Murder & Scandal in Prohibition Portland

This book explores the seedy past of PDX during Prohibition. The 1917 election of Mayor George Luis Baker marked the beginning of a long period of unscrupulous greed in Portland government. Despite his supposed enforcement of prohibition laws, Baker ordered police chief Leon Jenkins to control and profit from the bootlegging market. This allowed Baker to fill city coffers and his friends’ pockets with money from bootlegging. Meanwhile, sensational headlines like the 1929 affair between policeman Bill Breuning and informant Anna Schrader scandalized the city. Maligned in the press, Schrader launched a bitter campaign to recall the mayor. Tragically, on the day he would have filed a report on corruption in the city government, a hired gunman murdered special investigator to the governor Frank Aiken.

Authors JD Chandler and Theresa Griffin Kennedy delve into the salacious details of Baker’s crooked administration in a revelatory account of prohibition in the Rose City.