For decades the Mafia controlled gay bars, and in the 1950s
Lee Mortimer was the first to unmask the relationship. Mortimer was a hybrid crime reporter/gossip
monger who penned the syndicated column New York Confidential which took a walk
on the Big Apple's wild side. The
intrepid muckraker had a field day when he discovered that the wise guys were behind
the so-called "daffodil dens." Although a
homophobic tone is pervasive throughout his writing -- Mortimer obviously relished
coining terms by which to slur gays -- the clear target was the mobsters. Indeed, Mortimer was a consistent crusader
against the Mafia, and throughout his journalism career exposed a number of its
rackets.
Mortimer first took aim at the mob's pervasive involvement
in gay bars in his 1952 book USA Confidential with co-author Jack Lait, and
the pair claimed:
All
fairy night clubs and gathering places are illegal, and operate only through
pay-offs to the authorities. They are organized into a national circuit,
controlled by the Mafia which also finds unique opportunity to sell dope in
such dives. Many gangsters like it that way, too, after indoctrination in
prison.
By the late 1950s Mortimer launched a campaign through his New York
Confidential column to shine a light on the mob's role in gay bars. Mortimer specifically named the establishments
and their addresses, identified the wise guys who were behind them, and explained
in detail how the racket worked including the use of front men or clean names
so everything looked legitimate on paper and the use of bribe or ice payments
to keep the precinct cops and liquor authorities at bay.
In his September 10, 1959 column Mortimer explained "how it works":
A "clean" man without a record is put on the licenses of
queer dives and bust-out joints and gets paid from $50 to $100 a week for the
use of his name and from then on the real ownership is never looked into except
perfunctorily. In addition to
arrangements for the original okay monthly "ice" runs from $350 a month on a
small operation to $600 a month for resorts grossing up to $4,000 a week, and
more in proportion. When a place gets "hot," the joints are told they've got to take a ten day suspension to cool
off. But if they get "too hot" then the
intermediaries or lay-off men advise them in advance to "sell" to another guy
with a clean sheet, who won't have any trouble passing the board and preserving
the license.
Some of the gay bars may have been seedy dives and staffed
with intimidating goons but they otherwise were sophisticated ventures. Closely-held corporations through which the
mob laundered its money sometimes provided financing for the gay bars and the
purchase of the buildings out of which they operated, and white-collar
professional teams which included lawyers and accountants structured the
transactions. None of this escaped the
attention of Mortimer who wrote in a November 25, 1960 column: "Be a good idea for one of the probes to go
into the whole relationship if any between the mobsters and the real estate
agents, lawyers shylocks and fixers who set up the homo joints and hire the
Queens."
According to Mortimer all the gay bars were either owned by
the mob or paid off the mob, and in a September 4, 1959 column he writes:
Greenwich Village is reserved exclusively for the Mob. Non-Mob joints may operate uptown if they
make their "fix" through the boys (some of whom have been named here). If they don't see the right people they get
knocked off while places next door, running even more openly, are not
bothered. Legitimate businessmen have
great difficulty obtaining licenses, but Sing Sing graduates (working through
the proper front men) seem to have no trouble.
Mortimer notes the rich irony that "tough guy" mobsters were
running bars "for the dainty hand-on-hippers," and sympathizes with the exploited patrons who are under the mob's thumb in
an August 7, 1960 column:
Not one of the joints in this town catering to the so-called
"unfortunates" is owned by one of the "unfortunates." The Mob is in -- or back in -- or protecting
everyone and that's why they operate . . . It may be hard to believe that apes
and goons like Tony Bender, Vito Genovese and all the other so-called tough
guys, including imprisoned Frank Costello and exiled Joe Adonis collect tribute
from the dainty hand-on-hippers, but they do.
They're the ones I’m gunning for, not the deviates who excuse their
aberrations on the grounds of sickness.
Mortimer correctly identified mob boss Vito Genovese and his
Greenwich Village capo Anthony "Tony Bender" Strollo as the queen bees behind
the gay bars in the 1950s. Others whom
Mortimer identified with a hand in the racket at the time were Genovese capo
Vincent Maura and Bonanno soldier Tony Mirra.
Mirra was the mobster who nearly twenty years later would unwittingly
introduce undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone a/k/a Donnie Brasco to the Bonanno
family.
Of course, taking on the mob was not without its risks, and
Mortimer wrote about "threatening telephone calls" he received from "the boys" Vinnie
Maura and Tony Mirra. For example, on
August 31, 1959 Mortimer ran the following alarm:
I'm still alive (but living on borrowed time). This is another chapter on Tony Mirra, a low
and despicable hoodlum now out on bail on a narcotics conspiracy conviction and
Vinnie Bruno Mauro, a former small-time punk who tosses around a lot of weight
as a lieutenant of fearsome Tony Bender.
I am a reporter, not a cop and usually do not volunteer knowledge to law
enforcement agencies which have their own means of obtaining same. I print it instead, which is how I make my
living. Apparently such exposures are
hitting where it hurts. I was "advised"
to lay off. When I failed to follow such
advise, I was warned to lay off. I have
been threatened before and I have been slugged before. The experience is no novelty, but it gets
boring. In order to ensure against a
reputation (or in its event to guarantee that silencing me does not silence my
information) I turned the names and a list of some 25 key establishments over
to seven local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and you can be sure
that the latter cannot be "reached."
Indeed if anything happens to me they'll look for those thugs
first. It would just be too bad for them
if commies, Castro-lovers, or Sinatra-lovers got me instead. (Maybe the mob should provide me with a
bodyguard.)
It was not beyond Mortimer occasionally to flip the script on
the mobsters. For example, in his August
7, 1960 column Mortimer writes about visiting a gay bar at 15 Greenwich where "a
gorilla followed us out and around the corner, but we turned the tables and
followed the hood right back into the place."
Mortimer's New York Confidential column may have titillated
the gentle readers but undoubtedly it also served as a guide for his gay
readers: Davi Club at 78th Street and Broadway ("lost its liquor license for the usual reasons" but "is in
business bigger than ever selling 'set ups' to an 'all-boy' clientele which
stands bumper-to-bumper at the bar and out into 78th causing a
traffic hazard"); Calvin's at 55th
and 3rd Avenue ("crowd starts early and by midnight the entire
entourage is there"); The Lion on West 9th ("put on the Armed Forces
Police index, but it's selling liquor and packed every night"); Frank's on East
81st Street ("a 'Raided Premises' sign in the window . . . but
apparently it doesn't interfere with business as usual"); Regents Row at East
43 Street ("right after the fire, Regents Row customers were advised there'd be
a bigger and better club after Labor Day"); and The Rendezvous on lower Madison
Avenue ("another favorite rendezvous of the hand-on-hip set").
Gay historians often unfairly malign Lee Mortimer as little
more than a hateful man obsessed with shutting down gay bars. The characterization is not accurate. No doubt he shared some of the prevailing homophobia
of his time. However, in many of his
books and columns he wrote about enjoying his visits to the gay bars -- "tourists come to gape (I did)" -- and in an
August 1, 1960 column wrote the following:
I'm no crusader or moralist.
I'm not out to get anyone. I know
what goes on in big cities (and on farms, too) and I'm not trying to spoil
anyone's fun except the gangsters, crooked politicians and a handful of crooked
cops and liquor investigators who cut in on it.
Mortimer's purported obsession with gay bars is overblown by his
critics, and they miss the point of his campaign which was to bring down the
mob and clean up local government as he eloquently expressed in his September
9, 1959 column:
The blind alley of gangdom-influence-pressure ends in a
solid wall which none may crack or vault.
These few paragraphs of mine may seem to be minor league stuff in face
of the jungle of crime, murder, terror and fear that the streets of New York
have become. But the conditions of which
I write tie in with the other in the general breakdown of law and order, the
indifference of the courts and the "pressures" on honest cops. Incidentally, everyone has "interviewed" me
except the D.A.'s office which still maintains its monumental indifference.
More than fifty years later the mob allegedly still has a hidden
hand in a few gay bars in New York, and the D.A.'s office "still maintains its
monumental indifference."
Further reading that may be of interest:
My Brush With The Mob
