By Richard O Jones
When Prohibition first kicked in, Lyman Williams led a consortium of saloon owners to purchase a special license to remain open one last day, and earned the admiration of the city by throwing one last legal party.
Although Williams told the newspapers that he would likely just start serving soft drinks instead of hard ones, he remained one of the most active bootleggers and moonshiners in Hamilton, but he managed to mostly stay out of the limelight during the Little Chicago gangster wars. Toward the end of his career, as he was about to be hauled off to federal prison in Atlanta, the Cincinnati papers crowned him “King of the Hamilton bootleggers.”
In addition to operating the last legal saloon, Williams was one of the first Hamilton cafe owners to be fined for violating the Volstead act when on October 10, 1919, not quite five months into the dry era, he paid a fine of $1,000, equivalent to more than $14,000 in 2019 dollars, for selling beer stronger than 2.75 percent alcohol.
Williams and the other café operators were not only under the constant eye of federal Prohibition agents, but also local vigilantes operating as “The Butler County Dry Enforcement League” and the “Ohio Anti-Saloon League,” as well as a rag-tag group of official “enforcers” operating under the auspices of “Squire” Morris Shuler of Milford Township. First as the justice of the peace for Milford Township and later as the mayor of the village of Seven Mile, Morris Shuler assembled his own team of agents. Some of them were deputies and other police working part-time.
In early February 1924, Seven Mile agents raided Williams’s café, but found nothing and made no arrests. Feeling confident that Williams was getting over on them, they next raided his residence on Chestnut Street and found a veritable gold mine of good liquor.
The agents seized at least fifty quarts of good whiskey and a rare collection of fancy liqueurs and cordials. Shuler fined Williams $1,000, but Shuler appealed saying that the liquor seized was his private stash purchased prior to the Volstead act. So after several court hearings, on December 24, Shuler’s men returned the liquor. The value was reported at $1,700. Rumor was that some of the liquor was missing and could not be returned, but it would turn out, perhaps, that Lyman Williams would eventually be paid back with interest.
In February, 1925, Shuler had to go to court himself after his own home was raided by Hamilton police and some of his former agents. He claimed that the liquor was evidence left over from the Williams raid, but Lyman Williams testified on behalf of the state and brought receipts showing that all of his liquor had been returned. Shuler was acquitted anyway.
Squire Shuler’s agents conducted at least one more raid on the Williams café, confiscating an account book found in a cash register which Shuler said would be helpful in conducting future raids. But his raiders and his court would soon be put out of business. In March, 1927, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft, the former president of the United States and a Cincinnati native, announced a ruling that prevented mayors to act as judges in cases initiated by their own agents. The practice violated the Constitutional right to a fair and impartial trial, Taft ruled.
Lyman Williams’s trouble was not over, though. In the fall of 1927, Judge Clarence Murphy ordered the Lyman Williams café Place to be padlocked. It was one of ten cafes named in the suit filed by Butler County Prosecutor Peter P. Boli as “nuisances”, stating that more than two liquor law convictions were reported against each.
Williams, apparently undeterred, posted a $1,500 bond on the promise that it would not be used for the illegal possession, sale or use of liquor for one year, then pursued other interests. He purchased an interest in the Grand Hotel from the estate of former Butler County Sheriff Rudy Laubach and was allegedly a silent partner in a café at 117 Court Street, an operation that would soon cause his downfall, and was implicated in the operation of a 200-gallon still in Lindenwald.
The last big Prohibition raid in Hamilton came Friday night, September 27, 1929, when federal agents netted a total of 43 indictments against men and women charged with violating the Volstead act in one way or another, including Lyman Williams. Calling him “King of the Hamilton Bootleggers,” the Cincinnati Enquirer said Williams was one of the ringleaders of the “so-called bootleg ring operating in Butler County and is reputed to be connected closely with the gangsters, gunmen and racketeers who have been operating throughout this section of Butler County.”
“Practically every prohibition law charge that can be placed against a bootlegger was contained in a twelve-count indictment against Lyman Williams on October 4,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. “Williams… apparently is being centered on as an example. He is charged with a third offense, which means prosecution under the Jones ‘five and ten’ law,’” an amendment to the Volstead Act which demanded and additional five years and $10,000 fine for repeat offenders. Williams was charged with eight counts of sales of liquor, one count of possession of liquor, one count of conduct of a nuisance, one count of violation of internal revenue laws for failure to pay tax as a retail liquor dealer and one count of having conspired to violate the Volstead act.
The raid resulted in a sentence of 18 months in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta upon Ray Burke, 435 South Fifth Street, who was indicted under charges of having sold and possessed liquor and was believed to have taken the rap for Lyman Williams. Although government witnesses testified that gas, electric and telephone bills for that address were in the name of Lyman Burke insisted that he, not Williams, is the owner of the café there. Fred Morton, 117 Court Street, was sentenced to serve 18 months when he said he and not Lyman Williams was the owner of the café at that address in Hamilton.
On January 23, 1930, the Evening Journal said, “The Hamilton colony at Atlanta Penitentiary will be increased by one next week when Lyman Williams, bootlegger, is sent there to serve a maximum term of two and one half years for violation of the national prohibition act.
“Williams entered a plea of guilty to two of 13 counts against him. On his plea of guilty he was sentenced under the Jones ‘five and ten’ law to serve two and a half years, and on his plea to a charge of a third offense was sentenced to two years. The terms were to run concurrently. He will be eligible for parole in ten months, one third of his maximum term.”
Williams may or may not have beaten the charges if he had gone to trial, but by his decision to plead guilty he kept the government from introducing testimony which investigators have said would have been highly sensational and possibly would have led to other liquor indictments. More than that, the plea of guilty saved prominent Hamiltonians from taking the witness stand and telling of the purchase of liquor at the Court Street bar. Some of them, who have been so thoughtless as to do a credit business at the café, were under subpoena, their names having been found by federal agents in the “little black book” in which charge accounts were kept.
To what extent the government was prepared to go to convict Williams was indicated when Assistant U.S. District Attorney Jerry French made a statement to the court after the pleas were accepted. French revealed that the government had evidence of the presence in Williams’s café of “a notorious criminal of the underworld,” referring to Bob Zwick, the notorious gunman who was thought to be the target but only wounded when Turkey Joe was hit at Symmes Corner. Zwick was still in the wind, wanted for the murder of Peter Dumele, North College Hill marshal.
“The government is prepared to show,” said French, “that Williams was convicted in 1922 in Hamilton, again in 1928, and in September of last year he was arrested and later indicted on 13 counts, to two of which he has now pleaded guilty.
“The government can also show that Williams paid a fine of $1,500 in 1923 when a truckload of his liquor was seized in Montgomery County.
“Day after day last September, according to French’s statement, federal undercover men were admitted to the Court Street café and purchased drinks. Auraden, Morton or Williams were always in charge, he said. On one occasion he related how the agents knocked at the door and were refused admittance by Williams. Later they returned and were admitted when Auraden said they were ‘all right.’”
“It was during these visits that ‘Bob’ White made the acquaintance of Williams and gained his confidence. White admitted he was a government investigator and intimated that he would ‘deal.’ The arrangement, French said, was that Williams would pay White $600 a month in return for tips to himself and five other bootleggers regarding federal raids.
The prosecutor’s statement also recalled the police raid on the Zanna Case still on Dixie Highway near Belle Avenue in January, 1929, for which she escaped a prison sentence by paying a $15,000 fine. The government was prepared to show that the still was owned by Williams, who had it in the woman’s house.
“The night of that raid,” French said, “a man telephoned to Otto Kolodzik, then a detective in Hamilton. Kolodzik recognized the voice of Williams, who threatened him and said he would have him knocked off for seizing the still. The next day, police raided Williams’s place at 117 Court Street and they returned two days later for another raid. Williams said Jack Dunwoodie would take the rap.”
Dunwoodie was the handyman at the café. On one of the raids he fled when police entered and escaped in a volley of shots fired by Kolodzik.
In their investigations, federal agents seized lists of bootleggers and customers with whom Williams did business, which would have been put in evidence at the trial.
Williams’s attorneys M.O. Burns and John P. Rogers declared they could show that Williams was not the owner of the Zanna Case still, that Zwick did not frequent the café and as to the alleged arrangements for protection, they said it is White’s word against Williams’s.
Burns told the court that Williams is married and has two children, that there is a $10,000 mortgage on his home and that he is penniless. He pointed out that the government has been saved some considerable time and expense by Williams’s plea of guilty and asked that the court be lenient.
Nevin recalled that Williams was before him in federal court in Cincinnati last summer on a federal charge. At that time, Judge Nevin sentenced him to 30 days in Miami County jail. In passing sentence, Nevin said he took into consideration that Williams’s plea had saved the government “a long a tedious trial, at the end of which the defendant might have been convicted or acquitted.”
Assistant district attorney Harry Abrahms said the government would have required four days to take the testimony of its witnesses, who had been called to Dayton from all parts of the country. The member of a New York firm which manufactures “gin drops” was present. It was said Williams had purchased from him drops used to flavor gin.
For years, according to local authorities, Lyman Williams has been recognized as a leader among Hamilton’s bootleggers, defying raiders with an establishment almost in the center of the business district. Several times he slipped from under because his employees or friends took the rap.
Williams’s two and a half year sentence was the heaviest meted out to a Butler County bootlegger.