AN INTERVIEW with New York newspapers, federal Prohibition officer Izzy Einstein—the city’s “champion hooch hunter,” as he called himself—warned that the speakeasies were serving “the vilest concoctions masquerading as liquors that I have ever seen. I do believe a good-sized drink of this stuff would knock out the average man, even a Prohibition agent.”
Einstein, a former postal clerk, and his partner, a retired cigar-store owner named Moe Smith, had signed up as Prohibition agents in the first year of the new law and refined their techniques ever since. They relied on a simple method to collect evidence for a prosecution. They would order a drink and pour a sample of it into a funnel, hidden in a vest pocket, that emptied into a small bottle. After carefully stoppering the bottle, Einstein and Smith would whip out their badges and arrest everyone involved in serving them that drink.
The duo were endlessly inventive in procuring illegal offerings. Smith had once jumped into icy water so that Einstein could rush him into a bar and beg a drink for a freezing man. They then busted the bar. They had posed as football players (when arresting an ice cream vendor who sold gin out of his cart), Texas Rangers, a Yiddish couple (Smith playing the wife), streetcar conductors, gravediggers, fishermen, and ice men. Einstein—who had a booming baritone—once introduced himself as an opera singer and gave a rousing performance in a speakeasy before closing it down.
As Einstein assured the reporters, he and his partner were far too savvy to drink the toxic liquorlike substances currently circulating. Their work, he asserted, had led them to develop “a highly developed sense of smell as regards the aroma of anything intoxicating . . . Of course, these bootleggers are getting cleverer every day and occasionally we run across a concoction that is almost odorless. Then we barely moisten our tongues to determine whether or not it has a kick. Such a test is easy to the trained hooch hunter.”
Even if city agents did occasionally “enjoy a little nip now and then,” he added, they indulged only in the really good liquor they’d confiscated, the “choice article.” But Einstein wasn’t sure that he trusted even that. For himself, he left the evidence in the stoppered bottle: “I’d rather save my stomach.”
But in the Jackson case, the city’s ready supply of poisonous liquor turned out not to be culpable. The deaths at the Hotel Margaret continued to drive the medical examiner and police crazy.
Gettler ran tests on the contents of every bottle, box, and container in the apartment. One of them—a sleeping tonic—had included a legal amount of ethyl alcohol. It was easily enough to account for the trace alcohol in the brain tissue but was definitely not enough to kill a person. And ethyl alcohol wasn’t that poisonous anyway, Gettler noted, compared to (methyl) alcohol. He found nothing to indicate fatal alcohol poisoning.
Exasperated, one tenacious Brooklyn detective went back to the Hotel Margaret and reinterviewed every staff member he could bully into talking. This time a frightened maidservant told him something new. On the day of the Jacksons’ death the basement rooms under their apartment had been sealed with paper pasted over the doors and windows. This was standard procedure when fumigators were at work. Armed with that information he soon discovered that the hotel management had been hiding the fact that the basement had been fumigated at the time when the couple had died.
Had the fumigator used hydrogen cyanide, a fairly routine procedure, for the disinfection? Water and steam pipes connected the basement to the Jacksons’ rooms; could the gas have traveled up the pipes? Hydrogen cyanide was notoriously lethal, even in ridiculously small measures. If it was distilled into a liquid, a mere drop, a raindrop-sized dose (about 50 milligrams), could be fatal. During the previous summer U.S. public
Einstein, a former postal clerk, and his partner, a retired cigar-store owner named Moe Smith, had signed up as Prohibition agents in the first year of the new law and refined their techniques ever since. They relied on a simple method to collect evidence for a prosecution. They would order a drink and pour a sample of it into a funnel, hidden in a vest pocket, that emptied into a small bottle. After carefully stoppering the bottle, Einstein and Smith would whip out their badges and arrest everyone involved in serving them that drink.
The duo were endlessly inventive in procuring illegal offerings. Smith had once jumped into icy water so that Einstein could rush him into a bar and beg a drink for a freezing man. They then busted the bar. They had posed as football players (when arresting an ice cream vendor who sold gin out of his cart), Texas Rangers, a Yiddish couple (Smith playing the wife), streetcar conductors, gravediggers, fishermen, and ice men. Einstein—who had a booming baritone—once introduced himself as an opera singer and gave a rousing performance in a speakeasy before closing it down.
As Einstein assured the reporters, he and his partner were far too savvy to drink the toxic liquorlike substances currently circulating. Their work, he asserted, had led them to develop “a highly developed sense of smell as regards the aroma of anything intoxicating . . . Of course, these bootleggers are getting cleverer every day and occasionally we run across a concoction that is almost odorless. Then we barely moisten our tongues to determine whether or not it has a kick. Such a test is easy to the trained hooch hunter.”
Even if city agents did occasionally “enjoy a little nip now and then,” he added, they indulged only in the really good liquor they’d confiscated, the “choice article.” But Einstein wasn’t sure that he trusted even that. For himself, he left the evidence in the stoppered bottle: “I’d rather save my stomach.”
But in the Jackson case, the city’s ready supply of poisonous liquor turned out not to be culpable. The deaths at the Hotel Margaret continued to drive the medical examiner and police crazy.
Gettler ran tests on the contents of every bottle, box, and container in the apartment. One of them—a sleeping tonic—had included a legal amount of ethyl alcohol. It was easily enough to account for the trace alcohol in the brain tissue but was definitely not enough to kill a person. And ethyl alcohol wasn’t that poisonous anyway, Gettler noted, compared to (methyl) alcohol. He found nothing to indicate fatal alcohol poisoning.
Exasperated, one tenacious Brooklyn detective went back to the Hotel Margaret and reinterviewed every staff member he could bully into talking. This time a frightened maidservant told him something new. On the day of the Jacksons’ death the basement rooms under their apartment had been sealed with paper pasted over the doors and windows. This was standard procedure when fumigators were at work. Armed with that information he soon discovered that the hotel management had been hiding the fact that the basement had been fumigated at the time when the couple had died.
Had the fumigator used hydrogen cyanide, a fairly routine procedure, for the disinfection? Water and steam pipes connected the basement to the Jacksons’ rooms; could the gas have traveled up the pipes? Hydrogen cyanide was notoriously lethal, even in ridiculously small measures. If it was distilled into a liquid, a mere drop, a raindrop-sized dose (about 50 milligrams), could be fatal. During the previous summer U.S. public
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