by Daniel Wakin
Uenaka’s feelings are unrecorded, but his daughter expressed bitterness that her father did not receive more recognition. In any case, Uenaka swallowed any resentment of his own and worked loyally for Takamine for another sixteen years before finally returning to Japan and joining a company that Takamine had set up there. Uenaka eventually received some credit in 1966 when a journal sponsored by the National Museum of Science in Tokyo attributed adrenaline’s isolation to the assistant.
As for John Abel, he felt “scooped and duped,” in the words of Dr. Joan W. Bennett, a microbiologist who is probably the foremost scientific expert on Takamine’s work. Abel had produced what he thought was a crystalline version of adrenaline before Takamine, although it later turned out to be impure. He argued that Takamine’s crystals were also not unadulterated adrenaline—and he turned out to be right, although the state of chemistry at the time could not make that determination.
Abel did not challenge Takamine’s patent, but a rival drug company argued that a natural substance could not be protected by a patent. It remains a fraught question, but in 1911 Judge Learned Hand ruled in favor of Takamine’s claim, producing a quote famous in biotech patent circles: “I cannot stop without calling attention to the extraordinary condition of the law which makes it possible for a man without a knowledge of even the rudiments of chemistry to pass upon such questions as these.”
Adrenaline—later also called epinephrine—quickly found medical applications, saving lives in cases of severe allergic reaction, cardiac arrest, and breathing emergencies. It became a key way for surgeons to control hemorrhaging. “The drug transformed surgery,” Bennett wrote in an American Chemical Society article.
When a bee stings someone allergic to them, and an EpiPen saves that person’s life, thanks can go to the good Japanese entrepreneur, although EpiPens generally have the synthetic form of adrenaline. The natural kind courses through our bodies when we are pumped up by fear or excitement caused by events like armored car robberies in Brooklyn.
Takamine was on the road to becoming a tycoon. He founded a laboratory in Clifton, New Jersey, calling it the International Takamine Ferment Company, and established the Sankyo Pharmaceutical Company of Tokyo to sell takadiastase in Japan, which lives on today as the multinational corporation Daiichi-Sankyo.
Takamine, at the time called “a well-known Japanese chemist of this city” by the Tribune, joined the life of the Seven Beauties in 1909, when he and his wife Caroline moved down from 45 Hamilton Terrace (near a lab of his on 142nd Street) and bought 334 Riverside for $85,000. They spent a fortune remodeling the place using Japanese motifs. Decor included panels depicting festivals, carved teak furniture, a huge handmade bronze temple lamp, an inlaid dining table, and gilded grillwork on the walls. Thick carpets covered the floors and bouquets of violets rested on tables.
On one side of the newcomers was the wealthy Davis family in 330, with their disintegrating marriage and single adult daughter, and Ahnelt in 331, the fashion magazine king. On the other was the family of the industrious Lothar Faber, of the pencil-making dynasty, in No. 335.
The Takamines, with their sons Jo and Eben at Yale, installed themselves in No. 334 along with four servants—one from Sweden, one from Japan, and two from Hungary. The presence of the domestic workers was typical of the New York wealthy at the time. Many houses had a cook and several maids, who generally lived on the top floor and shared a bathroom. In the upstairs-downstairs arrangement of the time, servants took their meals in the basement. Laundry women came in several times a week for the washing. Tradesmen delivered ice and coal, fruit and vegetables, and other goods. Large receptions were held in the upstairs drawing rooms.
Takamine was also a prominent citizen and a representative of Japanese culture in his adopted country. He was a founding member of the Japan Society. He had the Japanese pavilion—a replica of an eleventh-century Kyoto palace—at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis dismantled and reconstructed on land Caroline had bought in the summer resort community of Merriewold, in Sullivan County, New York. He renamed it Sho-Fu-Den, or “Pine Maple Hall,” and used it as his summer place, sometimes hosting visiting Japanese royalty. Establishing a retreat at Merriewold was another example of the Hitch family exerting its influence: Caroline’s sister, Marie, had a house in the community.
Takamine’s public role included helping establish the Nippon Club, and in 1912 he paid for its new home on 93rd street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, now a Seventh-day Adventist Church.
In January 1916, the Takamines held a reception for Eben and his new wife Ethel Johnson at the Cosmopolitan Club. The club was turned into a “Japanese woodland scene” for the gathering of four hundred guests, graced with pine trees, a tiny lake with goldfish and water plants reflecting artificial moonlight, yellow and green lanterns, and a buffet served at a “wayside teahouse” with cherry trees outside.
While the Takamines are obscure in the United States these days, a firsthand account of the family has survived from an unexpected source: an intimate portrait by Agnes de Mille, the great dancer and choreographer who created the steps for Aaron Copland’s Rodeo and for Oklahoma!, among other musicals.
De Mille crossed paths with the Takamines because her parents, William and Anna, were neighbors at Merriewold. De Mille was a prolific memoirist and her 1978 book Where the Wings Grow provides a gauzy account of life at the resort, and especially of the Takamines, who inhabited the woodsy refuge as something like a royal family. It’s a funny sort of book, a golden-hued bit of nostalgia about a young girl’s life in the early years of the last century, quite lyrically written, coupled with a biographical sketch of a highly unusual family of the time. De Mille provides detailed portraits of Jokichi and Caroline and their two sons Jo and Eben. The recollections come some sixty years later and it is hard to know how much the perceptions of a little girl colored the view, but de Mille also drew on the memories of adult relatives and friends from those days.
Caroline, she said, “had the kind of presence that made everyone rise, men of course, but women too, and without knowing who she was, not only in Japan but everywhere she went.” An invitation to her house was like a “diplomatic recognition.” Tall, not so slender, straight-backed, often dressed in white, Caroline had a queenly—even haughty—presence. She had strong eyebrows, hair swept up into a crown of braids, and a strictness with the servants.
For the young Agnes, Takamine and his upturned waxed mustache inspired awe. At Sho-Fu-Den, he would stand in the vast Japanese garden, “all in white with his scarlet crest of eight arrowheads embroidered on his sleeve, his fresh pink and white skin gleaming beneath his white hair, flicking a scarlet fan, and we thought him the most stylish figure any of us had ever seen,” de Mille wrote. He seemed less remote when taking part in all-night poker games and fishing in the stream.
Takamine had an unpleasant side, de Mille reported. He treated his researchers like “upper servants,” who were occasionally invited to dinner at 334 Riverside Drive as guest fill-ins—but never their wives. Despite the air of propriety that filled the Takamine home, de Mille said the distinguished scientist impregnated a young Japanese girl and offered Caroline a divorce. She declined.
Like many sons of rich men, Jo and Eben were spoiled, lazy and cynical, in de Mille’s telling. She portrayed Jo, the couple’s older son, as a callow rake, with precise manners bordering on the unctuous, who roared about Merriewold in a Stutz Bearcat. She seems to have had a crush on him. “Jo was tender and elusive, small and sophisticated, the one the women feared. Eben was taller, bland in a kind of boyish way.” De Mille hints at scandals, saying Takamine used his money and standing “to extricate his sons from their more spectacular predicaments,” noting that their parents always forgave them in the end.
Although both boys went to Yale, Caroline could do little to help their social standing because of her marriage to a Japanese man. “Not all of her money, her international affiliations, not her intelligence, nor her Sou
thern charm could procure her boys a decent, dignified life. The boys were Japanese and they could never be anything else in this country except by act of Congress. They were Japs. Japs were yellow—and there was the Yellow Peril, as Mr. Hearst kept drumming into us, and there was the Oriental Exclusion Act,” de Mille wrote. That would be the William Randolph Hearst who bought a house for his mistress three doors away from the Takamine home.
The Oriental Exclusion Act, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, extended limits on immigration imposed in 1917, amid fears about security in the United States fueled by World War I. It also barred all Japanese from immigrating. An influx of Japanese laborers to California in the century’s first decade, along with Japan’s increased assertiveness—especially in China—after the Russo-Japanese War, had stoked anti-Japanese sentiments. The long-running anti-Japanese campaign by Hearst newspapers provided more poison. Caroline herself lost American citizenship with her marriage to Takamine, de Mille reported. Even in Merriewold, where the Takamines were well-known residents accorded outward respect, residents muttered ugly remarks about the scientist’s heritage.
The Takamines sold their townhouse at 334 Riverside Drive in 1921 to a dentist and moved to Passaic, New Jersey. A year later, Takamine, the Japanese entrepreneur and cherry tree lover, mortally ill with liver disease, converted to Roman Catholicism, following in the footsteps of Caroline. Within days Takamine was dead. His body lay in state at the Nippon Club, draped by Japanese and US flags. The funeral was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as befitting such a prominent New Yorker, and Takamine was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where a stained glass window on his crypt shows Mt. Fuji. He had divided his wealth equally between Caroline, Jo, and Eben. In his will, Takamine offered his body to science for dissection. Science declined.
Four years after her husband died, Caroline moved to Arizona and married a younger man, and they frittered away her inheritance.
The Takamine sons continued to work in the companies, with the elder Jo, himself a scientist not without talent, serving as president of International Ferment. But a dissolute youth caught up with him. One February night in 1930, after a drunken binge with a nightclub hostess named Helen Fitts, Jo checked in with her to the Hotel Roosevelt. The police found him later that night with a fractured skull on a ledge twelve feet below his fourteenth-floor window. Fitts said she was too drunk even to remember what places they had gone to. Jo died later at the hospital. The police ruled it an accident, but the circumstances were never explained.
With Jo’s death, Eben took over the Clifton, New Jersey, lab. He died in 1953—just months after being naturalized under the McCarran-Walter Act. International Ferment was sold to Miles Laboratories, which was acquired by Bayer, which sold it to Solvay of Belgium, which in 1996 sold it to Genencor International. The Clifton lab was razed in the early 1980s and the land developed for housing. Takamine’s papers and some objects had been kept at the Miles offices in Elkhart, Indiana, and eventually were moved to a museum in Kanazawa, the town in Japan where Takamine grew up. “The Great People of Kanazawa Memorial Museum” features Takamine as one of five featured august locals and has in its holdings his death mask, diary, letters, and a set of evening clothes. Daiichi-Sankyo, one of Japan’s largest pharmaceutical companies and a successor to Takamine’s original Japanese firm, maintains a room at a research center in Shinagawa, Tokyo, that contains Takamine’s desk and other personal items. Pfizer now owns Parke, Davis & Co., as Parke-Davis is called today.
CHAPTER 11.
The Getaway: Bennie Loses a Leg
THE TWO GETAWAY BOATS HEADED WEST, curling around the thumb of Sea Gate, and then turned east, passing Brighton Beach in Brooklyn and entering the Rockaway Inlet. They edged by Breezy Point at the front end of the Rockaway Peninsula and passed Floyd Bennett Field, heading onward into Jamaica Bay. So far, everything was going perfectly. The gang members did not fire a shot. They gathered up the money with no resistance. All ten were accounted for and they seemed to be home free, despite an emerging citywide dragnet.
But as the two boats puttered through the gray waters of the bay, bobbing with their crews of kidnappers, bootleggers, and thieves and bags filled with cash, a loud thud sounded. McMahon, on the speedboat, was apparently transferring the money from the bank bags into burlap sacks when his shotgun became tangled up in some line. As he sought to extricate it, he did not notice that a knot had become caught in the gun’s trigger guard. With a tug, the gun went off, firing into his left leg and blowing off part of his kneecap. John Oley, Stewart, Manning, and Hughes, scrambling in the well of the speedboat with a severely wounded comrade, clearly had an emergency to deal with. They made the best of what they had on hand, using a rope as a tourniquet around McMahon’s thigh to stanch the bleeding.
As they approached land, the men in each boat dumped their guns overboard except for one machine gun. Their boats puttered to a stop on the water’s edge in Arverne, a community in the Rockaways.
As McMahon lay bleeding in the speedboat, John Oley and Manning loaded the bags of money into a black Dodge truck—a vehicle McMahon used to transport bootleg liquor during Prohibition—that the gang had left nearby the night before. They drove off to an apartment in Queens belonging to a friend of Oley’s, taking the remaining machine gun with them. En route, Takamine’s adrenaline began pumping through their veins and they went cold with fear: a police siren was heard in the distance. A squad car approached, and Oley and Manning pulled their truck over. But they relaxed when the police car continued on, responding to another call. They turned back onto the road and proceeded, experiencing the first of several close calls that day.
Meanwhile, the other gang members were left to deal with the emergency resulting from Bennie the Bum’s accidental gunshot. Originally, the plan was to eliminate the two largest pieces of evidence, the boats, by sinking them, with the gangsters dispersing singly to reduce suspicion. Now they had the bleeding McMahon to deal with. Geary, Wallace, Quinn, and Francis Oley followed the original program and left individually, traveling by bus to a subway stop where a train took them to Manhattan, most probably the Brighton Beach Line (now the Q train). The speedboat was scuttled and Kress was dispatched by taxi to the home of a friend in Far Rockaway to borrow a car.
Hughes and Stewart stayed behind with the wounded McMahon. While Kress was off retrieving the car, they got back into the dory with McMahon to search for liquor, an unpleasant echo of his rumrunning days. They chugged for a mile west and landed close to the Rockaway Park Yacht Club. Stewart climbed out. After a quick walk, he found a saloon and bought a pint of whiskey for their ailing comrade. Then Hughes piloted them back to their original landing spot, where Kress was waiting with the car. Kress and Stewart heaved McMahon inside for the drive back to Manhattan. Hughes scuttled the dory nearby and took public transport home. All of this was happening in broad daylight.
The account of the gang members’ movements becomes spotty at this point. After crossing the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan, McMahon and his companions Kress and Stewart, traversing the width of the borough in the borrowed car, stopped off at Quinn’s garage, registered in the name of Marcey Kelly at 635 West 48th Street, where McMahon rested. He must have been in excruciating pain, maybe slightly numbed by liquor. Later, at a rendezvous in Queens, Francis Oley met Stewart and Wallace at Queens Boulevard and 46th Street and gave them $1,000 to pay for a doctor. McMahon was then brought into the care of Madeline Tully, who ran an establishment that was variously described during those years as a gang hideout, a rooming house, and a brothel.
The address: 334 Riverside Drive, the former home of one of Japan’s leading scientists and one of the first biotech engineers of the twentieth century, a man whose funeral was celebrated at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Its current main resident was another immigrant, but of an altogether different nature.
Tully was an underworld fixture, a boardinghouse madam who had immigrated with her Slovakian parents in the 1890s. At t
he age of twenty, she had the first of two children with her husband, an Irish American salesman twenty years her senior who soon abandoned the family. To support herself, Tully kept lodgers at various West Side addresses. Typically they were recent Russian immigrants, young couples, dressmakers. At 294 Riverside, she let out rooms to a domestic worker, a salesman, and the Italian journalist Amerigo Ruggiero, a former anarchist and correspondent for the Turin daily La Stampa. At 334 Riverside, her boarders included an importer of women’s hats and dresses named Ella Engel. “In police circles Mrs. Tully has long been regarded as a shrewd, evasive woman, incapable of resisting the high rents she could obtain from shady characters in need of a hideaway,” a Herald-Tribune reporter wrote.
It was to Madeline that the gang now turned. Holed up in her boardinghouse, they also needed a doctor, someone who could be trusted to be discreet. Their man was Dr. Harry Gilbert.
Gilbert was also a West Sider, but he lived in a tonier section, just off of Central Park on 69th Street. Gilbert had a practice connected to the Broadway theater world in the 1920s, once making the papers as the doctor who treated a Ziegfeld Follies star named Lillian Lorraine when she was hospitalized with a ruptured appendix. But Gilbert was broad-minded in choosing his clientele. Around the time he was summoned to Riverside Drive, he made a similar call to a gambler named Matthew Borzello who had found himself at the Hotel Alba in Midtown with a major inconvenience: his head had been bashed in.
Gilbert had a gift for attracting press attention. The New York Times quoted him as an expert about the evils of bootleg liquor, in a not-so-subtle indictment of Prohibition. He had plenty of opportunity to offer observations, the newspaper said, given his patients. With a certain theatricality, he described the death of one young woman: “That girl was killed by her own friends just as surely as if they had pointed guns at her and pulled the trigger, although they chose a less merciful death. They drowned her in liquor. Case after case was sent to her apartment, day after day, for endless parties. She was young, under thirty, but her liver was that of a middle-aged drunkard in days before Prohibition.”