Shooting on Monmouth Street
The brass-knuckle 1930s were long before Miranda rights and hands-off police questioning. They were the days when Cincinnati Detective Robert “Machine Gun” Meldon challenged a Newport mobster to a shootout in the street. Meldon waited with his trademark Tommy gun, which was invented in Newport by General John Thompson. The mobster never showed up, and Machine Gun Meldon’s legend grew with his list of kills.
In wide open Newport, mob gunman Albert “Red” Masterson was also racking up kills that were rumored in the dozens. One verified score was a Chicago hitman from the Al Capone gang, John Rosen, who came to town in 1935, shoved a gun into the ribs of a Glenn Hotel manager and told him to find Red Masterson.
The manager and Rosen took an elevator upstairs, but the Newport Enforcer was out. Rosen left and caught a cab.
The cab driver told police he was ordered by Rosen at gunpoint to follow a car and run it off the highway. He refused to run it off the road, but followed the car back to the Glenn Hotel on Monmouth Street, where Rosen “leaped out and attacked the other man, leaving his victim lying on the sidewalk,” the cab driver said.
Later, sitting in another cab at 609 Monmouth Street in Newport, Rosen finally spotted Masterson on the sidewalk, cursed him and called him out. Masterson walked up to the cab, yelled something that the newspapers translated to “Quit the fooling,” and began firing two .38s into Rosen. He kept shooting until Rosen was entirely dead.
In court, Masterson testified that he had seen Rosen reach for a gun. No gun was found on Rosen, but Masterson’s lawyer produced a witness who testified that he had reached into the cab while the gun smoke was still thick, took the gun from Rosen’s lap and ran off to throw it in the river. Detectives from Louisville and Columbus, Ohio, told the court that Rosen was a well-known gangster who had served time for only a small fraction of his crimes and killings. They described a mob hitman who got what was coming.
“Acquittal of the 29-year-old defendant on the murder charge came at 13 minutes to 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon, Friday the 13th, and only half an hour after the jury had withdrawn for its deliberations,” a newspaper report said.
The court ruled it was self-defense. Police said six of eight shots fired by Masterson hit Rosen. But the cause of death was “gambling war.”
Masterson was also wanted in Cincinnati for violating parole in Ohio by carrying firearms. But the Kentucky judge set bond at $2,000, which was easily posted by Masterson. He walked away. His lawyer was Daniel Davies, the same attorney who would represent Garrison, Whitfield and Diehm.
Eruptions of violence in the streets and burn-outs of bars and nightclubs by the mob were as common as cops on the take in those days. And bent cops were so common in the 1930s that one of the biggest brothels in the county was owned and run by a local marshal, while Newport’s police chief ran a casino.
But the “resort blaze” that made big headlines on both sides of the river in 1936 was different. It was not just mobsters killing each other. A little girl had been killed. The torching of Schmidt’s roadhouse had violated an unwritten code. Even crooked cops and a few gangsters wanted justice. There was no mercy to be found for men who would burn up a 5-year-old girl.
‘First time I ever killed a child’
It took the police just four days to track down two of them.
After interrogating the bartender Elrod, detectives learned that Edwin Garrison and Sidney “Chick” Diehm were both burned in the arson, and had been taken to Dave Whitfield’s café on York Street, which Whitfield had closed that night while Garrison and Diehm were given first aid.
Earl Fillhart identified Garrison’s mugshot as one of two men he saw at the roadhouse when he went to investigate the fire.
Garrison and Whitfield were arrested on February 7.
Whitfield said he had driven Garrison to a Covington doctor, Edward J. Nestley, and told the doctor that Garrison had been burned in a moonshine-still explosion. Garrison told the doctor it was a car wreck. The doctor apparently did not care which story was true or ask any questions. He gave Garrison some sedatives and followed up with a couple of visits over the next three days, without telling police.
When Garrison was finally found in the attic of a rooming house, thrashing and moaning in a fever of sweat, oozing burns and agony, police said he was half out of his mind.
“I see three people burning,” he raved. “I still see them, especially the little girl.”
He told the police, “It’s the first time I ever killed a child.”
He also boasted that he knew recently slain New York gangsters “Legs” Diamond and Dutch Shultz, and had been working at Shultz’s Coney Island Racetrack in Cincinnati. “Questioned about the blast and fire that is suspected of having its origin in a gambling war, Garrison kept his blistered lips tightly closed,” the Cincinnati Post reported on February 12.
Whitfield and Garrison were charged with arson, murder and robbery during a hearing that had to be held in a cell at the Campbell County Jail. Garrison was too crippled by burns to be moved from his jailhouse cot without being carried to court.
Police launched a manhunt for the third man, Chick Diehm. Detectives tracked him through Detroit and several states, then finally found him hiding out in an apartment on West 45th Street in New York City on March 23.
All three men were described as hoodlums and “police characters.”
Sidney Diehm, 34: For some reason, stories about Diehm showed no pictures of him. But he fit the “police character” portrait. He had been arrested for larceny a year before for trying to pay his bill at the Hotel Havlin in Cincinnati with a stolen adding machine. In 1927 he assaulted a federal prohibition agent “with intent to impede and obstruct justice.”
Dave Whitfield, 33: Whitfield stares from his mugshot with a direct, defiant gaze. His lower lip is thrust out over a dimpled double chin. His dark eyes are sad but lifeless. He had grown up in North Carolina and served in the Navy, then served three terms in prison for robbery, embezzlement and violation of federal liquor laws. In court he said he once was a partner with Pete Schmidt, whom he had known for 10 or 15 years, going back to Prohibition when they made bootleg whiskey on a farm Schmidt owned on Tippenhauer Road in Campbell County, Kentucky.
Edwin Garrison, 35: In a newspaper photo borrowed from police files, Garrison wears a white shirt, tie and jacket. His thin lips are tight, his face as blank and cold as a snowdrift. The irises of his eyes are washed out, making the penetrating dots of his pupils stand out like bullet holes in glass. He was also a graduate of the George Remus College of Criminal Knowledge, and had been part of Pete Schmidt’s crew. But lately he had been associated with the Meyer Lansky gang in New York. He was mathematics wiz who calculated racetrack odds. His police character friends called him “the human adding machine.”