Charles Carroll Rouse, a 34-year-old man, was working as a federal Prohibition agent in Baltimore when a tip drew him and two fellow agents into the city’s back-alley world of nighttime liquor deliveries. Word had reached the agents that illegal alcohol was being brought night after night to a house on Wayson Alley, and they set up surveillance, waiting for the routine to repeat itself.
When a vehicle finally arrived and liquor began moving into an open garage, the quiet stakeout broke into sudden action.
Two of the agents rushed into the alley, announced themselves, and arrested two men who were unloading the contraband. Rouse came in moments later and saw movement deeper inside the garage—shadows shifting where his partners could not easily see. Fearing an ambush, he stepped into the dark to check on what was hidden within. The response was immediate: gunfire erupted from inside the garage, and Rouse returned fire in a close, chaotic exchange. In the confined space, the shots hit their mark. Rouse was badly wounded and carried out to be rushed to Mercy Hospital.
For five days he lingered, gravely injured, as the case began to harden around a name. Rouse died in Baltimore on June 12, 1927, and the shooting that began as a routine liquor raid turned into a murder investigation. Authorities identified a suspect, Laveri Guiseppe, and he was arrested for Rouse’s murder. As investigators worked the threads outward—who had been in the garage, who had handled the liquor, who had warned whom—other names surfaced in connection with the manhunt and the wider liquor operation.
Not long after, detectives were reported traveling to New York to bring back Oresti Laveri, who had been indicted in the case, and to locate Anna Rohrmann in connection with the investigation. The pursuit underscored how quickly a back-alley gunfight in Baltimore had rippled into other jurisdictions, with indictments and prisoner transfers following the violence that started on Wayson Alley.
Rouse’s story did not end in the alley where he was shot. He had joined the Prohibition Unit on July 31, 1924, and his service placed him in the path of the era’s dangerous, profitable underground trade. Born in Fauquier County, Virginia, he left behind his wife, Lillian, and was buried in Alexandria, Virginia—his death a grim footnote to the long, volatile struggle between federal agents and those who made their living defying Prohibition.
