard asked.
“I did,” he said. “Then Gary seemed to leap into the air and fall backward. I reached in a drawer and got my gun and started firing at Gadd. I was fearful of Gadd. We exchanged shots. I don’t know how many I fired or how many Gadd fired, but we both kept going north and we met at the end of the bar. Gadd grabbed me and started beating me over the head. I was knocked out and fell into a corner, but before I lost consciousness Gadd fired at me, the bullet striking me in the back of the head.”
He told the court that he had stopped selling whiskey after his arrest on August 22 by Seven Mile officers, including Fred Gary. He was fined $500 for the incident and still owed $100 to Squire Shuler. He denied that he told Fred Gary that he would get even with him.
The star witness for the defense was a 33-year-old horse trader named Joe Jacobs. Around Hamilton, Jacobs was known as “Turkey Joe,” a nickname he picked up, it was said, after an incident in which he led the hijacking of what he thought was a load of moonshine hidden in a load of turkeys, but ended up just being turkeys.” Others said it was because he was raised on a turkey farm on Gobblers Nob. Whatever the origin, he hated the nickname.
Despite Gadd’s claim that everyone had fled the bar when he produced the warrant, Jacobs testified that he was standing at the bar talking to Wells when the officers came in, and that Gadd was standing behind him and to the north of him. He didn’t see Gadd fire the shot, but the shot came from his direction and he saw Gary fall to the floor. When he turned around, he saw the gun in Gadd’s hand.
“Did you see him fire the shot?” Prosecutor Peter P. Boli asked in cross examination.
“Not exactly,” Jacobs said, “but his gun was smoking. After the shot was fired, Gadd stood there trembling.”
In closing, the prosecution sarcastically referred to Jacobs and another shady defense witness as “those sweet-scented cherubs.”
“If you believe a man like Joe Jacobs,” Boli siad, “there is no need for further argument. I venture to stay that for $50 I can get the like of Joe Jacobs to swear that I was in St. Louis yesterday.”
The prosecutor then closed his argument with a statement that would resound in Hamilton for at least the next century: “Let your verdict show that law and order must prevail in this community. Don’t tell the world that Hamilton is a ‘Little Chicago,’ a breeding place for murder and robbery, that this is a haven for pillagers and pilferers and the stick-up man.”
Despite the bitter tone of the trial, the prosecution couldn’t make the case, and on April 1, 1926, after seven hours of deliberation, a jury of eight women and seven men acquitted Olney “Alabama” Wells and set him free.