Saturday, January 17, 2009

Who Was Lena Gray? Early African American Photographs

Just yesterday, I perused the University of Maryland's Baltimore Campus and came across several photos of African Americans from Washington, D.C. Among them are several portraits of a woman named Lena Gray. A black friend of mine recently bemoaned the fact that it's nearly impossible to research an African American family tree without hitting the brick wall of the 1860s--before which time, few records were kept.

I was intrigued by the photos I found yesterday--and found three photos, all taken of a Lena Gray.

The first (above) was taken by photographer William L. Spedden, also taken in Washington DC during the 1870s. It is captioned, "Lena Gray as a baby, Uncle William's daughter." The photo is so faded that I've had to brutally heighten the contrast in order to make out her face.

Next, another photograph of Lena (right), now looking to be about eight or nine years old. Captioned "Lena Grey, Uncle William's daughter, it was taken by A.H. Beck, at 1532 7th Street, NW.

Astonishingly, there is one more photograph of Lena (below), this time taken by "Miller" in Minneapolis during the 1890s, and it bears Lena's signature. She now appears to be in her early 20s.



I have tried to locate Lena Gray in the standard internet genealogical sources, but haven't been successful. Would any of my readers be able to help? Perhaps out there are Gray descendants who would appreciate the photos.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

A Film Trip Down the C&O from Cumberland to DC

Your blog host, being to some degree technologically-challenged, hasn't yet figured a way to embed this amazing series of digitized films onto this posting. So she will have to do it the old-fashioned way, inviting readers to visit the following link for an amazing, three-part film by the Thomas A. Edison Manufacturing Company. Down the Old Potomac follows a week-long journey by canal barge from Maryland to Washington--featuring scenes of the locks in operation; a mile-long, hand-dug tunnel which was built in 1840; coal barges plying the canal; Maryland farming country; Harper's Ferry; and Great Falls.

Follow this link, scroll to the bottom of the page and enjoy a trip through time:

http://www.travelfilmarchive.com/results.php?filmmaker_id=7



http://www.travelfilmarchive.com/results.php?filmmaker_id=7

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Whatever Became of Little Reddy the Brave?

Nineteenth Century New York had its Forty Thieves gang, which operated in the Five Points area of Manhattan. So too did Washington.

The only trouble with researching the Forty Thieves is that the group was so fluid that it may have been more than one, spread out over the city and operating until 1923, when the last of the gang was “captured.”

One such named gang surfaced in Georgetown. Its members were both black and white, and sufficiently organized that they carried membership cards and, by the mid-nineties, wore silver badges. Each took an oath of eternal loyalty to each other and the group. And by all indications, they were astonishingly young.

In January of 1883, Georgetown’s Forty Thieves appeared in court, charged with a variety of petty offenses:

• Collectively, Charles Bannon, George Dayton, Lemuel Finnecome, Joseph Jenkins, William Johnson, Alexander Walker and Thomas Wynne were convicted of stealing a keg of beer from the wagon of one John O. Guethler, for which they were give a one month jail sentence;

• Bannon, Dayton, Jenkins and Walker received an additional one-month sentence for having stolen five bottles of beer from a wagon belonging to Charles C. Bryan.

• Jefferson got a third month for having stolen brooms from a shop owned by William Keifer.

• Walker and Finnecome were also given extra sentencing for stealing a batch of cakes from one Henry Ruppert’s wagon. In this instance, Walker had threatened the baker with a gun.

Nine years later, we find four gang members in court charged with stealing jewelry, stationery and “Florida water,” for which they were given a lecture and a warning.

By 1895, we find the Forty Thieves headed by a young man named Bernard Dyer—or “Reddy the Brave”—known by Georgetown’s constabulary as “the worst boy in the crowd.” Bernard claimed he wasn’t sure of his exact age, but police estimated him to be only ten years old. His hair, said the Post, was as red “as they hair which has done so much to make Mrs. Leslie Carter a ‘famous actress.’”

Under Bernard’s leadership, the gang was said to be responsible for nearly every crime committed in the Georgetown precinct in several months—robbing stores and “smoking cigarettes.”

According to the Post, he lived with his mother in the 32nd block of O Street in Georgetown—that is until Detective Frank Burrows arrested him for robbing Clinton’s Jewelry Store on M Street.

Confronted with the evidence of this and several other robberies, young Bernard gave in: “Ise guilty, judge, an’ der ain’t no use of tryin’ ter bluff yer.” He was sentenced to Reform School and “took his punishment with a smile,” grateful he hadn’t been given a worse sentence.

Who Bernard was and what became of him isn't known. There is no record of him in the Georgetown census--and he appears to have vanished into Washington history.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Announcing the First Quondam Washington Readers' Challenge: Who Was This Mysterious Georgetown Trio?


Can any of my readers help identify the trio and/or the house described in this wonderfully-romantic article from the Washington Post (April 29, 1888, pg. 9.)? Could its be the Sims House on M Street, here pictured?




A STATELY OLD MANSION
---
ITS STRANGE OCCUPANTS AND THE STORIES TOLD ABOUT THEM


Toward the upper part of Bridge Street, near the newly-finished bridge, stands a stately mansion of a long past style, from which the stucco has peeled away in places, leaving a staring surface of greenish-looking brickwork. The upper part of the house—the Taylor Mansion as it is called—is always closed from the front. Heavy blinds effectively shut out the light and the solid oaken doors are seldom opened.

A mysterious looking and non-talkative Negress is the only attendant, and by many of the conservative inhabitants of Georgetown, is considered the only occupant. There are other inmates, however, whose peculiar habits and mysterious ways have ever been a source of wonder to the average citizen of the burg across the creek.

Their names, it has been said, are Weston, but whence they came, how long they have lived in Georgetown, or who they are, no one seems to know. They are three in number. First, there is an ancient looking and sedate appearing gentleman, who looks as though he had just stepped from the pages of Cervantes. His pure white hair is fashioned in silvery curls about his head, and adorns a face of patrician outline that, though weak in character, is strengthened somewhat by a firm aquiline nose. The air of courtly grace that is suggested by every movement strikes on in harsh contrast to the quaint-looking garb he wears. One could better imagine him in the doublet and hose of a courtier. The other members of the household are equally striking. The daughter, wherever and whenever seen, is not easily forgotten. Attired always in a manner to attract attention by the oddity of her style, she is rendered even more striking by the voluminous mass of thick hanging curls that fall about her head and upon her shoulders. In winter she dresses invariably in white, flimsy material and in summer in furs. These two, the father and daughter, are often seen upon the streets of Georgetown, but their habits are so exclusive that few of the inhabitants have ever spoken to them. Their accent is decidedly foreign and has given rise to many strange rumors about their origin.

As they walk the streets, one may hear the passers by exclaim, “There goes the Countess,” or “There is the Spanish exile,” these remarks being occasioned by the stories in vogue concerning them.

THESE STORIES ARE MANY AND CONFLICTING

One is that the old gentleman once held a proud position among the nobles of Spain, but receiving a slight from the king, he organized a force of insurgents and was about to proceed against his ruler when the plot was discovered, and barely escaping with his life, he fled to America. Another is that the daughter was at one time a woman of such remarkable beauty that in Italy, the land of her birth, she was famed far and wide. The stories of her beauty coming to the ears of a noble high in power, he contrived to meet her and at once he became wildly enamoured of her charms. His regard was reciprocated, but upon learning that his daughter’s suitor was already married, the distracted father, taking his wife and daughter, left his sunny clime, resolved to spend the rest of his days in an alien country. The inside of the house has been seen by but a few Georgetownians besides the attendant, the circumstances being as romantic as the rest of this history.

One evening late in June, four Georgetown youths returning from a fishing expedition to the Great Falls happened to be going along Bridge Street past the Taylor Mansion when the sound of music from the balcony of the house attracted their attention. Just below this balcony is a handsome flower garden, and the soft perfume of the many flowering plants was borne upon the air. Seated in the balcony mentioned was the daughter arrayed in a pure white garment of aesthetic Greek cut, while her fingers strayed softly over the strings of a guitar or mandolin. A soft soprano voice was raised in a song of superb tenderness. As she finished, a hush fell upon the young men.

“Spanish, isn’t it?” said one.

“No, Italian,” said another.

No one really knew, and no one knows yet.

“I am going to see inside of that place,” said one of the party, and as he made the remark, there was a slight noise, and on looking up the balcony was found vacant.

A few minutes later, the party crept over the railing and by a dint of considerable exertion, climbed upon the balcony. A light shone out through the crevices, and on looking through into the room beyond a strange sight met their eyes. Seated in a large throne chair, with rich purple hangings, was an elderly woman, one whose broad white clustering ringlets fell in such rich profusion, but whose eyes had a vacant unmeaning stare.

At her feet sat the daughter, still playing on the same soft instrument, while the old patrician sat near her with his head buried in his hands.

The light of a shaded lamp cast a shadow upon the sad scene, which so surprised the adventurous youths that they cautiously withdrew, and it was long before they would speak of their strange adventure.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Col. Joseph Rickey--Did he or Didn't He?

July of 2008 was declared Rickie Month by the DC Craft Bartenders Guild, which held a month-long challenge among its members for the best Rickie recipe. The winner was Justin Guthrie of Pennsylvania Avenue’s Central Michel Richard Restaurant, who added black pepper syrup to the traditional mix of gin or bourbon, lime juice and soda water.

Well, the drink may have thrilled the judges, but Colonel Joseph Kyle Rickey would have rolled in his grave to see what had become of the drink he is said to have invented. He was a confirmed bourbon man who insisted his favorite libation (Belle of Nelson) be served to him in a thin-stemmed glass, with chunks of ice and enough Apollaris to make up a highball—all at a cost of only 25 cents.

But first, a little history:
Born in 1842, Rickey grew up in the town of Keokuk, Lee County, Missouri. Until 1837, the sole inhabitants of the area were members of the Sauk and Fox tribes. In 1837, the tribes agreed to a treaty that allowed limited settlement of white farmers. Shortly thereafter, white settlers began to migrate into the area. In a second treaty in 1842, the Fox and Sauk tribes were forced to move further west. Whites began camping along the county border a month before the treaty went into effect. At one minute after midnight on May 1, anxious settlers rushed in to stake their land claims. By the beginning of the Civil War, Keokuk was home to a population of approximately 13,000 people.
The 1860 Census of Keokuk, Lee County, Iowa shows him to be an 18-year-old law student. A year later, he ran away from home and enlisted in the 2nd Iowa infantry on May 4, 1861. The infantry, Company B., was mustered on May 27, 1861, and under the leadership of Colonel Samuel R. Davis, was charged with taking military control of the lines of the Hannibal and St. Joseph and North Missouri Railroads.
Rickey was discharged from service on Nov. 29, 1861 at Benton Barracks, Missouri. By 1870, he was living in Fulton, Calloway County, Missouri, listed as a 21-year old land agent, married to Sallie Howard, who was a pupil at the convent where his sister studied, according to his New York Times obituary. At the age of 21, he is listed At the start of the Civil War, he ran away to enlist. He later studied law and, by 1880, was living and practicing in Fulton County, Missouri.
At some point, he operated a brokerage business along with his son-in-law, Robert Spencer, under the name Rickey and Spencer. According to the New York Times, he was a avid enthusiast of horse races and poker, with an interest in mineral water—a component of what would become the “Rickey.”
It isn’t known exactly when Rickey arrived in Washington—but from at least the mid-to-late 1880’s, this colorful Democrat was a prominent lobbyist, known as much for his capacity for drink as his political work. For years, he—was a regular at Hertzog & Shoomaker’s, a saloon had been opened in the 1850’s by two German-born army officers who had served in the Civil War—namely, R.H. Otto Hertzog and William Shoomaker.
The bar was located a block off Pennsylvania Avenue, at 1311 E Street, NW. Because of its vicinity to the Washington Post and other newspaper outlets, it was a favorite of the city’s newspapermen, as well as the likes of Former Speaker of the House Joe Cannon, congressmen and senators, justices, cabinet members and the military elite. It was a place, wrote “Elbert Hubbard” in a pamphlet called “A Little Journey to Shoomakers,” (1909) “where big men who carry big burdens play to the gallery of their own cosmic selves.”

This was no genteel establishment, but a “dive.” The building was not only worn-down, but a downright eyesore, riddled by the dust and cobwebs of the ages. It comprised two rooms, front and back: The front was stacked with wine crates and kegs, which Shoomaker sold to individuals and restaurants. The back room held a wide bar which ran the length of the room under a low ceiling affixed with dusty gas lamps. In the middle of the floor sat a coal stove, and to the side, several oak tables and wooden chairs. It lacked even the basic amenities, such as spittoons. The roughest patrons spat their tobacco on the floor, while the better classes would open the stove door and spit directly into the fire.

The enduring legend has it that Rickey strolled into Shoomaker’s one hot summer morning and threw together the ingredients of the drink that would make him famous.

However, the truth may Rickey didn’t invent the drink at all. According to George Rothwell Brown (Washington: A Not Too Serious History, Baltimore: Norman Publishing, 1930), it was a visiting stranger from the Indies.

Here is Brown’s account:

By August of 1883, both Hertzog and his partner Shoomaker were dead, and the bar was slated to close. Col. Rickey was so devastated that he purchased the place himself, installing George Williamson and Gus Noack as managers.

One summer afternoon, an unknown stranger visiting from the Caribbean walked into Shoomaker’s and asked Williamson for a rye whiskey. He pulled a lime from several he was carrying in his pocket, proceeding to squeeze it into his drink, in a manner he said was popular in the islands. On departing, says Brown, he left several limes on the bar.

When Ricky arrived the next morning for his “eye-opener,” Williamson suggested to him that he try a little lime juice to his regular bourbon. Rickey was delighted with the taste and later invited his friends, Cincinnati Gazette correspondent Frederick Mussey and and Charles Towle of the Boston Traveller, to sample the concoction. It was agreed all around that the lime juice was a “happy thought,” and the drink was officially born.

The following day, Mussey returned to Shoomakers and ordered one of those “Joe Rickey” drinks, and in no time at all, “Rickeys” were being concocted all over Washington D.C. and beyond, with much experimentation and modifications. When Rickey eventually moved to New York, he took the recipe with him.

Interestingly, according to the “Craft of the Cocktail,” by Dale DeGroff, Rickey later went on to become one of the first importers of the limes.

Footnote:

Rickey and his wife Sallie had at least three children: Alby Prather (named after the Civil War Colonel “Gus” Prather, a crony), Natalie Kyle and William Hyde (named after Civil War Colonel William Hyde) Rickey.

In later life, Rickey moved to New York City, where he lived at 24 West 25th Street. Rickey died on April 23, 1903. His family were convinced he had committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid; the coroner found small traces in his stomach and concluded that Rickey had added a small amount to a glass of whiskey.

A day earlier, while out on a stroll along 25th Street to the corner at Broadway, where he clutched his heart and was escorted home by a passing police officer.

Shoomaker's remained in business right up until Prohibition forced its doors to shut. George Williamson was tending bar right up until the end.

©Cecily Hilleary, 2009
Photo: Shoomaker's, ca. 1946, National Photo Company Collection (Library of Congress)

Coming Soon...

Reddy the Brave..."I'se guilty, judge, an’ der ain’t no use of tryin’ ter bluff yer."

and...

Who really invented the "Rickey?"

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Eddie and Lil -- Conclusion

If Eddie and Lillian had a honeymoon period, it was short-lived. From the start, constant quarrels, heavy drinking, and physical abuse—on both sides, plagued their relationship. It is difficult to understand Eddie’s feelings for Lillian, which may have been tied into guilt over having “ruined” her so many years before and reneged on his promise of marriage. Or, as some have suggested, Eddie could well have been Lillian’s source of narcotics, and their relationship could have been tied up in the complex relationship between distributor and addict, master and slave. Lillian was an attractive woman, though worn by years of drug and alcohol abuse. One early police mug shot in particular showed her faded beauty. With fine arched brows, well-shaped mouth, and saddened downcast eyes, she looked more like a Madonna from a Renaissance Pieta. Photos at the time of the murder show a heavier Lillian, eyes blackened and face puffy from drink.

It is perhaps easier to understand Lillian’s feelings for Eddie. She had met him as a young adolescent, when Eddie was already 24 years old. He was an attractive firebrand—likely glamorous to a girl just discovering her own sexuality. If, as she said, her first sexual encounter were with Eddie, it would have bonded her to him in a way that subsequent relationships may not have been able to. He had promised to marry her, but only as a ruse to seduce her, and the betrayal may have left her with a drive for a fair “settlement.” In her adult relationship with Eddie, he abused her, and as is often the case with abuse victims, she may have clung to the relationship out of a sense that it was all she deserved.

Their second affair came in the wake of the Depression, a time when there were few opportunities for women, outside of a traditional marriage. As an addict with a police record and two bad marriages behind her, she would have seen Eddie as someone who could offer her security and possibly, protection from the law.
During her relationship with Eddie, Lillian employed a housekeeper, Hannah Smith, who later described the relationship as toxic from the start.

Eddie sought to isolate Lillian from friends and family. He would often hold her as a prisoner, keeping visitors away from the house for days and weeks at a time. On one occasion, he locked Lillian aboard the Florence K., anchored on the Chesapeake Bay, and left her there alone for three weeks, threatening repeatedly to kill her. He once threatened to kill Lillian after she had refused to take part in a dangerous game: He had wanted to shoot a lit cigarette from between her fingers, just for the sport of it. On Christmas Eve, 1934, Lillian had asked Eddie for permission to deliver gifts to her Georgetown family. Eddie become so enraged that he tore off her clothes knocked her half-naked to the ground and kicked her repeatedly. Once, said Hannah, when Eddie was sitting downstairs, he shouted for Lillian, who was upstairs at the time. Getting no answer from her, he shot his pistol through the ceiling.

It was that same pistol that Lillian would ultimately use to end his life.

***

On Thanksgiving Day, 1935, Lillian was formally arranged for the Eddie’s murder. State’s Attorney James Pugh had already begun building his case. At first he was unconvinced by Lillian’s confession, and combed it carefully, looking for flaws. He found one puzzling contradiction: Lillian claimed that she shot Killeen in self-defense, after he had beaten her. However, the Georgetown doctor who had examined her in her cell the night of the murder said the bruises and cuts on her body had been three to seven days old—enough to support her claim that Eddie had beaten her, but not on the day of the murder.

Pugh had trouble accepting the fact a man with so many powerful enemies had been murdered by a penniless girlfriend. He became convinced she had not acted alone and that there may have been another gunmen in the house.

Four bullets had been fired. Investigators examined slugs from Eddie’s body and compared them to those found in the bedroom wall, but concluded that only one gun had been fired, and that the fifth chamber of Eddie’s .38 caliper pistol had been empty at the time of the shooting.

The Washington underworld was rife with speculation that Eddie’s rivals had paid Lillian to murder Killeen. Though there was no evidence to support the idea, Pugh was certain someone was backing Lillian. How else had she managed to retain Maryland State Senator Stedman Prescott, a prominent and high-priced lawyer?
Eddie’s gamester rivals made no secret that Lillian had done them a service by killing off they man they hated and feared. Some of them now approached her lawyer openly, asking whether there was a chance she might be released on bail, whether she needed anything in her cell or witnesses to testify on her behalf.

In the end, while he did not believe her story in its entirety, Pugh concluded she had acted alone.

Meanwhile, the fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation was interested in learning what Lil may have known about interstate racketeering. Within only a few days of her arrest, her lawyer Prescott granted the FBI permission to interview Lil, and was present during the questioning. The FBI later refused to disclose what, if any information, Lil gave them.

States Attorney Pugh and a team of investigators now shifted the focus of their investigation to Eddie himself. They sifted carefully through the boxes of papers they had retrieved from the Brookmont house. Slowly, they pieced together a chronicle of Eddie’s criminal rise and his hold on District and Maryland rackets—of interest, but not the prize they were seeking: any bit of information that could link Eddie to the killing of paper carrier Alan Wilson. Three Washington detectives had spent more than a year working the case—at the time, a record for any one murder.

Finally, investigators found what they had long been seeking: a box of stationary belonging to Mickey McDonald’s Richmond House casino—physical evidence linking Eddie with McDonald.

In another part of town, the defense began putting together their case. Lillian’s estranged husband, John Maddox, retained the services of a second lawyer to assist Prescott Stedman, Harry Whelan, who had earlier helped Eddie secure his liquor license. Though separated from Lillian, Maddox said he was determined to see she was adequately represented during her trial.


Meanwhile, Washington crime lords were scrambling to fill the void left after Eddie's death. The papers called the resulting power scuffle a "dog fight" and wondered nervously who would emerge as the new "Mayor" of the DC underworld.

***

Lillian remained in jail for more than two weeks. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for the first week in December, but rescheduled because her attorney was tied up in a Prince George’s County trial.

The State outlined to the press their strategy for the upcoming preliminary hearing.
“So far as the county is concerned, we are satisfied that the slaying occurred in the manner described by Mrs. Maddox,” State’s Attorney Pugh told reporters.

At the on December 11th, her lawyer, Stedman Prescott, read out Lillian’s initial confession, in which she said that she knew what she was doing when she shot Killeen, and that he would have killed her had she not done so. Prescott told the court that Eddie “was haunted by fear that he was to be the next victim [of the mob], and carried a gun wherever he went.” Months before his murder, Eddie began to drink heavily and physically abuse Lillian.

The defense called its principal witness, Lillian’s former housekeeper, Hannah Smith, who testified to the abuse she had witnessed Eddie inflicting on Lillian.
Lillian’s Georgetown doctor testified that just two weeks before his death, Eddie had beaten Lillian in her face so severely that she needed medical attention. She had appeared in the doctor’s office with blood flowing from her mouth, her teeth nearly cut through her lower lip. Killeen, he said, had followed her and waited in his car outside. After Lillian left his office, the doctor watched from the window as Eddie threw Lillian roughly into his car and threatened to kill her again, crying, “What the hell are you trying to do?”

Lillian, heavily made up and looking far older than her age, did not testify at the hearing. However, at one point in the proceedings, she was asked why, if Eddie was so brutal, did always return to him. She answered simply, “Because I loved him.”

The following day, Judge Harold Smith reduced her first-degree murder charge. Based on the State’s evidence, he said he did not believe a trial jury “would convict her of anything more than manslaughter.” The court released Lillian on $5,000 bond to await a grand jury trial.

Lillian said nothing, but smiled. A few minutes later, she fainted into the arms of her lawyers and had to be revived with smelling salts. She then signed her bond and left the courthouse for her sister’s house in Georgetown.

Killeen's estate was assessed in late December. He had left behind $2,650, consisting of $900 cash, two diamond rings, a car, and $300 worth of prize gamecocks. His yacht was not to be found, and there was no mention of the watch and knife police had confiscated at the house.

Florence, disappointed at Eddie’s meager legacy, began looking into whether the Northampton Brewing Company, who had retained Eddie as an agent a few years earlier, would provide any residuals.

***

On January 21, a Montgomery County jury charged four men with the murder of newspaper carrier Alan Wilson: Eddie’s former chief lieutenant Albert Sutton, “Slim” Dunn, Bill Cleary, and Ernest Myers. Cleary made a deal with lawyer, confessing to his involvement in killing Wilson and implicating the other three. In return, he was given legal immunity. The court postponed setting a trial date until “Slim” could be retrieved from Alcatraz Federal prison. The others were serving time in Washington jails. Another Tri-State” member, Dewey Jenkins, kept in seclusion somewhere in Washington, was indicted after having made a confession implicating the suspects in the murder.

The following day, State’s Attorney Pugh moved to extradite “Slim” from the California prison and issued warrants for the other three suspects.

***

On the first of February 1936, Lillian was arrested for shoplifting at department store at 9th and D Streets, NW. Caught with two pocketbooks, a packet of rouge and a bottle of massage oil for a total value of $6, she was held, and then released, on a $300 bond. She told reporters she was "back running dope."

***

On February 25, Sutton, Dunn, and Myers were arraigned in a Rockville court, and their trial date set for March 30th. Cleary did not appear in court. Sutton, Dunn and Myers, “nattily dressed and clean-shaven,” said the Herald, showed no emotion as the charges were made before Judge Charles Woodward. Sutton and Dunn, convinced they could not get a fair trial in the District area, obtained a change of venue, and would later be tried in Cumberland, Maryland.

On April 4th, after the Rockville jury deliberated only an hour and a half, 37-year-old Ernest Myers was found guilty of first-degree murder.

***

On April 8th, 1936, the manslaughter trial against Lillian Callahan opened in the Rockville Circuit Court. It took only an hour to select the jury. Three times, the sheriff was forced go out into Rockville streets to round up new prospects, after several potential jurors said they had already formed opinions about the case.

Lillian pleaded not guilty. Apparently confident, she showed little interest in the proceedings.

In his opening statement, her lawyer, Prescott, described Eddie Killeen’s underworld history, telling jurors that “Big Eddie” had been “practically” the head of all gambling in the area. Only a few days before his death, Prescott said, Killeen had woken Lillian from her sleep, striking her in the face, and raving that he was planning to kill gambling rival Sam Beard and US Attorney Leslie Garnett, who had headed the capital’s crackdown on gambling rackets.

He chronicled Lillian’s relationship with her lover. State's witnesses--two police officers and Lillian's own written confession--all corroborated a history of brutality at the hands of Edward Killeen.

In light of that testimony, State's Attorney James Pugh announced he did not feel he could ask the jury to convict Lillian. That day, the jury acquitted Lillian of all charges. She left the courthouse on the arm of her lawyer, beaming to the surrounding throng of reporters and photographers.

***

The New Deal enthusiasm for patching up and mending a worn national infrastructure had by now hit Georgetown. A few years earlier, the Rockefeller Foundation had invested millions to restore colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, to better-than-original condition. Inspired, Georgetown citizens set about restoring their long-neglected township. They purchased crumbling houses at fire-sale prices and refurbished them. They mended fences and manicured gardens. Shopkeepers painted storefronts and hung new signs. Gradually, Georgetown began to hold its head up again, its decorum restored.

So, too, did Lillian set about repairing up her life. She returned to her sister's house in Georgetown, where she would live quietly for years, fighting for sobriety and respectability. If Lillian knew more about the day Eddie Killeen died, she kept it to herself. Whether she formally divorced John Maddox is not known, but she returned to using her maiden name, Callaghan.

Though she never made it back to the front pages, she was never, at least in Georgetown circles, able to completely live down her past as a Notorious Woman. Neighbors either avoided her entirely, or nervously pretended the whole affair had never happened.

Children found her fascinating, among them, Washington painter and architect James Hilleary.

“Every time she would open her purse to take out a cigarette, I'd look to see if she was carrying her ‘gat’,” he remembers.

In her later years, Lil became somewhat of a local legend. Neighbors quietly referring to her by the nickname, “Diamond Lil,” after the Mae West character, due in part to her appearance.

“She’d wear clothes—the only way to describe them is ‘costumes.’ Like Sunset Boulevard,” former neighbor Jane Ward says.

Once, some time after World War II, Lillian threw a lavish party, in what some guests saw as an attempt to reinstate herself into Georgetown society. James Hilleary attended the party at Lillian’s apartment, which she had decorated very elegantly. She had draped a silk-tasseled shawl over a white lacquered piano and filled the rooms with flowers.

“It was the funniest mixture of people you would ever want to meet. She had all the Holy Hill Irish there, you know, the pillars of the Church,” he says. “Poor Lillian. The party was going well until some unwanted guest, somebody from her past, showed up drunk and made a big scene and shocked everyone.”

Lillian had one more brush with the law, says area resident Carmel Nance, who knew her in her later years. In the 1950s, while driving along Georgia Avenue near Silver Spring, Maryland, she was involved in a car accident. When police examined the wreck, they found a packet of heroin. She was sent to a hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, where she underwent treatment for the addiction that had plagued her since childhood.

Lillian spent her last years in a retirement home in NW Washington. The Georgetown University Hospital physician who cared for her in the early 1980s said she spent most of her time staring out of her bedroom window in silence. He did not know her history. In fact, she was a puzzle to him: On the surface, she looked every bit the “sweet little old lady.” But, her body, on physical examination, bore unmistakable signs of past physical and chemical abuse.

She never left the nursing home. Lillian Alice Callahan died in November of 1984, at the age of eighty-six.

© Cecily Hilleary, 2009

Friday, January 9, 2009

Eddie and Lil - Part Two

1928 was a bull market year on Wall Street, prompting hundreds of thousands of investors to funnel their savings into the stock market. On September 3, 1929, the market hit a record high, then in the following weeks, began to waver, then fall. Nervous investors began to sell, sending prices plunging further. On “Black Thursday,” October 24, securities plummeted six billion dollars. By Tuesday the 29th, stock prices collapsed altogether.

In 1931, thirteen and a half million Americans may have been out of work, but in Washington, the government kept thousands employed, and city residents were unaware of the extent to which the rest of the country had been devastated. Eddie Killeen was oblivious. The once small-time carnival gamester had by now reached the pinnacle of his underworld career.

It was not just shrewd business sense that helped Eddie rise to power, or the unspoken code among mobsters that they never testify against a fellow gangster. One of Eddie’s sisters was married to a local attorney named John Costello, the Democratic Party National Committeeman for the District of Columbia. According to Washington Herald accounts, Costello was also a man of ambition and am exhalted sense of his own importance. With the coming of Democratic Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House, Costello began perceiving himself as the “boss” of the city of Washington and planned to appoint new, exceedingly liberal District Commissioners and an equally liberal Superintendent of Police. Eddie was arrested countless times over the years. It was commonly believed that John Costello helped protect him from conviction.

Perhaps the most sensational instance of Eddie’s “untouchability” occurred back in January 1921. During a party at the Cabin John, Maryland, Boblinger Hotel, Killeen and a man named Barnett Tanner got into a fist fight. Tanner's date, Bessie Harris, tried to intervene and in the ensuing tangle, Eddie shot her in the heart, and she died. If the shooting was accidental, Eddie was not contrite: When police arrived at the hotel, they found Eddie and his friends singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

Eddie was arrested and tried for her murder. He told jurors he had shot Harris accidentally, that he had actually been aiming at Tanner. In spite of the damning testimony, jurors found Eddie not guilty. Among those who testified against was an eyewitness to the Boblinger shooting, Evelyn La Rue. The day after the trial ended, Evelyn La Rue was found dead of poisoning in downtown hotel. Police could never prove that Eddie killed her, but the word quickly spread on the street that Eddie was not a man to cross, and his rivals began to fear him.

He would elude the law again and again. In 1930, police raided and shut down one of his gambling dens on G Street, NW. Though he was not present at the time, prosecutors showed evidence that Eddie leased the property, and indicted him for operating a gambling business. Inflamed, Eddie went to police headquarters and threatened the arresting officers.

“I wish I had been there,” he told them. “I would have shot you down like dogs.” He was tried in the District Supreme Court, but after several hours of deliberation, nervous jurors once found Eddie not guilty.

By 1932, the “Mayor” controlled more than fifty gambling establishments, most of them small operations which “laid off” their bets with his central office—this way, he ensured he would never get caught on the premises. One house, on Conduit Road, just a mile past the D.C. line, was raided a dozen times, but police never found enough evidence to indict him. They kept a close eye on Eddie for years, waiting for him to slip up. A confident man, Eddie now boasted publicly, “They can’t touch me.”

Eddie surrounded himself with several henchmen, who worked to keep his enemies at bay and ensure that underlings did not pinch any profits.

“The Mayor was always sure to have a lieutenant with no mercy in his heart,” wrote the Herald, “and a ready trigger finger to see that the boys stayed in line.” His chief lieutenants were Bryant McMahon, Jack Cunningham, Tally Day, and Joe Nally, all of them with long criminal pasts.

As his self-assurance rose, Eddie began encroaching on the territories of other syndicates, some of them quite powerful. He had long been friendly with a prominent Washington racketeer, millionaire Sam Beard, who ran the 14th Street Richmond House, a casino that served as many as 500 bookmakers. In 1933, Beard was convicted and jailed for tax fraud. Eddie solemnly promised to look after Beard’s business interests until his friend was released. Once Beard was safely out of the way, Eddie seized control of the Richmond House and began banking its enormous profits for himself.

Feeling invincible now, Eddie took the step that would prove to be his downfall. He issued an invitation to powerful mobsters across the country to come to Washington.
“This city is going to be wide open,” the Herald newspaper later paraphrased him. “See me, and you can do what you want.”

Hindered by police crackdowns in other states, many of America’s criminal “big shots” heeded Eddie’s call. Hungry for the promise of “an undisturbed heaven” of gambling and legal immunity, they flocked to the District, which was rapidly transformed into a lawless capital of gambling, plunder and murder, all fed from the profits of racketeering. The newspapers of the day were filled with editorials decrying the new crime wave. Civic groups called for a tightening of laws, and D.C. lawmakers, in turn, shifted the blame to Congress itself, which controlled the financial purse strings.

A pressured DC government, aided by the Federal government, ordered a crackdown on crime and began to take a closer look at Eddie—and his political connections. In the first blow to Eddie’s empire, the Roosevelt administration dismissed Eddie’s brother-in-law, John Costello, from his post as Democratic National Committeeman, citing “questionable family connections.” Police cracked down on out-of-town gangsters, many of whom were arrested, convicted and sentenced to new, tougher penalties. Some ended up without any livelihood at all, save for “cutthroat competition” with each other, and—said newspapers—with Eddie, who had failed to live up to his promises.

In 1932, an armed battle for underworld primacy began, and Washington streets and alleyways were bathed in the blood of fallen gang members. Eddie lost a number of friends and “lieutenants.”

His chief “lieutenant,” Bryant McMahon, was killed in a gun battle with a rival gambler, as he tried to defend Killeen’s gambling interests at a “game meeting” in the Houston Hotel.

Another henchman, Jack Cunningham was killed in a shoot-out in a 14th Street alley.

Joe Nalley was murdered in a downtown nightclub.

Talley Day, who ran Eddie’s M Street gambling house, was killed by a man named Elmer “Bulldog” Sweeney in a fight over a card table.

To make matters worse, Eddie’s old friend Sam Beard was released from prison. Discovering Eddie’s betrayal, he declared war on Eddie. In a matter of weeks, Eddie found himself suddenly stripped of all his protective armor.

With his top aides gone, Eddie promoted one of his last remaining henchmen to serve as his chief “lieutenant.” Albert Sutton was a hardened, ex-convict who had been recently paroled from the “Big Top,” the Federal Penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was said to have organized a thriving dope ring. Rival gangsters were elated. Sutton was the weakest of Eddie’s aides and could easily be eliminated.

“Hovering in the background like jackals,” wrote the Herald, “they were afraid to make a move as long as the ‘Big Shot’ was alive.”

Around that time, Mickey McDonald, a gambler and former underling of Eddie’s who operated a large and prosperous numbers racket in Montgomery County, was looking for ways to expand his enterprise. Emboldened by Eddie’s new vulnerability, McDonald began to muscle in on Eddie's clientele, refusing to share the profits.

In retaliation, Eddie ordered his “lieutenant,” Sutton, to take out McDonald. Sutton placed a dynamite bomb—a “pineapple”—in McDonald’s car, but it failed to go off.

Fearing that McDonald would quickly strike back, Eddie called in a “big gun” from Philadelphia, a member of the then-notorious Tri-State Gang which operated along the East Coast from Virginia to New York: Tony “the Stinger” Cugino, a man law enforcement billed as one of the most ruthless and vicious killers in the underworld.

Cugino traveled to Washington to meet with Sutton. Two weeks later, they agreed on a deal. Sutton paid Cugino an undisclosed sum of money to execute Mickey McDonald.
Just before dawn on October 23, 1934, Cugino set off to accomplish his mission. He was accompanied by a driver, Howard Bailey; fellow Philadelphia gangster Bill Cleary; Sutton; and three other Tri-State gangsters: Albert McDermott (alias John “Slim” Dunn), William Cleary, and Ernest Myers.

A short time after the hit men arrived at McDonald’s Takoma Park, Maryland, home, another car approached, driven by a young Washington Herald newspaper carrier named Alan Wilson. Wilson left his car to place the morning paper in a mailbox by the McDonald’s front door. In the still-dim light, he did not notice the men crouched behind a cluster of bushes.

The unsuspecting Wilson never had a chance. “Slim” had mistaken Wilson’s car for McDonald’s and instructed Cugino and Myers to begin firing. Alan Wilson died in a salvo of shotgun fire and pistol bullets.

McDonald's wife Viola, who had been sleeping at the time, leapt from her bed to the window in time to see the attackers flee.

Bailey, Dunn, Myers, Sutton and Cleary were later arrested. They believed that Eddie was still powerful enough to get them out of jail, and, according to the Code, they refused to admit who had ordered the hit.

Bailey later attempted to break out of Lorton Reformatory and was shot dead by guards.

Cugino was arrested in New York, but committed suicide a few weeks later after confessing his criminal history.

Bill Cleary broke down, confessing to police that he had been approached by Sutton to murder McDonald, but, according to a newspaper account, he developed “amnesia” whenever Killeen’s name was mentioned.

District police took over the investigation for its obvious links to DC gambling. Investigators were certain Eddie had ordered the botched hit, but in the absence of supporting evidence, the investigation was deadlocked. As for McDonald, he had no doubt that the bullets which killed Wilson were meant for him. Nor did he have any doubt about who had ordered his execution.

***

A year earlier, in 1933, Washington citizens had been shocked to learn that 88 people had been murdered in that year alone and that Washington had the highest murder rate among similarly-sized cities across the nation. The Wilson killing touched the city's nerves, waking it up to the relationship between gambling and organized crime. “Enough!” cried Washingtonians, and the city declared an all-out war on crime. U.S. Attorney Leslie C. Garnett spearheaded the effort.

Numbers was a relatively new racket in Washington, and the laws against it were ineffective. One of Garnett’s first steps to combat crime was to appeal to newspapers to stop publishing racing results. The Washington Herald, the Evening Star, the Washington Times and the Washington Post all complied, but to his disappointment, this had little effect on the flourishing bookmaking industry.

Garrett began arguing either for the legalization of gambling or the revision of lenient laws and took his case to Capitol Hill. He proposed a series of amendments before the Senate District Committee, but these did not pass in either House. He then initiated a series of spectacular police raids on gambling establishments, resulting in many indictments, which were enumerated under glaring headlines across front pages.

President Roosevelt had recently formed the Federal Bureau of Investigations, endowing it sufficient resources and authority to put down the nation's gangsters from New York to Los Angeles. “G-men” joined local authorities in keeping Eddie under constant surveillance.

Eddie’s final blow came when “lieutenant” Albert Sutton’s parole was revoked and he was sent back to Leavenworth. Word quickly spread that Eddie had lost his last defense. Now, powerful Philadelphia syndicates began to move in on his territory.

Eddie fled the city, moving his records and equipment to his Brookmont bungalow, abandoning all but a few quasi-legitimate business ventures and a small numbers racket. He stored his gaming devices in a steel vault in the basement, and then exiled himself for several months on the Florence K., anchored off Colonial Beach. Depressed and drinking heavily now, he waited for the heat blew over, and used his new free time to plan his comeback. He boasted to his few remaining friends that he was planning on setting up a gambling establishment that would rival even the upscale Mohican Lodge, one of two stone “castles” along Conduit Road, near Glen Echo, Maryland.

Sometime during this period, he re-encountered a thirty-seven year-old woman whom he had known briefly during his youth in Georgetown. Her name was Lillian Callaghan Maddox.

***

She was born Lillian Alice Callahan in March 1898, to Alice Wills Baker, a nurse, and Timothy Callahan, a Georgetown blacksmith. Her parents were respectable working-class Georgetown immigrants. Her father had been a wheelwright and was among the hundreds of Irish laborers who had earlier come to Washington to build the C&O canal. Their first home was a squat frame house on Prospect Avenue. They later moved into a larger home in the 3200 block of P Street, NW, just a block away from the Killeen house.

Neighbors called Lillian a "bad apple,” “ahead of her time.”

Former neighbor Jane Ward remembers Lil as pretty and clever, “from a good Catholic family, but she just got mixed up with the wrong crowd.”

Early on, Lillian developed a fascination for Eddie Killeen, and neighbors said she frequently passed by a Wisconsin Avenue saloon where Eddie worked. Here, one neighbor claimed, Eddie also ran an upstairs brothel, and he alleged that Lillian took a job there as a “hostess.”

Lillian later told police that she first met Eddie in 1911, when she was only thirteen years old. When she was fifteen, Eddie, twice her age, seduced her by promising to marry her.

By 1915, Lillian was working as a salesclerk at Hecht & Company downtown, still living in her family’s P Street, NW, home. On November 3rd of that year, at the age of only 17, she married a cigar clerk named Richard Lewis Collins. Father Edwin Corbetts performed the ceremony at Holy Trinity Church only after obtaining special dispensation from the Diocese, as Collins was not a Catholic. Collins lived with the Callahan family for several years, but no details are known about the marriage itself, which later dissolved.

***

Lillian first discovered opiates during her childhood. After she fell from a garden wall, at the age of six or seven, doctors prescribed narcotics for her pain. This was not an uncommon practice at the end of the 19th century, when opiates were freely dispensed for headaches, pain, and even menstrual cramps. Until they were banned early in the twentieth century, over-the-counter patent medicines--containing up to forty percent opiates by volume—were widely available, and led many down the path to addiction. By the 1880’s, there were an estimated 300,000 opiate addicts in the United States, most of them women, and a great many of them from the upper and middle classes.

For decades, physicians had freely prescribed opiates to “innocent addicts,” viewing them not as criminals, but as pathetic victims to be spared the pains of withdrawal from drugs. In 1914, the US passed its first drug law, the Harrison Narcotic Act, a tax measure regulating the import, manufacture, transport and sale of opiates. Doctors were still permitted to prescribe drugs, and narcotics clinics still operated in dozens of American cities. However, in 1919, the US Supreme Court ruled that physicians could no longer provide narcotics to addicts. Clinics across the country were shut down, and by 1924, a total prohibition was in place.

This saw the birth of the street drug trade. Having no legal access to drugs, addicts all over America were forced to turn to illegal sources to support their habits. Dealers quickly grew wealthy, and addicts were forced to commit petty crimes to pay the increasingly high price of drugs. Many women addicts were forced to turn to “houses of ill fame” as sources of opiates.

Lillian was arrested ten times between 1924 and 1933. At 26, she was arrested for the first time and fined for disorderly conduct—the legal euphemism for being under the influence of alcohol or narcotics. At the time she was working as a clerk at Washington’s Union Station. By now divorced from her husband Richard Collins, she was still using her married name.

In spite of her weakened leg, Lillian had a reputation as a fighter who could rival any man. In 1930, after a car struck hers, she pursued the motorist into his downtown office, where, said the Washington Herald, she rained blows on him sufficient enough to drive the desperate man back out into the street. It took four police officers to subdue her.

In the 1920s, Lillian married a Union Station co-worker, a gambler named John Maddox. The couple later separated, but remained friendly for years. Maddox would later subsidize, in part, her legal defense in her later trial for Eddie Killeen’s murder, and stood by her throughout her trial.

In 1932, she briefly took up with a local hoodlum called “Hoofsie” Davis.” In June, the two traveled to Atlantic City. There, she was arrested in connection with the murder of a small-time racketeer named "Milsey" Henry, killed the previous April. Police accused Hoofsie of driving the getaway car for the murderer. Lillian was charged with hiding Hoofsie from justice and briefly jailed, however, the case was dismissed for lack of witnesses.

In February 1933, she was arrested for narcotics charges and sentenced in April to serve from one to two years at Lorton Reformatory. At that time, the Washington Herald labeled her “a drug peddler and operator of an opium den.” She was released from Lorton on probation thirteen months later, in May 1934 and promised anxious friends and neighbors she would go “straight.”

It was that year that she was reintroduced to Eddie Killeen, the man to whom she had lost her virginity so many years earlier. He took Lillian for a cruise on the yacht where he was by now living in exile, and in May of 1934, the two began secretly living together, splitting their time between her Third Street, NW, apartment, the Florence K., and his Brookmont bungalow.

It did not take long for Eddie’s wife Florence to find out about the relationship.

“Oh, I don’t remember exactly when it happened,” she later told reporters. “A year or so ago, I guess. He never talked about her. But I knew. There’s always a friend who will come and tell you about those things.”

Florence said Lillian had always held a strange fascination for Eddie, even though their meetings nearly always ended in quarrels. Though Florence downplayed her reaction to Eddie’s mistress, Florence had been privately despondent at the time. Once, she went to Lillian’s apartment when the latter was away and left a note threatening, “Next time I come here, I will blow you to hell.”

When Eddie and Lillian began living together, a desolate Florence attempted to commit suicide by turning on the gas in her Chesapeake Street home. She was revived by rescue workers, and told them, “I couldn’t go on living with him anymore.”
Eddie kept up his relationship with his mistress, and Florence eventually decided she had had enough. In September 1935, Florence filed for divorce.
“I charged desertion because I didn’t want to drag the other woman into it,” Florence later explained. “I was a better sport than she was.”

Marshals looking to serve Eddie his divorce papers found him in Lillian’s apartment. Eddie pleaded with them not to tell “the other side” where he was. Eddie opposed the divorce, and over the coming weeks and months, telephoned Florence several times, begging her to reconsider. Florence refused to back down, and after the divorce was made final, Eddie provided Florence with a generous settlement, giving her the fashionable Chesapeake Street house, paying all household bills, buying her a car, and giving her $25 a week in spending money—which was not a large sum of money by any means. One decent hat at Woodward $ Lothrop’s would have consumed an entire monthly allowance.

***

To be Continued...




© Cecily Hilleary, 2009

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Eddie and Lil: Washington’s Gangland King And the Woman who Shot Him Down-Part One

"A blazing gun in the hands of an infuriated woman yesterday snuffed
out the life of big Eddie Killeen, who won his crown
as king of Washington's underworld by ruthlessly
crushing his rivals and ignoring the law..."
--The Evening Star
Saturday, November 24, 1935


It was the third week of November 1935, and Washingtonians were getting ready for the coming Thanksgiving holiday. For those without families, Dr. Grace Thompson was organizing a "Strangers' Dutch Treat Thanksgiving Dinner" in the Shoreham Hotel’s Garbo Room. Arnold’s F Street Beauty Salon was advertising Thanksgiving permanent waves for $2.50. The Marx Brothers “Night at the Opera” was playing at the Lowe’s Fox Theater.

Late Friday evening, November 22nd, thirty-seven year old Lillian Maddox accompanied her lover, fifty-year old Edward Vincent Killeen, to his Brookmont, Maryland, home. It was an unimposing yellow stucco bungalow on an unpaved lane just below Conduit Road—now MacArthur Boulevard. Lillian still kept an apartment in town, but she had been spending most of the past eighteen months with Eddie, either here in Brookmont, or on his yacht, the Florence K., anchored in the waters of the Potomac.

It had not been a happy year-and-a-half. Eddie, once a rich and powerful mobster, was now living in exile and in constant fear of his rivals and police. Lillian, just eighteen months out of Lorton Reformatory, had believed that this was going to be the start of a whole new life with a man she had loved since childhood.

This was a grim little house, little more than a way station now, as Eddie waited for a chance to rebuild his fallen empire. The wood floors were bare, the windows curtain-less. Its rooms were furnished with only a few sagging chairs and the odd, worn table. No pictures hung on the walls, only faded and grimy wallpaper depicting racing and hunting scenes.

Eddie and Lil spent most of evening in bed—a bare mattress covered with a soiled blanket—drinking heavily, likely listening to the radio.. The bedroom was littered with their cast-off clothes, empty glasses, and scattered papers. The window was not trimmed with curtains, only a smudged paper shade which they kept drawn day and night. Everywhere lay the heavy dust of neglect.

Late Friday night, the couple began quarrelling. Eddie had always been quick-tempered, but nowadays, he had become downright vicious. If his spiteful words and strong fist did not impress Lil, then waving his revolver would always put a quick end to their arguments.

During her early childhood in Georgetown, Lillian had fallen from a garden fence and severely injured her right leg. She had walked with a limp ever since, something Eddie taunted her about when he was feeling mean.

“You’re already crippled in one leg,” he told her now. That is when their fight reached a flash point. He pulled out his gun and threatened, “I’ll put a bullet in your other leg and fix that so you can’t walk.” Later, she would tell police he put the gun away, only after much coaxing on her part.

If they slept that night, it would have the heavy sleep of intoxication. If they had sex, it would have been less lovemaking than biological wrangling. If they ate, it would have been hastily scrambled eggs, or a tin of soup and some crackers, all washed down by bottles of Heurich beer, or shots of White Horse scotch.

By Saturday morning, the couple began fighting again before they even left the bed. Both Eddie and Lil were nearly nude, each wearing one of his undershirts, and nothing else.

This, their last argument, escalated quickly, fueled by fresh shots of whiskey and pushed by an alcohol-induced fury that neither was able or willing to control.

Some time around noon, Eddie announced he was leaving Lil. He intended to sail to Miami on his yacht, one of the few luxuries he had managed to keep hold of. Miami was a wide-open town, with plenty of opportunities for enterprising businessmen like himself.

Eddie had threatened to leave her many times. This time, Lil knew he was serious. Just the day before, she had overheard him calling his steward with instructions to load a stove onto the Florence K. and ready it for a long cruise. Frantic at the prospect of losing Eddie, Lil softened her approach and pleaded with him not go. She loved him. She needed him. What would she do without him? She was still battling the dope and could not face her Georgetown relations, whom she had let down so badly. Nor was she willing to return to her long-estranged husband, a local gambler named John Maddox.

Eddie, disgusted by her pleas, now went for her emotional jugular. He told her he could do better than some hopped-up, shopworn scrag like her, and, in fact, he had already reconciled with his ex-wife Florence, who would be traveling with him to Miami.

What happened next is unclear. Lillian would later testify that Eddie began to physically abuse her, blackening one of her eyes and bruising the weaker of her legs. He told her, “I’m going to kill you. You’re no good!”
“Eddie, you don’t want to do anything like that!” she told him.

Newspaper reports, too, offer conflicting versions of the events that followed. What is certain is that Eddie again seized his revolver. One account says Lillian scrambled out of the bed and gave it a good shove in Eddie’s direction. Caught off balance, he staggered, fumbled, and then dropped the gun, which she seized in an instant.

By other accounts, Lillian talked Eddie into putting the gun back down on the bedside table, and as Eddie turned away from her, she seized it and fired: One! The bullet hit him in the back. Stunned, he whirled back toward her, and she fired again. Two! He was struck in the abdomen. Three-four-five! The remaining bullets missed, lodging in the wall behind him. Eddie slumped, then collapsed to the floor.

Lillian froze, aware of a ringing in her ears, the echo of the gun’s blasts. Somewhere in the distance, she made out the shouts of children. She dropped the gun and waited, divided between the fear that he was really dead, and the fear that at any second, he would leap up and really give it to her. When he did not move, she took a few tentative steps toward him. He lay still, wedged between the bed and the wall. She pulled the bed out to get a better look. Blood had pooled around the wound in his abdomen. She knew, without a doubt, that he was dead. Throwing the blanket over his body, she then steeled herself with another shot of whiskey.

In a field behind the house, two neighborhood boys had been playing an after-lunch game of football. When they had heard the sound of gunshots, they ran for help. Lillian went to the telephone and asked the operator to connect her to the police.

***

The Montgomery County police force was housed in a relatively new building, a two-story stone structure in Bethesda. Built by Italian stonemasons a decade earlier at a cost of $30,000, it was the pride of the County. 30 men comprised a recently expanded force. Among them was Private E.R. Jones, who was sent to investigate the Brookmont call.

Brookmont, Maryland, was a small community tucked away off the Conduit Road, within a mile of the District line, carved twenty years earlier out of an old District park. Today, it is a peaceful, upper middle class community overlooking the C&O canal and Potomac River. During Prohibition years, however, its remoteness from town attracted bootleggers, gamblers and saloonkeepers, and the neighborhood was dubbed the “Bucket of Blood” for its Saturday night brawls.

Edward Killeen had been no stranger to the local police force. They had been keeping an eye on him for months now, hearing rumors that he was planning on opening a new gambling operation in the Glen Echo area.

Now, Officer Jones, accompanied by his partner, steered his patrol car down onto Maryland Avenue, and left onto a small, unpaved lane. Killeen's house was only a few hundred feet to the right. The officers spotted Lillian immediately. She was standing on the covered porch in a dressing gown, which did not hide the man’s undershirt she wore beneath. As they stepped onto the screened porch, the officers noted her disheveled hair, her bloodshot eyes and a badly bruised jaw.

"What's the trouble?" Jones asked.

“Come on upstairs and see for yourself,” she answered.

The officers followed her up the dim stairwell to the bedroom, then over the side of the bed where Eddie lay.

“I’m not sorry,” she told the shocked men. “I would do it again.”

Jones immediately telephoned Montgomery County Chief of Police William Garrett and Maryland State's Attorney James Pugh. Though the shooting had taken place in Maryland, Pugh then called in the District police, who had been seeking to link Eddie with a murder that had been baffling investigators for nearly a year.
Over the next few hours, officers from both jurisdictions conferred at the house, while a small crowd of curiosity seekers, including neighbors and the boys who had heard the gunshots, hovered outside.

Late in the day, Eddie's brother William and nephew Jack and two friends showed up at the house. Will was weeping inconsolably as he entered the house. The police later sent them away.

After they finished taking her statement, the officers waited while Lil dressed in a brown "ensemble,” silk stockings and T-strap shoes. She pancaked and rouged her cheeks in an effort to mask her bruises. Then she donned her best coat—plaid, tapered and double-breasted—and was led to an awaiting patrol car. By the time it reached the Montgomery County courthouse in Rockville, Washington Herald reporters were already waiting. A photo that appeared in the next day’s edition showed Lillian covering her face with one hand. She appeared to be weeping.
Lil confessed willingly to investigators.

“He said he was going to beat the hell out of me,” she told them. “It was his life or mine. He began beating me and he wouldn't stop. During the scuffle, the gun, which had been lying on a table, was knocked to the floor. I snatched it up and began firing--I don't know how many times.” Then, she added, "I'm glad I killed him,” repeating, “I would do it again.” After she signed a confession, she was formally charged with murdering Washington’s underworld “Mayor.” Later, as the steel door slammed her into her cell, she threw her hat and coat on the bunk and swore, "Damn it, in jail again!" That night, she was heard to murmur repeatedly, “Why did I do it?” Finally, before falling into an exhausted sleep, she cried out, “Well, it served the damn fool right!”

She slept for a few hours, and then woke up screaming at ten p.m. Guards sent for her Georgetown physician, who treated her cuts and bruises and gave her a sedative for what he called alcoholic “jitters.” He ordered that a guard spend the rest of the night in the cell, giving Mrs. Maddox a drink every two or three hours until she could “taper off.”

Back at the Brookmont house, investigators were excited. It was a seemingly cut and dry case of murder, but the murder was, for them, secondary. This was the opportunity District and Montgomery County police had waited months for: a chance to pry through Killeen’s papers.

For more than a year, they had believed he was behind the murder of a Maryland newspaper carrier, but had never produced any evidence. Now, they rifled through Eddie’s desk, boxing up papers and correspondence. They discovered boxes of ammunition, a double-barreled shotgun, a rifle and two .38-caliber revolvers. They located a secret room behind a steel door, filled with gambling paraphernalia. They hauled away boxes of paper, $3,000 worth of roulette wheels, gaming tables and "chuck-a-luck" cages.

Behind the house, they found cages full of gamecocks Eddie used to fight for high stakes during parties. In the early evening, an old woman came to feed them dried corn.

“I don't know nothing about nothing except that I come to feed the chickens every day like this,” she told investigators. “He paid me to. He was always good to me. I never heard no quarrels.”

Killeen had been wearing two large diamond rings at the time of his death. Police also found an expensive watch, a watch chain embedded with pearls, and a knife engraved with the initials “E.V.K.,” which they turned over to the State’s Attorney’s office.

***

Eddie’s ex-wife Florence first heard about his death over the radio. Shocked, she went immediately to the home of her sister-in-law, Mrs. John Costello, for what she told reporters was “comfort and advice.” Family members later took her to the W. W. Chambers funeral home in Southeast Washington to arrange for Eddie’s burial. Dressed in a fashionable plaid coat and a smart, brimmed hat, she told reporters waiting there that she wanted Killeen “to have the best in death as he had in life.”
That night, a Montgomery County medical examiner performed an autopsy on Eddie’s body. He found two slugs—one, which had entered through the back, just above Eddie’s hip. The other had entered his abdomen.

Eddie Killeen was buried on the following Tuesday morning, two days before the Thanksgiving holiday. Because he had been divorced, Eddie was denied the customary Roman Catholic funeral Mass. A priest from St. Paul's Catholic Church, however, agreed to chant the Latin litany of the dead in the funeral home’s chapel.
A crowd of more than 200 curiosity seekers gathered on the sidewalk outside Chambers. Women with babies in their arms stood alongside curious workmen, who had wandered over from a nearby construction job in time watch the pallbearers remove the casket from a hearse.

Inside, Eddie lay in an open copper casket that had cost more than $1,000 at a time when complete funerals could be arranged for $300. His ex-wife Florence had dressed him in a tuxedo that had still been hanging in their home. She had pinned a white carnation to his lapel and twined his boyhood rosary through his fingers.
The casket was surrounded by lavish arrays of yellow chrysanthemums and red roses. Family members, friends, regional breweries such as Tru Blue and Abner Drury, and even some of Eddie’s more powerful underworld enemies had signed the attached cards. Moments before the service began, an unidentified man rushed in with a wreath, saying, “I never liked Eddie Killeen, but I am sorry he had to die this way.”
As the priest chanted the litany, an organist played “Ave Maria.” Florence, in widow’s black, knelt beside her sister-in-law, crying throughout the service, “Oh, Eddie, Eddie, why did it have to happen like this?” She wept, too, throughout his subsequent burial at Mount Olivet Cemetery. Later, however, she posed dry-eyed for photographers and the press, answering questions about her life with Eddie, the gangland “Mayor” of Washington, DC.

Later, Eddie's sister Agnes Costello and her daughter, Eddie's niece, Margaret Costello Grady, would be buried with him.  It is not known whether Eddie ever had a headstone.  Today, his name is not even mentioned.



Edward Vincent Killeen was born in 1887 to a respectable Georgetown family of Irish-Catholic descent. His father, George Emmett, had emigrated from Ireland and married Margaret O’Reilly, an English woman from Liverpool.

By the turn of the century, Georgetown, once a thriving port and fashionable address, had lost its colonial charm. Where the waterfront once harbored graceful schooners, it was now a tangled mess of power company smokestacks, gas works and grim brick factories. The new industry had attracted hundreds of European immigrant workers. The town soon swelled, and to accommodate the newcomers, developers erected countless cheap row houses and carved antebellum mansions into tenement flats. Old Georgetown gradually disappeared, and its former aristocracy migrated to Dupont Circle or the quieter suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.

George Killeen opened a Wisconsin Avenue saloon, which did a lively business. He and his wife Margaret settled into a three-story brick house in the cobbled block of 3300 P Street, where they raised their nine children. George was an active Democrat and became a personal friend of political leader and lecturer William Jennings Bryan, contributing heavily to Bryan’s political campaigns. Like most of the Irish in Georgetown, the Killeens attended Sunday mass at Holy Trinity Church and sent their children to the parish school.

Little is known of Eddie's childhood. Holy Trinity parishioners and classmates later remembered Eddie as a “stray sheep” and a constant embarrassment to his family. His parents fought to keep him out of trouble. When Eddie was only a boy, his father instructed the District police to arrest him, should they ever find Eddie in the vicinity of Washington’s “red light district.”

When he was a teenager, Eddie left home and spent time as a circus barker in the disreputable environment of a traveling carnival. There he also operated small games of chance, learning the basics of a business that would someday make him rich.
By May 1906, Eddie was nineteen years old and had returned to Washington. That month, he was arrested for the first time, on gambling charges. Police failed to convict him, and it was generally believed that his father’s strong political ties had helped Eddie get off. In fact, he would be arrested time and time again, but never convicted of any crime.

Eddie began his rise, like so many of America’s notorious gangsters, during Prohibition. The passage of the 18th amendment in 1919 banned the manufacture, transport or sale of alcohol. Within only months of Washington’s having going dry, open-air distilleries began cropping up all over the dense forests of surrounding Maryland and Virginia, out of the government’s sight. Most of these were small operations, but there were exceptions. In 1922, Internal Revenue agents raided one of the city’s more sophisticated distilleries in the woods off Bladensburg Road. They confiscated $15,000 worth of distilling equipment and thousands of pounds of sugar and corn meal. The plant operated seven days a week, producing up to 200 gallons of 10-proof corn whiskey each day. Rumrunners were paid $50 to haul as much as three hundred gallons of moonshine into the District each night. They sold the whiskey to dispensers, for $5 a gallon. They, in turn sold it in the streets for $8 a gallon, pocketing the difference.

Eddie Killeen began as a dispenser. Because the 18th Amendment did not prohibit the buying or drinking of alcohol, he had plenty of eager customers. His concession prospered. He used the profits to begin a sideline business in gambling.
Washington had been a gambler’s paradise since before the Civil War. The best gambling houses had always been located on or nearby Pennsylvania Avenue. Some were princely, appointed with the finest furniture, carpets, and crystal, and attracting Washington’s elite: Congressmen, White House officials, and top military commanders. Thousands of dollars, it is said, could be traded in a single night at Faro tables.

Elsewhere in Washington, second-class gambling houses catered to the middle and lower classes. Cheaply furnished, they drew the bulk of their clients from the large numbers of business visitors to Washington. The proprietors of these houses employed “red herrings” to loiter in hotel lobbies and in the Capitol building. The decoys would introduce themselves to unsuspecting strangers, volunteer to show them around the city, and then lure them to the gambling houses. In the most squalid of these establishments, visitors would be forced to drink, then forced to play. The decoys were paid commissions on the victims’ winnings. The victims, embarrassed at their gullibility, rarely complained to police.

Gambling casinos often began as “parties.” Struggling young workers invited their friends to rented rooms and basements across Washington, and for a quarter “admission,” provide them with bootlegged whiskey (two dollars a jar—four, when flavored with a fruit extract and billed as peach or apple brandy). These were generally bare bones operations, outfitted with tables and crates, where card games were played, at penny stakes. As their operations expanded, their proprietors would branch into numbers, the illicit lottery in which random numbers are chosen to determine race winners. Or they would offer blackjack and dice, the proprietor taking a percentage of all winnings.

It was a risky business. If patrons’ guests became too noisy, police might raid them, arrest the occupants and players, and shut down the operations. If operators attracted clientele from the bigger gambling syndicates, the “small fry” were forced out of business, taken over, or murdered. Clever operators might be hired by the bigger syndicates. Some, like Eddie, kept their noses clean and thrived. As his profits grew, he opened a series of successful gambling houses in the District and Montgomery County.

After the 1933 repeal of Prohibition, Killeen applied for a wholesale beer distributor's license from the District's Alcoholic Beverage Control Board (ABC). Many board members opposed his membership on the basis of his well-established reputation as a gambler. However, because he had never been convicted of any crime, the ABC grudgingly granted him a license and, as a necessary formality, declared him “of good moral character.”

This infuriated many Washingtonians, and the resulting controversy received wide media attention. The Evening Star accused the Board of “throwing the liquor business into the hands of racketeers.”

In spite of the furor, Eddie retained his license and opened a business distributing Northampton Brewing Company beer to more than fifty small stores in the Metropolitan area. That concession was short-lived, however, because of the strong-armed tactics used by his employees: “Buy Northampton Beer or we’ll dump any other beer you buy in the gutter,” they told clients.

Losing the concession did not worry Eddie. The Repeal had driven the price of alcohol so low that there was no longer much profit in the alcohol business. The real money, he told his friends, was in gambling.

***

In 1926, Killeen met his future wife, Miss Florence Underhill, an attractive, young stenographer from New York. By now, nearing forty, Killeen, was an attractive man, with dark eyes that seemed to be borrowed from a Byzantine icon. He wore his hair parted on one side and pomaded back from his forehead. He dressed in elegantly tailored suits and patted his face generously with expensive toilet waters.
Florence was swept off of her feet.

“Eddie was a fine looking man,” she later told reporters. “He had a way with him.”
The couple was married on Halloween Day, 1926. Eddie bought Florence a platinum wedding band set with diamonds, and they honeymooned in Hot Springs, Arkansas-- a favorite resort of the era’s high rollers.

Florence later described the marriage as a happy one, even though childless.
“That was in the laps of the gods. We both wanted them, but never had any,” she later said.

She knew all about Eddie's gambling business but later claimed it was not until they were married that she became aware of the darker side of his operations. She spent many years urging him to give up “the racket,” but to no avail.

“Eddie was always his own worse [sic] enemy…it was no use to point out the danger to him. He didn’t know what fear was.”

Eddie and Florence moved into an elegant Tudor-style home on Chesapeake Street, N.W. He built a summerhouse in Brookmont and purchased a large, wood-trimmed motor yacht, which he christened the Florence K., after his wife. On weekends, the newlyweds frequently invited friends and Eddie’s business associates to sail out to Point Lookout, Maryland, or Colonial Beach, Virginia.

The two never had any trouble, claimed Florence, “until he got mixed up with this woman.” The woman was Lillian Maddox.



To be continued...


© Cecily Hilleary, 2009, May not be published or reprinted without permission.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

The Woeful Demise of Little Sophie Major


On Thursday, February 7th, 1878, a small notice appeared in the Washington Post obituaries:

MAJOR -- At 7 p.m., February 5, 1878, after short illness, Olivia S., oldest daughter of David and Elizabeth Major, in the 20th year of her age.

Her death ignited a controversy which, though brief, was fiery. Possessing all the best elements of a good Victorian melodrama, the story of Sophie’s death and burial ignited passions and touched nerves across Washington.

By all accounts, 19-year-old Sophie Major was a beautiful girl of sweet disposition. With long dark hair, brown eyes and fair complexion, of medium height, and weighing 140 pounds, she possessesd what one Post reporter called a “faultlessly proportioned figure.” She had attended Grace M. E. Church Sunday school all of her life, though she was not an official member of the church as was her mother. She worked at Lansburgh’s Dry Goods store for a few years, but at the time of her death, had been “furloughed.” She lived at 229 Q Street, N.W.

At the age of 16, Sophie met a young man named John W. Hurley, a plumber and gas fitter who lived at 925 Massachusetts Avenue and worked nearby. He lived with his mother, Mrs. Amanda Hurley, a dressmaker. Tall, slender and red-headed, John was said to be a bit wild, but not to the extent that his reputation suffered. He was known to spend his evenings at a restaurant near Mt. Vernon Square (7th and NY), in present-day Shaw. The two saw each other for the next three years, and it was generally accepted that they were engaged to be married, though no announcement was made.

However, in November of 1877, according to newspaper accounts, friends and family noticed that Sophie, normally cheerful, looked more contemplative than usual. They made no comment. In December, thinking that her daughter was suffering from a cold, her mother consulted the family physician, Dr. Richard Mauss, asking for a remedy.

Dr. Mauss, in his mid-thirties, had been born in Germany and had studied medicine at the Georgetown Medical College.

When the medication failed, the doctor examined Sophie himself and confirmed his suspicions: Sophie was pregnant—-something she admitted “with much confusion and innocence of manner.” According to Dr. Mauss, he suggested to Sophie’s mother that the young couple should marry; she told him that Hurley had refused to marry Sophie. At this time, Sophie grew quite emotional, and she begged the doctor to help her in ending her pregnancy. It was Mauss’s contention that he scolded her for the danger and wickedness of her suggestion. “I saw the girl was so bent upon self-destruction,” he later told jurors, “that I had recourse to every artifice in my power to keep her from injury.

However, John Hurley told the Evening Star a different story: That it had been Dr. Mauss who had performed the abortion.

Oddly, a marriage license had been issued December 27, 1877 at DC’s City Hall; later, according to the Washington Post, many persons would go to City Hall and try to get that license back-dated. Were the young couple ever really married? John Hurley offered contradictory accounts. Yes, they had been married, he later told Dr. Mauss. He also stated that he had planned on marrying her on December 28th, but did not end up doing so, “for reasons, which while they exhibit a great degree of baseness,” Dr. Mauss did not care to disclose to the press. His grandmother later told a reporter that she did not know why, but that Hurley had insisted to her the couple had never been married. Hurley told his mother, however, that he had been married, though failed to show her the certificate, nor identify who who had officiated the ceremony. But Dr. Mauss said the young man had given him a reason: Later, Dr. Mauss told reporters that John confessed the two had actually been married on December 20th,

It was then that Sophie allegedly answered an advertisement in the newspaper and consulted a woman named Mrs. Pierce, who advertised in a city paper. Whether any such woman existed and who really performed the abortion is not known.

An inquest into Sophie’s death was held on February 6th, the day after she died, at the Second Precinct Police Station. The first to be questioned was Dr. William H. Triplett, who said he had been called that Monday afternoon, by the Major family physician, Dr. Mauss, to attend to the girl, whom he found in a “feeble” condition. Triplett testified that Sophie had told him the following: that on January 29, suffering from a “severe internal hemorrhage,” she had visited a Dr. Woodworth at his offices on 7th Street, between G and H. The doctor had performed an operation on her, which did not hurt until later. She described Dr. Woodworth as a tall man with black hair and said that she had paid him $50 for the procedure. On examining Sophie, Dr. Triplett said it had been his impression that she suffered from septicemia, caused by the abortion, though he could find no evidence of an instrument having been used.

The coroner questioned the family physican, German-born Dr. Mauss (b. 1843, approximately 35 years old), who insisted that he had seen nothing of the girl since she had declared her intention of obtaining an abortion. He testified that Mrs. Major had sent for him the Thursday before [January 31st), and finding Sophie in such bad shape, he had called Dr. Triplett in for consultation. His story varied only slightly from Dr. Triplett’s; he stated that Sophie told him she had answered an advertisement by a Mrs. Pierce, who brought the mysterious Dr. Woodworth to perform the abortion at the Major’s house. Mrs. Pierce visited the house several times after that to check on the girl, and was paid $50.

The cornoner apparently did not investigate Hurley’s claims that Dr. Mauss himself performed the abortion, and the jury, in the end, ruled that Sophie Major had died of complications of an abortion procured by “Dr. Woodworth” with Mrs. Pierce as an accomplice.

Initially, newspapers announced that funeral services would be held at Grace M.E. Church, at 9th and S Streets, NW, site of the present-day New Bethel Baptist Church. That, however, was before the circumstances of her death were made public, and several members of the church threatened to leave the church if the funeral were held there. The church’s board of trustees met and decided against the funeral; three members of the board—Mssrs. Humphrey, Riggles and Tinkler, informed Sophie’s brother John that the family that they would have to hold the funeral elsewhere. It was a decision that would create great dissent within the hurch and outrage the city. Within days, four out of seven of the church’s trustees had left to join other churches, and other churchgoers complained that Church matters had long been run by the trio of trustees.

The bereaved Major family held the funeral on the afternoon of the 7th at their Q Street home. The occasion attracted a large throng of friends and strangers, who had read about Sophie and had been attracted by her sad tale.

Sophie lay in an open casket, amid a “profusion of flowers,” a single white tea rosebud on her breast. But what astonished funeral-goers most was the small silver plaque attached to the coffin that read, “Olivia S. Hurley,” which most mourners believed was only a gesture by John to protect his own reputations.

Most outragous of all, John attended the funeral himself, leaning on the arm of Sophie’s sister and lamenting Sophie’s loss as emotionally as anyone else present. “A deal of indignation,” wrote the Post, “was manifested by many persons at his presence, and some strong language was used, particularly by ladies, in reference to his part in the affair.” Mourners set aside their feelings long enough for Sophie to be laid to rest at Rock Creek Cemetary, but talked freely to the press afterward.

“It’s too late, it’s too late!” lamented one mourner. “His name cannot do the poor girl any good now!”

Two days later, a reporter hunted John Hurley down at his favorite restaurant, determined to settle the matter once and for all. The dialogue was reported as follows:

"Were you or were you not married to Miss Major?"

"I was married, and have already told the reporters so."

"Have you any objections to stating where and by whom the ceremony was performed?"

"Yes, I have. I don’t want this thing talked about in the papers any more."

"If you will give the minister’s name who married you, or the names of any of the witnesses, or produce the marriage certificate, it will settle the question and put a stop to all the talk."

"Well, all I have to say is, I was Miss Major’s husband when she died, and that is all there is about it."

On April 29th, 1891, Dr. Mauss, suffering from a serious case of pneumonia, shot himself in the heart in his own bedroom, saying afterward, “I was in such pain, and I thought I’d shoot it away.” He died two days later.

As for John Hurley, a check of the 1880 census found him still living with his mother Amanda; the 1900 census showed him married to one “Catherine J.,” and by 1910, he had a son, John W., Jr., who eventually went into the plumbing business with his father.

C.H. ©2009
Image,"Poor Sophie Major," Julia Holmes, ©The Washington Post, 1877-1954): Feb 9, 1878; Proquest Historical Newspapers The Washington Post 1877-1991) pg. 2
 
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