Liberated Spirits

by Hugh Ambrose

  While Pauline Sabin had pulled the WONPR’s initial membership from her extensive political and social contacts, most of the women lacked any experience in political organizations. Typical of the membership was Bessie Gardner du Pont, former wife of Alfred du Pont. Bessie attended the convention in Cleveland as part of the Delaware delegation, “utterly unprepared . . . for the responsibility we were entrusted with.”35 She had never attended a convention of any kind or belonged to a women’s club, and she knew little of the convention’s purpose beyond what she had learned in reading the newspapers and “from a short morning’s study” in the local library. She was exactly the kind of woman—previously uninvolved, her opinion not registered—that Sabin hoped to attract to the WONPR.

  Sabin followed the convention with a radio address, explaining the identification of the WONPR as a “wet organization.” She had no objection to the term for the purpose of distinguishing between her members and those who were satisfied with the current Prohibition Law, but said, “Literally, our organization is as far from being wet as many of our so-called Prohibitionist legislators are from being dry. Our organization stands for temperance, for wise and honest government, for better social conditions, and for the protection of the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Editors at the New York World, a publication with Democratic Party leanings, applauded Sabin’s clarification, advising its readers to discard old definitions of wet and dry, and to understand that a “wet to-day is a man or woman who is opposed to national Prohibition.”36

  Sabin submitted to almost any request, from wets or drys, to speak about the dangers of Prohibition and of liquor; she hoped to illuminate the WONPR’s calls for repeal without a return of the saloon, a distinction that escaped many people. She proposed that after repeal, national Prohibition would remain in effect for one year while state legislatures passed bills to regulate liquor traffic within their boundaries and devise laws “forbidding the return of the saloon.” She believed “the people” in each state knew what measure of Prohibition or restrictions best suited their desires. The organization had members who “never have drunk intoxicating beverages,” and, “undoubtedly,” there were members who did.37 That divide did not obscure the group’s objection to the Eighteenth Amendment, which infringed on personal liberty and did more harm than good. Responding to the charge that Prohibition had not been given a “fair trial” in New York, a WONPR representative cited government statistics to demonstrate that law enforcement had done little to curb drinking or the illegal traffic in liquor, even in states where the law had been supported. Between 1920 and 1930, federal expenditures increased from 3.7 million dollars to nearly 29 million dollars, seizures of stills had increased nearly twentyfold, seizure of illegal liquor had grown from 153,000 to 32,000,000 gallons, deaths from alcoholism had increased 300 percent, and arrests for alcoholism had risen 125 percent, but none of those factors had stemmed the tide of liquor washing over the country or the burgeoning criminal enterprises needed to keep the booze flowing.38

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  On May 14, 1930, Senator Jones informed William Whitney that the attorney general had decided to empanel a grand jury to determine whether indictments should be handed to Whitney, Lyle, Revelle, or any other Prohibition Bureau staff for bribery and corruption.39 As the grand jury convened, the U.S. Senate passed the transfer bill, placing the Prohibition Bureau within the Department of Justice. Whitney’s worst fear had come into being. Not only did his job now reside in the department accusing him of wrongdoing, but with all the attorneys employed by the DOJ, his position might be unnecessary.40

  On May 26, 1930, the grand jury indicted Lyle, Whitney, Clifford McKinney, and two others for conspiracy to violate the National Prohibition Act and for conspiracy to violate the statute against accepting bribes. Former U.S. Attorney Thomas Revelle was not named. Whitney, always the main target, faced an additional indictment for the crime of perjury. All men were suspended from duty, effective immediately.41 “We never had a chance,” lamented Whitney. “It [the investigation] was never intended to give us a chance.” The coldest indignity came when Whitney was held in the city jail for want of a five-thousand-dollar bond. Lyle, ever the saintly figurehead, had been released on his own recognizance. McKinney’s whereabouts were unknown, Revelle’s former assistant having fled more than a year earlier, leaving his wife and children behind.42 The following day, yet another disgrace befell Whitney when Senator Jones, his confidant and fellow Prohibition champion, stated he would allow repeal or modification of the Volstead Act if that was the will of the people, a statement unthinkable a few years earlier.43

  The government had had years, as many as sixty investigators and agents, and tens of thousands of dollars, Whitney charged, to create its case. He and his codefendants had “scarcely a dollar.” With all the negative publicity, the local newspapers aligning against Prohibition, “we cannot get a fair trial.” Whitney estimated he needed three months to prepare for the trial, seeing not only his personal reputation at stake, but the larger import of this trial, and declaring, “This case will be tried on the wet and dry issue.” If the forces arrayed against Whitney succeeded in getting him convicted, he concluded, “then the future of Prohibition is utterly hopeless.”44 According to Whitney, if he could be convicted, every “vigorous official” would be intimidated by the forces within law enforcement as much as from without, and begin to relax enforcement lest they incur the same wrath.

  Whitney prepared for the trial just as his opponents had. He sought out the inmates at McNeil Island Penitentiary, hearing a great deal of damning hearsay about the work of the FBI investigators. Unnamed sources told him that bootlegger Chris Curtis had been paroled five days before the grand jury to induce his testimony. Curtis was willing to testify to any accusation made against Whitney and his colleagues, including the charge that Curtis had paid a six-thousand-dollar bribe to Lyle, through Hubbard, with the money directed to Senator Wesley Jones’ 1926 campaign fund.45 Confirming Whitney’s suspicion that former assistant attorney general Mabel Willebrandt had always been out to get him, Jones confided, “I think that the reason why Curtis was paroled was because the department felt that it was under obligation to do so because of a promise made by Mrs. Willebrandt in connection with some trial about the same time when he was indicted.”46 While Whitney had always blamed Willebrandt for a significant portion of the attacks against him, he now hedged a little, accusing former U.S. Marshal Ed Benn, Alf Oftedal, and the warden at McNeil Island Penitentiary of intentionally misleading Willebrandt to further their own ends. She, in turn, had spread that prejudice throughout her department, including the FBI, which had produced the report used to indict Whitney and his colleagues. Summing up his predicament, Whitney wrote, “This case actually simmers down to this: not only must we prove ourselves innocent, but we have got to convict the very government itself. It’s a pretty big task.”47

  The most embarrassing, painful, and egregiously unfair period of Whitney’s life, his trial for conspiring with Roy Olmstead, began on Monday, August 11, 1930. Entering the courtroom where he had spent so much of the past eight years trying to convict bootleggers, rumrunners, and moonshiners, this time as the defendant, was to know betrayal—a perfidy capable of twisting his years of hard work into the end of his career, while all of Seattle and most of Washington State watched. Alfred Hubbard, whom Whitney had trusted, befriended, and ultimately staked his own career upon, arrived with great fanfare in the courtroom, mingling with bootleggers, Prohibition agents, and gawkers alike; smiling and backslapping; wearing his unofficial designation as “one of the most important government witnesses” like a crown. Whitney filed through the crowd alone, without his codefendants in tow, leaving them to find their places in the defendants’ chairs while he took his customary seat at the counselors’ table, though this time for the defense, not the prosecution.

  Called as the first witness, Hubb
ard approached the stand. The years of lavish meals and abundant alcohol showed in his rounded face and thickened frame; the years of playing fast and loose in his flashy attire, a gaudy, rakish style favored by successful bootleggers across the country. He had dressed, according to one observer, “as fastidiously as a theater usher,” his panama hat ringed with a red band, his black-and-white shoes setting off his dark suit. Hubbard reveled in the spotlight, having sought it since he had metamorphosed from a kid hawking lies about his inventions in radio, X-ray machines, and other electrical wonders into a double agent in 1925, freeing him to make large sums of money by playing both sides, a freebooter living on a knife’s edge, the last great pirate of Puget Sound. Still identified as “a former inventor and electrical wizard,” Hubbard viewed the trial as his path back into the big leagues, fancying his testimony worth an appointment to one of the federal agencies overseeing Prohibition. His greed for cash, power, and notoriety was never more apparent than when he began unwinding the most outrageous reinvention of himself and of Olmstead, Whitney, and the other defendants, mixing into this new version of history a slew of bald-faced lies intertwined with dashes of truth, told utterly without conscience, without concern for the damage he was wreaking upon men he had called his friends.48

  Hubbard’s testimony about bribes, their amounts, and dates, came tumbling out haphazardly, clearly made up as he went along. He claimed he had collected a total of $140,000 to $170,000 to bribe Whitney and his alleged coconspirators, reserving a 10 percent commission for himself. Reporters, upon hearing the volume of liquor passing through Olmstead’s network, calculated the revenue that should have been generated for Olmstead, and asked the perfectly obvious question, as one headline put it: “Where did all of the millions of dollars supposed to have been handled by Olmstead and other liquor rings go?”49 In the coming days’ testimony, Hubbard would step over his “facts” repeatedly, unconcerned that dates, places, and amounts did not jibe with earlier testimony. At one point, he claimed to have built radio stations upon Whitney’s direction, “presumably for Prohibition work, but really to tip off the boats about the Coast Guard.”50 Whitney had implied as much about Elsie Olmstead’s broadcasting station in the first Olmstead trial, to little effect. If the witness was recycling and repackaging old charges to give shape to his new conspiracy tale, no one seemed to notice.

  To buttress Hubbard’s testimony, the prosecution introduced key documents: Lyle’s letter authorizing Hubbard to use any boat he chose as part of his undercover investigation; and two letters from Whitney, one that began, “Dear Al, I guess you are still my pal . . .” and describing Hubbard’s bust in the Zev case as “the most spectacular and bravest thing ever done in US in Prohibition enforcement.” Another seeming nail in Whitney’s coffin was the glowing letter of recommendation he had provided Hubbard after Hubbard’s termination. Whitney skipped over his doubts about Hubbard, touting his “initiative and ability as an investigator,” which had resulted in “some of the largest and most important conspiracy cases ever tried . . .” The praise went to ever loftier heights. For example, Whitney had written, “I have known him quite intimately, and I have not known him to do a dishonest act, but have found him always actuated by a desire to assist the government in to [sic] run down the criminal.”51

  The moment the government prosecutors stepped back from the bar, announcing the end of their questioning of the witness, the defense attorneys sent their best interrogator, A. R. Hilen, to destroy Al Hubbard. In his hands, Hilen held transcripts from previous trials at which Hubbard had testified. Terse and intense, Hilen fired questions at Hubbard, allowing only no-nonsense answers, quickly revealing that every piece of testimony offered by Hubbard in earlier trials stood in direct opposition to the story he had just spent days telling. Using the witness’s own words like a hammer, Hilen forced Hubbard into a series of confessions. Admitting to perjury, the witness explained, “No, I wasn’t telling the truth then. I was wearing Whitney’s collar at that time—but I’m not anymore.”52 The defense team turned, at last, to Hubbard’s motivation for making these charges, asking him if he had been pushed by Ed Benn, one of Whitney’s nemeses. Provoked at last, Hubbard, with some heat, “insisted that Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt was the only person who urged him to tell his story.”53 There was nothing else to ask, the statement hanging in the air as proof of Whitney’s years of suspicion, though Willebrandt was not called to testify to the claim and never commented upon it. Hubbard was excused and left the courthouse a free man despite having admitted to years of graft, bribery, and rum-running.

  Whitney took the stand nearly a month into the trial, anxious to unravel the specious case against him and his comrades. Led by his attorney’s questions, he disproved many of Hubbard’s specific allegations using official expense reports and time sheets to explain how money came and went and to verify his whereabouts on days in question. Whitney mocked other charges as “a figment of his [Hubbard’s] imagination.” He admitted paying for a speedboat for Hubbard’s use and investing in a radio station, but he said friendship, not conspiracy, drove him to put the boat title in his own name and help with the station, both more expensive than Hubbard could manage on his own. Ultimately, Whitney had to admit that, regrettably, he had trusted Hubbard to an exceptional degree. That trust had created a tangled mass of hearsay and lies and half-truths. Whitney’s trust did not equate to duplicity, but his faith in Hubbard did call into question his judgment. Whitney described the moment in April of 1929 when he had finally shown Hubbard the door after the boy wonder had offered him a bribe to let a load of liquor slip through. Wrapping up, Hilen gave Whitney a chance to conclude his days of testimony with a flat, unequivocal denial that he had “received a penny of corrupt money” from Hubbard, the “pay off man for the Olmstead organization.”54

  Thomas Revelle, next on the witness stand, supported Whitney’s version of events in quick order, but the prosecution was anxious to put the former district attorney in the hot seat, hoping to reveal him as another link in the conspiratorial chain, even though Revelle was not on trial. The questioning began with Revelle’s trip out to McNeil Island to see Olmstead and warn him not to tell reporters he had paid protection money to Clifford McKinney, Revelle’s former assistant. Revelle admitted he had gone to meet Olmstead, but confessed nothing more about their conversation. Hoping to lead Revelle into a trap, the prosecution read from Olmstead’s affidavit recalling the conversation, in which the former bootlegger quoted Revelle: “God Bless you my boy, you don’t know how I’ve suffered for you . . . I want to see you out of this trouble.” The audience burst into laughter.

  The government prosecutor questioned Revelle about the wisdom and legality of allowing the Prohibition Unit to be complicit in smuggling huge quantities of liquor. Despite the prosecution’s attempts to portray each of Revelle’s affirmative replies as shocking, Revelle calmly explained that the ends justified the means.55 He and Whitney had needed a man on the inside, and having one came with risks. They had used their best judgment and won several large conspiracy cases because of it.

  Hoping to cast a wider net around the alleged conspiracy, the prosecution presented correspondence between Revelle and Willebrandt, revealing Revelle’s shifting confidence in Hubbard’s motives and veracity. In August of 1927, then U.S. Attorney Revelle had tried to block an investigation into Hubbard and had sent a series of telegrams to Willebrandt explaining that an inquiry would do harm to the DOJ and Prohibition enforcement as a whole. In one missive, he pled that suspending Hubbard would have weakened the Olmstead conspiracy case, which had been built largely with tips and information provided by Hubbard. Revelle had begged Willebrandt to recall him to Washington, D.C., so he could provide further explanation to her and Hubbard’s superiors in the Treasury Department. Willebrandt had reminded him she had no authority over the Treasury Department and their possible suspension of Hubbard, but offered, “Our office will back you in all steps that may become necessary
to trial . . .”56 Revelle had followed up with his boss on September 10, 1927, citing rumors that “Hubbard and Fryant have accepted bribes and have been interested parties in [the] smuggling of whiskey,” the truth of which Revelle could only guess.57 A month later, he had changed his view, confessing to his boss in Washington, “Personally, I am very strongly convinced from our experience here in the last two or three weeks, that even though Hubbard and Fryant took money, yet there is no possible hope of ever successfully trying them for the same.” This correspondence, which Revelle acknowledged, contradicted his earlier testimony that he had not believed reports of Hubbard’s improprieties when they were first made known to him.58 Revelle told the court he would not have put Hubbard on the witness stand in the second Olmstead case if he had had any doubts of his honesty, but his correspondence with Willebrandt recorded something different.

  The prosecution had proven that Revelle, and by implication Whitney, had conspired to keep Hubbard out of jail long enough to use him as a key witness in several big conspiracy trials even though they knew he was deeply compromised as an agent, his testimony unreliable and largely unverifiable. The two had violated their oaths and the law. To have their sordid business on display, for the public to learn how they had been duped by Hubbard and allowed him to blossom into a freebooting pirate, must have caused the former district attorney and the former assistant director of the Prohibition Unit in Seattle the ultimate embarrassment.