April 12, 2018, Thursday - “Dirty Doc Ames and the Scandal That Shook Minneapolis” Author Event at Mill City Museum
Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: Mill City Museum, 704 South 2nd Street
Join author Erik Rivenes for a presentation and signing for his new MNHS Press book, Dirty Doc Ames and the Scandal That Shook Minneapolis. Rivenes is a writer, historian, founder of the Saint Paul Gangster Tours, and producer of the Most Notorious podcast. A cash bar with be available starting at 6 pm, and the presentation will begin at 7 pm.
The story of Albert Alonzo “Doc” Ames is perhaps the greatest political scandal in Minnesota history. As mayor of Minneapolis, Ames exposed the city to national humiliation—and helped jumpstart an era of reform. At the turn of the 20th century, Minneapolis was moving away from a time of political rings, frontier justice, and old boys’ clubs to a more civic-minded way of governing. But in 1901, the affable, degenerate Doc Ames, a former Minneapolis mayor well past his political prime, duped his way back into the office. Ames appointed his brother as chief of police, and together they assembled a rogues’ gallery of thieves to squeeze as much money out of the city as quickly as they could.
Under Ames’s leadership, criminals walked beats wearing policeman’s uniforms. City detectives robbed prominent citizens. Police maintained arrangements with madams and saloonkeepers, extracting pay for the privilege of openly ignoring the law. With a card game gone bad and a complaint to a newspaper, it all fell apart. Ames fled Minneapolis in mid-term to avoid prosecution. And at Doc Ames’s spectacular downfall, the citizens of Minneapolis finally woke up and took their city back.
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