An Expensive Bottle of Wine (1907)

A bottle of fine wine can be a very expensive item, as Bay Area restaurateur John Marcovich would discover at eleven o’clock on Friday evening, April 19, 1907.

Marcovich, co-owner of Oakland’s Gas Kitchen on Thirteenth Street near Washington, stood talking to his friend George Neece when disgruntled employee Frank E. “Ed” Smith burst through the door with a revolver in his grip. Before Marcovich had a chance to turn, Smith aimed his gun and squeezed the trigger five times in rapid succession. All five bullets hit Marcovich in the back. He crumpled to the floor as Smith darted out the front door.

Marcovich’s wife Jane, seated at the next table, leapt from her chair and raced to her husband’s side. She cradled his head in her hands as he uttered “Goodbye, wife.” His eyes glazed over. The forty-eight-year-old died on the spot where he fell.

Meanwhile, the assassin ran out onto Thirteenth Street, where he ran into William Witcher, who had heard the gunshots and realized something had happened in the Gas Kitchen. Witcher tried to stop Smith, who pointed the barrel of his gun at Witcher’s nose. Witcher threw up his hands and stepped aside, then called the police.

Marcovitch’s business partner Antone “Tony” Clecak provided police with the backstory to the tragedy.

Frank E. Smith, about thirty-years-old, had worked as a waiter at the Gas Kitchen for the past ten months. A man with a seedy reputation, Smith spent most of his off-hours at either saloons or cathouses. Although he claimed to be infatuated with his wife Mazie, Smith spent his paychecks in the city’s red light district.

The night before the shooting, Clecak gave a dinner party at the Gas Kitchen for a group of friends. He left instructions to Smith not to charge his guests as he would settle the tab with the restaurant. The next day, Marcovitch noticed a discrepancy on the books and discovered that Smith had charged a partygoer for a bottle of wine and apparently pocketed the money—$2.50. Knowing Smith’s reputation, Clecak believed the money went straight into the pocket of a barkeep or a whore.

On Friday morning, April 19, Clecak confronted Smith about the bottle. Unsatisfied with the waiter’s excuse, Clecak fired him on the spot.

His honor marred, Smith spent the rest of Friday drinking at local taverns. In one watering hole, he ran into Marcovitch, and the two had words. Although the confrontation was non-violent, Smith vowed to get even for the perceived slight to his honor and reputation. By nightfall, he had imbibed enough liquid courage to face Marcovitch at the Gas Kitchen, except instead of facing Marcovich, he shot him in the back.

After the shooting, Smith ran home to his wife Mazie, who hurried him out of the house and sent him to Mrs. Murray, who ran a boarding house once occupied by Smith. He stayed with Murray for about twenty minutes before dropping out of sight.

Following the shooting, investigators found Smith’s wife, but she said she last saw her husband on Friday evening and insisted she didn’t know where to find him. She thought he would commit suicide before allowing himself to fall into the hands of authorities. The pretty and slender brunette—a beauty who could turn any boy’s eye—described her husband’s mindset on the night of the murder.

“He brooded over the charge of theft,” Mazie explained, “and intended to go out and find Edward McGary and some of the others who were at the dinner Friday night to try to provde that he didn’t take the money. He told me that there was trouble between Marcovich and Clecak over the checks, because there was too much wine taken from the wine room for the amount on the check.”

By Tuesday, April 23, 1907, Oakland police had not managed to collar Smith, but they had learned that Smith was a pseudonym for Samuel E. Short (who also went by the name Ed Short), a deserter from the US Army. They obtained a photograph of Short as a member of Battery H, Third United States Artillery, and Clecak positively identified the subject as the man he knew and employed as “Frank E. Smith.”

A Texas native, Short enlisted in 1898 and served in the Spanish American War. When his hitch ended, he reenlisted in Company A of the 36^th Volunteers. In 1900, he walked away from his unit in Manila and disappeared. He returned to the United States as “Frank E. Smith”—a pseudonym he had hidden behind for nearly a decade.

It was as Smith that he had married Mazie about a year earlier.

Short, alias Smith, had a short criminal record stemming from a violent outburst at a San Francisco brothel. San Francisco police also believed he worked as a pimp. Regardless, he had numerous underworld connections that he may have used to slip through the police dragnet and drop out of sight. Police, however, were confident they would nab their suspect, who had a few, easily-identifiable quirks. Chief of Police Wilson characterized Smith as a “fast walker” with an odd gait: he tilted his head to one side.

On Monday, April 22, Oakland authorities printed wanted posters pledging $500 for Short’s capture. They sent the circulars all over the west and beyond. The manhunt for their pimp-turned-murderer was in full swing.

Over the next few days, police sifted through several promising leads.

On April 24, 1907, a detective spotted a photograph resembling Short in the San Francisco police department’s “Rogues Gallery.” The subject, an ex-con from Chicago named George Waters, resembled Short, but eyewitnesses to the shooting and Short’s friends said that Short was not Waters.

That same day, Oakland authorities received word that a man—a local bakery employee—resembling Short was taken into custody in Hayward. Oakland Captain of Police Peterson, along with Detective Hodgkins and Antone Clecak, traveled to Hayward, but after eyeing the incarcerated baker, Clecak insisted he did not shoot Marcovich.

About a week had passed before the next promising lead. On Monday, April 29, a posse hunting the wilderness around Willow came across a man vaguely resembling Smith. The man, believing the posse to be bandits, fired at them. The lawmen returned fire, killing their suspect in the process. When the cordite dissipated, the slain suspect was identified as Count Otto Von Waldstein, an Austrian from one of Europe’s richest families. The Count was walking to San Francisco and was not the “fast walker” who had murdered Marcovich.

The manhunt continued, but the leads dried up. Apparently, the “fast walker” had eluded authorities for good.

Then on the morning of May 6, the most promising lead to date surfaced. A watchman noticed something floating in the estuary by the Peralta Street wharf. The something turned out to be a body with a bullet hole in the forehead. Apart from a shaved head resulting from water action pushing the body across the sea floor (dead bodies sink first before floating, typically with the head—the heaviest part of the human body—down). The victim’s clothes contained no form of identification, only several calling cards from prostitutes employed by local bordellos.

Authorities paraded friends and acquaintances past the body. D.P. Quinlan, a lieutenant in Short’s unit, traveled from the Presidio and identified the body as the man he knew to be Edward Short. Marks on the body appeared to confirm Quinlan’s identification. Scars on the body’s left wrist, forehead, and left knee corresponded to similar marks noted in Short’s army personnel file.

A number of co-workers and Antone Clecak identified the body as Ernest Smith’s. The case of the Marcowitz murder appeared to have come to an abrupt conclusion.

Except for one problem: Mazie Smith insisted that the corpse was not her husband.

Although many investigators believed the case had come to a dead end in the Bay, the search for Edward Short continued.

Many believed that Mazie was the key to finding Short, but they didn’t keep a close enough eye on her. Like Smith, she had disappeared although she hadn’t gone far. By October, 1907, Mazie had taken up residence at May Smith’s Sixth Street bordello under the alias “Babe Morris” and had taken up with another lover.

Following a row with her lover in October 1908, Mazie attempted suicide by shooting herself in the stomach. When she reached the hospital, Mazie clung to life with her fingernails, and doctors gave her up for dead. Alerted to the shooting, detectives rushed to the hospital to ask Mazie, one last time, where they could find Frank Smith. Once again, Mazie stuck to her story and insisted she did not know where Frank had gone.

Mazie beat all odds and survived what doctors believed to be a fatal gunshot wound.

Edward Short, alias Frank E. Smth, was never found…unless Mazie made a mistake, or lied, at the morgue.