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Although section one of the Twenty-First Amendment famously provided that Prohibition “is hereby repealed,” lawmakers wary of returning to the wide-open saloon also inserted section two, which gave the states virtually unlimited power to regulate booze.5 In 1934,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 52ND 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 60TH 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 N
YSAC 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
“The Combination”
The Cosa Nostra moved into prizefighting in the 1930s principally behind Paolo “Frankie” Carbo and his partner Frank “Blinky” Palermo. Carbo was born on the Lower East Side in 1904 to respectable parents who found themselves with an incorrigible child and sent him away to a Catholic protectory. The nuns could not stop young Carbo's thirst for the criminal life: the police would arrest him twenty different times for charges ranging from juvenile delinquency to murder. In 1924, when he was twenty years old, Carbo killed a taxicab driver in the Bronx. He went on the lam for four years before pleading guilty to manslaughter in 1928.19
6–3: Frankie Carbo, ca. 1928. Carbo was a de facto boxing commissioner due to his influence over managers and fighters. (Used by permission of the John Binder Collection)
After getting out of Sing Sing, Carbo was looking for new enterprises, and he was drawn to the fight game. In the early 1930s, he started hanging around the famed Stillman's Gym on 55th Street and 8th Avenue in midtown Manhattan.20 The mafioso was enthusiastic and knowledgeable about boxing, charming everyone from lowly pug fighters to top promoters. “I like boxing. I don't know other business,” he told confidants. Still, Carbo was foremost a solider in the Lucchese Family. His business consisted of taking hidden interests in boxers, bookmaking bets on fights, and then fixing those fights.21
Carbo's partner was Frank “Blinky” Palermo of Philadelphia. They were a feared pair. “Blinky” was a bug-eyed, gravel-voiced, strutting rooster of a man with ties to Philly's Jewish gangsters. Carbo was the shadowy power broker they called “Mr. Gray.” Both loved boxing and making money off boxing. They and their associates came to be known as “The Combination,” the underworld's commissioners of boxing.22
They captured professional boxing using tactics not unlike those the Mafia used elsewhere: they targeted fragile producers (individual boxers), gained control over key geographic spaces (Madison Square Garden), and used coercive industry associations to keep everyone in line (the Boxing Managers Guild and the International Boxing Club).
Fragile Fighters
The boxer, for all his athletic strength, had a glass jaw in the mob system. Most came from working class backgrounds, with little education and few prospects outside the ring. And they could not get into the ring unless they fought by the mob's rules. “You want to know why they control boxing? It's poor, hungry people,” said former welterweight champion Don Jordan of the mob's influence. “In each state there's another syndicate person waiting to see you.”23
Fighters could only get professional matches through mobbed-up managers. When the young Rocco Barbella (the future “Rocky Graziano”) started showing promise, neighborhood gangsters sent him his first professional manager, Eddie Coco. “You better do what Eddie says. He's an important guy and he's going to get you some matches,” they told him. Coco changed Barbella's name, arranged his first pro matches, and told him when to “carry” an overmatched opponent. “No fighter can get anywhere without us,” mob guys warned a young Jake LaMotta. “Carbo had the middleweight division sewed up,” recalled the fighter Marty Pomerantz. “They made sure there was a huge amount of betting. ‘Don't knock this guy out. Knock that guy out. Maybe you don't have to win this.’ All of that went on.”24
Prizefighters who refused to carry a weaker opponent, or take dives, could be shut out from future matches. “The implication is that if you don't do certain things, you're not going to get certain fights,” explained Danny Kapilow, a boxer in the 1940s. “You were almost blackballed at that time.” It is sometimes forgotten that Jake La Motta took his infamous dive against Billy Fox (managed by Palermo) to get a title shot for the middleweight crown.25
Boxers knew even worse things could happen. “With Steve [Belloise], there came a time in the ’40s that he started to talk around the gym about the fighters’ organizing,” recounted Kapilow. “Somebody quickly put a piece in his ear. That was the end of that. They're not going to talk about it.” As former heavyweight champion Joe Louis testified in retirement, “Fighters have been taken advantage of by the underworld. A lot of managers, even a lot of promoters, get backing from outside world, outside people, who are gangsters and hoodlums.” Louis, who ended up broke himself, could have been speaking from personal experience.26
Madison Square Garden, Eighth Avenue and 50th Street
For boxers, the apex was a fight at the old Madison Square Garden, in operation from 1925 through 1968. The cavernous arena in Hell's Kitchen could seat eighteen thousand spectators, all seemingly atop the ring. The Garden was described as “the center, the pivot of boxing” in America.27
Carbo gained access to the Garden through the legendary promoter Michael “Uncle Mike” Jacobs of the Twentieth Century Sporting Club. In the 1930s, Jacobs skillfully promoted a young Joe Louis, the first African-American heavyweight champion to gain a nationwide following. He parlayed the Brown Bomber's popularity into an exclusive lease of the Garden.28
The problem with success was that Jacobs suddenly needed lots of boxers to fill matches at the Garden. Carbo had scores of fighters in his pocket. Soon, the Lucchese Family soldier would be dictating fight cards on the nation's premier boxing stage.29
The Boxing Managers Guild
Carbo and Palermo maintained power through their influence over the managers. When most managers made less than $1,000 a year (less than $8,000 a year in present dollars), Carbo was known for doling out cash to struggling managers for food or rent. Managers became so ingratiated that when they found their newest fighter, “Mr. Gray” came calling for favors. Carbo and Palermo's influence extended to every corner of the fight game. Outside New York and Philadelphia, they had collusive arrangements with managers in the Midwest boxing centers of Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, and Youngstown, Ohio.30
Their power was enhanced by the Boxing Managers Guild. This shadowy front operated on subtle extortion and hidden interests. Out-of-state boxing managers were forced to “cut in” the guild before they could even hope to get a fight in New York. Television contracts for fights were decided behind closed doors by the guild, which favored fighters in which Carbo and Palermo held interests. An investigation later found that the guild “engaged in monopolistic practices” and “abrogated to itself the conduct and regulation of boxing in New York.”31
When economic coercion was insufficient, Carbo and Palermo drew on past talents. After the boxing promoter Ray Arcel staged Saturday fights without Carbo's permission, he was assaulted with a steel pipe in front of Boston Garden. Subsequently, four bombs ripped through the Boston house of Arcel's business associate Sam Silverman. “The threat of the same for anyone else even thinking about not cooperating with Carbo & Co. was enough to bring the entire sport into line,” recalled trainer Angelo Dundee.32
December 1946, Stillman's Gymnasium on Eighth Avenue
The stench of sweat permeated the dressing room at Stillman's Gymnasium, where up-and-coming boxers trained. “How you feel Rocky? Like to make a good deal on this fight?” offered the gambler. The boxer Rocky Graziano was in training for his match against “Cowboy” Reuben Shank at Madison Square Garden on December 27, 1946. The gambler reappeared a few days later. “Don't forget that that deal is still on. You'll make a hundred grand,” he said to Graziano.33
After the District Attorney's office went public with the bribe offer, Graziano tried to backpedal from his original account, claiming he thought the offer was “a joke.” Still, the entire situation reeked. Graziano's manager was Eddie Coco, a caporegime in the Lucchese Family (who in 1953 killed a car wash owner over a bill). The knockout artist Graziano was a 4-to-1 favorite over the journeyman Shank, but a gambling syndicate was reportedly placing huge bets on Shank. Suddenly, on Christmas Eve, two days before the match, Graziano pulled out of the fight claiming a back a
ilment.34
The District Attorney's office believed Graziano knew gangsters had already bet heavily on Shank, and he was worried about crossing them if he did not take a dive. The New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) temporarily revoked Graziano's license for failing to report the bribe offer. The 1946 bribe debacle portended an era of scandal in boxing that ultimately brought down Carbo and Palermo.35
The Downfall of the International Boxing Club
The most audacious monopoly in boxing was initiated not by gangsters, but by prestigious businessmen. Truman K. Gibson Jr. was a prominent Chicago lawyer and civil rights leader who had helped heavyweight champion Joe Louis with his tax problems. In 1949, Gibson approached James Norris and Arthur Wirtz, who controlled the Chicago Stadium, the Detroit Olympia Arena, and the St. Louis Arena, and proposed that they create a dominant boxing promotion company: the International Boxing Club (IBC). They first struck a deal with the aging Joe Louis: in exchange for shares in the IBC, Louis would secure exclusive fight contracts for the IBC with the four leading contenders and then give up his heavyweight title. In the euphemisms of monopoly, it was proposed that they all “work together now and keep the events for our building and not create a competitive situation that would be harmful to all.”36
The only problem was that they had left Carbo out of the scheme. Gibson explains what happened next. “In New York the first fight that we tried to stage, the Graziano-La Motta fight, suddenly was called off because Graziano developed an illness and we had a picket line around Madison Square Garden,” Gibson recounted. They knew instantly who was behind it. “T]he organization of managers…the Carbo friendship with managers over the years,” cited Gibson. Cosa Nostra was threatening the IBC's ability to fill its fight cards. “I was having a great deal of guild trouble,” James Norris concurred. So they decided “to live with” the underworld. They put Carbo's very pretty, if very unqualified, girlfriend Viola Masters on their payroll and funneled “goodwill” payments to him through business fronts.37
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