From 1935 until his death in 1971, Joe E. Lewis was the comedian at the forefront of the Mob’s nightclub network. He was everywhere: El Rancho in Las Vegas, Ciro’s in Hollywood, the Copacabana in New York. Lewis was possibly the most prolific nightclub comedian who ever lived. But he almost didn’t live at all. Lewis defied the Mob—and paid the price in gore.
In 1927 he’d already been booked for a lengthy engagement at a small Chicago club called the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge when he was lured down the street for a gig at the New Rendezvous. Both venues were run by the Mob. Unfortunately for Lewis, they were rival factions.
The Green Mill was co-owned by Machine Gun Jack McGurn, an Al Capone associate. Taking a gig elsewhere without permission was an act of treason, but Lewis was a show business novice who thought nothing of it. Three Mob enforcers came to his hotel room to teach him a lesson. What happened next became a symbol for the decades-long relationship between comedians and the Mob. As described in the 1958 biography The Joker Is Wild by Art Cohn:
A horrendous blow struck him from behind. He turned as he fell and saw the man with the .38 raising his arm to hit him again. The third assailant was unsheathing a hunting knife. Pain coiled around his brain, tighter and tighter, and sank its fangs deeper and deeper. The knifeman went to work. He punched the blade into Joe’s left jaw as far as he could, ripped his face open from ear to throat, and went on cleaving impassively, like a butcher. He was lying on the floor, his face immersed in a pool of blood.
It took three years for Joe E. Lewis to regain the ability to talk. As a comic, words were his trade. The average comedian building an act from nothing had it tough enough, but now he had to do it while relearning how to speak.
Years later mobster Sam Giancana admitted he had been involved: “Jack [McGurn] sent me, Needles [Gianola] and another punk over to pay him a visit. We beat him to a pulp and pistol-whipped him real good. Shit, we cut his fucking throat from stern to stern. His goddamned tongue was hanging by a string out of his mouth when we got done with him. It’s a fucking wonder the guy lived. One thing we didn’t count on was how other entertainers would react. There isn’t a star alive now who’d turn us down.”
When Lewis staged his comeback in the early 1930s, crowds got a look at the fleshy scar that started at his left ear and curved across his neck. They heard the obvious rasp and struggle to establish command. The fact that Lewis survived and recovered was remarkable. More incredible, by the time Prohibition was repealed he was a headlining professional. Adhering to the code of the street, he refused to comply with police and name the men who sliced him. Back from the dead, refusing to squeal, Joe E. Lewis now had the respect of every Mob outfit in the United States. As a result, his career was set for life.
Alcohol was legal and vaudeville was dead. Milton Berle was oscillating between the half-empty vaudeville houses and the post-speakeasy nightclub world, trying to determine how to make a living without the power of Keith-Albee behind him. Nightclubs required comedians to have longer acts than in vaudeville. The average vaudeville turn was anywhere from eight to eighteen minutes; in a nightclub a comedian needed forty-five. Berle didn’t have that, so in order to stretch his time, he would ridicule the crowd. He picked on a random table at the Vanity Fair club in New York, but was unable to evoke any laughter. It is a typical nightclub story of the time.
“A mobster nicknamed ‘Pretty’ Amberg had a fondness for puncturing people’s faces with a fork,” said columnist Earl Wilson. “Milton Berle, then a young comic, didn’t know Amberg was sensitive to remarks about himself. Glancing at Amberg’s table one night at the old Vanity Fair, Berle said, ‘Oh, it’s Novelty Night—you’re with your wife.’”
Berle recalled, “When the show ended I went straight to my dressing room. ‘Table twelve wants to see you.’ Nobody at the table nodded or said hello or even smiled at me. When the waiter left no one spoke. I was getting very nervous, so I said, ‘Did you like the show?’ ‘No. It stunk.’ He yanked my face close to his.”
“Amberg grabbed Berle’s throat and began pulling on his tie,” said Wilson. “Berle was choking helpless. Then Amberg reached for a fork ready to tear Berle’s face with it.”
“He jabbed the fork straight into my chin,” said Berle. “[Mobster] Marty Krompier stepped in and grabbed his wrist and forced his hand open . . . I got the hell away from that table as fast as I could. Krompier pushed me into the street, pushed me into a cab, and gave the driver the name of a doctor the local Boys had on call. I got two stitches for each prong of the fork, eight stitches in all.”
“Amberg was later found dead in cement,” said Wilson. “His penis had been cut off and jammed in his mouth. This was the mobster’s way of saying that a victim had talked too much.”
For a good forty years the Mob controlled American show business. “It was always ‘Outfit’ to us,” says comedian Dick Curtis. “Never the Mob or Cosa Nostra or any of the other names you might have heard. These guys were the Outfit.” From the 1930s through the end of the 1960s every city in America had at least one glamorous supper club, if not four or five, featuring the top headliners in every showbiz genre. Furthermore, it didn’t matter if these clubs were in Cleveland, Portland, Corpus Christi or Baton Rouge—if it was a nightclub, the owners were the Mob.
“The clubs were owned by bootleggers and even a few killers,” said actor George Raft, who had worked as a dancer in New York supper clubs. “In my time I knew or met them all. Al Capone, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Dutch Schultz, Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Lucky Luciano, Vinnie Coll—most of them were around.”
“The Mob was very, very good to me,” says ninety-one-year-old comedienne Rose Marie, best known as Sally on The Dick Van Dyke Show. As a nightclub performer in the 1940s she was regularly booked at the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Newport, Kentucky, a Mob venue that was intentionally burned to the ground on two different occasions.
Insulting the Mob-connected was a common problem for comedians. As Milton Berle learned, you had to be cautious. In New York five caustic insult comics—Vince Curran, Frankie Hyers, Fred Lamb, Pat Harrington Sr. and Jack White—figured out a way around the risk. In 1938 they opened Club 18. Its whole mandate was insult comedy. It was known in advance that patrons would be ridiculed, thereby downplaying the risk of the wrong person being angered. Club 18 was named for its address on West 52nd Street, the former domain of Red McKenzie, a preeminent comb-and-wax-paper soloist. Taking over the jazz joint, Curran, Hyers, Lamb, Harrington and White made it the bailiwick of angry comics for ten successful years.
“Jack White was a wild kind of guy for those days, a leader of comics,” says Pat Harrington Jr. “By the second year of Club 18, everybody knew what the place was about. If a guy looked like he was from the Midwest, then you treated him that way and insulted him. But if he had any kind of a broken nose or scarred forehead, your instinct was to avoid him.”
Jack White was the first modern insult comic. He had balls like no other. Comedians Bob Hope, George Jessel and Rags Ragland sat in his audience as willing targets. It was a comic’s room where comedians actually laughed rather than sneered from a back table. The five comedians simultaneously berated patrons. From backstage Frankie Hyers would shout, “And ah-way we go!” and, with individual mics, they’d prowl the crowd. “They are all masters of insult,” wrote Life magazine. “When a well-dressed guest arrives, Jack cordially invites him to stand up and bow. Then Pat yells, ‘Sit down, you bum!’ And Frank adds, ‘That’s no bum. Bums take baths!’” Arnold Shaw, chronicler of 52nd Street, wrote, “No small part of the club’s audience consisted of would-be comics, as well as the leading comics of the day. In fact, there were so many gagsters around that it was difficult to know who was part of the act and who was just sitting in.”
Club 18 occasionally used guest comedians when one of the primary five was on the road. Jack Waldron was a good fit. He honed his insult shtick at Lambs Club L
ambastings, a rival offshoot of Friars Club roasts. Comic Benny Rubin said Waldron was “the first Don Rickles and Jack E. Leonard. His task was a little more difficult, however, because he insulted guys who would shoot you.”
Agent Willie Weber asked Fred Lamb to use a comedian he represented, a fat kid who usually played Queens. His name was Jackie Gleason and he became a regular. Gleason said, “Every time someone like Frankie Hyers or Pat Harrington or Jack White couldn’t make it, it was little Jackie boy who stepped in and always saved the day.” Gleason picked up some of his familiar phrases at Club 18. “Frankie Hyers was the guy who invented the phrase ‘And ah-way we go,” says straight man Peter Marshall. “It was his catchphrase—and then Jackie Gleason took it.”
Gleason, Harrington and Hyers eventually became regular performers in Miami Beach. The same could be said of almost every comedian of their era. Dominated by the Mob element, there were more nightclubs in South Florida than anywhere else in the country. In the words of comedian Alan King, “Miami Beach was the Vegas of the 1940s.”
Lax laws in regards to gambling and prostitution made it an attractive vacation spot. South Florida was transformed into America’s playground during the Great Depression. To buoy the sinking economy, restrictions on pari-mutuel gambling were erased. Desperate people flooded the region and wasted their meager dollars at new dog tracks, horse tracks and casinos. Construction boomed, with forty new hotels opening in 1940 alone. “Early Miami was marvelous, and there were big gambling places way out past Miami toward Hollywood, Florida,” says comedian Jack Carter. “There were places like Greenacres and the Colonial Inn and they would play four people on one bill: Sophie Tucker, Harry Richman, Joe E. Lewis, Milton Berle—they’d all be on one show. It was big, big-time showbiz.”
“They had dice games going on and stuff like that, all on the QT,” says comedian Woody Woodbury. “You’d go into the back room and it was like walking into a showroom in Vegas. You couldn’t believe the gambling there in the old days.” At midcentury Time called Miami Beach “the prime destination for Americans on the make, on the lam, or on a pension.” It was also the prime destination for comedians. The Beach was a place where total nobodies like Jackie Clark, Artie Dann and Frankie Scott could make a living reciting their joke book hackwork. At the same time they could brush shoulders with giants like Milton Berle, George Burns and George Jessel. Everyone did the Beach. It had the largest concentration of stand-up comedy in the United States.
Comedian Bobby Ramsen got his break in Miami Beach playing the Nautilus Hotel. “I jumped at the chance to be playing Miami Beach. Every year they put up a new hotel. When World War II was over, America had a party. We had won the war, people were working, money was no object, people were going out every night. Every town in America—every other door in every small town in America was a nightclub! Comics were working. Marimba players opening the show! Dance teams! Contortionists! Everybody had a job in show business.”
During the winter of 1950, the region had more than three hundred hotels in operation. The number of hotels operating in Las Vegas at the same time was four. It was a hedonistic culture where tourists indulged in booze, drugs, gambling and girls. A comedian could do a show at midnight, seduce a woman at three, wander into the Five O’Clock Club and drink till dawn. Jack Carter says, “The people that stayed at the big hotels would go early to the Colonial Inn or the Copa City. The Five O’Clock Club stayed open for the late mobs. You really had to be on your toes to work that crowd. That’s when Murderers’ Row came in.”
The Five O’Clock Club was a compact joint at 22nd and Collins Avenue. When it first opened it meant class. Leo Lazaro and his Continentals played sultry waltzes and Lady Vine belted out the standards. The advertisements boasted that it was elaborately decorated in the modern manner. But like so many class nightclubs, it drifted into depravity; the Five O’Clock Club frayed and lost its allure. In an attempt to boost business, Martha Raye was offered a piece of the club if she would allow her name to appear above the sign. The scheme worked and Martha Raye’s Five O’Clock Club reopened as a party spot where high society shared space with drug addicts.
“I went down there and Martha Raye was a big star, supposedly,” says Shecky Greene. “This guy named the club after her and it was successful for a while. I went in and I really didn’t know what was happening . . . strange people hanging out at the bar . . . all of a sudden I smell this stuff. They were all hitting on amyl nitrate. The whole club. Errol Flynn came in. He was on amyl nitrate.”
It was the kind of place where comedians, no matter how bad their act was, could always find a stripper to lay. The kind of place where rim-shots were born and backstage babies conceived. “The Five O’Clock Club brought in comedians and Martha would take their stuff,” says Greene. “I would come back to work for her and the bandleader would say, ‘Don’t do your French routine—she’s doing it.’ Well, it was my routine!”
Another compact venue was the Vagabond Club, a joint named for a musical novelty act with a stoned accordion player. “I worked with the Vagabonds on and off for seven years,” says Woody Woodbury. “They were a tremendous hit down there. They opened up their own place, a real plush place.” Jack Carter says, “They were a good act. Atillio Risso played the accordion and created a lot of the hippie-stoned jokes.” The Vagabonds, like all the others, were connected to the Mob. Vagabonds member Babe Pier says, “The Mob was always good to us. They were great guys—to us.”
Miami Beach was stand-up comedy’s busiest city, but the whole country was littered with club dates. “When we say a ‘club date,’ we mean a one-nighter,” says old-time comic Milt Moss. “An organization would send out a singer, a dancer, a comedian for a club date. Today that has faded out. But there used to be tremendous work between New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami and Houston.”
Many of them had back rooms with casinos or bookmakers. By the end of the 1940s Democratic senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee was going after them. A mild-mannered Machiavelli-in-disguise, Kefauver railed against Mob-run gambling rooms and rode the issue to prominence. Perfectly timed with the rise of television, Kefauver became the first celebrity-politician of the televised age.
Kefauver’s attack on the Mob officially started January 5, 1950, when he introduced Senate Resolution 202. It called for an investigation of organized crime in the United States. The committee started work on May 10, 1950. Kefauver launched the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce. Suddenly people knew the name Frank Costello as well as they knew the name Kefauver.
Kefauver’s battle was a touchy one. The Mob’s power was concentrated in the big cities of America, which were overwhelmingly liberal. Consequently, the majority of the politicians in the pocket of the Mob were Democratic officeholders—and their Democratic colleague Kefauver was about to expose them. By default the liberal senator became a hero to Republicans and a pariah in his own party.
The committee held hearings in fourteen different cities. The first stop was Miami. It listened to several hours of testimony. Florida governor Fuller Warren refused to cooperate with the commission and by doing so implied guilt—ending his political career. Warren said Kefauver “is an ambition-crazed Caesar who is trying desperately and futilely to be a candidate for President of the United States.”
Kefauver’s next stop was Chicago. A former Chicago police officer was slated to testify, but he was murdered first. Two days later the lawyer amassing the information for the sheriff’s office was killed. Lenny Bruce joked that Chicago was the only city where death certificates listed a cause of death as “He wouldn’t listen.” Bruce played small Chicago coffeehouses like the Cloister, but even they were run by the Mob. Comedian Dick Curtis says, “The Cloister was an Outfit joint. Of course it was! All of those places were.”
The Chez Paree was Chicago’s primary nightclub. “It was the most important club and the biggest stars played it,
” says singer Monica Lewis. “They had a wonderful orchestra, wonderful food and a wonderful line of dancing girls. They’d have a comic as an opening act and a singer or a dance act. It was always a big show.” Mike Wallace, long before hosting 60 Minutes, did a radio talk show from its lounge, and the Mob ran a secret casino in the back. Peter Marshall says, “You needed a gold key to get in the back room, with gambling and broads and all of that.”
Chicago had a collection of lobbyists that defended Mob interests. A Mob front called the Chicago Cafe Owners Association represented their concerns. It flourished during the war years, but ended when its president, John Comise, was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.
Variety usually signed its nightclub reviews with the nickname of the author—but in Chicago the bylines were left anonymous. “It was emphatically chancy,” said one editor. “Two staffers in the Chicago office narrowly escaped bone fractures or worse for pans.”
When Kefauver arrived in New York, the hearings became high drama. Frank Costello, éminence grise of Manhattan’s Copacabana nightclub, was the star witness. Brought before the committee, Costello would not allow his face to be shown on television. In a compromise, the committee instructed cameras to focus solely on his hands, adding an expressionist flourish to the broadcast. Costello’s statement “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds it may incriminate me” became a familiar refrain that entered the American lexicon. As Costello was grilled, the names of nightclubs and comedians entered the public record.
The Copacabana was the most important of all the Mob-run nightclubs. “The Copacabana was a front for Frank Costello,” says comedian Lou Alexander. “I mean, all of those places were racket guys. All of them. If you worked nightclubs and these guys didn’t like you—then you didn’t work.” The Copa hosted successful runs of comedians like Sid Caesar, Jack Carter, Myron Cohen, Pat Cooper, Jean Carroll and Martin & Lewis. It opened in 1940 at 10 East 60th Street in New York City, directly below the Hotel Thirteen. It was accused of being a Mob front as early as 1944. “In those days, any of the nightclubs were being run by that element,” says Bobby Ramsen. “It was a natural flow of ownership and leadership [because] these guys, during Prohibition, were the ones running speakeasies.”
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