Note Type
In-House NoteNote
Notes: From: Kevin R. Eberle [mailto:keberle@charlestonlaw.edu]
Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 2:08 PM
Subject: Photo of 248 Congress St.
Many months ago, I found a descendent of the builder of 248 Congress St., a cool house in my neighborhood. I sent her an email, but I never heard back.
Lo, many months later, this morning, I got a nice email from her. Her mother-in-law is in her late 80s but is the surviving daughter of the builder. They went through some old albums and found a photo for me! She thinks it was taken around 1930.
The house, happily, looks pretty much the same today except it is all white and there is no landscaping. I'll attach a current photo of the house too.
Not only is the house cool, the builder is too. Manly Sullivan built it about 1917. Manly was a notorious bootlegger, and not just the sort of bootlegger that every family claims without any basis, but an actual, documented one. In fact, Manly was charged by the federal government in a very, very interesting case. He had made about $10,000 in unreported income during the Depression. That was a TON of money in those days when a house in my neighborhood cost about $3000. Manly took a very clever position about the charges. He claimed (1) that the federal government could not collect taxes on activities which it simultaneously had declared were illegal and (2) that it was unconstitutional to charge him with failing to declare that income since doing so would have required him to admit under oath that he had conduct illegal activity. That, he said, was a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights.
Manly's case worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1927 (as I recall), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an opinion which upheld the convictions. When the federal government won in the U.S. Supreme Court, the president told the Justice Department to start using the same tactic against other criminals. Merely proving that income had gone unreported was MUCH easier than trying to prove the illegal source of that income. The president specifically told the Justice Department to use its new-found tactic against Al Capone. And, as everyone knows, that was how the feds brought him down - on tax charges and not the underlying crimes!
So, there is your little interesting historical fact about Hampton Park Terrace of the day!
Kevin