The Poisoner's Handbook (36 page)
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 ordered 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.
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
(Tl)
1935—1936
T
HERE 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.
HERE 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
THE NAME
thallium
comes from the Greek word
thallos
for a newly leafed plant, brilliant with the sun-bright green of spring. It seems a strangely vivid description for a less-than-colorful metallic element, silvery pale in the ground, darkening to tarnished gray when exposed to air.
thallium
comes from the Greek word
thallos
for a newly leafed plant, brilliant with the sun-bright green of spring. It seems a strangely vivid description for a less-than-colorful metallic element, silvery pale in the ground, darkening to tarnished gray when exposed to air.
But the story of its scientific discovery explains the name, as well as the scientific advances entailed in that discovery. Thallium was first identified in 1861 by a leading British chemist. William Crookes had been asked to analyze a batch of sulfuric acid, used in industrial mining, which was apparently tainted with an unknown impurity. Following his usual routine, Crookes started with a simple flame test. He dipped a platinum wire into the acid and put the wire into the colorless fire of a Bunsen burner.
As it heated, the wire lit to a sudden brilliant green.
Crookes had done hundreds of flame tests. He’d seen other elements that flashed green—copper and barium, for example. But the springlike exuberance of this color was new to him. He decided to run a more sophisticated test on a new instrument, the spectroscope. The device worked on the same principle as the flame test: when a material heats to incandescence, it emits light of varying colors according to its atomic makeup. In a spectroscope, an unknown compound was heated until it glowed. The resulting light was directed through a slit and into a prism. The prism then refracted the light into its full spectrum, whatever that might be. A scientist looking at those bright shimmers through a magnifying tube could identify each component of the heated material, matching the color to the existing chemical catalog.
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