The Poisoner's Handbook (35 page)
PROHIBITION MIGHT still be technically the law of the land, but the country was leaving it behind.
In the month of July, according to the U.S. Brewers Association, Americans drank 1,332,790,408 glasses of freshly brewed beer. Hotel bars reopened, offering light wine as well as beer. Churches were once again permitted to use sacramental wine in services. Doctors had new flexibility in prescribing medicinal alcohol.
Repeal, once begun, gained an almost unnerving momentum. In April the first two votes, from Michigan and Wisconsin, approved the Twenty-first Amendment. In May, Rhode Island and Wyoming. In June, New Jersey, Indiana, Delaware, Massachusetts, and New York. By the end of September, twenty-five states had voted to bring back legal alcohol, meaning that ratification was two-thirds complete.
Already distributors were applying for import licenses to bring back Italian vermouth, French champagne, and Scotch whiskey. The Treasury Department felt compelled to issue public assurances that the good liquor would indeed flow when Prohibition died. “Enough Whiskey Promised Nation” read one upbeat newspaper headline, undoubtedly written by one of those alcoholic journalists who so annoyed the government’s Prohibition enforcers.
Still, the illicit alcohol years had changed American culture. Gin, a new cocktail recipe, and a smoky aura had become the necessary atmosphere of any good party or hot speakeasy. The Prohibition look—drink in one hand, cigarette in the other—spoke of the new sophistication and was achieved at precious little cost.
In 1933 a pack of cigarettes cost 13 cents (two for a quarter). Carton costs averaged $1.19. Some bars set cigarettes out for free, along with sardines or, in the better speakeasies, sandwiches, cheeses, little sausages, spicy pickles, and trays of salty snacks. The cigarettes themselves came in dazzling and enticing variety, offering endless possibilities for experimentation.
Smokers could choose from among almost three hundred brands. Cigarettes containing Turkish and Egyptian tobacco included Abdullah, Benson & Hedges, Cincinnati Club, Egyptian Straights, Hassam, Mogul, Omar, Pall Mall, Phillip Morris, Ramses, and Turkish Trophies. Blends of Turkish and American tobacco included Barking Dog, Camel, Chesterfield, Dunhill, Fatima, Lucky Strike, Marlboro, Pep, Picayune, Strollers, and Three Castles. For purists, Players and Richmond used only tobacco from Virginia and North Carolina; El Toro and Havana cigarettes were packed with leaves from the West Indies.
Cigarette smoking was so pervasive that, as Alexander Gettler discovered, the habit interfered with his research into carbon monoxide saturation of the blood.
SCIENTISTS HAD KNOWN since the late nineteenth century that tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide. Victorian scientists had even been able to calculate the amount of gas in the smoke: up to 4 percent in cigarette smoke, and in Gettler’s own choice of tobacco, the cigar, between 6 and 8 percent.
Gettler’s latest work theorized that chain smokers might suffer from low-level carbon monoxide poisoning. He speculated in a 1933 report that “headaches experienced by heavy smokers are due in part to the inhalation of carbon monoxide.” But his real interest lay less in their symptoms than in how much of the poison had accumulated in their blood, and how that might affect his calculations on cause of death.
He approached that problem in his usual, single-minded way. To get a better sense of carbon monoxide contamination from smoking tobacco, Gettler selected three groups of people to compare: persons confined to a state institution in the relatively clean air of the country; street cleaners who worked in a daily, dusty cloud of car exhaust; and heavy smokers.
As expected, carboxyhemoglobin blood levels for country dwellers averaged less than 1 percent saturation. The levels for Manhattan street cleaners were triple that amount, a solid 3 percent. But smokers came in the highest, higher than he’d expected, well above the nineteenth-century calculations. Americans were inhaling a lot more tobacco smoke than they had once done, and their saturation levels ranged from 8 to 19 percent. (The latter was from a Bronx cab driver who admitted to smoking six cigarettes on his way to Gettler’s laboratory, lighting one with the stub of another as he went.)
It was safe to assume, Gettler wrote with his usual careful precision, that “tobacco smoking appreciably increases the carbon monoxide in the blood and cannot be ignored in the interpretation of laboratory results.”
THE OTHER NOTABLE poison in tobacco smoke was nicotine.
Nicotine is a naturally occurring alkaloid found in tobacco plants, a tightly woven skein of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen (C
10
H
14
N
2
). The tobacco plant, in fact, belongs to the rather notorious nightshade family, a group overpopulated with toxic vegetation, including mandrake, jimson weed, and deadly nightshade, from which the poison belladonna is produced. Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult.
10
H
14
N
2
). The tobacco plant, in fact, belongs to the rather notorious nightshade family, a group overpopulated with toxic vegetation, including mandrake, jimson weed, and deadly nightshade, from which the poison belladonna is produced. Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult.
The poison is famed among toxicologists because it was the first plant alkaloid that scientists had been able to detect in a corpse. That breakthrough occurred in France in 1851, when a remarkably determined young chemist named Jean Servais Stas extracted nicotine from stomach tissues. The stomach belonged to a wealthy aristocrat who had been murdered by his financially strapped sister and her husband. Driven by evidence of the victim’s suffering as he had died, the reclusive and fanatical Stas closeted himself in a laboratory until he found a way to isolate nicotine from the corpse.
In high doses, nicotine is a terrible poison—it blisters its way through tissues, burns a path from mouth to stomach, and induces intense vomiting, rapidly followed by convulsions and then a complete shutdown of the nervous system. Even in the nineteenth century, its reputation was grim. “The course of the poisoning in fatal cases is a very rapid one, measured by minutes rather than by hours,” one medical textbook stated, citing one case of nicotine suicide in which the unhappy man died before he could even put the poison vial back on the table. “Death is due to respiratory paralysis,” another author noted, adding that it sometimes happened so rapidly that the heart would beat on, at least briefly, after the lungs stopped working.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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