by Keach Hagey
At that point, the partnership was simple. Redstone would run the club, and Sagansky would put up the money. “It was my father’s money,” Sage said. “The Redstones didn’t put any money in it, I don’t think, until 1949 or 1950. My father paid for all the theaters, and he paid for all the nightclubs.”
Mickey had a good feel for talent and an even better touch with the press. He took chances on a new generation of up-and-coming comedians, like the rotund Romo Vincent, whom several years later Dinneen declared the “funniest man in America.” Mickey had the influential Dinneen wrapped around his little finger.14 By 1942, with America’s involvement in World War II in full swing and Boston’s harbor crawling with sailors and other servicemen looking for a good time, the Mayfair was making money hand over fist along with the rest of the Conga Belt. So Mickey and Sagansky decided to double down on their nightlife empire by taking over the much-higher-profile Latin Quarter.
* * *
The Latin Quarter was the brainchild of Lou Walters, a slim, elegant talent agent with a British accent, a bookish streak, and a glass eye, whose daughter Barbara would go on to become the pathbreaking broadcasting legend.
In her memoir, Barbara Walters describes her father’s innovation when he opened the nightclub in 1937 in a deconsecrated Greek Orthodox Church at 46 Winchester Street, a few blocks away from the Mayfair and Cocoanut Grove:
Boston had its share of nightclubs already. What Boston did not have was an inexpensive nightclub that served a full dinner for under ten dollars and was naughty enough for grownups but tame enough for families. My father toyed at first with using the Congo as a theme, with lions and tigers painted on the walls and a chorus line of pretend native dancing girls. His next idea was to re-create a more bohemian club, like those in New York’s artsy Greenwich Village. But after seeing the new movie Gold Diggers in Paris, starring Rudy Vallee as a nightclub owner with a chorus line of American girls transported to Paris, he decided to do the same thing in reverse: He would bring Paris to Boston.
No bank would give him a loan for a nightclub, she writes, so he scraped together money from friends and family. He got his liquor license by calling “his old patron and friend” Joe Timilty, Boston’s police commissioner, who turned around and called “his close friend” then governor James Michael Curley. He spent the weeks before the opening melting candle wax around the necks of empty wine bottles to create a Parisian ambience.
It was an instant success. There were two shows nightly featuring singers, acrobats, and the occasional comedian, but the main attraction was the chorus line of barely clothed, besequined girls whom Walters had recruited from local dance schools. He called them his “petite mamzelles.” “For the finale,” his daughter wrote, “they would drop, one by one, into a deep split, raising their skirts over their heads and showing their ruffled panties.”
The formula worked so well that Walters took it to Miami and eventually, in April 1942, to New York, where it was such a phenomenon that the corner of Broadway and Forty-Eighth Street, where it was located, is named “Lou Walters Way.”15 In July 1942, Walters sold the Boston Latin Quarter to the L.Q. Corporation, a newly formed company whose three officers included a Boston lawyer named Louis Winer.16 In typical fashion, the founding documents bore no mention of the name Redstone, but Winer would go on to become one of Mickey’s most trusted advisers, serving as general counsel for National Amusements for decades and as a trustee of the trust that Mickey would leave to his grandchildren. Winer would go on to cofound a law firm with a younger lawyer named George Abrams, who began arguing cases for the Redstones around 1960 and would remain one of the family’s most trusted advisers for more than half a century.17
On September 10, 1942, just as Boston’s nightclub scene was enjoying its best business in years, the Latin Quarter opened for the season under Mickey’s management with a lineup that included the comedian Buster Shaver “and his two midgets,” comedic dance duo May and Lou Seller, a “starlet singer” named Jerry Kruger, and a ballerina named Helene Denison. “The place is still Boston’s finest show case and the site of the best revues in town,” Dinneen wrote. “Mickey Redstone, who also operates the Mayfair, succeeds Lou Walters and will be as good a showman.”18 Within a little more than a month, Mickey’s Latin Quarter, despite being the most expensive of the city’s nightclubs, with its $3 minimum, was drawing twelve hundred patrons on a Saturday night—the most of any club in the city.19
* * *
Sagansky’s other businesses were also flourishing. By then, he had become “perhaps the principal gambling racketeer in the New England area,” according to FBI testimony before the Senate special committee on organized crime led by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver in the early 1950s. And he was increasingly a player on the national scene. By 1942, he was speaking on the phone as many as six times a day to Frank Erickson, New York’s biggest bookmaker, who had learned the trade as Arnold Rothstein’s right-hand man and forged a lucrative partnership with New York mob boss Frank Costello.20 Along with Costello, Erickson—plump and bald with cartoonishly round features that made him look a bit like the Belgian comic strip character Tintin—pioneered a system of “laying off” bets, which let bookies all around the country minimize their risk through a system that worked essentially like reinsurance. If a large number of people placed a bet with long odds that, if it hit, would have required a large payout from the bookie, that bookie could hedge his risk by calling up a more powerful bookie, sometimes called a betting commissioner, and placing that same bet. That summer of 1942, Erickson was doing a lot of business as Sagansky’s betting commissioner, collecting $13,520 ($200,000 in today’s money) from him in July alone.21 Sagansky had similar relationships with betting commissioners from Houston to Chicago to Rhode Island, and business was booming. By the end of 1941, he had $1.1 million in the bank, and by the end of 1942, he had $1.3 million—nearly $20 million in today’s dollars.22
Mickey and Sagansky were riding the crest of a wave. But the good times would not last long.
* * *
It was a frigid Saturday night, November 28, 1942, and Boston’s Conga Belt was buzzing. The undefeated Boston College football team had played Worcester’s Holy Cross at Fenway Park that afternoon, and Boston College’s victory party had been scheduled at the Cocoanut Grove. BC lost in an upset, but that didn’t make the Grove any less the place to be that night. A Hollywood cowboy movie star visiting town, Buck Jones, had attended the game with Boston mayor Maurice Tobin and was due to make his own appearance at the nightclub, which had a special terraced area reserved for celebrities.23 Since Charles “King” Solomon’s rubout, the club had been run by his lawyer, Barnett Welansky, who had installed a low-key efficiency to the operation, as well as some more respectability. Anyone who was anyone was going to be there, enjoying a slice of tropical island paradise amid a Boston winter.
By ten p.m., the club was packed with more than a thousand patrons, more than twice its legal capacity. Coats were stacked on the floor of the coatroom, and waiters had set up extra tables on the dance floor and in the hallways between rooms. Beneath columns disguised as palm trees, lighting fixtures dressed up as coconuts, and a ceiling draped with blue satin, patrons had to pass cocktails and oysters overhead to each other when waiters couldn’t reach.
Downstairs, in the dimly lit Melody Lounge piano bar, a sailor and his date were getting intimate. Wanting a bit more privacy, the sailor reached into a fake palm tree and unscrewed the nearest lightbulb, leaving his corner of the lounge in complete darkness. Annoyed, a bartender asked a sixteen-year-old busboy to screw it back in. The busboy lit a match to better see what he was doing. The palm tree sparked, ignited, and then torched the reams of satin covering the ceiling. Panicked patrons soon found that many of the club’s nearly dozen exits had been bolted shut to keep people from sneaking out without paying their bills. They stampeded for the revolving door through which they had entered, but only a few made it out onto the street before the stack of bodi
es lodged in the door rendered it useless.
Within less than a half an hour, 492 people had been killed or fatally wounded in the worst club fire in American history. The fire and toxic smoke had moved so fast that several patrons died with their drinks in their hands.24
City officials launched a smattering of investigations, but they were all quickly subsumed by the one led by Attorney General Robert Bushnell, a crusading forty-six-year-old prosecutor who, but for the sweep of his cowlick and a bit of softness at the base of his mustache, bore an unfortunate resemblance to Adolf Hitler. Bushnell was a politically ambitious, New York–born Republican who sought to ride the same wave of reformist fervor that had propelled the similarly mustachioed Thomas Dewey from gang-busting prosecutor, best known for putting away Lucky Luciano, to the New York governor’s mansion and presidential ticket.
He framed his Cocoanut Grove investigation as a story of political corruption, the almost-inevitable outcome of the too-cozy relationship between mob-affiliated nightclub owners and public officials. A neon lighting specialist testified in an earlier investigation that he had told Welansky that some lighting in a new wing of the club needed a city permit and supervision by a licensed electrician, and Welansky had replied that it wouldn’t be needed because “Tobin and I fit. They owe me plenty.”25 The quote became Bushnell’s clarion call as he charged Welansky and a handful of city officials with manslaughter. “The whole thing constitutes a trap in which lives were taken as a result of gross, wanton and willful acts and failures to act on the part of the defendants,” Bushnell said at trial.26
In the end, Welansky was the only one who went to jail, sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in Charlestown State Prison. In classic Boston fashion, he was pardoned, gravely ill with cancer, three and a half years later by Maurice Tobin, who had gone on to become governor.
Over the next year, Massachusetts tightened its fire safety codes, defining nightclubs and restaurants as places of public assembly for the first time, and therefore subject to stricter rules. And Boston, as well as other cities, began to enforce its already existing fire rules more forcefully. The Conga Belt would never be the same. The Latin Quarter had to yank down its sumptuous draperies to minimize potential fire hazards.27 Attendance suffered. Musicians went out of work while the city conducted its inspections. But that would turn out to be the least of the club owners’ problems.
Most troublingly for Mickey and Sagansky, an emboldened attorney general now had a surge of popular support to crack down on the toxic cocktail of gangsterism, graft, and palm-greasing that had defined Boston’s politics for a generation.
Chapter 3
“The Whole Situation”
January 12, 1943, started out1 like any other Tuesday in Doc Sagansky’s gambling empire. By ten a.m., his sales force had taken up their regular posts at the beauty shops, shoeshine parlors, and poolrooms of Boston’s West End, North End, and Charlestown, ready to pick up the day’s number pool plays and horse bets. In sparkling new cars, obtained the previous August despite the war’s rationing of tires and limits on car sales, they made their rounds—once in the morning, once in the afternoon—before turning over the plays to the sales manager for their district as the midwinter sun set.
Normally, the sales managers would then take these plays to the syndicate’s headquarters, disguised as a paper company inside a yellow brick and limestone building across the street from the Charlestown police station. But there had been a fire in the building a few weeks before, so for the last few days, Sagansky and his lieutenants were making do in the Back Bay apartment of a blond nightclub hostess.2 They were just converging here for the accounting hour, when the winning bets would be tallied and sent back out through the same network of managers and salesmen, when the door flew open.
At precisely 4:45 p.m., fifty-two state troopers and a handful of FBI agents simultaneously smashed through the doors of twelve apartments, homes, and offices suspected to be involved in Sagansky’s sprawling gambling operation, including his palatial Brookline home and the headquarters that turned out to be owned by the city. Ominously for Sagansky, not a single Boston police officer was on hand for the raid.
A few of the gang tried to escape by diving out of windows, but the troopers, who had been methodically tracking the syndicate’s routine for seven months, had covered all the exits. In the end, twenty-three people—including Sagansky; the hostess, Lee Goldblatt (who he would go on to marry several years later, after losing his wife to cancer); his wife’s brother; and his wife’s sister—were arrested and taken down to state police headquarters. The officers found so many adding machines, racing charts, and betting slips that it took two vans to cart all the evidence down to the station.
The Boston Globe ran Sagansky’s mug shot on its front page the next day, his wire-rimmed glasses, crisp suit, and stoically pitying expression giving him more the look of the inconvenienced dentist he was than a criminal mastermind. Above it was an enormous headline painting him as the brains behind a $90 million gambling ring spanning Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut that had defrauded the federal government of $1.5 million in taxes over the last eight years. A line of his compatriots in rumpled double-breasted suits marched by the news camera, hiding their faces with their fedoras. All twenty-three people were charged with conspiracy to set up and promote a lottery, but Sagansky’s $25,000 bail (or about $350,000 in today’s money) was more than twice anyone else’s.
The paper touted the roundup as “the biggest raid of its kind in Massachusetts history,” which, given the surge of illegal gambling throughout Massachusetts in the wake of Prohibition, spoke more to the priorities of local law enforcement than the ambition of these particular authorities. Indeed, a hint about those priorities would emerge the next day, when investigators rummaging through a locked closet in Sagansky’s home found him named as the beneficiary on a $50,000 life insurance policy on Congressman James Michael Curley, the famously colorful and corrupt “Rascal King” of Boston’s politics then passing a sojourn in Washington, D.C., between his third and fourth terms as Boston’s mayor.3 Curley said the policy was collateral on an $8,500 loan from Sagansky and claimed he’d never met the bookie before borrowing the money. But his presence on Sagansky’s client list was politically problematic nonetheless.
Curley had been mayor of Boston during Prohibition, when he would display his low opinion of the Eighteenth Amendment by attaching a corkscrew and bottle opener to the keys to the city that he gave visiting officials. The financial ties between Curley’s Democratic machine and nightclub owners never fully dissolved after repeal. In the wake of the Cocoanut Grove fire, they became a liability for both sides.4 To top it all off, his involvement underscored the ugly appearance that the police were in on the whole thing. During Curley’s term as governor in 1936, he had tapped his good friend Joseph Timilty, a tubby man with slicked-back, salt-and-pepper hair and bushy black eyebrows who was less of a lawman than a Democratic political operative, as Boston’s police commissioner, despite loud protests over his lack of qualification.5
Attorney General Robert Bushnell, who was probing the Cocoanut Grove fire, happened to also be the architect of the raid against Sagansky. And as was becoming increasingly clear, his true target was not so much Sagansky’s gambling operation as his political relationships.
Within forty-eight hours of the raid, Bushnell went after Timilty directly, demanding that he hand over a “complete” record of the Boston police department’s number pool, horse betting, and other gambling arrests and prosecutions over the last two years, ensuring the department’s rank and file that they were “all right” because “for obvious reasons police officers of lower ranks are helpless when criminal syndicates are allowed to take over.”6
Bushnell was so bent on proving that Boston’s police department, and indeed entire political establishment, was on the take from its underworld that he was not going to take any chances. Even as he pursued illegal gambling charges against Sagansky and
his crew, Bushnell was also working with the Middlesex County district attorney on a new angle showing how Sagansky and his ilk bought off government officials. A week after Sagansky’s brother bailed him out of jail, Sagansky was arrested a second time, this time for allegedly trying to bribe two aldermen from the Boston suburb of Malden to vote for a chairman who would grant him a license to run a game of beano, a variant of bingo played with beans. When Sagansky was indicted on bribery charges a few days later, Bushnell declared, “I am under no illusions as to what we are up against—undertaking to attack conditions which are deep-rooted and have existed for years.”7
* * *
Timilty’s alliance with Sagansky had been in Bushnell’s sights since the start of his term. One of his first acts as attorney general was to write the Boston police department about the complaints he had been receiving about the gambling rackets, particularly one “big shot” who controlled horses, numbers, and dice games. A Boston detective was assigned to investigate and came back naming the big shot—Harry “Doc Jasper” Sagansky—and giving the exact location of his headquarters. Police officials promised immediate action. But a year then passed, and nothing happened.8
So in June 1942, having laid a paper trail revealing the police department’s inaction, Bushnell assembled a team of investigators borrowed from state police, district attorneys, and federal authorities and launched his own investigation, quietly setting up an off-site location away from state police headquarters. For seven months, investigators filmed Sagansky’s network making their rounds and picking up plays, occasionally posing as customers themselves to build trust. Again and again, they passed up opportunities to nab lower-level players in hopes that patience would lead them to Sagansky himself.