In a recent Pittsburgh City Paper Affordable-ish Housing column, Michael Machosky wrote about a curious Regent Square building at 1036 S. Braddock Ave., known by passersby for the massive bearded face affixed to the facade. “You can now rent an apartment in the house with the weird face on it in Regent Square,” Machosky wrote.
Pittsburgh true crime afficionados might know the apartment building for another reason: in the 1970s, Pittsburgh police identified it as one of the sex work sites run by the city’s so-called Million Dollar Madam Mae Scheible.
Scheible became one of Pittsburgh and the nation’s best-known madams in the 1930s after FBI director J. Edgar Hoover targeted her in a roundup of interstate sex workers. The government tried Scheible and others under a 1910 law known as the Mann Act for transporting women across state lines to engage in prostitution.
Between 1925 and the early 1970s, Scheible operated multiple brothels in Pittsburgh and New York City. Her well-guarded black book allegedly included attorneys, judges, law enforcement officers, and many wealthy Pittsburgh businessmen, including real estate mogul Herman Kamin.
Scheible hired scores of young women to service her well-heeled clients. Her brothel locations included a second-story Fifth Avenue apartment in Oakland — Sciulli’s Pizza now occupies the building’s first floor — a building across the street from the Allegheny County Courthouse, and several Shadyside apartment buildings.
In the late 1960s or early 1970s, Scheible, who was born in 1895 and well into her 60s, struck up a partnership with Imogene Orum, a 30-something Kentucky native who had moved to Pittsburgh after her first marriage to Wheeling jukebox and pinball machine company operator, Henry Orum, disintegrated. Eight years before they married in 1966, Orum’s Wheeling office was destroyed in a bomb blast linked to organized crime.
The FBI described Orum, who used the street name “Penny,” as an “established prostitute … extremely cautious in her dealings with customers to insure that the operation is not taken over by the racket element.”
In a department prostitution record card, Pittsburgh police noted that Orum was a “very attractive” woman who gave established customers codes to protect the operation, by then based at 1036 S. Braddock Ave. “I think the best bet on this operation is to stake it out and capture a trick, scare him and try to obtain the correct code,” a vice officer wrote in 1973.
In that same year, federal prosecutors jailed Orum on contempt charges because she refused to answer grand jury questions about her ties to organized crime. She was the last in a string of sex workers tied to Scheible who were jailed for refusing to cooperate with local and federal law enforcement officers.
Scheible, who by then had married Herbert Smith, the owner of a Pittsburgh engineering supply company, was using the name Sue Smith. Herbert died in 1974, and Scheible retired to Florida, where she died in 1980 or 1981 (Florida doesn’t release death certificates to non-relatives).
Orum also left Pittsburgh in 1974. She remarried that year in Ohio and divorced her second husband in 1979. By 1990, Orum was living in Texas. That’s where she married her third and final husband, Edward Reichert. Orum was living in Pecos, Texas, when she died in 2007. Orum’s obituary, published in the Pecos Enterprise, described her as “a homemaker, a longtime Pecos resident and a member of North Temple Baptist Church.”
Another curious postscript to the Regent Square building’s saga happened after Orum moved to Ohio. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms published a legal notice in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The agency had seized 11 blasting caps from 1036 S. Braddock Ave.
“Any person claiming an interest in said property may file a claim,” they wrote. Nothing else appeared in local papers, and it’s unknown whether the explosives’ owner was ever identified.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.
