The Mob and the City (24 page)

Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge…anything at all.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
(1925)

Don't ask me why, but people seem to want to come to a mob place. Maybe it's the excitement of mingling with mobsters.

—Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa,
My Life in the Mafia
(1973)

Thirty-year-old Frank Sinatra walked off stage after 2:00 a.m. to the whistles of adoring patrons under the papier-mâché palm trees of the Copacabana in midtown Manhattan. Sinatra had flown in from Hollywood, where he'd been filming
It Happened in Brooklyn,
to make a surprise appearance beside comedian Phil Silvers (who later played Sergeant Bilko on
The Phil Silvers Show
). In the audience were Broadway singer Ethel Merman, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sidney Kingsley, actress Paula Stone, and restaurateur Toots Shor. Gliding among them were the “Copa Girls,” the nineteen-year-old ingénues whose long legs and demure smiles became club trademarks under the talented management of Monte Prosser.
¹

Presiding over the Copa behind the scenes was its hidden owner, Frank Costello. Mr. Costello was the bootlegger turned businessman, the street gangster who became a political fixer—and the secret acting boss of the Mafia's Luciano Family. Or as his nickname said, he was the “Prime Minister of the Underworld.”
²

Nighthawks who stepped out on the town for jazz on 54th Street, or drinks at a nightclub in the Village, or a prizefight at Madison Square Garden were at some point enjoying a mob-run production. Gangsters had an outsized influence over Manhattan's nightlife. They kept the doors open and the booze flowing. Mobsters, or glamorized versions of them, became part of the nightly allure. This chapter is a tour through the mob nightlife.

THE LINGERING HANGOVER OF PROHIBITION

The Mafia's influence over Manhattan's nightlife was due to the lingering aftereffects of Prohibition. The mix was one part cultural and one part legal.

Repeal ended the ban on alcohol, but
not
gangsters in the liquor business. Between 1920 and 1933, speakeasies were the only place where drink and music could be enjoyed together. The Jewish and Italian gangsters who ran them
loved
the nightly entertainment business. So when Prohibition ended, many former bootleggers and speakeasy operators slid over to newly legal bars and nightclubs.
³
“Nightclubs are big business for mob guys. They pick them because they like to cabaret, themselves,” recalled Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa. “It's also a place to go where you'll find women, loads of women, and you get a chance to be in the limelight.”
⁴

Although section one of the Twenty-First Amendment famously provided that Prohibition “is hereby repealed,” lawmakers wary of returning to the wide-open saloon
also
inserted section two, which gave the states virtually unlimited power to regulate booze.
⁵
In 1934, New York's State Liquor Authority (NYSLA), began issuing a dizzying array of regulations over bars and nightclubs. The NYSLA could revoke a liquor license—a death sentence for nightspots—for anything from “improperly marked taps” to “undesirables permitted to congregate.”
⁶
What's more, such violations could be reported by any beat cop on the street.

This bred venality in the nightclub business. As the Knapp Commission on police corruption found: “Selling liquor by the drink is governed by a complex system of state and local laws, infractions of which can lead to criminal penalties, as well as suspension or loss of license.” As a result, liquor “licensees are highly vulnerable to police shakedowns.”
⁷
Mobsters were often the ones keeping the cops at bay.

JAZZ CLUBS ON 52
ND
STREET

For New Yorkers wanting to hear the new music coming out of New Orleans during Prohibition, speakeasies were the place to go. Gangsters became an inseparable part of the jazz scene. At the Cotton Club in Harlem, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway created the music of the Harlem Renaissance. Its owner was the bootlegger Owney “The Killer” Madden, and its patrons included
mafiosi
like Joe Valachi. This was not unusual. As a New York jazzman said, “no popular speakeasy seemed devoid of hoodlum associations, backing or control, regardless of whether a top performer's name like Club Durant or Club Richman appeared on it.” In Chicago, Al Capone, a jazz enthusiast, controlled the top clubs. “To our amazement Capone would come over to the bandstand every few minutes or so and give each member of the band a twenty-dollar bill and then return to his table beaming and smoking fat cigars,” recalled Teddy Wilson.
⁸

Many bootleggers and speakeasy operators shifted over to legitimate clubs after Repeal. The bootlegger and jazz enthusiast Joe Helblock opened Onyx on West 52nd Street, a platform for Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as they were inventing modern bebop. Sherman Billingsley, an ex-convict who worked for the Detroit mob, first opened The Stork Club as a speakeasy with underworld partners, including for a time Frank Costello. The Stork Club on East 53rd Street became a fashionable nightspot where celebrities like Lucille Ball and Damon Runyon mixed with wiseguys like Sonny Franzese.
⁹

Although mob clubs offered essential venues, they were tough, treacherous places for musicians. “Around New York and Chicago ‘The Boys’ pretty much told you where you were going to work. The union didn't say nothin’,” said jazz bassist Pops Foster. “The working conditions were horrible, really,” recounted pianist George Shearing. When jazzman Mezz Mezzrow was going through heroin withdrawal, his nightmares were of the mobsters: “Legs Diamond and Babyface Coll and Dutch Schultz and Scarface and Louis the Wop, along with a gang of other mugs I couldn't quite recognize but still their murderous leers were sort of familiar, had been chasing me all over the Milky Way,” dreamed Mezzrow. Louis Armstrong spent his early career dodging mobsters until he hired Joe Glaser (a man who once worked for Capone) to be his manager. Glaser “saved me from the gangsters,” said Satchmo.
¹⁰

6-1: Times Square, 1933. Even after repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the mob had an outsized influence on Manhattan's nightlife. (Photo by Samuel H. Gottscho, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection)

THE COPACABANA, 10 EAST 60
TH
STREET

The Copacabana at 10 East 60th Street was the center of the mob nightlife in Manhattan. On any night, there was “someone from each family in there,” confirmed a
mafioso
. Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano and Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno kept a regular table with boxing mobsters Frankie Carbo and Frank Palermo. In they'd strut in silk suits, ridiculing waiters, then making up for it with big tips. When they wanted to talk business, wiseguys paid the wait captain to keep nearby tables unoccupied.
¹¹

Mobsters were part of the Copa's electric atmosphere. Hollywood actors, judges, and New York Yankees would literally bump into
mafiosi
like Joseph “Joe Stretch” Stracci or Frank “Frankie Brown” Bongiorno. They became part of the allure of the Manhattan nightlife. “A well-known gangster was respected as much as any movie star or politician,” said actor George Raft. To most night owls, who never saw the barrel end of their guns, they were no more threatening than underworld characters from
The Great Gatsby
.
¹²

Frank Sinatra had great times with the boys at the Copa. He had been looking up to them since his childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, where young Francis grew up a skinny, lonely only child in the same neighborhood as Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo, a
caporegime
in the Mafia. On his way up the nightclub circuit, Sinatra became pals with Willie Moretti, a vicious enforcer for Frank Costello.
¹³

Sinatra's mob connections were first exposed in February 1947 when a newspaper revealed that he had given a special performance in Havana, Cuba, for a gathering of Lucky Luciano with other mobsters. Then, in August 1951, bandleader Tommy Dorsey told the
American Mercury
that when Sinatra was trying to get out of his band contract, Dorsey was intimidated into signing a release of Sinatra after being visited by three toughs who said “sign or else.” Notwithstanding the bad publicity, Sinatra continued to socialize and do business with
mafiosi
. In 1962, Sinatra invested $50,000 in the Berkshire Downs horse track, which witnesses testified was secretly owned by the Patriarca Family. In 1963, the Nevada Gaming Control Board pulled his gaming license for hosting Sam Giancana at Sinatra's Cal-Neva Lodge.
¹⁴

6–2: Singer Frank Sinatra talking with boxer Rocky Graziano at the Copa, 1946. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

While denying his mob connections publicly, behind closed doors the Chairman of the Board was something of a want-to-be mobster who socialized with
mafiosi
throughout his adult life. “Sinatra's always talking about the mob guys he knows. Who gives a damn, especially if you're a mob guy yourself?” said Vinnie Teresa. He was drawn to the life. “Frank Sinatra loved gangsters, or at least the world they lived in,” observed George Jacobs, his longtime valet. But he was no gangster himself. “Dad was interested in the wise guys because they were so
different
from him,” explained his daughter. The skinny kid from Hoboken with the tough-guy persona was imitating life.
¹⁵

PROFESSIONAL BOXING

Professional boxing was always a controversial sport on the edge of the law. Congress actually outlawed the interstate transportation of fight films between 1912 and 1939. The New York legislature did not fully legalize decision prizefights until 1920, believing they promoted gambling. Gamblers hovered around boxing gyms to get tip-offs—or worse, a deal to fix a fight—from boxers. The gambling stakes grew after the advent of nationally televised boxing matches. Mobsters lived in the same rough world as pugilists and were naturally drawn to them, too.
¹⁶

The New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) was the nominal regulator of the sport. It had dismal beginnings. In 1925, promoter Tex Rickard was forced to hand over 25 percent of the gross receipts of the fight between Jack Dempsey and Luis Firpo to William J. McCormack, licensing commissioner of the NYSAC, “for his permission to let the fight go on.”
¹⁷
Mostly, the NYSAC was just ineffectual. It was difficult to prove a gangster's hidden interest in a fighter. Even when the NYSAC issued a suspension, promoters crossed state lines to find another sanctioning body.
¹⁸