A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  In Chicago and New York, Italian and Jewish gangsters operated many of the most important early jazz clubs. Al Capone, who controlled several of the clubs in Chicago that introduced jazz to mainstream audiences, was an aficionado of the music and was the first to pay performers a better than subsistence wage. The pianist Earl Hines remembered that “Scarface got along well with musicians. He liked to come into a club with his henchmen and have the band play his requests. He was very free with $100 tips.” Most importantly, Capone supplied steady and professional incomes to jazz musicians who had previously lived in poverty. The singer Ethel Waters fondly recalled that Capone treated her “with respect, applause, deference, and paid in full.”

  Mob-owned clubs on State Street in Chicago, where, according to the writer Langston Hughes, “gangsters were coming into their own,” employed the musicians who made jazz a national phenomenon, including bands fronted by Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, and Benny Goodman. According to one performer, “the worst places on State Street always had the best music.” The same was true in New York City, where, as another jazz musician remembered, the clubs where the music was being invented were “run by big-time mobs, not tramps … who had a way of running them better than anyone else.” According to the scholar Jerome Charyn, “There would have been no ‘Jazz Age,’ and very little jazz, without the white gangsters who took black and white jazz musicians under their wing.”

  Similarly, very few people were more important in the development of Broadway as an entertainment center than Arnold “the Brain” Rothstein, a man credited with turning organized crime into big business. Rothstein gained massive wealth first by investing in speakeasies, underground casinos, and horse tracks, then by gambling on poker games, horse races, and sporting events (including the 1919 World Series) that he “fixed.” In the 1920s, Rothstein moved into bootlegging and narcotics trafficking and by 1927 was considered to be in control of virtually the entire U.S. drug trade. Along the way, Rothstein, whose unofficial office was Lindy’s restaurant at Forty-ninth Street and Broadway, invested heavily in the burgeoning musical theater industry in midtown Manhattan. He financed the opening of several venues, including the famous Selwyn Theater on Forty-second Street, as well as various productions that brought tens of thousands of patrons to Broadway and helped establish it as the first entertainment capital of America.

  PUBLIC ENEMIES, PUBLIC HEROES

  Today there is nearly universal consensus that Prohibition—the period from 1919 to 1933, during which the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption were banned nationally as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution—was a puritanical disaster. And yet it is seldom acknowledged that organized criminals were primarily responsible for making Prohibition the most spectacularly unsuccessful moral reform movement in American history.

  Beginning on January 16, 1920, the date the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect, rumrunners employed by Italian and Jewish crime syndicates delivered liquor all along the coasts of the Pacific, Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico. In the North, giant sleds carrying cases of liquor were pulled across the border from Canada. Thanks to these efforts and the overwhelming desire of Americans to drink, consumption of sacramental wine increased by eight hundred thousand gallons during the first two years of Prohibition. Speakeasies, many of which were owned by criminals, could be found in every neighborhood in every city in the country. In Manhattan alone, there were five thousand speakeasies at one point in the 1920s. Women, who had been barred from most saloons before Prohibition, were welcome in speakeasies and became regular customers. When a rumrunner boat escaped a Coast Guard ship off Coney Island one summer day, thousands of people on the beach stood and cheered. All of this helps explain why gangsters became the heroes of the Prohibition era, both in the movies and in real life.

  In 1931, in a poll conducted by Variety magazine, a broad cross section of the American public was asked to identify a list of names of public figures. Variety reported that the names most familiar to Americans in 1931 were those of film stars. But the next most familiar names belonged to gangsters. Third on the list were athletes. And fourth were politicians. The celebrity status of gangsters can be explained, first, by the publicity they received during Prohibition. But their greatest promotion came from the gangster genre film, which was by far the most popular variety of motion picture during the last years of Prohibition. Three of the largest grossing films of this period were Little Caesar, released in 1930, The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932). Little Caesar and Scarface were based on the life of Al Capone, and The Public Enemy told a fictionalized account of the life of Hymie Weiss, the leader of a major Jewish gang of the 1920s. These three films established the prototype of the American gangster film of the early 1930s. In these films, the story is told from the point of view of the gangster, whereas previously criminals had been portrayed as objects of moral disapproval. In other words, these were the first films to treat the gangster with empathy and with sympathy. W. R. Burnett, the author of Little Caesar, who essentially invented the genre, said this about why his film was revolutionary:

  [The reason it] was a smack in the face … was the fact that it was the world seen completely through the eyes of a gangster… . It had never been done before then. You had crime stories but always seen through the eyes of society. The criminal was just some son of a bitch who’d killed somebody and then they got ’em. I treated them as human beings.

  In Little Caesar, the protagonist, played by Edward G. Robinson, rises from a small-town crook to become the leader of a major crime syndicate in Chicago. The film shows his success as the product of courage, intelligence, and determination, and his death as tragedy rather than as justice. Like Robinson in Little Caesar, James Cagney’s character in The Public Enemy starts out as a petty criminal and works his way up to the top of a criminal empire. He is smart, ruthless, and entirely out for himself. The death of the Cagney character comes from a rival gang, and, again, it is portrayed as tragedy. Scarface, which censors rightly claimed glorified gangsters, was perhaps the most blatant example of the genre. Paul Muni plays Tony Camonte, a thinly disguised Al Capone, whose motto is: “Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it.” Camonte is released from prison by a crooked lawyer who finds a loophole in the law, and when he walks out of the prison, he strikes a match on a policeman’s badge, lights his cigarette, and waves a mock salute. In these three films, as with gangster movies of the period generally, the filmmakers clearly intended the audience to identify with and admire the renegade protagonists.

  The gangster of early Depression films had a female counterpart, via another highly popular genre during the period: what film historians have called the “fallen woman genre.” Hollywood produced a number of successful films that portrayed women who used their sexuality to gain wealth and power. They manipulated men, they were highly intelligent and independent, they loved luxury, and they rejected the traditional roles of wife and mother. Nearly every female star in Hollywood appeared in at least one “fallen woman” film, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, Jean Harlow, and Tallulah Bankhead. Red-Headed Woman, starring Jean Harlow, generated enormous publicity, much of it attacks by moral reformers, because it depicted a working-class woman who seduces her wealthy, seemingly happily married boss. Her use of sex as a means to gain material rewards and power over men is bluntly shown, and in one scene she barges into an exclusive country club and forces her rich, respectable boyfriend to kiss her in a phone booth. The film ends with the heroine shooting her rich husband and laughing over his body with her boyfriend. In Blonde Venus, Marlene Dietrich separates from her husband and supports herself by performing in a cabaret in a sleazy part of town. Though seldom regarded as a feminist, the Dietrich character refuses to be a loyal and monogamous wife. In one of her performances in the film, Dietrich sings these lyrics:

  Things look bad—stocks are low

 
So today, my best beau

  Went back again to live with his wife

  Why should I care a lot?

  So he’s gone—well, so what?

  It doesn’t mean a thing in my life.

  BOSSES AND QUEENS

  Though famous for their ultramasculinity, gangsters were nonetheless instrumental in fostering and protecting the gay subculture during the hostile years of World War II and the 1950s. Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino, leaders of the largest and most powerful crime families in New York, began investing in gay bars in the early 1930s. Some have speculated that Genovese learned of the bars from his wife, Anna Petillo Vernotico, who was a regular at the bars and for many years was openly involved in a lesbian relationship. Genovese not only approved of her sexuality but also had her first husband murdered so that she could be unbound by what she considered a loveless marriage and freely involve herself with women.

  By the 1950s, most of the gay bars in New York were owned by the mob. Because of the Mafia’s connections with the police department and willingness to bribe officers, patrons of mob-owned bars were often protected from the police raids that dominated gay life in the 1950s. The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village had been a straight restaurant and a straight nightclub for many years when it was purchased in 1966 by three associates of the Genovese family, led by “Fat Tony” Lauria, a mob don known for weighing 420 pounds and for preferring men as sexual partners. Partly to facilitate his own yearnings and partly in recognition of the great demand among gay men and lesbians for bars protected from the police, Lauria converted the Stonewall into a gay bar and began paying officers in the Sixth Precinct headquarters $2,000 per week to shield it from raids. Despite the bribes, Stonewall provided a huge profit for its mob owners. Many of the mafiosi who managed the Stonewall and other gay clubs were themselves gay, and several had penchants for drag queens. An enormous bouncer known as “Big Bobby,” who worked the door at Tony Pastor’s, a popular Mafia-run gay club at Sixth Avenue and MacDougal Street, carried on an open relationship with a Chinese drag queen named Tony Lee, who performed ballet at the club.

  Vito Genovese, leader of one of the most powerful crime syndicates in American history and owner of many of New York City’s first gay bars.

  The Stonewall Inn seems to have had more than the usual number of gay mobsters. According to the historian Martin Duberman, a gangster-bouncer named “Petey,” who worked various gay clubs, including the Stonewall, “had a thick Italian street accent, acted ‘dumb,’ and favored black shirts and ties.” He was “the very picture of a Mafia mobster—except for his habit of falling for patrons and coworkers.” Petey was especially fond of an Italian drag queen named Desiree who frequented the Stonewall. The Stonewall’s manager was a man named Ed “the Skull” Murphy, a lifelong hood and ex-convict who chose to work as a bouncer at many of New York’s first gay clubs because he found it an easy way to meet and have sex with men. Murphy was also known for his fondness for black and Latino men, which contributed to the Stonewall’s reputation as the most racially diverse bar—gay or straight—in New York City.

  The famous 1969 raid on the Stonewall was actually part of a federal sting operation directed at the mob. The Sixth Precinct was not notified of the operation until the last minute, when it was forced by federal officers—who were not on the mob payroll—to conduct the raid. Over the next decade, Murphy and the Genovese family funded the gay pride parades in New York that became annual, international demonstrations of sexual freedom, and Murphy rode the route every year in an open-top car wearing a crown and a sash that declared him “the Mayor of Christopher Street.”

  MAKING VEGAS

  Today the most visited tourist destination in the United States, the Strip in Las Vegas, would be just a street in the desert were it not for gangsters. As with other illicit but popular amusements such as early jazz and sexy movies, alcohol during Prohibition, and gay bars before Stonewall, gambling was first made profitable by those who most thoroughly disregarded social norms. In the 1930s, Meyer Lansky, leader of a Jewish crime organization known as the Syndicate, controlled more gambling operations in the western hemisphere than anyone, with major casinos in Miami, Saratoga Springs, New York, and Havana, Cuba. In 1934 Lansky sent two of his lieutenants, Moe Sedway and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, to explore the possibilities of developing casinos and hotels in Nevada, where gambling had been made legal three years earlier. Soon Sedway was working with William Wilkerson, a hotel developer who wanted to take advantage of the state’s new law but needed the mobsters’ knowledge of running gambling operations.

  By 1945, Wilkerson, Sedway, and another of Lansky’s lieutenants, Gus Greenbaum, had broken ground in the desert for what would become the Flamingo hotel and casino. Though the war had ended, wartime regulations and restrictions on construction remained, making building materials scarce and expensive. A year later, the project appeared on the verge of collapse, with Wilkerson running out of funds and unable to obtain sufficient construction materials. So in stepped Bugsy Siegel, a rising star in Lansky’s syndicate and a prominent playboy who headed the mob’s operations in Los Angeles. With his various shady connections and through a series of illegal payoffs, Siegel obtained black-market building materials at low enough prices for construction to resume on the Flamingo. Soon Siegel forced Wilkerson out of the project, established the Nevada Project Corporation of California as owner of the Flamingo, and named himself as president. By the summer of 1946, the Flamingo, which became the foundation on which Las Vegas as we know it was built, was wholly owned and operated by the mob.

  Though the Flamingo ultimately thrived, Siegel did not. The ambitious gangster’s desire to run the casino entirely on his own terms along with unaccounted losses soon after its opening led Lansky to believe that Siegel was skimming money from the enterprise. On the night of June 20, 1947, Siegel was shot repeatedly, including twice in the head, while reading the newspaper at the home of an associate in Beverly Hills, California.

  After Siegel’s murder, Greenbaum, Davey Berman, and Morris Rosen, three of the Syndicate’s chief authorities, took over the hotel and renamed it the Fabulous Flamingo. These gangsters essentially invented what is known as the “complete experience” resort. Instead of limiting its offerings to just a casino and simple accommodations, as had been the norm until then, the Flamingo staged spectacular theater productions and featured lavish rooms and massive swimming pools. Guests had no reason to ever leave the grounds. From then on, the hotel proved a smashing success, encouraging the Syndicate to devote much of its resources to building more resorts along the Strip. By the mid-1950s, the Strip was lined with hotel-casinos, most of which were owned and operated by professional criminals, and Las Vegas was made.

  BAD JEWS, THOMAS EDISON, AND THE INVENTION OF HOLLYWOOD

  Soon after he invented the motion picture camera and projector, Thomas Edison formed his own movie production and distribution company. In 1908 Edison joined with nine other film companies—owned mostly by upper-class WASPs—to create the Motion Picture Patents Company, a monopoly that attempted to control the making, distribution, and showing of all movies in the United States. Edison and “the Trust” pledged to make only movies that promoted wholesome, Christian, and “American” values. But on the Lower East Side, a group of entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants used Edison’s inventions to produce and screen their own films, which were shown in hundreds of nickelodeons—five-cent movie theaters—in working-class neighborhoods all over the country. These “outlaw” filmmakers started out as vaudeville and burlesque promoters, and many of their movies were sexier, more violent, and far more entertaining than the bland fare put out by the Trust.

  The great inventor was furious that “Jewish profiteers” were stealing his patent, getting rich from it, and using it to spread “smut” across America. So too were newspapers and law enforcement officials. In 1907 the Chicago Tribune denounced nickelodeons as being “without a redeeming feature to warrant their
existence” and “ministering to the lowest passions of childhood.” It was “proper to suppress them at once,” since their “influence is wholly vicious.” The new, cheap theaters “can not be defended,” the paper concluded, and “are hopelessly bad.” A judge in Chicago concurred, writing that “these theatres cause, indirectly or directly, more juvenile crime coming into my court than all other causes combined.” Progressive reformer Jane Addams called for tight regulation of the moral content of the motion pictures shown in nickelodeons, allowing only stories that encouraged thrift, sobriety, communal sacrifice, and the work ethic. Shortly thereafter, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance granting power to the chief of police to censor motion pictures played in the city. In New York in 1907, soon after the police commissioner recommended that nickel shows be wiped out entirely, Mayor George McClellan Jr. was so moved by the evidence of immoral motion pictures polluting the minds of his citizens that on Christmas Day he ordered that all of the illicit motion picture houses be shut down. Not until the producers of nickelodeon movies agreed to censor their own material did the mayor rescind his order.