Tracing the history of a vintage WW1 razor - Part 9: Robert Mercer and Little Chicago

Discussion in 'Safety Razors' started by Rosengaard, Jan 14, 2023.

  1. Rosengaard

    Rosengaard Well-Known Member

    Read all eight parts of the story here:
    Part 1: The Khaki sets.
    Part 2: Searching for Pvt. Robert Mercer.
    Part 3: Robert Mercer Joins the Army.
    Part 4: Over There.
    Part 5: Battle.
    Part 6: At Wars End.
    Part 7: What Became of Robert Mercer?
    Part 8: Fathers and their children
    Part 9: Robert Mercer and Little Chicago


    Robert Mercer and Al Capone


    As related in part 8 I have now been able to further dig into the post-war life of Robert Mercer. This is thanks to his great-granddaughter in Pennsylvania, who has been so kind to send med some of the anecdotes that she was told from Roberts two daughters, Amelia and Launa Mercer, Amelia being her late grandmother.


    [​IMG]
    A photo from the 1920’s of Robert Mercer and his two older sisters Gertrude and Nettie.


    I must yet again express my gratitude to the great grandchildren of Robert Mercer, who have helped me make the history of Robert and his razor much more personal, and full of details. There is only so much that you can learn by only rummaging through the archives.

    In part 8 I mainly focused on how these stories and anecdotes helped me to understand Robert’s relationship with his children, mainly Amelia, and how, as a biproduct, the story about the relationship also explained how Robert’s razor ended up currently residing in a display case in a Danish living room.

    One anecdote however is of a somewhat different nature, and therefore I saved it for a chapter all its own. This is the exact quote of how the anecdote was told to me:

    “Other stories I was told over the years included ones about Robert's gambling habits. One that Amelia and Launa both shared several times were about their father and Mr. Capone. Hamilton, Ohio was a regular stop for many of the passenger trains traveling to the East and West. There was a hotel near the train station, The Grand Hotel, which had a large social area where many gentlemen engaged in gambling of various types. During his many years of gambling at the establishment, Robert had become friends with Al Capone, who regularly traveled by rail and often stopped in Hamilton. The story the girls told was of it being a Saturday morning. Apparently Robert had not come home the night before. Their mother, Edith, dressed them for the Winter weather and sent them off to the hotel to find their father and obtain money from him for payment of the weekly bills. Amelia was about 5 and Launa would have been 4 at the time. Upon finding their father playing cards, the girls were instructed to wait for a few minutes. When the current hand was finished, they were welcomed back to the table where Robert gave them the requested bill money and Mr. Capone also gave them each a penny for candy. Both girls fondly remembered getting a large bag of candy with their pennies.”

    This story is positively mind-blowing! Did Robert Mercer really know Al Capone? If he did, it further cements his role as a kind of WW1 era “Forrest Gump”. An unknown everyman moving through US history and taking us along for the ride.


    [​IMG]
    Was Al Capone Robert Mercer’s friend and poker-partner?


    When reading a story like this, we of course must start by being skeptical. Was it really Al Capone, that the 4- and 5-year-old girls saw in the (probably) smoke filled saloons of the Grand Hotel in the mid-1920’s? Children at that age could easily have been impressed by some ‘big shot’ character, and then later, on their own, have pieced together that it could have been Capone. On the other hand, Amelia and Laune seems to know of other instances where Robert and Capone have met, and even labelled Robert and the mob king as friends.

    If we accept the story, this opens another set of speculations. Because was it even possible for a simple railroad worker to be friends with the most notorious mobster in the US at the time, without having been part of Capones ‘circle’? In other words: Could the WW1 veteran Robert Mercer have been involved in the widespread organized crime of the era?

    To try to answer the questions about the probability of the story being true and of Roberts involvement with Capone, we need to examine the story of Hamilton in the prohibition era. And that story turns out to be a very interesting one.


    James L. Blount and Hamilton history

    It should be noted that my research into the ‘Little Chicago era’ of Hamilton history mostly draws on the writings of Hamilton’s great local historian James L. Blount. Blount, a journalist, writer, and educator who died in 2017, spent most of his life digging through Hamilton’s history, and his book ‘Little Chicago – A History of the Prohibition Era in Hamilton and Butler County, Ohio’ from 1997 has been a great source of information.


    [​IMG]
    James Blount’s book about Hamilton, Ohio in the prohibition era and beyond.


    Blount’s father, Jimmy Blount, was himself involved in the ‘underworld’ of Little Chicago, if only peripherally, and narrowly escaped death on 5 January 1934. Blount sr. worked as a driver for Carl L. Kieser, a former owner and manager of speakeasies in Hamilton. And at 2:15 a.m. on that fateful January night, Kieser’s car exploded outside of his Billiard Parlor at 116 South Second Street in Hamilton. Luckily for Blount and Kieser, Kieser was running late, and the car was empty.

    So, historian James L. Blount’s family was, like so many other families of that era, a part of the violent history of Little Chicago. Because of the ‘Al Capone story’ we can assume that there is a possibility, that the same applies for Robert Mercer. But in what way and in what extent needs some careful examination.


    [​IMG]
    Journalist and historian James Blount, whose father was nearly killed in a mob-related car-bombing in 1934.


    When the 17-year-old Edith-Marie Balser married the young war veteran Robert Mercer on 17 July 1920 (as described in part 7), she was living with her parents in Hamilton, Ohio. The tragic death of their first child three days later was registered in neighboring Dayton, where Robert was living with his sister’s family up until the wedding. We must assume though, that the newlyweds, shortly after this, moved to Hamilton, probably to live nearer to Edith-Marie’s parents. Alternatively the change of address could also have been caused by Robert being hired by the Baltimore Ohio Railroad Company.

    The short move from Dayton to Hamilton seems like a minor detail, but in hindsight it could be deemed as very ill-advised, since Hamilton was on the cusp of being transformed into one of the most notorious cities of the prohibition era. In the coming years, it would even be dubbed ‘Little Chicago’.


    Prohibition and the Great War

    The push for prohibition was famously a product of a pious trend in US society, but it was also a product of the Great War. History tells us, that the war ended with the armistice on 11 November 1918, but at the time, both soldiers and civilians had no way of knowing if the peace would be permanent, or if hostilities would break out again shortly. One of the products of this, was that Robert Mercer and more than two million other US soldiers remained in Europe for more than 4 months after the war had ended, as related in part 6. Another product was that US society did not immediately switch off its wartime mindset (in lack of a better term). The idea that the US citizens should save resources for the war effort was still very much present, and this trend was a big factor in the arguments for prohibition. Drinking alcohol was seen as unproductive in the greater war effort, and therefore it was deemed unpatriotic. This in some ways explain why the prohibition act, that was hatched in 1917, the year the US entered the war, was still passed in January 1919, and implemented in January 1920, even though one of the primary causes for the prohibition – the war – had effectively ended at that time.


    [​IMG]
    Two prohibition posters with a patriotic WW1 inspired theme.


    [​IMG]
    Prohibition poster with a social theme.


    Little Chicago

    [​IMG]
    The last open saloon in Hamilton in 1919. The owner: Lyman Williams (fourth from the right) paid to get a special dispensation, so the saloon could be open for one extra night.


    Even though the National Prohibition Act (the Volstead Act) was implemented on January 17, 1920, state law in Ohio mandated, that the last legal beer was served in Butler County already on Monday, May 26, 1919. 107 saloons were closed in the county - 66 in Hamilton. The majority of the residents in Butler County, and especially the Hamiltonians did not care for the new “dry” laws, as the polls leading up to this fateful day show.


    [​IMG]
    Prohibition election results from Butler County. ‘Wet’ means that people voted ‘NO’ to prohibition. ‘Dry’ means that people voted ‘YES’.


    So, there was a general dislike of the prohibition laws in Hamilton and the outlying Butler County. But this alone does not explain why Hamilton would soon be known as ‘Little Chicago’.

    It is generally acknowledged today, that the prohibition laws had a disastrous effect on the country, as they opened an enormous playing field for organized crime. Because of the new laws, the legal suppliers stopped providing alcoholic beverages, even though the demand still existed. This started a whole new boot-legging industry.

    The producers of illegal alcohol were not all ruthless Al Capone types. Far from it. Especially during the first years of prohibition, most bootleggers were normal citizens who saw a way of earning easy money, while spiting a law that they saw as unjust in the first place. In this way the Volstead Act effectively criminalized a big chunk of the US population. In 1923 a national report asserted, that 1 in every 100 American was in some way employed in the bootlegging business. In Hamilton, Ohio this number would have been substantially higher. In 1921 a federal prohibition agent reported the following to a local reporter:

    "We found Butler County to be one of the wettest we have visited so far. The outlying parts of Butler County are much wetter than Hamilton, though a great deal of the traffic is carried on in the city."

    A federal prosecutor in the early twenties described Hamilton as:

    "…the oasis of the Volstead desert."

    Hamilton was not very different than other cities in America at the time. It was just more extreme. The problems of the era were somehow more ‘distilled’ (pun intended).


    [​IMG]
    Hamilton was surrounded by farmsteads and rich farmland. The perfect conditions for production of moonshine.


    From day one of prohibition, the rural areas of Butler County proved to be fertile ground for hundreds of small illegal stills, and the city seemed unable to stop this development. The police and fire departments in Hamilton were notoriously understaffed, due to multiple cutbacks, cutbacks that continued well into the prohibition era. In January 1925 the police force, that had once numbered 40 men, were down to 9. A number so low, that patrolling was eliminated. Instead, two to three men were on call at the station. In a city of more than 40.000 people during the prohibition era, this proved to be a haven for people wanting to earn a buck on bootlegging.

    And it was easy to earn a buck on bootlegging. The average monthly earnings for a relatively active bootlegger were many times the pay of a policeman or a city official, and many of those eventually became a part of the bootlegging business. Many officials and politicians accepted bribes to look the other way, and several policemen not only took bribes, but also took jobs as bouncers in speakeasies on their nights off.


    [​IMG]
    A photo from one of the countless raids (this one is from 1921) on stills in the area around Hamilton.


    If a bootlegger was caught, the fines were so low, that the lost money could be re-earned in just a few days or even hours of bootlegging. For example, on January 11, 1929, a raid on one of the major bootleggers Lyman William’s (also the owner of the ‘Last Saloon’ – and appearing in the picture above) stills resulted in a fine of $1200 for Zana Case, the woman running the still. The stills daily earning was calculated to be $4000! In many respects the city never really had any real interest in shutting bootlegging down altogether, because the fines closed a significant gap in the city’s earnings. A gap created by the loss in taxes from the pre-prohibition selling of legal alcohol.


    [​IMG]
    High Street in Hamilton at some point between 1928 and 1930 The ‘Soldiers, Sailors and Pioneers’ monument can be seen in the lower left corner.


    [​IMG]
    The same street-corner today. The monument can still be seen, but almost everything else is new.


    With the explosion in bootlegging followed a string of other criminal enterprises. Smuggling or rum running as it was soon dubbed, inevitably followed the production of alcohol. Hamilton produced so much moonshine, that nearby cities and states started importing. Frequent rum-running then spawned hi-jackings of rum loads. Gambling, prostitution, and general racketeering also followed. Even though gambling was illegal in the state, both a dog track and a horse track intended for betting, were opened in 1927. As late as 1942, nine years after prohibition had ended, the WW2 soldiers stationed near Hamilton, experienced three times as many cases of venereal disease, as soldiers stationed elsewhere. The reason being the large number of bordellos in the city.


    [​IMG]
    A photo from the Hamilton dog-track, where small monkeys were sometimes used as ‘jockeys’, to the merriment of the spectators but not the monkeys.


    In the mid-20’s the bootlegging business, which had started in a free for all kind of atmosphere, was increasingly being run by gangsters and mobsters. As a result, the murder rates rose steeply. Criminals were being killed in constant disputes amongst themselves, and policemen were being killed in rising numbers, when they interfered with the work of the more and more hardboiled gangsters. Even John Dillinger, the most hardboiled of them all, choose to hide in Hamilton with his gang for periods of time during his spree of violent bank robberies. In 1933 he hid in a house on Dixie Highway. Several speakeasies could also be found on Dixie Highway, and a number of gangland related car chases took place on that road as well in the 1920’s and 30’s. Dixie Highway was the very road where Mercer and his family lived for most of the 1920’s


    [​IMG]
    Robert Mercers old house on Dixie Highway, as it looks today.


    [​IMG]
    John Dillinger after his capture in 1934. Dillinger and his gang hid in Hamilton in 1933 and on several occasions.


    Al Capone in Hamilton?

    It was in this city and in this atmosphere that Robert Mercer lived with his daughters and his first wife Edith-Marie. If Robert, as his daughter later told her grandchildren, knew Al Capone and often gambled with him at this time, it is difficult to believe, that he took no part in the criminal activities, that was so rampant in the city at the time. Before we jump to this conclusion though, we must establish if it is even plausible that Al Capone, the uncrowned king of mobsters of the era, could have been gambling in the Grand Hotel in Hamilton in the mid-twenties.

    The answer to this is: Yes. Even though Capones main base of operations was Chicago, and even though mobsters naturally are careful to not leave a paper trail, it is possible to link Capone to several of the criminal activities in Hamilton. Firstly, a factory sized still, disguised as a rag laundry was raided on 13 December 1930. Investigation pointed to Capone as the possible owner. Secondly the era’s two arguably worst gangsters in Hamilton, Ray (Craneneck) Nugent and John (Jew John) Marcus, were both connected to Al Capone. Nugent, who had a hand in no less than 15 murders, disappeared, while on the run from the police, in June 1930. He was last seen at Al Capones Miami residence. Nugent’s wife was only successful at having him declared dead as late as 1952. A more colorful, but also unsubstantiated story, reports that Capone had one of his mistresses installed in a house on Symes Road in neighboring Fairfield.

    But the affirmation that Capone was active in Hamilton in the 1920’s and that it is therefore possible for Robert Mercer to have known the crime boss, is not the only piece of evidence that points to a link between Robert and the activities of racketeers in Hamilton.


    Robert Mercer in prohibition era Hamilton

    While it is possible that the man that gave Robert’s daughters a penny in the Grand Hotel in the 1920’s was not Al Capone, it is almost a certainty that Robert Mercer frequented the hotel and regularly played cards at the establishment. This in itself points to him being close to the racketeering that was so rampant in the city at the time. Because The Grand Hotel seems to have been one of the mob hot spots in the city.


    [​IMG]
    Hotel Atlas shortly before it was renamed ‘The Grand Hotel’.


    The Grand Hotel had multiple links to mob dealings and criminal enterprises. Harvey Langdon, the owner, also owned ‘The Stockton Club’, the biggest and most posh of the many speakeasies in the city. Stockton Club catered to the rich and famous of the area and employed off duty policemen as bouncers. Langdon was furthermore involved in a protection racket scam in Dayton, where he and his associates posed as federal officers, who collected bribes from various businesses that sold moonshine.

    The Grand Hotel furthermore employed a George Murphy as a night clerk, a job which seems to have been a front, when the rest of Murphys activities in the 20’s are listed.

    Like Robert Mercer, George Murphy was a war veteran. He had been a captain in the canadian army in the great war. In civil life he had worked on both sides of the law. He had been a policeman in Los Angeles, but also a member of the Tracy McAllister gang from Kentucky, where he served more than five years in jail, for robbery and safe-cracking charges. At the same time as he worked in the Grand Hotel, George Murphy also owned and ran one of the many ‘beer and booze camps’, that, during prohibition, popped up about 5 kilometers outside of Hamilton along the Great Miami River in the Woodsdale area. Furthermore, George Murphy seems to have participated in protection scams, like the ones Harvey Langdon, the owner of the hotel, took part in.

    George Murphy was murdered, gangland style, on 20 May 1929. He was found in an alley, machine gunned to death. 6 of the 18 bullets that had killed him were positioned right around his heart. His girlfriend, waitress Pauline Wilson, was gunned to death on the same night on a nearby bridge. The double murders were only two in a series of murders happening in Hamilton in 1929 as part of a vengeful war between Ohio gangs.


    [​IMG]
    A more resent photo of the former ‘Grand Hotel’.


    Apart from frequenting The Grand Hotel that seems to have been a hotbed for gangsters, Robert Mercer was also exposed to the darker sides of ‘Little Chicago’ every day when he showed up at work. The railroad was the most efficient way to smuggle the Hamilton made moonshine to the neighboring counties and states. This gave the people employed at the B & O railroad an easy way of making money on the side, and we know that several of these employees took them. One of them was the notorious gangster George ‘Fat’ Wrassman.


    George ‘Fat’ Wrassman – The King of Bootlegging in Hamilton

    Like Robert Mercer, ‘Fat’ Wrassman got his job on the ‘Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’ through his father, who was also a ‘railroader’. This happened around 1918, when Wrassman moved to Hamilton. Robert Mercer was employed by the same company in 1920, at a time as Wrassman was sowing the seeds for his later criminal empire.

    In 1922 Wrassman’s house was raided and a big still was confiscated. Wrassman paid the fine and promptly continued in the moonshine business. But his main criminal endeavor proved to be not the production of moonshine, but the smuggling of it. In the early 1920’s he was working as a brakeman on the Hamilton-Indianapolis line, and he soon started supplying the ‘dry’ Indiana state capitol with moonshine from the ‘wet’ Hamilton area. His smuggling operation soon expanded, and in a few years, it had grown into the largest in Hamilton and the outlying counties. Wrassman’s growing gang consisted mainly of railroad employees, even though he himself quit the railroad in the mid 20’s, and that is why it is very possible that Robert Mercer could have worked for him, had Mercer been involved in mob activities in ‘Little Chicago’ in the 1920’s.


    [​IMG]
    George ‘Fat’ Wrassmann – The King of Bootlegging in Hamilton in the 1920’s.


    In the late 1920’s ‘Fat’ Wrassman’s gang was notorious, and Wrassman himself seemed almost untouchable. His gang was heavily involved in the ever-prevalent assassinations and the ongoing feuds between the rivalling gangs, and it is possible that he was behind the double murder of George Murphy and his girlfriend that is described above. Wrassman was arrested and prosecuted several times, but witnesses in the following court-cases had a strange tendency to either disappear or forget what they had previously told the police, when they appeared in court. So Wrassman remained a free man despite being connected with numerous homicides and other criminal activities.

    Wrassman’s criminal empire soon expanded and in the late 1920’s he was also active in Cincinnati, and it was in this city that he met his violent end shortly after midnight 11 June 1929.

    At this point Wrassman must have felt above the law. Apart from having threatened witnesses and having been able to make them disappear, he had on at least one occasion simply threatened the police to leave him alone. In November 1925 a group of federal agents tried to raid one of his ‘Soft Drink Parlors’ (the usual cover for speakeasies) and was met in the door by Wrassman and a gang of toughs bearing guns. The agents backed down and left, and maybe it was with this incident in mind, that Wrassman acted like he did on that fateful summer night in 1929.

    Detective Joe ‘Dutch’ Shaeffer was one of the witnesses that Wrassman had not been able to scare or make ‘disappear’. The detective had both arrested, questioned and testified against Wrassman on numerous occasions, but Wrassman had escaped incarceration every time. On 10 June Dutch Shaeffer was once again on the lookout for Wrassman in yet another attempt to arrest and convict the ‘King of Bootlegging’ in connection to an ongoing investigation. Shortly after midnight Dutch noticed Wrassman’s car parked at Race and Elm Street in downtown Cincinnati. Shaeffer waited near the car, and a while later Wrassman and a group of his henchmen exited a nearby Chinese restaurant. When Wrassman saw Dutch Shaeffer, he immediately drew his gun and shot two times at the detective. Both shots missed. The five shots that Shaeffer fired in retaliation did not. Wrassman was hit in both the head and torso and was dead on arrival at the hospital.


    [​IMG]
    Article from a Cincinnati newspaper about the shootout that caused Wrassmann’s death.


    Was Robert Mercer involved?

    The five henchmen that accompanied ‘Fat’ Wrassman the night he was shot (none of which defended him) were all later identified, and none of them were Robert Mercer (I checked thoroughly). In fact, I have to date not found any ‘smoking gun’ that links Robert Mercer to either ‘Fat’ Wrassman or any of the other criminal figures that were so plentiful in Hamilton in the prohibition era and the years that followed. Robert’s daughter’s story about Robert playing cards with Al Capone is thus still the only ‘hard’ evidence we have that links Robert to the mobsters. If we look at the circumstantial evidence though, there is a lot of incriminating material that points to it being very possible that Robert was somehow connected to the vast criminal world of ‘Little Chicago’. He lived right in the eye of the storm, he was a war veteran, he liked to gamble, he was by no means an abstainer, he switched wives four times, he hung out in places run by the mob and lastly, he worked at a place that spawned one of the many gangs that ruled and terrorized Hamilton and the surrounding area. If we connect this to the fact that 1:100 of every US citizen was connected to the moonshine industry, and that this number must have been significantly higher in Hamilton, I will guess that there is a higher than average probability that Robert indeed was a part of this industry in some way. But we still do not know this for a fact.


    [​IMG]
    Excerpt from the article about Robert Mercer’s death. Read the full article in part 7.


    When that is said, one more thing needs to be discussed. When Robert died 31 January 1955 (as narrated in part 7), the newspaper article reporting his death told that he died ‘apparently accidentally’. Robert fell under a train late at night while working alone by the railroad tracks. Even though it is wildly speculative, there is a tiny possibility that someone pushed him, and given the fact, that he may have been connected to racketeering earlier in his life, the culprit could have been one of his former ‘colleagues’ or adversaries. Again, this is wildly speculative, but people I have told the story keeps coming up with the theory, so I felt it needed to be mentioned.


    [​IMG]
    We will never know for certain if Robert Mercer took part in the racketeering in Hamilton in the 1920’s and 30’s.


    Whether or not Robert was ‘connected’, the Capone story and the story of Hamilton, the place where Robert lived until his untimely death in 1955 further fills out the picture of the world that Robert was a part of after his ordeal in ‘The Great War’. Robert lived through one of the more notorious periods of US history in one of the most notorious places to be at the time, and once again, the story of this fascinating gentleman tells us a piece of US history. A piece of history that most of us would be ignorant of, if Robert Mercer had not owned and used a WW1 issue razor for most of his life. A razor that I by pure luck acquired in an auction a couple of years ago.


    [​IMG]
    Robert Mercer’s army issue Khaki Set. The razor set that started this historical investigation.


    This will be the last chapter I will publish on Robert Mercer’s life for some time. I am still digging into his history, but currently most of my findings has been published in these 9 chapters. However, Robert’s story has proven to be ever unfolding, and after finishing chapter 7 I was way too quick to assume that not much else could be found now. So, this time I will end the narrative by stating, that many historical treasures are maybe still waiting to be found in my pursuit of the history of Robert and his razor.

    .
     
    Last edited: Jan 14, 2023
    MoAllen, Latherin’ Luddite and brit like this.

Share This Page