It was the case that had it all murder and intrigue, an impetuous and manipulative young Navy wife, white supremacy in an island paradise and a courtroom drama featuring the great Clarence Darrow himself. Set in Prohibition-era Hawaii, the Massie Affair captivated the entire country, as it laid bare the deep social ills behind the Territory’s idyllic facade. In the dark hours of the morning on September 13, 1931, US Navy lieutenant Tommie Massie called his house and heard his wife, Thalia, say, ‘Come home. Something awful has happened.’
What was it that had truly happened to Thalia Massie? A half-century after the case closed, William ‘Billy’ Kane Wells, a federal narcotics agent with first-hand knowledge of the crime, shared his own tale with author John Madinger, providing the inspiration for Pipe Dreams: The Dark Secret Behind Hawaii’s Most Notorious Crime-an intriguing twist on the case that changed Hawaii forever. Thalia maintained that she had been abducted, beaten and raped by a gang of Hawaiian men. The subsequent arrest and trial of five locals, dubbed the Ala Moana Boys, lit a fuse under the simmering racial and political tensions in the Islands. When the deadlocked jury resulted in a mistrial, the Massie family’s tempers and all of Honolulu society exploded. Two of the accused locals were kidnapped and beaten. One, amateur boxer Joseph Kahahawai, was shot dead, resulting in an even more sensational trial: a murder charge against Tommie, two of his Navy compatriots and Thalia’s mother, the prominent East Coast socialite Grace Fortescue.
In Pipe Dreams, Madinger masterfully weaves together the hidden side of Thalia Massie’s life and fictional detective Jack Mather’s ongoing investigation into the Islands’ opium trade, against a backdrop of the tension between Territorial Hawaii’s haole elite and its non-white immigrant and native Hawaiian working class. Madinger’s own background in law enforcement and Billy Wells’s previously undisclosed revelations lend realism and new perspective to the infamous Massie Case.
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