The Hotel Lee, a café at the corner of Wood Street and Monument Avenue, was one of the hottest spots in the part of Hamilton known as “the Jungles.”
The nickname was largely a racial epithet, but people of all races frequented the speakeasies, “soft drink parlors” and “sporting houses” that lined Wood Street, now Pershing Avenue, the heart of the Ohio city’s thriving Prohibition era nightlife. It was run by Lee Richardson, an African-American attorney from Nashville who moved to Hamilton in 1903.
Edward Schief, proprietor of a “cafe” at 328 Court Street, and his right-hand man Andrew “Skimmer” Kuhlman were making the rounds of the clubs on April 30, 1925. They, along with Philip Einsfeld and his wife, went to a restaurant to get some food but found it closed, and decided to go to Peter Farley’s café on Wood Street, between the Hotel Lee and Madame Hawley’s house, to get some sandwiches. Einsfeld and his wife waited in the car. Ten minutes later, when Schief and Kuhlman did not return, they walked to their house.
They did not hear about the murder until the next morning.
Reports of what happened were incoherent and contradictory, but by all accounts a party of about eight men and one woman swooped down upon the Hotel Lee about 1 a.m. The café was supposed to have closed by midnight by city ordinance. Owner Lee Richardson said he had closed it, but that “the boys” broke in.
The brawl started in the cabaret room.
According to one of the patrons, a black man who “took the air” as soon as the fuss started, said that Kuhlman and Schief were squared off against John “Todd” Messner and four other men. Metal knuckles and broken bottles made for a bloody fifteen minutes. A door window was knocked out and the tables and chairs were overturned.
Patrolmen Henry Keiser and Frank Mayer were a few blocks away when the red signal lights began to flash. When they got to the Hotel Lee, they saw Eddie Schief trying to kick in the door to the hotel, blood running down his face.
They saw several other men beaten and bleeding but no one would give them any information and no one wanted to get treated for their wounds. The patrolmen had heard shots fired, but they could not find a gun.
Schief and Kuhlman retreated to the Farley Café, a few doors east on Wood Street, to clean up. They stayed inside there for about thirty-five minutes. Kuhlman was the first to come out. Several men from the brawl jumped him, knocking him to the sidewalk.
“I felt a blow on the head, but it did not quite knock me out,” Kuhlman said later. “I fell to the sidewalk and tried to get up.”
One of the men was kicking Kuhlman in the face when Schief came out of Farley’s place.
“What are you doing to Skimmer?” he shouted.
Two shots fired.
Kuhlman said, “I heard a shot and saw Schief fall. The gang then jumped on me and that is the last I knew until I woke up in the hospital.”
Schief collapsed on top of him. He was shot twice, once in the neck and once about six inches above his left knee. He was killed instantly by the throat wound.
The gang jumped in a Hudson and fled.
The police arrived shortly, detectives Joe Koons and Charles McCormick, found Schief and Kuhlman in a pile on the sidewalk, one on top of the other, and took both to the hospital.
Word on the street was that Messner and Schief had a falling out over a shipment of beer from Canada, that Messner somehow “double-crossed” his partner.
When the coroner examined Schief at the hospital, he had no personal effects except for a single key and a fountain pen.
Jack Schief, the victim’s brother: “When I examined Eddie, I found that he had cuts and gashes in his head which had been sustained in the brawl which preceded the killing.”
Police got an answer to the mystery when they spoke to taxi cab driver Edward “Red” Weber, who said that he met Ray Nugent, a local thug named he knew as Crane drive off in the Hudson.
“I had two customers in the cab when the fight in the hotel took place. I don’t know much about the scrap. After the row in the café some of the boys left in a Hudson coach. As I was parked in front of butcher shop, I saw this same coach drive north on Front Street and turn into Wood Street. This was some time after the fight. I followed the coach and parked my car on Monument Avenue, north of the Hotel Lee. Pretty soon, I heard two shots fired. I drove to Wood Street.
“I was sitting in my machine on Front Street when I noticed a large automobile being driven toward Wood Street. I recognized Nugent and Messner as occupants. I did not see anyone else. Knowing of the fight in Richardson’s place, I followed the car for a while. It was driven back to Richardson’s place and parked in front. I kept on going over Wood Street. Suddenly two shots rang out. I turned my machine and hastened back. Just as I came upon Nugent running toward his machine, Messner had already boarded the automobile. Nugent saw me and aimed his revolver at me. It was a nickel plated gun.”
“Don’t shoot,” he cried. “I’m just a taxi driver.”
“What are you doing here?” Nugent asked, still pointing the gun.
“Then a little fellow who is in the Hudson calls, ‘Come on, Crane, come on!’
“Then Messner began to call for him to hurry. He appeared to become excited at this point. I think I owe my life to the fact that Messner called him. Otherwise I believe that he would have shot me.”
Farley said that immediately after the shooting her heard the sound of an automobile being driven away rapidly but was unable to see the machine.
On Thursday afternoon around three o’clock, less than 24 hours after the killing, police arrested Raymond Nugent in his home at 331 North Ninth Street, where he lived with his wife and two children, two and four years old.
He had been going by the name Roy Browning since getting to Hamilton as he was wanted in Cincinnati in connection with the murder of insurance agent Ashur L. Pickens during a brawl in the Little Sunshine fishing camp in Turkey Bottoms in Cincinnati’s East End the previous October. Police had also charged a man Edward Naegle with the crime. At that time, Nugent had been going by the name Richard Crane.
He was arrested by Detective Charles Nugent, no relation. While detective Charles Morton guarded the front door, Nugent told the man’s wife that he was a friend of “Crane Neck,” Nugent’s gangster name.
She pointed him to the room where he found Nugent lying in his bed. His face was cut and bruised, but the detective recognized him as the partner of George “Fat” Wrassman, a convicted bootlegger and burglar that he had recently arrested by Middletown police. During the arrest, this man Nugent — alias Browning alias Crane — jumped on the running board of Wrassman’s car and escaped.
As Detective Nugent walked the thug Nugent into the station, Weber took one look at him and said, “That’s the man who pointed the gun at men.”
Nugent said nothing.
Questioned by Police Chief Frank Clements, Nugent denied any knowledge of the Cincinnati murder nor Schief’s murder, but he did talk about the brawl that took place in the Hotel Lee’s cabaret room.
They asked him about his association with Fat Wrassman. Nugent “shut up like a clam,” detectives said. That evening, Cincinnati detective Joe Schaefer and William Duning, superintendent of the Bertillon Bureau of the Cincinnati police department, identified Nugent on sight.
“We want him badly,” Schaefer said, “for murder.” He told the Hamilton police that Nugent was “a gangster, a hi-jacker, a thug and a safe-cracker.” He was well-known at a joint called the Hole in the Wall, a notorious West End resort and the hangout of Cincinnati yeggs. But since Hamilton had possession of the man, the Cincinnati police conceded, they could have first crack at bringing him to trial.
From the jail, Messner said, “Why should I kill Eddie? He was my pal and my friend. Why, I was not there when any of the shooting they talk about took place.”
After two days of searching for the third man in the Hudson, Detective Schaefer and Cincinnati police did Hamilton police a favor by arresting Edward Scott, twenty-three years old, a black man who lived on Cutter Street. Scott was a known associate of Nugent.
Chief of Police Frank Clements noted that this was one of the hardest cases he ever had to unravel. “Everyone we questioned gave us facts very reluctantly, as if they were afraid something would happen to them if they told when they knew.”
Nugent, Messner and Scott were all held on charges of first degree murder. Only Nugent was held without bond.
The trio would be tried together, and a date set for December 9, 1925. Two days before the trial began, Judge Walter Harlan gave Sheriff Epperson subpoenas to deliver to potential jurors and witnesses. On the list was Red Webber, the taxi driver and the only person who puts a smoking gun in the hands of a killer. Epperson turned to the Hamilton police for help, but the man was nowhere to be found.
On the day of the trial, Judge Harlan waited until 10 a.m. for Webber to show up, then called the trial to order. Prosecutor Boli asked for a continuance: “The witness has not been found and without him, the state cannot proceed.”
Word got back to Sheriff Epperson that Red Webber was in Dillsboro, Indiana. Webber showed up at Prosecutor Peter P. Boli’s office on December 29 with a certificate showing he had gone to Dillsboro for his health and arranged for a $300 bond to assure his presence when the trial could be rescheduled.
Finally, on January 11, 1926, while the city dug its way out from under a weekend snowstorm, the trial of Nugent, Messner and Scott got underway. The morning was devoted to seating a jury, and the afternoon was spent in as the long-awaited “star witness” Red Weber, began the state’s case by repudiating his previous statements, even though he told his story under oath to three different courts during preliminaries.
“That’s typewritten stuff,” he said when confronted with transcripts, “and some of it is not true. My memory isn’t very good. I’ve been sick for five or six years and I drank a good deal until recently.”
Over the objections of defense attorney Warren Gard, a clearly exasperated Boli read passages from the grand jury, mayor’s court and coroner’s inquest transcripts, but Weber held fast that he didn’t know what he was talking about then, and that he’s not feeling much better now.
“I was in no condition to appear at those hearings,” he said.
“Were you drunk?” Boli asked.
“I was pretty well mixed up,” he said. “I don’t know much about this case.”
“You remember more now than you ever did?” Boli asked.
“Yes, sir. My memory’s been bad.”
“How long has your memory been bad?”
“One day it’s all right, and the next day it is all wrong.”
“Did you get well today?”
“No, sir. I am not right yet.”
“If you told the grand jury it was Crane that came toward you, that wasn’t right?”
“If I did say it then, it wasn’t right,” he said.
The defense did not need to call a single witness. For all the delays, the trial which was expected to last a week was done in only two days. After the state rested its case Tuesday afternoon, still agitated over Red Webber’s change of story, Gard moved for a directed verdict.
Boli said, “The state believes that there has been some pressure brought to bear on the testimony of one witness in an attempt to bring about a miscarriage of justice. We believe this case should be given to the jury.”
“Undoubtedly, there has been a cover-up process, suppression of the truth and intimidation,” Harlan said. “I guess there’s nothing to do but direct a verdict. I don’t like to do it.”
Later that month, Red Weber was indicted for perjury, but the trial was postponed indefinitely.
The papers never said why police didn’t hold Nugent on the Cincinnati charges, but he man went on to enjoy a notable career in the gangster world as one of the top machine gunners around. He would never be put on trial again, but would be credited with at least a dozen other murders, moving on to bigger and more notorious gangs. He went to Kansas City and renewed his acquaintance with a war buddy, his sergeant on a motorcycle machine gun crew who was now leading a gang there. His name was Fred “Killer” Burke, and the notorious Chicago gangster Al Capone called the Burke gang his “American boys,” and it was this gang that he called upon for the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Ray “Crane Neck” Nugent was one of the machine gunners with Burke that day.