On the morning of October 6th, 1927, a woman named Imogene was on her way to the courthouse in Cincinnati. Her divorce was being finalized that day and she had been waiting for it for a long time. Her car was forced off the road in Eden Park. She was shot in front of her own daughter. Her husband walked to the nearest police station and told them exactly what he had done. Open and shut. A jealous husband, a bitter divorce, a crime of passion on a bright autumn morning.Except nothing about this story is what it looks like.Before he was a killer, George Remus was one of the best criminal defense attorneys in Chicago, with a specialty in murder cases and a gift for reading a jury. When Prohibition started in 1920 he studied the Volstead Act until he found a loophole. Medicinal alcohol was still legal. If you owned the distilleries, the permits, and the drugstores all at once, you could move liquor openly while everyone around you got arrested. George moved to Cincinnati, where eighty percent of the country's legal whiskey was warehoused, and built an empire worth forty million dollars.The government noticed. A federal agent named Franklin Dodge was assigned to build a case, and by 1924 they had enough. George went to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Dodge was later sent into that same prison undercover to investigate corruption. George had no idea who Dodge really was. He saw a connected man who might be his way out, and told him everything. His businesses. His fortune. His wife Imogene managing it all on the outside. Soon after, Dodge quietly resigned from the Bureau and went looking for Imogene.By the time George got out of prison, Dodge and Imogene had sold the distilleries, cashed out the permits, emptied the mansion down to the chandeliers, and moved in together. Everything George had built was gone. Then they tried to have him deported back to Germany. When that failed, they paid a hitman fifteen thousand dollars to kill him. The hitman got nervous, went to George, and told him everything.George knew about the affair, the stolen fortune, and the murder plot. He filed paperwork, talked to reporters, and showed up to every hearing. When the divorce date was set for October 6th, 1927, George had other plans.The trial was front page news coast to coast. George represented himself. This was not an ordinary man standing up on his own behalf. George Remus had spent twenty years defending murder cases. He knew every move the prosecution would make before they made it. He built his entire defense around temporary insanity, arguing that years of accumulated betrayal had broken something in his mind that morning. Then he cross-examined every witness himself, patient and methodical, including Imogene's daughter who had watched it happen.The jury came back in nineteen minutes. Not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.The courtroom erupted. George walked out a free man. Franklin Dodge sat there and watched. He later went to prison for perjury in an unrelated case, but his connections got him a job at the state liquor board the moment he was released, like none of it had ever happened.Was George Remus the real Jay Gatsby? F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby while Remus was building his empire and throwing lavish parties. If Remus was Gatsby, Fitzgerald looked at a bootlegger who talked his way out of murder and called him the American Dream.

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