by Deborah Blum
People had killed themselves simply by swallowing several ounces of tobacco, although that acted more slowly than the pure alkaloid. But no one was sure how much nicotine was inhaled in smoke or how dangerous it might be. For one thing, nicotine was surprisingly difficult to measure; an analysis done in 1929 pointed out that tobacco plants contained differing amounts of the poison, according to where they were grown—Virginia plants, it turned out, contained three times as much as those grown in the West Indies. And people inhaled differently as well—some puffed away rapidly, some held the smoke deep in their lungs; that would account for the range of carbon monoxide readings—from 8 to 19 percent—that Gettler had recorded when looking at smokers.
By the end of the 1920s, researchers knew that tobacco smoke contained more than nicotine and carbon monoxide. They’d also found cyanide, hydrogen sulfide, formaldehyde, ammonia, and pyridine, the latter a component in industrial solvents. A few doctors had also charted the chronic ill effects—sore throats and coughs, bronchitis, and heart and circulation problems, from rapid pulse to blocked arteries. Some even suspected that the chemistry of cigarette smoke might be linked to cancer, although that idea had plenty of skeptics.
Far more doctors argued that the beneficial effects of smoking outweighed the yet-to-be-proven risks. Tobacco chemistry seemed to stimulate the nervous system in positive ways, producing alertness but also offering a soothing effect. It helped control appetite and thereby obesity. Some physicians believed that the smoke even fended off infections through a natural antiseptic action. Doctors writing in the British medical journal Lancet offered the happy notion that cigarettes helped people cope with the stresses of living in the complicated world of the early twentieth century.
A comparable essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association cited sociability and relaxation as some of the more beneficial results of smoking tobacco. The author, while enthusiastic, acknowledged that about a third of the smokers in his own medical practice suffered from shortness of breath, a chronic cough, or both. “It still remains for the smoker to decide whether he desires to pay this price for the enjoyment he derives from it,” the physician wrote.
He added an unusual note of caution. Doctors didn’t understand the physiological effects of tobacco smoking, his JAMA editorial warned. They didn’t know the entire chemical composition of the smoke. They had yet to fully realize the “the clinical effects which can be caused by it.” There was reason to appreciate the habit, yes, but there was equally good reason to be wary.
IN THE FIRST WEEK of October, Marino and his friends Pasqua, Kriesberg, and Murphy at last went to trial.
During the five months since their murder indictments, the Bronx district attorney had ordered Malloy’s body exhumed and sent to Bellevue for analysis. True, the old alcoholic had been underground for months, but Gettler assured the DA that if the man had been killed by illuminating gas, his laboratory would find evidence of carbon monoxide still there.
The durability of carbon monoxide in a dead body was another question Gettler fixed upon that year. German scientists had reported, two years earlier, that bodies exhumed after three months in the ground still contained carboxyhemoglobin. Was that its limit? Gettler wondered. Or was the compound even longer-lasting?
He’d filled sixteen bottles with blood from people, including Malloy, who had died of CO poisoning. All the blood samples were saturated with carboxyhemoglobin. Half of them had gone into the lab icebox and half onto one of the long wooden shelves that lined the laboratory wall. His idea was simply to compare the cells’ rate of decay in cold preservation conditions versus room temperature. Gettler and his staff checked the bottles at intervals ranging from twenty-four hours to eighty-four days after first storage. “In no case was the carbon monoxide increased by putrefaction,” he’d noted, reaffirming the fact that after death a human body neither made nor absorbed the gas.
Gettler found that carboxyhemoglobin did diminish as the blood cells decayed. But its disappearance was slow, barely detectable in the earliest measurements. At the longest interval, eighty-four days, the carbon monoxide saturation declined only from 75.3 to 70.8 percent, a fatal reading at either amount. And Mike Malloy’s blood? His CO saturation measured at that still potent 70 percent. Equally damning, on autopsy, the old man’s heart and lungs were stained bright with the all too familiar cherry red.
On October 19, 1933, all four plotters were found guilty of first-degree murder. The following day they were sentenced to die in the electric chair, the date to be set pending appeal, and depending on how soon the conspirators could be fitted into the schedule at Sing Sing.
IN MANHATTAN, as the clock ticked away on the end of the hated Prohibition years, the mood at the city’s hotels, clubs, and restaurants was a feverish mix of anticipation and celebration.
The Waldorf-Astoria outfitted three new bars, two small and cozy, and one, off the hotel’s admired Peacock Alley, to outshine all others with its blue mirrored ceiling, silver-shell walls, and gleaming blue and gold columns. The Hotel New Yorker bought $100,000 worth of good whiskey and was in the process of building a subbasement wine cellar, an indoor bar, and an elegant outdoor terrace restaurant.
The Yale Club, the Harvard Club, and the Racquet Club had all filed to reopen their bars. By late November, requests for liquor licenses were coming into New York’s city hall at the rate of one thousand a day, and nationally, the government was permitting alcohol production at such a rate that 125 million gallons were expected to be available as soon as the dry era officially ended.
By the end of November thirty-three states had voted for repeal and, three more—Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah—had scheduled votes on December 5. The master chef of the Hotel Pierre predicted a return to fine dining, elegant dancing and an end to the “restless jazz and hip flask” days of Prohibition. The chef had real hope, he confided to a sympathetic newshound, that men and women might linger over their wine rather than dancing around the tables while they awaited their food.
The manager of Louis Sherry’s, the stylish two-story restaurant at 300 Park Avenue, worried that customers would have to relearn the appropriate wine for each course. He wasn’t even sure his waiters remembered—all anyone knew anymore was bathtub gin and renatured alcohol. The kitchen at Sherry’s was planning a new menu: caviar with vodka, terrapin with sauterne, pressed duck with champagne (preferably Cliquot Brut 1921), and an after-dinner drink of café brulé (hot coffee, cognac, and a cinnamon stick, served in a glass with a sugared rim).
“It means the end of drunkenness,” the Sherry doorman predicted. “We won’t search the place after a party to find the boys and girls who have slid under the tables. We’re heading back to the days of fine manners. I feel it in my bones.”
UTAH, the last state needed to complete ratification, did so at exactly 5:33 P.M. Eastern Time on December 5. States like New York found that timing wholly irritating. Repeal came so late in the day that most retail liquor stores—a good five thousand now had licenses—were unable to get their newly legal stock into the city that night.
Still, the well-prepared hotels rolled out bar carts, wheeling them through the lobbies to dispense cocktails. Bloomingdale’s department store had been savvy enough to acquire its own liquor permit, and the moment the radio flashed news of the Utah vote, it sold waiting customers bottles of imported scotch and rye.
The line at Bloomingdale’s snaked out the door and into the noisy, shouting, jubilant streets.
THERE WAS other change to celebrate. After fifteen years of Tammany Hall control, after the scandalous departure of Gentleman Jimmy Walker, the city of New York finally had elected another reform mayor. Unfortunately, Charles Norris didn’t get along with Fiorello H. La Guardia any better than he had with previous city leaders.
La Guardia, elected in November, promptly began dealing with the city’s still appalling deficit ($31 million). He trimmed salaries, laid off city employees, and raised fees. And in January 1934 he’d orde
red all the fat trimmed from departmental budgets. La Guardia’s enthusiastic staffers even removed what they saw as an overabundance of timepieces, including the wall clock at the medical examiner’s office.
Norris immediately paid for a replacement clock himself, but he was infuriated enough to once again complain to the city papers, regardless of whether it embarrassed La Guardia.
It wasn’t a matter of fat, Norris snapped: “For years our budget has been cut to the bone. Now the bone is being scraped.” Didn’t the mayor’s office know anything about how a medical examiner’s office had to operate? “The law requires that we record the exact time a case is reported to us and the staff is dependent on that clock for accuracy. Enough said for such economy.”
Mayors, he’d learned, had to be trained to appreciate the science of forensic medicine. Repeatedly.
ON JUNE 3, 1934, Tony Marino, Frank Pasqua, and Daniel Kriesberg went to the electric chair. Their fellow conspirator, Red Murphy, had won a two week stay while the courts evaluated his mental status. The three men said good-bye to their families, met with their spiritual advisers, and waited in the Dance House for the call to execution.
A reporter for the New York Daily Mirror recorded the events in the crisp staccato of a machine gun: “It’s 11 o’clock,” wrote the Mirror’s Robert Campbell. “The crack of doom. Now the flic-flac of feet. The unlocking of the door.” The prisoners’ march down the so-called Last Mile, really only about two dozen steps. Pasqua went first: “The kw-e-e- of the dynamo. Two thousand volts and ten amperes. The rip-saw current that tears one apart. Three shocks.” Next Marino. Another three shocks. Then Kriesberg. Three shocks again. All the three men were dead in seventeen minutes. Just over a month later, having lost that last appeal, Red Murphy, angrily unrepentant, went to the electric chair as well.
Campbell summed it all up—the shrill song of the dynamo, the dark fire of the electric current, the rumble of bodies wheeled away on the stone floor, all in the terms of a newly liberated lover of whiskey: “It’s the State’s toast to old ‘Mike the Durable.’ ”
ELEVEN
THALLIUM (Tl) 1935—1936
THERE WERE TIMES, AND they came frequently enough, when one could believe that modern society, machine-age America, was addicted to poisons. Every day retold the story of that dependency: poisons floated in the exhaust-smudged air of the morning commute and swam in the evening martini, in the gas-fed blue flames of the stove, in the soft smoke of the after-dinner cigarette, in the barbiturates that so many now swallowed at the end of a stressful day.
In a best-selling book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (reprinted nine times by 1935), a pair of consumer-advocate authors complained that American citizens had become test animals for chemical industries that were indifferent to their customers’ well-being. The government, they added bitterly, was complicit. Regulation was almost nonexistent. The nineteen-year-old FDA was a joke, lacking authority to set even minimal safety standards. For two years consumer groups and their allies in Congress had been trying—unsuccessfully—to get a new law passed that would give the FDA meaningful authority.
Their demands were not particularly extravagant. The proposed legislation would require safety testing before a product was introduced on the market. It would establish corporate liability for marketing hazardous products. One of the proposals—fought by an unholy alliance of industrial manufacturers and patent medicine companies—simply required that consumers be provided with basic information, for instance that ingredients be listed on containers of medicine, household cleaners, and cosmetics.
In 1935 a woman seeking to darken her lashes with Lash Lure had no way of knowing that the dye contained a benzene compound that could—and did—cause corneal ulcers and blindness. A balding man using Acme Hair Rejuvenator had no way to know he was rubbing lead acetate into his scalp. Stillman’s Freckle Remover was loaded with mercury, according to medical tests. A popular coloring agent, Mrs. Potter’s Walnut Tint Hair Stain, advertised itself as “guaranteed free from lead, sulfur, and silver” but contained an aniline dye, derived from coal tar, that was banned in Europe because of its toxic properties. In the United States, of course, federal agencies had no power to take such protective actions.
The authors of 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs, Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink of the Consumer’s Research Union, devoted a large section of their book to a worst-case cosmetic: depilatory creams that contained the metallic element thallium. It was no secret that thallium was poisonous; it was the main ingredient in a number of pesticides. Yet cosmetics makers used it anyway, insisting that it was safe in small doses and advertising its amazing ability to remove unwanted hair from the face—and anywhere else on the body that a woman might desire.
The depilatory creams had created a small but significant epidemic in the early 1930s, fully recounted in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A woman had applied the cream to her chin and ended up almost completely bald, barring about one hundred hairs forming “a fringe on the back of her neck.” A woman in Minnesota had used the cream on her upper lip and ended up hospitalized, her hair coming out in clumps, her legs unable to support her. A woman in Maine had lost her vision. “Could there be lead in the cream?” her doctor wrote to ask AMA experts, saying that her other symptoms—including severe nausea—reminded him of acute lead poisoning, which could cause the corneas to become opaque.
Kallet and Schlink issued repeated warnings against thallium-based creams, which they said were, of all poisons, “one of the most deadly known,” and urged consumers to lobby their congressmen for better regulation of such compounds. The AMA had been campaigning against such products for years. Due to the lack of government regulation, it had created its own Bureau of Investigation, which analyzed numerous brands and warned repeatedly that thallium creams were a “menace to public health.”
But women bought the beauty products anyway. Women’s magazines, such as Vogue, carried advertisements extolling the potions’ ability to remove unsightly hair and lend a beautiful pale luster to skin. After all, these ubiquitous poisons worked as advertised. Tetraeythyl lead did solve engine knocks; carbon monoxide did provide an inexpensive and reliable fuel; cyanide did help neatly fix clear photographic images on film.
And thallium, as promised, did cause hair to painlessly fall out, did make it disappear like snow on an unexpectedly warm morning.
APRIL that year of 1935 blew in gold, with hints of summer: crowds packed the boardwalks at Coney Island during the day and sunned the afternoons away on Long Island beaches. Not that Frederick Gross could afford a beach trip, but sunshine was free. In the gentle light of evening, he liked to sit with neighbors on the high stoop of his rooming house, smoke a pipe, and trade stories about the day, watching the kids play kick-the-can in the street.
He was such a nice man, his neighbors said. He never complained about being a cripple; he just gave himself a little extra time because he moved so slowly with his artificial leg. His right leg had been amputated below the knee following a carriage accident in his native Philadelphia. He’d worked for thirteen years as a bookkeeper at an importing firm in lower Manhattan. His co-workers liked him too. He was kind-natured, they said, hardworking, friendly in his quiet way.
Gross, his wife, Barbara, their five children, and his mother-in-law lived in a small cold-water flat in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, where the streets were lined with houses that had been divided and then divided again into rooms for rent. Their next-door neighbor swore that the walls were so thin she could hear every word spoken in the Gross household. She’d never heard him raise his voice in anger, she told the police.
Yes, the neighbor said, it was true that by the end of April his wife and four of his children were dead. Yes, the remaining son and mother-in-law were both hospitalized. But she would never, never believe that the little bookkeeper with the sweet smile had killed them all.
THE FIRST SIGN that things were about to go wrong—terribly, unbelievably wrong—for
the Gross family came on an ordinary day in late March. When Gross returned home for dinner, his wife, Barbara, told him that one of the boys didn’t feel well.
Nine-year-old boys like Freddy were always picking up colds and stomach upsets. Gross put his eldest son into pajamas and tucked him into bed. The boy seemed pale, though. Gross decided to stay in the room in case his son got worse. He was dozing in the chair when Freddy suddenly woke up retching and gasping for breath. By early morning the child was dead. And then the next day their three-year-old, Leo, fell ill. He died the first week of April.
Their doctor reported both deaths to the Department of Health as bronchial pneumonia. But by that time Barbara Gross was also desperately ill. She died two days after little Leo, on April 4. This time the hospital doctors diagnosed the cause as encephalitis. Stunned, Gross requested a few days off work. He and his mother-in-law worked together to care for the remaining children, seven-year-old Katherine, five-year-old Frank, and the baby of the family, Barbara, who was eighteen months old.
Curiously, only the father seemed healthy. The rest of them dragged; even the usually energetic youngsters were tired and a little achy. Gross’s sister-in-law started coming by almost daily, helping with dinner, letting her children play with the Gross youngsters. But things only got worse.
By the end of the month both the little girls were dead, diagnosed with encephalitis, and the grandmother and the five-year-old were in the hospital. And all four of them, the dead and the sick, were almost completely bald. The neighbors had been wondering about it for weeks. The youngest, Barbara, had once had the most beautiful head of curly brown hair. Her mother had been so proud of it that she’d showed the little girl off up and down Eldert Street, where they lived. But by mid-April the toddler’s hair was so thin that her scalp showed through, and two days before the little girl died, one neighbor said, “She was as bald as your hand.”