August Pope was born in Germany in 1857 and by the 1880s he was living in Pittsburgh working as a laborer. In the 1890s, he went into the grocery business and owned a store on Woods Run Avenue in Manchester (now, part of Pittsburgh’s North Side). On March 5, 1898, Pope’s eight-year-old son Henry lost one leg and the other was seriously injured in a streetcar accident near the family’s store. The accident devastated the Popes. August closed the grocery and went to work in a steel mill while pursuing more than a decade of litigation against the streetcar company.

Pope ultimately secured a hefty cash judgement and he put part of the money into a trust for his son and used another part to buy a West End saloon business formerly owned by Jonathan and Edward Hay. The Hay Hotel and saloon was a family business. In 1900, the U.S. Census documented Jonathan as the hotel’s proprietor with sons Harry, Bert, and Edward working as bartenders.

Edward Hay died December 5, 1910. That same day, August Pope filed an application in court to take over the Hays’ liquor license and rent the three-story brick building. Henry Pope’s tragic accident laid the foundation for the Pope family’s rise as bootleggers and later successful entertainment entrepreneurs.

Life at the Hotel Pope was uneventful until the advent of Prohibition in 1920. About that time, the Popes moved to the 400 block of South Main and within a year, Prohibition agents raided their establishment and two nearby properties that the Popes rented and used to store a massive quantity of alcohol. By the end of the year, August, Freda, Henry, and Leo federal officials had arrested, prosecuted, and convicted the Popes on alcohol charges. Federal officials declared their saloon, by then known as the Pope Hotel (or Hotel Pope), a nuisance. It was the start of more than a decade of arrests and prosecutions for the Popes.

The Pope family became one of Pittsburgh’s earliest family bootlegging ring to be busted during Prohibition. Using the tragedy of Henry Pope’s accident, the Pope’s built wealth and infamy. By the time of their first big bust in 1920, the family had been annual “cottagers” spending summers in Atlantic City. In fact, August’s wife Mary died there in 1921 as federal authorities were prosecuting the family. Newspapers in Atlantic City and Pittsburgh reported on Mary’s death. “She was well known in the New Jersey town and in Pittsburgh,” the Pittsburgh Press reported. None of the papers reported that her husband and children were being prosecuting for violating Prohibition.

Though August was the patriarch, Frederica “Freda” Pope (1894-1978) was the family’s ringleader. In fact, after Prohibition agents busted the family’s West End saloon and got convictions against Freda, her father, and several brothers, one Pittsburgh newspaper dubbed Freda the “brains of the bootleg ring.”

Before August died in 1941, the Popes had run several rural roadhouses ringing Pittsburgh, including the Cliff Mine Inn, the Riverview Hotel, and Longview Gardens. In the 1930s, Freda went on to become one of several front people running the Show Boat floating casino and speakeasy. She ran the club for three years, 1933 to 1936.

After leaving the Show Boat, Freda and her husband Eddie Hess managed other establishments, including the Grant’s Hill Tavern downtown and the Haddon Hall dining room and cocktail lounge on Centre Avenue.