The Poisoner's Handbook

  NORRIS COULD talk all he wanted about the significance of pink faces; Gettler could discuss carboxyhemoglobin until he grew hoarse. But in Brooklyn the police found bloody knives and body parts more convincing.

  Which meant that Francesco Travia was, after all, arraigned to stand trial on murder. And as Charles Norris saw it, the New York City medical examiner’s office would have a date in court, a chance to prove very publicly that scientific evidence was a tangible thing, as real, as convincing—and as influential—as any other evidence presented in a courtroom.

  Some months later, in March 1927, a Kings County jury acquitted Frank Travia of murder. Norris had predicted that the gruesome nature of the case would make sure people paid attention. In fact, publicity surrounding his case had gained Travia an unusually well-connected young lawyer, Alfred E. Smith Jr., son of the governor of New York.

  It was Smith Jr.’s first case, and it went perfectly for him. Unlike the police, he’d found the medical evidence very impressive, enough so that he built his whole case around it. Smith’s witness list was short: the building owner, to say that he’d discovered that a coffeepot on Travia’s stove had boiled over, putting out the burner flame, allowing gas to drift through the apartment; Alexander O. Gettler, to testify that carbon monoxide poisoning had caused the woman’s death; and Frank Travia, to describe his panicked reaction on finding her dead.

  Travia was found not guilty of murder but guilty of illegally dismembering a dead body. The difference was enormous; it meant that he went to prison instead of the electric chair. When the trial concluded, Travia’s attorney returned home and found a telegram from Albany waiting for him. The governor wanted to congratulate him on his debut as a criminal lawyer, on proving that the cause of death was not a drunken Italian laborer but an all-too-common, all-too-lethal household gas.

  THE GOVERNOR did not also congratulate the scientists of the medical examiner’s office, but they celebrated anyway. All that patient chemistry, all Gettler’s time-consuming experiments with carbon monoxide, had helped save a man from the electric chair, despite the doubts expressed by the police. As much as Norris’s lectures at the police academy, as much as those scheduled tours of Gettler’s laboratory, the Travia case illustrated that forensic toxicology was a powerful—and credible—tool.

  The days when chemists killed cats in courtrooms, and medical experts waved chloroform vials in front of nervous jurors, were demonstrably over. They could make their points with sober testimony and charts of chemical analysis. They hadn’t entirely figured out carbon monoxide, true, and no one was sure how to contain the environmental hazards posed by the gas. But Norris and Gettler had saved one life this day, and they were confident that they could save others.

  Call it a coming-of-age party for forensic toxicology—there in the third-floor laboratory at Bellevue the bubble and hiss of beakers sounded like victory music in the air around them.

  SEVEN

  METHYL ALCOHOL (CH3OH) 1927

  THE RUMORS BEGAN in the summer of 1926. Government chemists were developing a secret project in the aid of Prohibition, people whispered. Dry officials issued warnings that drinking was about to become more risky. The Great War had taught people that chemists could be more dangerous than other scientists. A new chemists’ war was brewing, it was said, pitting government scientists against those employed by the country’s powerful bootlegging empires.

  It was no secret that the federal government seethed with frustration over the flouting of anti-alcohol laws. When Prohibition went into effect, backed by a Constitutional amendment no less, its supporters had assumed citizens would, however reluctantly, obey the law. The succeeding years had proved them wrong. Many now drank more than ever, more recklessly, more adventurously. In Washington, D.C., where the Volstead Act—which provided for enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment—had been militantly approved, the police reported nearly a ten-fold increase in drunk driving arrests since the legislation was enacted.

  The illegal alcohol trade had not only flourished but grown more sophisticated. In the mid-1920s much of the available spirits came from stolen industrial alcohol, which was famously poisonous. Since 1906 the U.S. government had required that manufacturers denature (poison) industrial alcohol or else pay liquor taxes. By the 1920s some seventy denaturing formulas existed. The simplest formulas just added extra methyl, or wood, alcohol into the mix. Others mixed a cocktail of bitter-tasting but less lethal compounds, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.

  With the use of such tainted supplies the liquor syndicates needed chemists to help them clean up industrial alcohol. By paying well enough, the bootleggers secured some very able scientists. The chemists had quickly neutralized the simplest of the denaturing additives. Formula 39b, used in production of alcohol for perfume and cosmetics, was a favorite of the illegal alcohol trade because it was not particularly dangerous and thus “renatured” nicely. The heavy-duty industrial versions were deadlier and more difficult to make safe. But recently the bootleggers’ chemists claimed to have found a way to renature even the most lethal versions. They’d found—or so they claimed—a process that caused the methyl alcohol to precipitate to the bottom of a container where it could mostly be filtered out. The resulting spirits were more poisonous than traditional grain alcohol but not so much that the consumers dropped dead in the street.

  Amid indications that the bootlegger chemists were gaining on the denaturing front, dry advocates in Congress demanded tougher measures and better poisons. Their position was that if Americans persisted in flouting the law, if they continued to evade the hardworking law enforcement agents, then perhaps the best way to enforce Prohibition was to make alcohol so deadly that even the sellout chemists working for the crime syndicates couldn’t rescue it. If alcohol was truly undrinkable, the argument went, even the most devoted boozer would have to give it up.

  And those summer 1926 rumors? They were absolutely true. The government was experimenting with new denaturing agents, planning to require much greater amounts of methyl alcohol in the denaturing process. Other poisons were under review as well, including benzene, kerosene, and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine). Federal chemists defended this practice as simple law enforcement: “ignorance, politics and bootlegging” were the real problem, according to a report by the American Chemical Society, which complained that “the continual controversy for and against Prohibition and over the methods for the enforcement” of the law was starting to create public hostility against hardworking scientists.

  By 1926 federal chemists had devised ten new formulas dedicated to deterring bootleggers and their customers. But the black market chemists proved able in countering these moves. In the spring, formula number six, which included mercury bichloride, was overcome. In September, numbers three and four had to be discarded. Formulas one and five—which contained the most methyl alcohol (plus some benzene and pyridine)—remained dangerous, but that was mostly because, as one government chemist told reporters, no one had ever figured out how to completely detoxify wood alcohol.

  It was hard to miss the conclusion. Prohibition chemists didn’t have to create exotic formulas. Wood alcohol, methyl alcohol, whatever you chose to call it, was still the best poison at hand.

  AS THE YEAR pulled toward its close, on a festively lit Christmas Eve, a man came running—make that weaving—into Bellevue’s emergency room, claiming that Santa Claus had chased him from Fifth Avenue with a baseball bat. He was among the sixty-five people who came to the hospital in two days, all sickened by holiday celebrations.

  The problem, Charles Norris reported, was primarily poisoned liquor. The latest round of hooch available in the city had not cleaned up well. It remained an unusually nasty soup of government-added impurities and methyl alcohol. Eight people died at Bellevue, and fifteen others were admitted. Two days after Christmas twenty-three were dead and eighty-nine hospitalized. Most of them later were packed into the alcoholic w
ard at Bellevue, hallucinating, vomiting, blinded by wood alcohol, bundled onto cots like so many sticks of kindling.

  On December 28 a furious Norris issued a public statement:The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol. It knows what the bootleggers are doing with it and yet it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States Government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible.

  The equally furious response came from Wayne Wheeler, general counsel of the Anti-Saloon League of America. He accused Norris, and the newspapers that had quoted the medical examiner, of being in league with bootleggers. The fact was that these so-called victims had violated the law, Wheeler said, and deserved no sympathy for their illegal, and also idiotic, behavior.

  A speakeasy patron was “in the same category as the man who walks into a drug store, buys a bottle of carbolic acid with a label on it marked ‘poisonous,’ and drinks the contents,” Wheeler asserted. If these individuals chose to engage in suicidal actions, he added, that was their choice and no reason to change an important and righteous national policy.

  It became obvious on the next day, the last day of 1926, that Wheeler’s position was also the federal government’s position. The Treasury Department announced that it had decided to require that denatured alcohol be more poisonous. The amount of methyl alcohol in all formulas would be doubled at a minimum. Mostly that meant going from the traditional 2 percent to 4 percent of contents. But if that didn’t serve, then the Prohibition chemists had developed a Special Formula One, which called for 5 to 10 percent methyl alcohol.

  The chances of bootleggers distilling that out were slim; some stills might actually concentrate the poison. But as Wheeler had made so clear, that was the drinker’s problem.

  THE PRESIDENT of Columbia University was fed up with all of it.

  Nicholas Murray Butler had opposed the Eighteenth Amendment from the start. He didn’t oppose regulation of saloons, but doing so by constitutional amendment, he said, was overkill. And by 1927, Seven years into the social experiment, any idiot could see that Prohibition had been an enormous mistake, Butler said, one that could be remedied only by replacing the country’s leaders.

  Butler announced in February that he would himself run for president, seeking to become the Republican Party candidate on an anti-Prohibition platform, which would call for repealing the Eighteenth Amendment and returning the power to regulate alcohol to the individual states. Butler’s declaration, though, received less attention than the vituperative answers it generated.

  “The people of the United States will never make Uncle Sam a bartender,” Wheeler responded. Nor would they ever elect someone like Butler, a man “soaked in avarice and rum.” Law-abiding dry advocates represented the majority of Americans, Wheeler added. They would always reject being led by a representative of New York City, a den of “bootleggers, rum-runners, owners of speakeasy property, wet newspapers, underworld denizens, alcoholic slaves and personal liberty fanatics . . . Neither Nicholas Murray Butler nor any other apologist for the liquor crowd will ever occupy the White House.”

  Butler, in his public response to Wheeler, sounded amused, maybe a little bored: “It sounds as if something had happened to trouble him.” But Wheeler and his allies—for the moment, at least—still wielded real political power. Butler did not gain the presidential nomination—it went to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who promised continued economic prosperity and endorsed Prohibition as an “experiment noble in purpose.”

  Much later Hoover’s friends would reveal that the experiment had been a little too noble for Hoover, who regularly stopped by the Belgian embassy on his way home from Commerce. Since the embassy was technically on foreign soil, he could drink there legally and be guaranteed some very good-quality alcohol as well.

  THE PATHOLOGISTS and chemists of the New York City medical examiner’s office viewed the government’s deliberate poisoning of alcohol as an act of betrayal. Handling an average of twelve thousand bodies a year, they were accustomed to unnecessary loss of life—nearly half of those corpses were the result of accident, suicide, or murder.

  But they weren’t accustomed to having their national government adopt a policy known to kill people in droves. In the offices at Bellevue, their outrage crackled like a current in the air.

  In January the usually reserved Gettler marched off to meet with the New York press, bearing pages of information on lives taken by poisoned alcohol. As always, Gettler said, money bought greater safety. The wellheeled clubbers, the wealthy lovers of jazz-flavored cocktails, could afford the pricey higher-quality alcohol on the market. Many of them routinely invited their bootleggers to parties, gaining some personal insurance against poisoning. But the poor could buy only the alcoholic dregs: nickel whiskey from the tenement stills, the Smoke cocktails of the Bowery, straight wood alcohol. More than anyone else, the city’s impoverished residents were paying the real price of Prohibition.

  The statistics that Gettler delivered to city newspapers bore this out: in the year 1926 alone some twelve hundred in New York City had been sickened or blinded or both by drinking some form of industrial alcohol; another four hundred people had died, most of them from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Gas House district, Hell’s Kitchen, and like neighborhoods in the other boroughs. “The figures exceed the number who died from alcoholism in the days of the saloon,” he said, his sentences dry and cold with determination. “It is impossible to estimate the effect which this poisoned liquor has had on the nervous systems of those taking it and who are not made ill enough to be brought to the hospital for treatment. It is clear enough, however, that the liquor which contains enough poison to kill so many is slowly but surely killing many others.”

  MAYOR JIMMY WALKER’S first response was that of any dedicated drinking man: “If I had a club I would hit on the head myself any man who sold poison liquor and I would not wait for a policeman.” His second was that of a mayor confronted with a public health crisis: he wanted a report. He wanted his chief medical examiner to give him a tally and evaluation of alcohol deaths in the city.

  Charles Norris was never a man to miss a moment of opportunity.

  His reply to Walker’s request, published in February, started small, using Bellevue Hospital as a case study. At the start of Prohibition doctors there had treated about a dozen cases of moonshine and wood alcohol poisoning every year. Maybe a fourth of them had been fatal. But in 1926 the hospital had treated 716 people for alcoholic hallucinations, blindness, and even paralysis due to poisoned alcohol. Sixty-one of those patients had died. And that figure didn’t include deaths due to chronic alcoholism—those had numbered 87 in 1918. In the current year of 1927, Norris predicted, based on January and February deaths, more than 700 city residents would drink themselves to death by year’s end. (He would be proved right.)

  Not only were people drinking more under Prohibition, he said, but with full government complicity they were imbibing alcohol that hardly deserved the name. He and his staff had analyzed bottles from speakeasies and Smoke joints, from hip flasks found in the pockets of bodies on the street. Every drink contained methyl alcohol but they also found gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. No wonder the newest nickname for the stuff coming from the tenement stills and grocery store moonshiners was “white mule”: the clear liquid, it was said, left the drinker feeling kicked in the head.

  “There is practically no pure whiskey available” anyplace in the city, Norris warned. “My opinion, based on actual experience of the medical examiner’s staff and myself, is that there is actually no Prohibition. All the people who drank before Prohibition are drinking now—provided they are still alive.”

  THE NEW YORK PAPERS—th
ose wet publications so despised by the Anti-Saloon League—promptly embraced Norris’s report as evidence of a government policy gone haywire. “Prohibition in this area is a complete failure,” the Herald Tribune’s editorial page declared, “enforcement a travesty, the public a victim of poisonous liquor.” Columnist Heywood Broun wrote in the New York World, “The Eighteenth is the only amendment which carries the death penalty.” And the Evening World described the federal government as a mass poisoner, noting that no administration had been more successful in “undermining the health of its own people.”

  The impact of Norris’s report rippled outward beyond his city. U.S. Senator James Reed of Missouri told the St. Louis Post that the New York medical examiner had convinced him that Prohibition supporters were uncivilized: “Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes.” The St. Paul Pioneer Press called the government “an accessory to murder when it uses deadly denaturants.” Even the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which had supported the Eighteenth Amendment, said that sympathy for the cause did not mean “we wish to inflict punishment upon those who persist in violating Prohibition laws.”

  And the Chicago Tribune put it like this:Normally, no American government would engage in such business. It would not and does not set a trap gun loaded with nails to catch a counterfeiter. It would not put “Rough on Rats” on a cheese sandwich even to catch a mail robber. It would not poison postage stamps to get a citizen known to be misusing the mails. It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.