The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  She and Elmo weren’t there long, though. Sarah told her new husband that if he didn’t move her out, she was going home to her mother. Elmo bought her a house in Lakeview, a family-oriented section of town and a far cry from the Quarter in the late forties. But as long as Sarah was married to Elmo, which she was until he died in 1968, she couldn’t get away from the part of the city she found so distasteful, because she kept the books for Elmo’s various nightclubs in the French Quarter and across Canal in the Central Business District.

  While Norma was in Pearl River, she developed a small cyst on one of her eyes. Her sister-in-law Helen took her into the city one day to have it removed. Norma talked more that day to Helen than she had to anyone since the move to the farm. Things were not good at Shady Pond. Everything was going wrong: The livestock was dwindling as cows seemed to be dropping dead overnight; some beautiful young heifers were under a tree during a thunderstorm when lightning struck and killed them all—"There went the future of our dairy!” Norma told Helen.

  Also, McCoy’s management was poor. “What does Mac know about running a dairy?” Norma said. “He’s an ex-policeman. But you can’t tell any city person there’s no money to be made in the country. They don’t believe it.”

  As they drove to New Orleans, Norma told Helen, “Your life is so different from mine. I’d trade shoes with you any day.”

  But at that time Norma’s life was not very different from Helen’s. Helen knew what she meant, though—that their backgrounds were different. “For Norma,” Helen said in retrospect, “it was already too late.”

  Nearly five years after Norma and McCoy moved to Pearl River, Norma decided she’d had it with being domestic. In the kitchen were shelves and shelves of canned fruit and vegetables. She couldn’t stand the sight. She went to her next-door neighbor’s house, a mile away, and said, “Bring up your wagon,” and she unloaded every last jar of corn and beans and preserves. Then she told McCoy she was selling the farm.

  He was shocked. “Living with you is like sitting on a keg of dynamite!” he told Norma.

  Norma didn’t care. She wanted to get back to her old life, the one she’d grown accustomed to and understood, the life of danger, excitement, and action. She had begun to think she could actually die of boredom in the country. She called another dairy farmer she knew, Louie Ballaminte, who happened to be Carlos Marcello’s brother-in-law. Marcello was reputedly the mob kingpin in New Orleans, though he had a number of vegetable trucks all over town and claimed to be nothing other than a lowly tomato salesman. Norma didn’t know Marcello at the time; she didn’t care who Louie Ballaminte’s brother-in-law was anyway. She just wanted him to buy the farm. ("He stole it from me,” she said after she let it go for a lot less than she thought it was worth in her hurry to leave Pearl River.)

  McCoy went along with Norma’s decision; he didn’t have much of a choice since the farm belonged to her. But it was in his nature to be acquiescent; not only that, he loved Norma more than he loved any cows or land or dairy business. He loved her so much that he made a dire threat before they left Pearl River for good. “If you ever get in trouble,” he told her, “if you ever go to jail, I’ll leave you.” Poor Mac. Money wasn’t important to him. He didn’t mind working; he always said he could make enough for them to live on.

  Norma brushed off his threat. “I guess he figured this old girl was squared up and we were gonna get into canned goods,” she said. “But all I could think about was what I was missing.”

  McCoy packed his belongings and followed Norma back to New Orleans, where he and Carlos Marcello became regular golf partners. He hoped he’d never have to follow through on his threat. At that time, he wasn’t even sure he could.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Big Mayor, Little Mayor

  “Without a doubt,” Norma said of this time, “I picked the single worst moment to return to New Orleans.”

  When Gaspar finally gave her the all-clear signal to come home, it was late fall of 1949 and Chep Morrison had been mayor for nearly four years. He was riding a wave of popularity and had been written up in Time magazine as the “symbol of the bright new day which had come to the city of charming ruins.” He was a busy man: changing the face of New Orleans with building projects like a new union station to replace the Southern Railway and Greyhound terminals; forging international trade programs that would turn New Orleans into the nations second-largest trading port; and initiating civic improvements like garbage trucks to replace mule-drawn wagons. He was also conducting other affairs—his marriage to the socially prominent Corinne Waterman was faltering, but divorce was not a consideration since he had hope and promise to move on to national politics. As one of his former aides put it, “He went for hamburger when he had filet mignon at home.” With all this on his plate, the sweeping cleanup of French Quarter vice and corruption that Morrison had promised dropped in priority. Not only that, he had his friend Gaspar Gulotta keeping an eye on things.

  Howard Jacobs began his profile of Norma for The Times-Picayune with the following anecdote:

  There was a mayor’s convention in town, and the more adventurous of the visiting burgomasters found themselves at Norma Wallace’s house of assignation in the French Quarter.

  The delegation was about to depart after an evening of fun and frolic when the flamboyant Norma, peering out of the peephole at the front window, was horrified to espy a policeman lolling on the sidewalk. Quickly she telephoned her brother-in-law, Bourbon Street “Mayor” Gaspar Gulotta.

  After informing him of her predicament and urging him to use his influence with the bona fide mayor to call off the law, she commented: “Do you realize if these men are busted the wheels of progress will grind to a halt in a dozen cities and an international incident might prevail?”

  Replied Gulotta: “You mean a national incident?”

  “An international incident,” repeated Norma dryly. “One of ‘em is the mayor of Barcelona.”

  Providentially, the poliziotto vanished in a few minutes. Norma gave the signal the coast was clear, and the city fathers eased furtively into the street and dispersed.

  With the mayor tightly within Gaspar’s sphere of influence, Gaspar gave Norma the signal, and Norma and Mac spent Christmas on Conti Street.

  But the status quo was sharply interrupted by an incident on New Year’s Eve 1949. A wealthy Nashville contractor who was in New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl was celebrating the new year in a French Quarter bar when he was slipped a Mickey Finn—a drink laced with chloral hydrate drops, which killed him. The mayor, under pressure from organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Young Men’s Business Club, the Kiwanis Club, Lions Club, and Optimist Club, and facing protests from the press about the vice-ridden state of the Vieux Carré, formed a citizens’ committee to investigate crime in the Quarter. This committee included such stalwart citizens as Owen Brennan, owner of Brennan’s restaurant; Richard Foster, chairman of the police advisory board; Edgar Stern, who founded New Orleans’s first television station (his estate, Longue Vue Gardens, is now owned by the city); and Gaspar Gulotta, the Little Mayor of Bourbon Street, so called because of his political influence.

  No one on the committee had the personality and array of friends in both high and low places that Gaspar had. The pudgy Little Mayor greeted all the patrons of his Bourbon Street club equally, his cigar always stuck in the corner of his mouth, and when he wasn’t tending to his own club he was off in a more splendid one, like New York’s Copacabana, with pals like the stand-up comic Joe E. Lewis, who was played by Frank Sinatra in the 1957 movie The Joker Is Wild.

  A newspaper reporter supposedly asked Gaspar how he came to be the Little Mayor. Gaspar grinned and talked around his fat cigar. “You know any udda guy in the street’s gonna challenge?”

  On April 4, 1950, a front-page article in the States implicated Gaspar in the Nashville contractor’s death. The prime suspects, two women, had been in his nightclub five days before and attempted to steal fifty
dollars from a sailor. Worse, a States reporter had been approached by a B-girl at Gaspar’s. (B-drinking establishments hired girls to sell drinks to male patrons at extravagantly inflated prices in return for the pleasure of their company.) And she invited him to come back later for a sexual assignation.

  Foster, chairman of the crime committee, demanded Gaspar’s resignation. But the Little Mayor refused to resign, and Morrison, who was known to frequent Gaspar’s, refused to dismiss him. Gaspar denied that any of the women worked for him, and he was given a vote of confidence by the rest of the committee.

  After taking office Chep Morrison liked to remind the voters of the corruption and vice that had run rampant during the Maestri regime, keeping his image of reform before the public as much as possible, posturing as a knight in shining armor whose crusade was to save the city from its archaic afflictions. He replaced the lax police superintendent George Reyer with Adair Watters, a former marine colonel. A military man stiffened the reform image; no more weak spine on the side of law and order. But when Watters made too many public statements about municipal officers’ corruption and acted to halt police graft, Morrison overruled the chief, and Watters resigned. He was replaced by Joseph Scheuring, the former chief of detectives. But Morrison’s carefully polished reform image took on its first coat of tarnish after charges that more than 650 gambling establishments still operated in the city and that Scheuring was regularly taking advice from Maestri’s partner in vice, Reyer.

  Nevertheless, the committee continued its work, recommending the prohibition of taxis on Bourbon Street and convincing the City Council to strengthen municipal laws against prostitution. A new ordinance required mandatory jail sentences for prostitutes and their patrons. The promised cleanup seemed to be a thorough and organized effort, with pressure coming to bear particularly on the bordellos.

  Norma saw the panic of all the landladies—Dora Russo, Juliet Washington, Gertie Yost, Bertha Anderson—everybody going Uptown. “So I went with the gang; I panicked and bought a house on Girod and Saratoga, a house near where the Italians killed Police Chief Hennessey before the turn of the century [another major New Orleans police scandal].” The house no longer exists; where it stood is now a parking lot, and its location is no longer considered Uptown but is on the periphery of the downtown business district, close to the Superdome.

  Things eased off, but Norma continued to conduct business Uptown while she began new improvements to her property at 1026 Conti, with an eye to making money off it in another way. She put in kitchens and air-conditioning, turning the place into an apartment house, but she was apprehensive that no one would rent from her. “People knew who Norma Wallace was, and I sure didn’t think they’d want to live in my house. At that time you were blackballed if you had a house; today it would be good for business.”

  A friend suggested she rent to Blue Room musicians. The word spread from outgoing to incoming bands, and Norma had no trouble keeping the place full at top dollar.

  Meanwhile, from Chief Hennessey’s old neighborhood, she established a friendship with Superintendent Scheuring. “He said I had a nice place and he would go along with it as long as he could.”

  Many believed that Chep Morrison wanted reform but that greed, corruption, and commercialized vice had become too ingrained over the city’s two-hundred-year history. Then, on November 15, 1950, the Item reporter Tom Sancton interviewed Criminal Sheriff John Grosch, once George Reyer’s chief of detectives. Sancton wrote that Grosch gave a “horse laugh” to the belief that Morrison was running a “reform administration.” He went on to claim that seventeen houses of prostitution were being run with police protection, as well as over a hundred handbook operations. He charged that innumerable police officers were still taking graft.

  Seven months later the investigating committee’s head, Richard Foster, pointed out to the mayor that still the police had taken no action to reduce crime in the Quarter. At the mayor’s request he wrote Scheuring, naming establishments and violations of the law. Scheuring did nothing. One month later Morrison asked Foster for his resignation from the police advisory board and appointed him chairman of the Bienville Monument Commission, a post even lower than commissioner of public safety!

  By then Senator Estes Kefauver had arrived in New Orleans. His focus was organized crime in Louisiana. Under intense questioning John Grosch, wearing the only uniform he ever wore—his white linen suit and rose boutonniere—admitted that he had allowed gambling while he was chief of detectives, but he skirted other issues. His estranged wife, however, was happy to fill in for Kefauver: She testified that Grosch had received money and gifts from gamblers and proprietors of houses of prostitution, namely Henry Muller, and $150,000 in graft while he was a patrolman. As the damaging testimony grew, Reyer admitted to owning part interest in several gambling casinos. Then Morrison conceded that he’d taken campaign contributions from pinball operators, although he denied that he’d promised any favors.

  Revelations continued until a newly called Orleans Parish grand jury demanded a private probe of police ties to vice. Many people were questioned by the Orleans grand jury, but few gave answers. One police captain refused to explain how he could afford a summer home, other real estate, and a yacht, and how he maintained various bank accounts on his salary. He was suspended. Then Cody Morris, Norma’s adversary and the chief reason for her exile to Pearl River, took a jail sentence rather than answer such questions as did he have paid protection to run his bawdy houses and did he supply girls for policemen. News leaked out that several witnesses for the grand jury had asked for protection after receiving threats, and that thirty-eight high-ranking police officers had refused to answer questions.

  Even though each grand jury served only a six-month term, the foreman was satisfied at the end of his term that if the police wanted to do something about stopping vice, they could. Provosty Dayries, the last police superintendent under Morrison, later proved this to be an accurate assessment, but to his own detriment.

  A federal grand jury was formed to continue the probe. Norma was called before that jury on April 17, 1952, along with other Quarter madams, Dora Russo, Gertie Yost, and Marie Bernard. Cody Morris was called with another male operator, BeBe Anselmo, and a gambler and close friend of Gaspar, John Saia.

  Norma’s thirteen arrests for prostitution in the 1920s were cited in the newspaper account of the federal grand jury probe, along with the other witnesses’ records, many dating back to the twenties. The more information that surfaced, the clearer it became that from the 1920s to the 1950s, little had changed.

  The 1950s police scandals gave rise to one of the smartest, crassest, and most shameless scoundrels in the history of New Orleans. For most of three decades the mere mention of the name Pershing Gervais had New Orleanians sitting up and sniffing the air for scandal, and the antics of the volatile Gervais made The Times-Picayune read like a tabloid.

  The son of deaf-mutes, Gervais had a trace of a speech impediment, the slightest pause before he began to talk, as if he had to untie his tongue first. His political life—and his life in the underworld—had started when he was a boy, brazen enough to hire out to the highest bidder (though his allegiance was usually to the Old Regulars) to stuff the ballot box or, if he didn’t have time to stuff it, to pour ink into it. He grew up to become a police officer, but he was always on the lookout for money. In old New Orleans, heavy with corruption and graft, Gervais was quick to see moneymaking opportunities and take advantage of them. According to a story he told the reporter Rosemary James (New Orleans magazine, July 1970), one of those opportunities started the 1950s police scandals. Such a claim was only more of Gervais’s theatrics: The police scandals were well under way, but his story was, at the very least, ingenious.

  Fearless and completely amoral, as a police detective Gervais openly associated with known underworld characters. But when he began flaunting some very expensive jewelry, then went on “business” to New York City, Superintendent Scheuring, who
was out of favor with Morrison and looking to ingratiate himself, decided to investigate Gervais.

  Gervais told James that one morning he arrived at police headquarters late; roll call had already begun. Thinking the precinct captain might still be in his office, Gervais opened the captain’s door and saw money spread all over the top of his desk. He scooped it up.

  He told James, “I took a trip to New York. I rented not one, but two fancy suites in a fancy hotel. I rented fifty-dollar-a-day limousines with chauffeurs, too. In those days, La Vie en Rose was a big nightspot. Jersey Joe Walcott hung out there, and Pearl Bailey was the headliner. The minute I would walk in I would get a fine table, because if anybody smiled at me I handed him a hundred-dollar tip. I know exactly how it feels to be a millionaire, because . . . for weeks . . . I lived like one . . . on police graft.”

  But the story a colleague told differed significantly from Gervais’s. Two supposedly well-known criminals had just been released from jail. They broke into the lakefront home of a Bourbon Street club owner who ran a B-drinking establishment and was also a bookmaker. He kept a large amount of cash in the safe of his house to hide it from the Internal Revenue Service. The ex-cons demanded that the club owner open the safe. The man refused, so the ex-cons began to bind his mother’s and wife’s wrists and ankles with copper wire, coming frighteningly close to cutting them off. The man opened the safe. The criminals got away with $150,000.

  Since he had not claimed the money as taxable, the club owner told the police he’d lost five thousand dollars. Gervais and his partner Sal Marchese caught the criminals and took the money, saying they’d recovered none of it. And off to New York went Gervais.

  Meanwhile, back in New Orleans, Mayor Morrison was busy defending the police in spite of the blatant revelations of graft and greed. He claimed that police were underpaid and that most officers were honest, that only rumors were at the root of the police scandals. But it was a line some people weren’t buying.