History of Gay Bars in New York City

The Sopranos Take

"[b]eginning in the 1890s, homosexuals, a group that historically faced widespread discrimination, found a few hospitable commercial establishments in the Village"

In The Italians of the South Village (Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation:  2007), Mary Elizabeth Brown writes:

The South Village business establishments catered to a wide variety of groups, a fact that underscores how the penchant for making money overcame the desire to discriminate. Beginning in the 1890s, homosexuals, a group that historically faced widespread discrimination, found a few hospitable commercial establishments in the Village. In the 1920s, Prohibition outlawed alcoholic beverages, driving underground the sale and consumption of alcohol and the interactions that accompany it. When Prohibition ended in 1933, the tolerance previously extended to homosexuals socializing in public did not resume. Mafiosi (individuals with Mafia ties) took advantage of the situation by opening establishments catering to gays and lesbians.  Several men affiliated with the Genovese crime family owned and operated the Stonewall Inn, the site of the 1969 protest that began the Gay Liberation Movement.

Download The_Italians_of_the_South_Village.pdf

The Slide at 157 Bleecker Street: the "wickedest place in New York"

A January 25, 2007 article ("Preservation Bid Eyes Gay History") by Paul Schindler from Gay City News states:

“Witness the Scenes in 'the Slide' as the Herald Describes Them to You, and Straightway Begin Your Work of Reform."  So read a sub-headline in a crusading piece of New York Herald reporting on January 5, 1892, as reported in George Chauncey's acclaimed 1994 history, "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940."  The Herald exposé called readers' attention to what it described as a "depravity unknown in the lowest slums of London or Paris"-a basement club located at 157 Bleecker Street near Thompson, two blocks below Washington Square Park, in the heart of the South Village. The establishment catered to "pansies"-effeminate men whose faces were often "rouged up" and who counted on more butch types, mostly single men, many of them working class, to buy them drinks and perhaps even pay them for sex. In a reversal of the way in which the commerce runs in today's gay slang, the macho partner was sometimes known as "trade."  The Slide, dubbed by the Press, another Gotham newspaper of the day, as the "wickedest place in New York," was probably indeed the most disreputable of the turn-of-the century establishments we would now call gay, but it was not the only one. In the area that runs up from Bleecker to West Third, from Sixth Avenue to as far east as Broadway, historians as well as tales passed down from one generation to the next document a vibrant outcropping of establishments that served men and women who enjoyed same-sex desire-including cheap restaurants, saloons, and tea rooms-and sat close by brothels of a more traditional kind as well as Catholic churches that served the neighborhood's emerging working class Italian-American community.  By 1925, at the northwest corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, the neighborhood supported a tonier watering hole, the San Remo, that for decades to come drew what cultural historian Steven Watson has called "the younger generation of bohemians," a group that could also be thought of as perhaps proto-metrosexuals-including Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Frank O'Hara, Larry Rivers, Gore Vidal, Dorothy Day, Miles Davis, Jackson Pollack, James Agee, and Jack Kerouac.  * * *  But Bohemia proved resilient in the South Village, and by the early 20th century the dives of the 1900s were supplemented by a more varied array of establishments probably more recognizable to the modern gay eye. Gay speakeasies arose and in many cases survived for decades, and institutions that would grow to have important influence in the development of modern gay culture-such as the Provincetown Playhouse, on [133] MacDougal Street-emerged. For all we know, at the San Remo, Merce Cunningham and Gore Vidal may have argued bitterly over whether they were a pair of gay men, or merely "homosexualists," to borrow the iconoclastic author's preferred formulation. And by 1958, a new generation of gay New Yorkers was at it, this time at 31 Carmine Street, with the establishment of Café Cino, a coffee house that Dolkart writes "became the birthplace of the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement." There young gay dramatists, including William Hoffman, Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson, and Lanford Wilson first won attention, along with what Patrick, in an interview with On the Purple Circuit's Michael Dale, described as "the odd straight playwrights like John Guare [and] Sam Shepard."

The Ariston Turkish and Russian Baths at Broadway and Fifty-fifth Street: "There was intense excitement about the place when the raid was made"

A February 22, 1903 article ("Police Raid Ariston Baths") from the New York Times states:

Inspector Brooks, Acting-Inspector Walsh and Capt. Schmittberger of the West Forty-seventh Street Station, about 1:30 this morning raided the Ariston Turkish and Russian baths, at Broadway and Fifty-fifth Street.  The party surrounded the place and found about sixty persons inside.  They drove up a patrol wagon in which they were going to take away those at the baths, of whom two were detectives looking for evidence.  Inspector Brooks said evidence had been gathered for weeks against the place and that the conduct of some of the frequenters of the establishment was questionable.  * * *  There was intense excitement about the place when the raid was made.

1900 - 1920: NYC Finocchio

In Gay New York:  Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (1994), George Chauncey writes:

The contrast between Italians and Jews, the two newest and largest groups of immigrants in New York at the turn of the century, is particularly striking.  A 1921 study of men arrested for homosexual “disorderly conduct,” for instance, reported that “the Italians lead” in the number of arrests; at a time when the numbers of Italians and Jews in New York were roughly equal, almost twice as many Italians were arrested on homosexual charges.  More significant is that turn-of-the-century investigators found a more institutionalized fairy subculture in Italian neighborhoods than in Jewish ones.  The Italian neighborhood of the Lower East Side had numerous saloons where fairies gathered interspersed among the saloons where female prostitutes worked.  In 1908, Vito Lorenzo’s saloon, located at 207 Canal Street (near Baxter), was charged by the police with being a “fairy place.”  In 1901, agents conducting a systematic survey of “vice conditions” on the Lower East Side found male prostitutes working at two Italian saloons on the block of Elizabeth Street between Hester and Grand, the same block where the Hotel Zaza’s manager hired rooms to female prostitutes who stood at the windows in “loose dresses and call[ed] the men upstairs.”  One investigator noted that the Union Hall saloon was crowded with old Italian men and several young fairies on the night of March 5; a few doors up the street, at 97 Elizabeth, stood a saloon where the fairies, aged fourteen to sixteen, could “do their business right in [the] backroom.”  A month later the same saloon was said to have “5 boys known as [finocchio, or fairies] about 17 to 25 years of age.  * * *  The patterns of homosexual behavior noted in Sicily appear to have persisted in modified form in the Italian enclaves on the Lower East Side, in Greenwich Village, and in East Harlem.  * * *  [I]t seems likely that an important part of the homosexual culture of fairies and their sex partners visible in turn-of-the-century New York represented the flowering in this country of a transplanted Mediterranean sexual culture.

In An Offer We Can’t Refuse:  The Mafia in the Mind of America, George De Stefano writes:

Although homosexuality was rarely spoken about, same-sex attractions were not rare in the Mezzogiorno, at least among men.  Male prostitution was common in southern cities, particularly Naples.  In the nineteenth century, northern European homosexuals sought refuge from the harsh Protestant morality of their home countries in what they saw as the more tolerant culture of the Italian South, which retained to some extent the pansexual attitudes of classical Greece and Rome.  The Sicilian town of Taormina was especially popular with foreign same-sexers, the most famous being the German nobleman Wilhelm Von Gloeden, who somehow managed to persuade dozens of Sicilian youths and men to strip naked for his camera during the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Baron Von Gloeden managed to avoid scandal, maybe because of his hundreds of photos, only a very few were overtly sexual.  He tended to shoot his models, sons of fishermen and peasants, in kitschy tableaux meant to evoke classical Greece and Rome and North Africa.  (The naked young Sicilians displayed their uncircumcised and generally large penises for the baron’s camera, but the laurel wreaths and Arabic headdresses they wore connoted Art, not porn.)  Von Gloeden adopted the classical Mediterranean model of homosexuality, of erotic and financial mentorship between an older man and a younger, generally heterosexual male.  Today one can purchase his photographs, as postcards and in expensive coffee table books, in shops all over Sicily.

"the Mafia . . . began running bars catering to homosexuals"

In Lives of Lesbian Elders (Haworth Press: 2004), the authors write:

The Volstead Act (prohibition), originally passed in 1919 and generally ignored until the 1930s, actually opened the door for a more entrenched payoff system that allowed speakeasies to flourish and furthered East Coast expansion by the Mafia who began running bars catering to homosexuals.  A similar non-Mafia payoff system on the West Coast also allowed such bars to operate

Village Raid Nets 4 Women and 9 Men: Detectives Thought They Had Five Females, But Misjudged One Person By Clothing

A February 5, 1923 article (“Village Raid Nets 4 Women and 9 Men:  Detectives Thought They Had Five Females, but Misjudged One Person by Clothing”) from the New York Times states:

The police continue to pay special attention to Greenwich Village.  Every tearoom and cabaret in the village was visited yesterday morning by Deputy Inspector Joseph A. Howard and Captain Edward J. Dempsey of the Charles Street Station, and a party of ten detectives.  * * *  Detectives Joseph Massie and Dewey Hughes of the Special Service Squad were at the Black Parrot Tea Shoppe Hobo-Hemia, 46 Charles Street, to witness what they had been informed would be a “circus.”  They arrested what they thought were five women and eight men.  It developed later, however, that one of the “women” was a man, Harry Bernhammer, 21 years old, living at 36 Hackensack Avenue, West Hoboken, N.J.  He is familiaryly known in the Village as “Ruby,” according to the police.  The charge against him is disorderly conduct for giving what the police termed an indecent dance.  The other prisoners, all of whom were bailed out at the station house, were Lucy Smith, 22 years old, of 46 Charles Street, and Patricia Rogers, 24 years old, of 16 Charles Street, alleged proprietors of the establishment, charged with violating the Mullan-Gage law; . . .  Arthur C. Budd, 21 years old, of 25 West Fifty-second Street; . . . Paul Warring, 21 years old, of 75 West Seventy-second Street; . . . . The real name of the Smith woman, according to the police, is Vera Black, and the real name of the Rogers woman is Nan Paddock.  Budd, according to the police, is known as “Rosebud,” and claimed when arrested that he is a female impersonator in “The Lady in Ermine” at The Century Theater.  Warring, the police say, is pianist at the Black Parrot and was formerly employed at a Broadway cabaret.  Reilly is accused of doing “a suggestive dance.”  The detectives allege that before the raid early yesterday morning they bought eight drinks of whiskey at $1 a drink.  The “circus” did not actually take place, the detectives said, for just before the time for it to beging Patricia Rogers stepped out on the floor and announced:  “There are two policemen here and I am afraid to put on the circus."

Whalen Warns All To Shun Night Clubs

A July 29, 1929 article (“Whalen Warns All to Shun Night Clubs”) from the New York Times states:

Gangdom is in control of the night clubs and “decent people” will shun them of they want to avoid “police attention,” Commissioner Whalen declared yesterday, revealing that John (Legs) Diamond, notorious gunman and racketeer, had been indicted for Saturday’s double murder in the Hotsy Totsy Club, 1721 Broadway, of which he was part owner.  * * *  “This indictment brings to the fore the fact that gangdom is in control of the night clubs.  It would be well for decent people to keep away from such places for they’re going to get lots of police attention from now on.”  * * *  More recently, according to Mr. Whalen, Diamond had been discovered there was bigger money to be made, and with greater safety too, in the night club racket.  For a gangster with his reputation it wasn’t always necessary to put up any cash to be declared in on a well-paying club.

The Big Business of the Racketeers

An April 27, 1930 article (“The Big Business of the Racketeers”) by F. Raymond Daniel from the New York Times states:

[M]odern gangdom simply has followed the trend of business, perfecting its organization, merging when necessary.  It seized upon prohibition and bootlegging as its golden opportunity and made the most of it.  The liquor traffic, however, is not the only source of income for the modern outlaw bands.  It is, according to many authorities, the backbone of the racketeering industry, but there are many sidelines.  * * *  Frank Marlow, one of the lesser lights of gangdom, who about a year ago was found dying in a lonely section of Queens, had managed to “declare himself in” on half a dozen night clubs without putting up a cent.  Threats and terrorism were the currency he used.  Recently, a Harlem night club which showed signs of offering dangerous competition to other resorts in the neighborhood was raided and wrecked by gangsters, presumably because its owners shortsightedly had failed to comprehend the wisdom of taking a certain man into partnership without his contributing any capital.  Police Commissioner Whalen, after a murder last spring in the Hotsy Totsy Club, on Broadway, said that gangsters had “a piece” of nearly all the night clubs, and law-abiding folk who wished to stay out of trouble would do well to avoid all but the most fastidious dining and dancing resorts.

The Pansy Clubs: "These establishments were run by gangsters"

In an article concerning the career of female impersonator Karyl Norman from the 1920s and 1930s, Brooks Peters writes:

In 1930 Karyl, after returning from another triumphant tour of Australia and New Zealand, achieved fame of a different sort when he appeared as the headline attraction at a new nightspot called The Pansy Club at 204 W. 48th Street, on the corner of Broadway in New York. Part of the so-called Pansy Craze of the late 20s and 30s, this club catered to a different clientele than those of his old vaudeville days. The queerness of drag was coming out of the closet. No one who dropped by the Pansy Club could claim ignorance as to the sexual persuasion of the “queens” who vogued along its runways. Like the drag balls up in Harlem, the Pansy Club was a hideaway for a burgeoning underground gay subculture, but also a haven for aging flappers and party-goers who liked “slumming.” That these establishments were run by gangsters proved their undoing however. In January 1931, the Pansy Club was raided by the police and shut down, as was Cleo’s Ninth Avenue Saloon at 46th Street. Just a few nights before Dutch Schultz, the notorious mobster, had been gunned down and stabbed, and very nearly killed, at Club Abbey, a notorious late-night hang-out where drag queen extraordinaire Gene Malin ruled the roost. Malin had previously starred at Club Rubiyat in Greenwich Village. While Schultz survived, others were killed and the police cracked down on all late-night clubs which violated blue laws. Some gay historians see the crackdown as motivated more by homophobia than concern for safety, but at the time it was defended as a direct response to organized crime’s involvement in Manhattan’s cabaret scene.

The 1930s

In Gay New York:  Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (1994), George Chauncey writes:

The precise locus of the hustlers’ and gay men’s activity on Forty-second Street shifted several times over the course of the 1930s.  The details of the moves are unimportant in themselves, but they reveal something of the social organization of the streets in general, for they resulted largely from the changing geography of the gay bars and other commercial sites where men met.  The corner of Broadway and Forty-second near the Times Building was popular in the late 1920s, when the building’s basement arcade and the Liggett’s drugstore upstairs functioned as meeting places.  Men gathered in the middle of the northern side of the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the mid-1930s, when it was the site of the Barrel House, the most famous sailor-prostitute-homosexual bar of the era.  It was “wholly uninhibited . . . as to ‘accosting,” recalled one patron.  “You could count a dozen [hustlers] lined up on the curb outside the Barrel House, in addition to the number inside who had the price of a beer to get in.”  They moved to the south side of the street after the police closed the Barrel House and the Marine Bar & Grill took its place.  During the war they settled near Sixth Avenue, where several cheap luncheonettes and sailor and hustler bars, such as the Pink Elephant, stood under the Elevated.

"[t]he city raised little objection . . . when gangsters began to underwrite a new network of clandestine and unpretentious gay bars"

In Nightclub City:  Politics and Amusement in Manhattan (Penn Press:  2007), Burton W. Peretti writes:

Another vogue of the early 1930s, the transvestite or “pansy” show, had abated considerably by mid-decade, but a rash of reports of sex crimes and “perversions” also led [Mayor Fiorello] La Guardia to launch an unprecedented dragnet against public homosexual behavior.  These years witnessed a growing homophobia nationwide.  As George Chauncey has put it, beginning in the mid-1930s a “powerful cultural reaction” against gay men and lesbians grew, supplanting the vogue for public displays of gay culture and the relative tolerance of the previous decade.  “Gay life in New York,” Chauncey writes, “was less tolerated, less visible to outsiders, and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the first.”  The official repression of nightclub “pansy shows” and drag balls had begun in 1931.  Police Commissioner Edward Mulrooney’s campaign temporarily shut down all public transvestitism in Midtown and in Greenwich Village.  After the repeal of Prohibition the New York State Liquor Authority (SLA) linked gay-themed speakeasies with “disorderly” saloons that flouted the new liquor-sale regulations.  In 1938 the SLA explicitly forbade homosexual-themed bars and threatened tolerant establishments with closure.  The police made highly publicized arrests of male transvestites.  Gay-friendly establishments such as the Times Square Bar and Grill [at 228 West 42^nd Street] were shuttered and later lost their court appeals to reopen in the summers of 1939 and 1940, during the time of the world’s fair.  Cruising sites such as Bryant Park were now strictly policed, and policewomen raided lesbian tea rooms and sent their proprietors to city hospitals for psychiatric evaluation.  The city raised little objection, though, when gangsters began to underwrite a new network of clandestine and unpretentious gay bars.  In general, as Chauncey concludes, gay life became “more hidden and more segregated from the rest of city life than it had been before.”

 

Carlo Gambino Buys Into Gay Bars

A biographical summary of Carlo Gambino states:

In 1933, with Prohibition lifted, Gambino moved contraband liquor, selling alcohol without paying government taxes. He was arrested and charged with tax evasion, but he was able to beat the rap, released with a suspended sentence. Gambino invested his profits in a business that was low-key and taboo, running "Gay Bars" for homosexuals.

An additional biographical summary of Carlo Gambino by the Crime and Investigation network states:

During World War II, Carlo [Gambino] made his first million dollars selling stolen and counterfeit ration stamps. By age 45, Carlo invested in a broad range of businesses, legal and illegal, with the money that he made throughout his criminal career. Carlo owned everything from meat markets, fat rendering plants, and trucking companies, to restaurants, pizza parlours, and even gay bars.

Vito Genovese Buys Into Gay Bars In Greenwich Village

A January 2002 article by John William Tuohy from Rick Porrello’s AmericanMafia.com states:

During the early 1930s, [Vito] Genovese took over New York's massive Italian lottery, and grew rich from it, using his wealth to buy into gay bars in the Greenwich Village area, which struck police as an oddchoice of investments until 1954 when they learned from a cashier at one of the clubs that Genovese’s wife, Anna Petillo Vernotico, who was also his distant cousin, was a regular at these clubs and for many years, was involved in a lesbian relationship which Genovese knew of, and approved. It had always been an oddball union anyway.  Genovese had married Anna a year after the death of his first wife in 1931. When he met her, Anna was locked in a loveless marriage and couldn't get a divorce. On March 16, 1932, Genovese had her husband murdered and twelve days later they were married.

And in An Offer We Can’t Refuse:  The Mafia in the Mind of America, George De Stefano writes:

In the social mythology of the mob, there is an unbreachable barrier between the world of the “men of honor” and homosexuals who dishonor masculinity by being like women.  But both the actual history of organized crime and its pop-culture representations belie the myth. Mobsters thrived on illicit enterprises such as gambling and prostitution, and in the pre-gay liberation days, they owned gay bars and bathhouses.  Nick Tosches, in his biography of Dean Martin, reports that mobster Vito Genovese, “the most violent, most grasping, and most treacherous of his breed,” owned drag queen bars and was married to a lesbian.  Gay folklore has long held that Mafiosi put their sons and other male kin who were homosexual in charge of the gay bars they owned.

"[W]e had the best protection in the world from the Mafia. They ran everything."

A March 1, 2006 article (“Back in Buddy’s Day:  Drag’s Original Lesbians Reflect on Their Heyday”) by Lisa E. Davis from Xtra West states

Buddy Kent was still gorgeous at age 70.  She was even cuter in the 1940s, when she played the Club 181, located at 181 Second Avenue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the Moroccan Village, on 8^th Street in Greenwich Village.  Back the, downtown nightclubs like these, under the protection of the New York mob, featured shows with gay girls and boys performing in drag.  * * *  “It was home,” Buddy replied, “and we had the best protection in the world from the Mafia.  They ran everything.”

Cafe Bohemia at 15 Barrow Street and the San Remo at 93 MacDougal Street: "the police and organized crime, which jointly supervised such things in the Village, rarely allowed a homosexual haunt to run for more than a few years"

In On Bohemia:  The Code of the Self-Exiled (Transaction Publishers:  1990), contributor Michael Harrington writes:

I was not looking for historical trends on the evening in 1949 when I first arrived from Chicago – then, as always, the second city – put down my bags, and went out to find Greenwich Village.  I wandered in and out of a few bars around Sheridan Square and then drifted into a place called Café Bohemia on Barrow Street.  It was in a lesbian phase (the police and organized crime, which jointly supervised such things in the Village, rarely allowed a homosexual haunt to run for more than a few years) and, like all straight young men from the Middle West, I found that fascinating.  I got into a conversation with an attractive young woman, but then her girl friend appeared, angry with my heterosexual poaching.  “You don’t belong here, buddy,” she said.  “You’re a San Remo type.”  The next night I went to the Remo and found out that she was right.  The San Remo was an Italian restaurant at the uneasy intersection of Greenwich Village and Little Italy, with bad, yellowed paintings over the bar and the Entr’Acte from Wolf-Ferrari’s Jewels of the Madona on the jukebox.  In 1949 it was the united front of the Village.  * * *  Among the regulars there were heterosexuals on the make; homosexuals who preferred erotic integration to the exclusively gay bars on Eighth Street; communists, socialists and Trotskyists; potheads; writers of the older generation, like James Agee, and innovators of the future like Allen Ginsberg, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina, who were to found the Living Theater.

NOTE:  Café Bohemia owner James Garafalo turned the place into a famed jazz place by 1955 although the premises at 15 Barrow Street later resumed operation once again as a gay bar which was busted in 1971 as a Gambino crime family operation.  The San Remo at 93 MacDougal was a frequent locale at which Genovese gangster Anthony Strollo a/k/a Tony Bender conducted his "family" business.

The NYPD, Organized Crime and Gay Bars: 1930s Through The 1960s

In Money, Myths, and Change:  The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men (University of Chicago Press: 2003), Mary Virginia Lee Badgett writes:

In response to a perceived subversion of legal authority in New York City during the Prohibition era . . . the state began its own stringent regulation of bars following the repeal of Prohibition.  The new State Liquor Authority (SLA) was authorized to issue liquor licenses and was expected to revoke the licenses of establishments that served homosexuals and other groups considered disreputable, such as prostitutes and gamblers.  The SLA used its authority to target gay bars systematically, and gay bars opening in New York from the 1930s through the 1960s had to resort to police payoffs and protection from organized crime to avoid the common fate of license revocation.

The Gambino Crime Family Plants Its Beachhead Flag On 42nd Street: 1945 into the 1960s

In Down 42^nd Street (Grand Central Publishing:  2001), Marc Eliot writes:

In the years immediately following World War II, a far more explicit, rough-trade pornographic sexual subculture had surfaced west of Seventh Avenue. Much of it had sprung from two sources. The first was the American enlisted man's wartime experiences abroad. Having been exposed to a less puritanical, more aggressive sexuality in Europe and a highly ritualistic eroticism in Asia, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who left as callow boys returned as sexually experienced men, accustomed to the easily available pleasures they found in the young girls overseas eager to give their American saviors something to savor in return.  The second was the limited options available anywhere outside of the city for its still dead-bolt-closeted gays. The two groups gradually coalesced in the early fifties in a street-savvy proliferation of straight and gay bars and male prostitution rings on West 42nd Street. Wagner treated that situation and the entire street as the outbreak of a morally perverse epidemic and, to save the rest of the city, in effect quarantined it.   * * *  It was a decision that,  while the complete opposite of La Guardia's hands-on one-man war, was just as damaging to the street. By 1960 the Wagner administration's policy of isolated toleration was seen as an opportunity by the organized crime families of New York to plant their beachhead flags on West 42nd. The Gambinos, especially, would develop a hugely profitable market for the production and sale of totally explicit, industrial-strength pornography, the ultimate come-on that helped turn the street into the sleaze capital of the world. Left alone by a timid mayor, the mob expanded into all of porn's peripherals, including male and female prostitution rings, the deliverance of child runaways to middle-aged male pedophiles, and the distribution of yet one more favorite of World War II veterans: heroin (derived during the war from battlefield morphine), which induced extreme-and extremely addictive-euphoria.

Our Sister J. Edgar Hoover

In FBI Secrets:  An Agent’s Expose, M. Wesley Swearingen writes:

One year after arriving in Memphis, Hoover transferred me to Chicago, Illinois.  I was thrilled – my mind was full of gangsters, Tommy guns, and the FBI’s famous machine gun battles of the 1930s. It was clear to me from Chicago’s newspaper headlines that gansters ruled a Chicago underworld element in the 1950s because gangland style murders averaged close to 100 a year in the Chicago area.  * * *  But when I told my colleague and veteran agent Vince Coll of my big plans for Chicago, he said that Hoover did not recognize the existence of a mob in Chicago.  According to Coll, Mafia leader Meyer Lansky’s organization had enough on Hoover and Tolson, as closet homosexuals, that Hoover would never investigate the mob.  I laughed, thinking Coll was joking.  I said he should be careful to whom he tells such stories.  Coll insisted he was not joking.  He made me promise never to tell anyone as long as he lived. I noted that it was true that FBI training school had taught nothing about organized crime.  The thought of Hoover and his associate Clyde Tolson being homosexual shocked me.  There were jokes in training school about Hoover and Tolson being homosexual, but I had passed off the jokes as being in bad taste.  * * *  Rumors of Hoover’s and Tolson’s homosexuality continued to permeate the field offices for years, but no agent seemed to have any personal knowledge of an affair.  Still, Hoover did nothing about organized crime for thirty-seven years, until pressured to do so by Attorney General Bobby Kennedy in 1961.  * * *  Today it’s clear that Hoover disliked Bobby Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy because Hoover feared the Kennedys would prosecute Meyer Lansky as a gangster, and prompt Lansky to expose Hoover and Tolson as closet homosexuals.

Anthony Summers documents the basis for Hoover’s fear in his 1993 book Official and Confidential, the Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover.  The book’s dust cover states, “J. Edgar Hoover . . . was a closet homosexual and transvestite.  Mafia bosses obtained information about Hoover’s sex life and used it for decades to keep the FBI at bay.  Without this, the Mafia as we know it might never have gained its hold in America."  A review of Anthony Summers’ book from the February 22, 1993 issue of Time magazine states:

The motto of the FBI is "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity." How well did William Sessions' all-powerful predecessor, J. Edgar Hoover, uphold these words? Not very, according to a just published biography of the late FBI chief. Anthony Summers' Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover is sure to disturb the old crime fighter's final rest.  Even as he railed against gays as "sexual deviants," Hoover apparently struggled with his own homosexuality. Summers offers fresh details of Hoover's 40-year friendship with Clyde Tolson, a handsome young agent he plucked out of the rank and file and quickly promoted to assistant director. The pair ate dinner together almost every night and vacationed together every year; Summers contends that Luisa Stuart, a former fashion model, once saw them holding hands in the back seat of a limo. According to Summers, the Mafia claimed to have the goods on Edgar and Clyde, including compromising photographs of the two men engaging in oral sex. That knowledge provided the mob with rich blackmail material. It protected gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello from FBI scrutiny for more than 20 years and forced Hoover to insist that syndicated crime was not a national problem. Perhaps Summers' most bizarre revelation is an account provided by Susan Rosenstiel, the wife of a liquor distiller and gambling crony. Rosenstiel recalls attending what she thought would be an elegant private party at New York City's Plaza Hotel in the company of lawyer Roy Cohn, Hoover and others. Instead, Cohn introduced Rosenstiel to a woman named "Mary," dressed in a fluffy black dress, lace stockings and high heels. It was obvious Mary was no woman. "You could see where he shaved. It was Hoover," said Rosenstiel. Joined by Cohn, Hoover stripped down to a tiny garter belt and proceeded to have sex with two young boys. Cohn later joked about the evening. "That was really something, wasn't it, with Mary Hoover?"  Hoover's presidential snooping included efforts to pin an illicit liaison on Eleanor Roosevelt and culminated, most famously, with eavesdropping on J.F.K. frolicking with Mafia moll Judith Campbell and Marilyn Monroe.  "We had to be not only as straight as an arrow," recalled a former agent last week on PBS's Frontline. "We had to give every perception that we were straight as arrows." In 1972, at age 77, the omnipotent FBI chief became the first civil servant to be granted a state funeral, at which he was eulogized by Richard Nixon in the Rotunda of the Capitol as "one of the giants . . . a national symbol of courage, patriotism and granite-like honesty and integrity." But the year before, bedeviled by fallout from his efforts to tap the phones of journalists, the President had confided to John Ehrlichman, "We may have on our hands here a man who will pull the temple down with him, including me." It is not surprising that not one of the eight Presidents he served dared fire him.

In Stonewall:  The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution, [New York:  2004] David Carter writes:

Ginsberg, a man who loved both to gather and pass on gossip, had known since the late forties that J. Edgar Hoover was homosexual.  * * *  That Hoover was homosexual, and Clyde Tolson his lover is currently generally accepted.  The history of The Homosexual Handbook, published in 1968, shows, however, that by the late 1960s, not only was Hoover’s homosexuality whispered widely in the homosexual world but also that Hoover was, understandably, extremely sensitive about any public suggestion of this information.  The book’s last chapter, titled “Uncle Fudge’s List of Practical Homosexuals Past and Present with Very Short Biographical Notes—A Hearsay Reference Work,” includes Hoover’s name:

J. Edgar Hoover:  Celibataire, the director of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence [sic], he has for several decades remained the eminence froide of our national great society.

After the book appeared, pressure from the FBI caused it to be withdrawn.  The publisher soon reissued the book, but with Uncle Fudge’s list one name shorter.

*     *     *

From information published in the 1993 book Official and Confidential:  The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, by Anthony Summers, Ginsberg’s intuition has been proved correct.  Not only did Summers discover that the Mafia had photographic evidence implicating Hoover in homosexual activities, but it also came to light that Hoover at times dressed in female attire.  Research conducted for this book strongly suggests that Ed Murphy had one or more of these photographs, which allowed him to avoid serving time in prison for leading an extensive national blackmail ring.

John Paul Ranieri, a former prostitute interviewed for this history, provided critical testimony for corroborating and better understanding the larger implications of Murphy’s criminal enterprises for gay history.  Ranieri said that as a youth from Westchester County he had been forced by blackmail and Mafia-supplied drugs into a prostitution ring in which he remained active for three years before he escaped the mob’s control.  He claimed that a number of youths in the ring had disappeared after they got careless with talk, for while most of the customers were more or less average homosexual men with money, the regular clientele, according to Ranieri, also included famous men such as Malcolm Forbes, Cardinal Spellman, Liberace, U.S. Senators, a vice president of the United States, one of the most famous rock musicians, and J. Edgar Hoover.  The mob’s order, according to Ranieri, was strictly “Keep your zipper open and your mouth shut.”

Ranieri said that he met J. Edgar Hoover at private parties at the Plaza Hotel and that Hoover’s name was never mentioned.  Hoover was always in drag, and Ranieri said he could tell that the FBI director was sure that no one recognized him.  Ranieri said that he had ensured his own survival by having in his possession a photograph of himself with Hoover, given to him by the photographer.

How does the preceding information link Ed Murphy with J. Edgar Hoover?  The connection is made evident in a news story written shortly after Hoover’s homosexuality and transvestism became public.  When Summer’s book was published, a newspaper story about the 1960s national homosexual blackmail ring suddenly appeared after a quarter of a century of silence on the subject.  Without mentioning Murphy’s name, it quoted law enforcement sources who had worked on the case as saying that their investigation into the nationwide blackmail ring had turned up a photograph of Hoover “posing amiably” with the racket’s ringleader and had uncovered information that Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s lover, had himself “fallen victim to the extortion ring.”  After federal agents joined the investigation, both the photograph of Hoover and the documents about Tolson disappeared.  * * *  Very suggestive in this context is that Murphy would publicly say in 1978—before it became public information, as it did in the 1990s, that the Mafia had photographs of Hoover involved in sex acts—that he knew that J. Edgar Hoover “was one of my sisters."

New York Confidential

In Jack Lait's and Lee Mortimer's 1952 U.S.A. Confidential, they write:

Where side-street sin is organized, the big boys of the Crime Cartel have no hand in it themselves, but hand it out for cigarette money to poor relatives.  That is why Greenwich Village can get away with almost anything – it is run by Alan Bono, a cousin of Joe Adonis.  We cannot give you here a compendium on what goes.  The following paragraphs are a few, at random, as they occurred to us:  The fairy situation is a pronounced problem, the more so because, in addition to our own, we get the pick of the nation’s pansy crop.  Like everything else in New York, our homosexuals are divided into three geographic strata – downtown, the West Side, and the East Side.  The Greenwich Village she-males are supposed to be the artistic set in an esoteric bohemian colony where everyone knows everyone else.  One of their favorite gathering places is the Moroccan Village, on West 8^th Street.  They can be found also at almost every bar on Third Street, where Lesbians, too, foregather.  The most famous fag joint in town was the 181, at that number on Second Avenue.  After we wrote about it, City Hall was reluctantly forced to shutter it; but it was allowed to reopen sans liquor license, ostensibly as a hot jive place, but actually to steer customers to the Rainbow Inn, around the corner, where the gay girls and boys moved, show and all.  As a patron enteres the reconstructed 181, he is told “We only sell cokes; there’s no show.”  When the customer’s face falls, he is handed a card for the Rainbow.   * * *  So it is most understandable that the East Side homos should be a cut above those in the other parts of town.  We have two breeds East of the Avenue—the streetwalkers, who parade along Lexington Avenue, from 45^th to 59^th, and the swish-swells.  The streetwalkers are college boys and young “intellectuals” who prance Lexington, arm in arm, or try to make picj-ups, usually accosting Negroes.  There are some twenty or thirty cocktail lounges along the avenue and adjoining side streets, all patronized almost exclusively by fairies, and it is not uncommon to see as many as a hundred young near-men packed up against the bar without a woman on the premises.  One of the most patronized is the Golden Pheasant, on 45^th just east of Lexington.  Another is the beautiful Chandelle Bar, on E. 48^th.

 

"my friends and I always carried with us the name of one of the three lawyers who specialized . . . in getting arrested homosexuals out of jail; they knew whom to pay off and how much to pay them"

In Cures:  A Gay Man’s Odyssey (Westview Press:  2002), Martin Duberman writes:

Police departments . . . remained immune in the fifties to . . . humane views . . . .  Indeed, there was a surge in police raids on gay bars, and an ever-present danger developed of being entrapped by plainclothes detectives on the street.  In New York, under the prodding of the virulently homophobic Daily Mirror columnist Lee Mortimer, a citywide series of roundups in the late fifties kept us in a state of constant jitters.  We went to the bars anyway—courage in those years took unfamiliar forms—but when we did, my friends and I always carried with us the name of one of the three lawyers who specialized (to their own great profit) in getting arrested homosexuals out of jail; they knew whom to pay off and how much to pay them.

East 55, Blue Parrot & Shaw's: Bars in the East 50s during the 1950s

In Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives:  The Story of Homosexual Men in America Today (HBJ:  1977), Dr. Howard Brown writes:

Friends in Detroit had provided me with a classified list of more than fifty gay bars in New York:  elegant bars, homely bars, dancing bars, and so on.  * * *  In the summer of 1954 I walked into the East 55—a gay bar that took its name from its location on East Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan—and found myself in a very posh place indeed.  Everybody was well dressed; there was a fancy pianist jazzing up the air, and the restaurant served excellent food.  * * *  The Blue Parrot—a couple of blocks from my apartment—was smaller, more intimate, decidedly less elegant, and cheaper than the East 55.  Since it was so close to home, I often dropped in.  The men who hung out there reminded me of my fraternity brothers back at Hiram, getting on and growing chunky.  * * *  [M]ost of the men at the East 55 wore elegantly tailored suits.  The guys at the Blue Parrot dressed casually and looked straight.  * * *  Shaw’s—also in my neighborhood, at Third Avenue and Forty-ninth Street—was a gay bar for a special set:  the supermasculine crowd.  The men who frequented Shaw’s dressed up as city cowboys, in Levi’s and boots and as much leather (such bars are known as leather bars) as they could pack onto one body.  I looked almost criminally out of place in my blue business suit.  I had come in part because I was intrigued by the thought of men who took such extreme measures to avoid effeminacy (no transvestite would have dared to enter Shaw’s) . . . .

"the New York Syndicate under the former Gallo gang used some dozen homosexual bars as 'fronts'"

In Brothers:  The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Simon & Schuster:  2007) David Talbot writes:

There was no one in America with more acute investigative instincts than Robert Kennedy when it came to organized crime.  And Jack Ruby had mob written all over him.  If Bobby could not have figured this out himself, anonymous tipsters quickly emerged to point him in the right direction.  One week after Ruby blasted his way into the national spotlight, an unsigned communication was sent to the attorney general and former CIA director Allen Dulles, from an informer who claimed that Ruby was a mob “finger man” or hit man.  “If my memory serves me right,” wrote the informer, “Jack Ruby was visiting Syndicate Members in San Diego between the last months of 1961 and early months of 1962.  The meeting of the Syndicate Members was at The Brass Rail, a bar-restaurant . . . .  It is used as a homosexual bar, much as the New York Syndicate under the former Gallo gang used some dozen homosexual bars as ‘fronts.’”

1950s Gay Bars

In The Gay Metropolis (Grove Press: 1997) Charles Kaiser writes:

Roy Strickland, who would become a very successful window designer for department stores, remembered the routine at the Old Colony, a popular cruising spot on West 8^th Street in the forties.  “You’d see a cop walk in and go toward the rear and meet with the proprietor, and the proprietor would put his hand out – obviously with cash in it – and the cop would walk out.  That’s the way these places kept open.

*      *     *

In the summer of 1955 Roy Aarons discovered “’this little [gay] bar called the Cork Club on the south side of 72d Street . . . .  * * *  Of course I asked people if they knew anywhere else to go.  And they told me a great spot down on 45^th Street called Arties . . . between Sixth and Broadway.  In fact, it was about five or six doors down from the Peppermint Lounge, which later would become famous for the Twist.  * * *  You could see right through the window from the street – at a time when one wondered how that was allowed.  I assume there were big payoffs going on.  * * *  The next thing I heard about were two dancing bars in the seventies.  One was called the Mais Oui and one was called the Bali.  Probably 70^th Street for the Mais Oui, between Broadway and Amsterdam.  The basement of an apartment house.  * * *  At the Mais Oui, there was always a bouncer to screen you as you came in.’”

*     *     *

There was another famous cluster of gay bars near Third Avenue in the East Fifties known as the Bird Circuit:  the Blue Parrot on 53d, the Golden Pheasant on 48^th, the Swan and the 316 – at 316 East 54^th Street.  * * *  In the Village, the more conventional gay bars included Mary’s, Main Street, the Eighth Street Bar, and the Old Colony.

1950s: Mama's Chick'N'Rib on Charles Street

In Stonewall:  The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution (New York:  2004), David Carter writes:

Tree is another native New Yorker who discovered the Village as a gay place in his teen years.  His favorite place was not a bar but the restaurant many gay men from the era still remember affectionately, Mama’s Chick’N’Rib.  With perhaps a touch of hyperbole, Tree remarks, "It was considered the gay hangout of the world." Tree was at Mama’s so often he ended up working there in the late 1950s. "This place was more crowded than any bar.  Of course the bars in those times were all owned by the Mafia – they charged you to get in, watered down drinks, a little roughing up if you got too drunk.  But Mama’s Chick’N’Rib was a home."  * * *  Even though Mama’s was not run by the Mafia, as the place catered to gay people, Mama still had to pay off the police.  "Brown bag Friday it was called.  Cops would come around to bars and restaurants that catered to gay people, and they would have a little brown bag like a container of coffee with no coffee in it.  It was all full of money for the neighborhood precincts – uptown, downtown, midtown. ‘You want your windows broken?’ ‘No.’ “Well, you let all these fags hang out in there.’  So we had to give a little envelope every once in a while.’"

Club 82 at 82 East 4th Street: Part I

A June 20, 1953 article (“Brutal Mugging Fatal”) from the New York Times states:

Stephen Franse, a former night club owner in Greenwich Village, was found murdered yesterday, the police believed, of a brutal mugging.  His body, badly beaten, was discovered at 9:45 A.M. face down on the rear floor of his automobile, which was parked in front of 164 East Thirty-seventh Street.  Detectives said a sapphire and diamond ring, a gold watch and approximately $200 in cash were missing.  Up to last night they had discovered no serious threats on Mr. Franse's life.  The police said that Mr. Franse, who was 55 years old and lived with his wife at 1777 Grand Concourse, the Bronx, had left the Club 82 at 82 East Fourth Street at 4:30 A.M. planning to go to a restaurant at Fifty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue.  Mr. Franse formerly operated the Club 181 and the Howdy Club both in Greenwich Village, the officials said.

A September 7, 1998 column by Jerry Capeci states:

Genovese's first wife died at a young age in 1929. Three years later, he married Anna Petillo, two weeks after her husband was mysteriously killed. The couple had two children, Nancy and Phillip, and Phillip was never tied to  in any mob rackets.  Anna Genovese divorced Vito in a very public and spectacular trial [in 1953], in which she named him as a mob boss, as well as a wife beater. Anna detailed her husband's criminal activities and his extensive income from loansharking, gambling, nightclubs and the like. Despite her claim that Genovese had an income of at least $30,000 per week from one racket alone, she was awarded only $300 a month in support. Genovese (left) claimed he could not afford that meager amount and quickly sold his valuable New Jersey mansion to prove his point. Mob watchers quite naturally were expecting some kind of violent response, and in a roundabout way, Don Vito obliged them.Genovese had spent a decade in Italy on the run from a murder charge. Before he left, he delegated one of his soldiers, Steve Franse, to assist and watch over his wife. Shortly after the messy divorce in 1953, Franse turned up dead. A decade later, Joe Valachi confirmed what everyone had believed: Don Vito had ordered the hit.

In U.S.A. Confidential, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote in 1952:

The most famous fag joint in town was the 181, at that number on Second Avenue. After we wrote about it, City Hall was reluctantly forced to shutter it; but it was allowed to reopen sans liquor license, ostensibly as a hot jive place, but actually to steer customers to the Rainbow Inn, around the corner, where the gay girls and boys moved, show and all.  As a patron enters the reconstructed 181, he is told “We only sell cokes; there's no show.” When the customer's face falls, he is handed a card for the Rainbow.

Under The Mink states:

The Club 82, at 82 East 4^th St., opened in 1953 as the 181 closed.  The 82 –“The East Side’s Newest Rendevous”—was under the same management as the 181 and inherited much of its personnel and style in floorshows.  But it was never so elegant.  Tourists flocked to the 82, and gay people often came to see their friends.

In Too Much, Too Soon: The Makeup and Breakup of the New York Dolls (London: Omnibus, 1998), Nina Antonia writes:

82 Club had been an influential drag revue since its opening in 1953. Anyone who wanted to make it as a serious drag artist performed there and by the mid-sixties it was a big draw for any celebrities who wanted to take a little walk on the wig side. By the following decade however, the club had lost its clandestine appeal and most of its clientele. The Stonewall riots had taken drag out of secretive smoky bars and on to the street. David Jo: "We used to always go there and say to Tommy, who was this butch dyke who took the tickets, 'You should have rock & roll here.' The place was dying, that whole speakeasy element was over, 'cause everything was out in the open. People didn't have to go there and hide what they were doing anymore but Tommy didn't get it. 'Where are all the people going?' 'They're doing it in the street, Tommy.'"

In Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets to the Voidoids (New York: Penguin, 1993), Bob Gruen states:

Since the Club 82 had had this outcast image for so long, the punk and the early glitter kids were treated very openly by the management. They didn’t think they were weird and didn’t try and cash in on ‘em—they’d been dealing with weirdos for forty years! So when bands started going there they brought the young rock & roll crowd.

A December 7, 1930 article (“25 Dry Agents Raid Greenwich Village”) from the New York Times states:

In a campaign to dry up centres in Greenwich Village which were considered “dripping wet,” twenty-five agents of Andrew McCampbell, prohibition administrator, made eight raids yesterday on restaurants and alleged speakeasies.  * * *  In a night club known as the Rainbow Inn, 82 East Fourth Street, agents arrested Jack Misker, 2018 West Sixth Street, manager; Sam Wald, 1052 Ocean Avenue; and Morris Solomon, 1710 Avenue B, waiter, all of Brooklyn; and seized 175 bottles of alleged liquor, twenty-four gallons of wine and six cases of supposed ale.

A November 1, 1928 article (“24 Indicted In Dry Law Cases”) from the New York Times states:

The Federal Grand Jury returned seven indictments yesterday charging twenty-four defendants with violations of the national prohibition law.  In addition, Assistant United States District Attorney Maxwell Shapiro filed summonses in fourteen padlock actions against as many groups of defendants.  * * *  Those named in the padlock and personal injunction actions are . . . Louis Shapiro and others, 80-82 East Fourth Street.

BITTER QUEEN NOTE:  Since the early 1990s the 82 East 4th Street property -- in the photo below -- has housed the gay sex club and porn theater the Bijou.  The door into the Bijou is directly under the "Bar" sign and behind the security shutters were are rolled down during the day until the place opens up in the late afternoon/early evening.

Club 82 at 82 East 4th Street: Part II

In Betty and Pansy’s Severe Queer Review of New York (Cleis Press:  2003), Betty Pearl and Pansy Bradshaw write:

Club 82, commonly called the Bijou Theater, is a place for men to go and have sex with other men in small darkened private booths.  * * *  Now it is owned by Pakistani men who make money off gay sex.  The overintoxicated and obviously drugged increase markedly around 4 A.M.  * * *  Some of the changes are bad.  Smoking is no longer allowed, although that is probably for the best, as the basement theater is surely a deathtrap.  * * *  Condoms are no longer provided, which means the management’s motto must be, “We don’t care if you get syphilis, but don’t kill us with your secondhand smoke, please.”

Club 82 at 82 East 4th Street: Part III

According to a dossier compiled in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the Bureau of Narcotics within the United States Treasury Department – later relied upon by Bobby Kennedy when he became Attorney General in 1961 in his early efforts to bust the mob – Genovese member Ralph Polizzano was identified under government surveillance as frequently located at Club 82 on East Fourth Street.

Polizzano was a major heroin trafficker for the Genovese crime family, and owned the Squeeze Inn Bar just at 57 [87?] East Fourth Street as a front for his operations.  Fellow Genovese member Vincent James Ciraulo was identified under government surveillance as frequently located at the Squeeze Inn Bar, and Ciraulo himself owned the Stage Bar at 59 [89?] East Fourth Street.

According to the feds, the East Fourth Street strip was a center for heroin distribution trafficking – which included Al’s Luncheonette at 34 East Fourth Street, and a plant at 36 East Fourth Street where imported pure heroin was cut – by the Genovese crime family.  The identical facsimile of this Bureau of Narcotics dossier was published last year by HarperCollins under the title Mafia:  The Government’s Secret File on Organized Crime.

Club 82 at 82 East 4th Street: Part IV

The FBI Files: David Petillo: "in his early teens was reputed to be a 'fairy,' but . . . when he was 18 or 19 years old he went to Chicago where he was ‘straightened out’ by Al Capone"

David Petillo was a long-time soldier in the Genovese crime family and, born in NYC in 1908, perhaps began his criminal career as a finocchio in Little Italy because “in his early teens was reputed to be a ‘fairy,’ but . . . when he was 18 or 19 years old he went to Chicago where he was ‘straightened out’ by AL CAPONE and was soon a member of the CAPONE mob there.”  Although Petillo may have “straightened out,” he nevertheless had a fetish for dressing in drag when he killed his numerous victims over the decades.  When Petillo returned to New York he hooked up with Charlie Lucky Luciano, and on February 1, 1936 was arrested on white slavery charges “with 100 prostitutes and madams and was described as an individual who had organized 200 houses of prosititution under LUCIANO with 3,000 girls grossing $12 million a year.”  The girls were happy to testify against Petillo, and he served 20 years at Sing Sing until he was paroled in 1956.  At this point Petillo trafficked heroin for Vito Genovese through the Lower East Side gay and straight bars on East 4^th Street and Second Avenue, including Club 82, and in the mid- and late-1960s had hidden interests in an afterhours club at 11 East 16^th Street.  Petillo became involved in the pornography rackets in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and he had an interest in the notorious Arrow Laboratories at 75 Spring Street which produced some of the most hardcore obscene material avialable at the time until selling out to the Gambino crime family. However, throughout the 1970s, Petillo was “active in operation of sex-related businesses in New York City” and cocaine trafficking.  On February 4, 1980, he murdered Edward Vassallo a/k/a Charles Talbot, and fled the country.  Petillo died in Spain on December 28, 1983.

 

Download David Petillo FBI Files Part I

 

Download David Petillo FBI Files Part II

 

Download David Petillo FBI Files Part III

 

Download David Petillo FBI Files Part IV

 

Download David Petillo FBI Files Part V

Genovese Crime Family Gay Bars and Nightclubs in the 1950s

By the late 1950s the FBI had identied several existing nightclubs that allegedly were controlled by the Genovese crime family including – but hardly limited to – the following:  the gay Rainbow Inn and, later, 82 Club, at 82 East Fourth Street; the gay Club 181 at 181 Second Avenue and the Howdy Club in Greenwich Village both of which were fronted by Stephen Franse; the lesbian Surfmaid Bar at 151 Bleecker Street fronted by Tommy Musto a/k/a Tommy the Priest; the gay and beatnik San Remo at 93 MacDougal Street fronted by Frank Santini; the gay Cherry Lane Theater bar and the Bon Soir at 40 West 8th Street both of which were fronted by Ernest Sgroi; the gangster hangout the Gold Key Club at 26 West 56^th Street fronted by Vinnie Mauro; the gangster hangout Tommy’s Bar at 171 Bleecker Street fronted by Johnnie “the Bug” Stopelli; the cabaret Greenwich Village Inn at 5 Sheridan Square at which Dominick Strollo – brother to gangster Anthony Strollo – often worked; the gay bar Tony Pastor’s at 130 – 132 West 3^rd Street and the Heatwave at 131 West 3^rd Street fronted by Joseph Cataldo; the “negro nightclub” the Savannah Club at 66 West 3^rd Street, the gay club Moroccan Village at 23 West 8^th Street and the Village Barn at 52 West 8^th Street all of which were fronted by Joseph Schiavone; the Seven Steps Café at 92 West Houston Street and the Music Bar between MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue both of which were fronted by Alfred Faccio a/k/a Al Butch; the Pomp Room at 125 East 47^th Street fronted by Carlo Cataldo; the Continental at 127 West 52^nd Street; and Club Caravan.

Anthony Strollo a/k/a Tony Bender, who managed the extensive nightclub and restaurant holdings for the Genovese crime family in Greenwich Village, conducted much of his business at the Savannah Club and the San Remo although he also was frequently observed with other Genovese members and associates at the Dante Alighieri Coffee House at 79 MacDougal Street, Greenwich Café Expresso at 102 MacDougal Street, Rocco’s Restaurant at 181 Thompson Street, Tokay’s Bar & Grill at 1433 Second Avenue, the Lodge Bar & Restaurant at 185 West Houston Street, and Dave’s Blue Room at 565 Lexington Avenue.  Although the nightclubs and restaurants provided the Genovese crime family with opportunities for profit skimming and money laundering, many of the establishments were used as wholesale and retail distribution points for heroin trafficking which was its primary racket, and it was for this that Vito Genovese was convicted in 1959.

A May 29, 1958 FBI report on Anthony Strollo states:

New York files reflect that . . . the Club Caravan, the Savannah Club, the 82 Club, and the Morroccan Club were owned by . . . VITO GENOVESE, and the syndicate, but were fronted by someone else.  On March 25, 1953, ANNA GENOVESE appeared at the office of the New York State Liquor Authority with her attorney, H. DAVID FRACKMAN, and was questioned, under oath, in a public hearing conducted by the State Liquor Authority.  She stated that she did voice the opinion in Superior Court of New Jersey, that the 82 Club, the Club Caravan, the Savannah Club, and the Moroccan Village were owned by VITO GENOVESE and the syndicate, and that the proprietors of record were fronting for them.  However, on March 25, 1953, she stated at this hearing that VITO GENOVESE never had any interest in the Moroccan Club or the 82 Club.  In regard to the Savannah Club, she stated that she knew of no previous transaction between STEPHEN FRANSE or JOSEPH SCHIAVONE and her husband, VITO GENOVESE.  SCHIAVONE was president of the Savannah Club, and FRANSE was the previous owner.  As to the Club Caravan, she stated that she never had an interest in this club, and had never visited same as a customer.   * * * In public hearings conducted by the New York State Liquor Authority on April 17, 1953, VITO GENOVESE was questioned, under oath, in the presence of his attorney, JOSEPH MATTICE.  During this testimony, VITO GENOVESE denied investing any money in the 82 Restaurant, Inc.  He stated that he had no financial interest in the Moroccan Village, and he also denied any interest in the Savannah Club in New York City.  GENOVESE denied that he had ever joined any group to purchase, own, or share in any licensed premise in New York State, or that he, in fact, has or ever had any interest in any such premises in New York State.  * * *  [I]n March, 1953 . . . the books and records of the Club Caravan, Savannah Club, 82 Club, and the Moroccan Club had been picked up by the District Attorney’s Office in New York City.  The informant stated that the persons listed as having an interest in those clubs testified under oath at public hearings conducted by the New York State Liquor Authority, and all denied that VITO GENOVESE had any interest.

1959: Lenny's Hideaway at 183 West 10th Street

Lenny of Lenny’s Hideaway in the later 50s was part of the Village mafia scene.  He was a very affable guy with his customers.  The people who showed up as the management at Aldo’s Restaurant (a gay place in the late Fifties on Bleecker and Christopher) were also part of the same segment of the Mafia.  You would occasionally see them visiting down at the Finale (another Mafia restaurant) just off Seventh Avenue South a few blocks below Sheridan Sq.  There was a lot of ambivalence about the Mafia running the bars . . . .  Guys were glad to have a place to go – and if you drank beer you didn’t give a shit about whether the liquor was watered or not.  On the other hand, any bad news about the guys who ran these places generated derision rather than sympathy.  However, it never hurt to be friendly to them if you were a regular customer, and most of these guys, I think, liked this and played the cordial Big Shot.

Source:  NYCnotKansas

In Walking After Midnight:  Gay Men’s Life Stories (Routledge, 1989), Todd Butler writes:

I was working in a Greenwich Village bar called Lenny’s Hideaway, probably the most famous gay bar at that time.  Lenny was a front.  I mean, the Mafia used to come around to make their pick-ups, and the police came in to get their pay-off too.  You couldn’t see in unless it was summer and the door was open.  Gay bars at that time always had blacked-out windows.  You had to look in and they were always gloomy.  You could barely see to the other end of the bar, it was so dark.

1956 -- 1998: Keller's at 150 Barrow Street (a/k/a 384 West Street)

By at least 1935, it [Keller Hotel] housed transient sailors. After the decline of the maritime industry on the Hudson River, the Keller Hotel became a single-room occupancy hotel and the Keller Bar at the corner storefront became a popular bar catering to a gay clientele.  * * *  By the early 1970s, the western end of Christopher Street and adjacent blocks along West Street, long established with waterfront taverns, had become a nucleus for bars catering to a gay clientele. The June 1969 rebellion by patrons of the Stonewall Bar, 55 Christopher Street, against police harassment, helped to launch a renewed national gay rights movement and made Christopher Street the social and cultural center of New York’s lesbian and gay community.  * * *  The corner storefront at 384 West Street had been occupied as a restaurant, bar or saloon since at least the 1930s by a succession of tenants (Renee Tavern, 1939-1949, Charles Bar & Grill, 1950-1955, Keller Bar 1956-1998).The Keller Bar was reputed to be the oldest gay “leather”  bar in the City.

In The Gay Insider by John Francis Hunter (The Olympia Press, Inc.:  New York 1971), he writes:

This dependable place is something of Danny’s, The Den and The Tool Box, leather-y, but not entirely.  Close to The Tracks, it’s not without its allure.  It’s the oldest leather bar in town—twelve years, they claim!  Once I brought an older out-of-towner here who got raped by two leather types, but he was asking for it.  He overdrank here, since beer is cheap[.]

Source:  Landmarks Preservation Commission, March 6, 2007, Designation List 387

The FBI Files: Anthony Strollo a/k/a Tony Bender: Part I

The FBI Files: Anthony Strollo a/k/a Tony Bender: Part II

State Aids Clean-up Of Taverns In City

An October 14, 1959 article (“State Aids Clean-up of Taverns In City”) from the New York Times states:

The State Liquor Authority has transferred sixteen investigators from upstate to help the city staff of twenty-five conduct a clean-up drive of bars and taverns patronized by prostitutes and homosexuals.  Thomas E. Rohan, chairman of the authority, said last night that the additional investigators began work several days ago.  A preliminary investigation had disclosed that a large number of places, particularly on the East Side, were visited nightly by “objectionab;e” patrons.  Mr. Rohan said there were some questionable places on the West Side and in other parts of the city, but that the biggest concentration was on the East Side.  He said there would be a “thorough probe” of all questionable places to see if the law were being violated.  The investigation would also seek to find what places were under the control of gangsters, he said

1959: Aldo's at 340 Bleecker Street

Aldo's and the Finale were gay places, both with Mafia connections. * * *  Mafia hands reached into all parts of life in the Village – not least, into its gay life.  I arrived in June ’59, and in a June ten years later [the Stonewall Riots] the New York police, the Mafia and gay men would engage in a three-way struggle in the Village which would become legendary – though it would be almost three decades after the event before an accurate history would be written.

Source:  NYCnotKansas

Hustlers at the Silver Dollar Bars

In The Gay Metropolis (Grove Press: 1997) Charles Kaiser writes:

There was a thriving hustler scene on the streets surrounding Times Square in the fifties and early sixties.  “In those days it wasn’t as scummy,” remembered “Sam Baron” (a pseudonym), a young journalist who had grown up in the Bronx and first discovered the wiles of 42d Street in the mid-fifties.  “There was a safer feeling about it.  The boys were teenagers on into their twenties . . . .”  * * *  “The hustlers were mostly at the Silver Dollar bars,” Jack Dowling recalled.  “There was one on Sixth Avenue and 43d Street that had a wonderful selection of hustlers and gay guys, gay older men looking for hustlers, whores, sailors . . . .  It was also known that if you wanted to get picked up or pick somebody up and it involved money, you went to the Astor Bar . . . .”

S.L.A. Warns Bars On Bad Clientele

An October 18, 1959 article (“S.L.A. Warns Bars On Bad Clientele”) from the New York Times states:

The State Liquor Authority has issued a warning to the owners of all restaurants, taverns and night clubs serving wine or liquor.  It said that catering to the patronage of prostitutes, sex deviates, hoodlums or others of  “bad reputation” would lead to the revocation of their S.L.A. licenses.  * * *  Two more restaurants were closed yesterday in the authority’s drive.  They were . . . and the Grapevine Restaurant, 300 East Twenty-eighth Street.  * * *  Grapevine Restaurant, Inc., the owner of the other restaurant, did not contest the authority’s charge that it had become disorderly.  The charge was based on reports by the police and the authority’s investigators that the restaurant employed homosexuals.  They also found that “a substantial portion of the patronage included lesbians and homosexuals, some of whom were observed committing indecent acts.”  * * *  On Friday, the authority revoked the license of . . . Le Cupidon, 40 East Fifty-eighth Street.

In Cures:  A Gay Man’s Odyssey (Westview Press:  2002), Martin Duberman writes:

The Grapevine became my bar of choice.  It was the liveliest gay spot in the city in the late fifties, patronized by lesbians as well as gay men, and a forerunner of the seventies discos, which thought themselves sui generis.  Indeed one of my diary entrues from April 1958 reads like a press release from the disco-queen delirium of twenty years later:  “. . . absorbed and yet released in a concatenation of emotions, bathed and abetted by the heat and excitement, the stimulation of the liquor and the music.”  We would, like those who came later, dance till dawn, pour comatose out into the streets, suffer gargantuan next-day remorse (which in the seventies purportedly gave way to mere exhaustion.)

3 Liquor Permits Lifted

An October 24, 1959 article (“3 Liquor Permits Lifted”) from the New York Times states:

The state Liquor Authority lifted three liquor permits in Manhattan last night.  This brought to ten the number of establishments closed by the authority in its campaign against taverns that permit catering to prostitutes, homosexuals or criminals.  * * *  The Kildare Restaurant, Inc., 638 Sixth Avenue had its license revoked for allegedly “permitting homosexuals and degenerates on the premises[.]"

The Jewish Mafia and Gay Bars

In Stonewall:  The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution [New York:  2004], David Carter writes:

When [Edward Francis P.] Murphy was released from reform school in 1943, he entered the army after a short stint in the gay bar business at the Pink Elephant, an establishment run by the Jewish Mafia.  After combat in France, he left the army in 1946 and worked as a bouncer at the Moss Bar on Eighth Avenue.  * * *  By the late 1940s Murphy had teamed up with a gay friend to rob dentist offices, targeting them for their shipments of gold from dental laboratories.  After robbing seventy-three dental offices, Murphy was finally caught in 1947 and served ten years in prison, the maximum time, spending much of it in isolation for assaults.  When he left prison, he worked as a bouncer in gay bars such as the Cork Club, the Bali, Mais Oui, Sans Souci, the 415, the Terrace, and Artie’s.

In Cruising the Deuce (chelCpress: 2005), Allen Windsor a/k/a Warren Allen Smith writes:

In the early 1950s or 1960s, I had heard one teenager brag to another that his dad bribed police to stay away from his gay bar, the Cork Club, on 72^nd Street.  Most of us in the subculture assumed we were patronizing Mafia places, mainly because we didn’t feel safe elsewhere.

A June 4, 1949 article (“Suspect Is Arrested As ‘Toothache’ Thief”) from the New York Times states:

The “toothaches” that Edward Francis Murphy complained about when he visited Brooklyn dentists during the last year became one big headache yesterday in Brooklyn Felony Court.  The 23-year-old ex-convict waived examination before Magistrate Thomas H. Cullen on a charge of robbery.  * * *  Murphy, who lives at 139 West Fourteenth Street, according to police, was a member of a gang of three men responsible for more than thirty hold-ups of dentists in Brooklyn.  Their loot consisted of about $25,000 in cash and large quantities of gold pellets used in dental work.  The police said that Murphy, apparently the leader of the trio, would enter a dentist’s office and complain about his teeth.  Asked to wait, Murphy would excuse himself on the pretense of having a business appointment and arrange for the work to be done the next day.  On his second appearance he would show up with two accomplices and hold up the dentist.  Murphy was picked up on Thursday when he went to the old gold shop of Philip Pruzansky at 309 West Forty-second Street.  * * *  Pruzansky, 57 years old, of 1372 East Tenth Street, Brooklyn, was arraigned in Manhattan Felony Court on a charge of receiving $650 in jewelry and dental scrap allegedly stolen by Murphy.

A June 5, 1949 article (“2 More Are Arrested in ‘Toothache’ Thefts”) from the New York Times states:

Two more alleged members of the so-called Brooklyn “toothache gang,” who are said to have held up twenty dentists’ offices and made away with $4,000 in cash and gold pellets, were picked up yesterday by detectives.  The suspects, in company with a third man, were arrested at 8:05 A. M. in front of Armando’s Restaurant, 143 Montague Street, Brooklyn, which, the police say, they were preparing to hold up.  * * *  One of the men was Francis Mullin, alias “Red” Ryan, 25 years old, of 130 West Seventieth Street, who had dyed his red hair a black shade.  He and Richard Nelson, 31, of 352 Van Brunt Street, Brooklyn, were identified as the hold-up men by twelve dentists and were booked on charges of assault and robbery.  The man picked up with them was Val Sandstron, 35, of 611 Forty-first Street, Brooklyn who was charged with possessing burglar tools and conspiracy to commit robbery.

The Latino Gay Community & Organized Crime: 1950s - 1960s

An April 6, 2001 article (“Speaker discusses history of Latino gay community”) by Kathryn Monroe from the Daily Northwestern states:

Latino gay culture flourished in the 1950s and 1960s as gay men escaped to New York, a city that "asked no questions," George Chauncey told a group of 80 students and faculty Thursday at University Hall. Chauncey, a history professor and the director of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago, focused on Latino gays and the urban politics of New York City after World War II. He talked about the tolerance of homosexuality, the thriving sexual culture in the Puerto Rican community and the hostility encountered outside of that community. "For many men desperate to escape pressures they felt at home from marriage and traditional lives, New York was only the latest stop in a journey that had already taken them from their homes to their island's capital cities," Chauncey said. The source of Chauncey's talk came from his upcoming book, "The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness and Politics from the Second World War to the Stonewall Era." He described a crackdown on homosexuals and on gay bars in 1959 that followed a murder case in which two male Latino teen-agers, depicted by the press as gay, were accused of killing two white male teenagers. Latino gays were closely linked to organized crime and corruption during this time, Chauncey said. He explained that organized crime protected gay bars by paying off the police. These negative ideas were further fueled by racial tensions and by the view of homosexuality as degenerate, he said.

1960: The Lion at 62 West 9th Street

The Lion was a bar in Greenwich Village, predominantly gay, located on the ground floor of a typical New York brownstone.  On Monday nights they had a talent contest.  According to Barry Dennen, who convinced Barbra [Streisand] to enter the contest, The Lion had a back room where there was a little area that acted as a kind of stage, with the piano backed up at one end and the audience sitting at tables all around it.

Source:  Barbra Streisand:  Live in Clubs and Concerts

The 1960 Mafia Wave Over Gay Bars In NYC

In Stonewall:  The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution [New York:  2004], David Carter writes:

According to both Dick Leitsch and Randy Wicker, in the late 1950s there were a considerable number of gay bars that operated openly in New York City.  Leitsch puts the number of gay bars at “more than forty” in 1959 and says that they were business that had been around for a long time and were controlled by “private individuals.”  But a great wave of bar closings began in 1960, which Leitsch felt was the fallout of a large investigation into corruption within the State Liquor Authority (SLA).  When the New York City Police began a systematic campaign in 1960 to close all gay bars, they all lost their licenses, with one exception, the bar of the Cherry Lane Theater (though even that bar finally lost its liscense during Koch’s 1966 antigay crusade).  The result of the 1960 crackdown, according to Leitsch, was that “the organized crime syndicate saw an opening and rushed in, opening bars all over town.”  Leitsch claims that “during one period” Mafia gay bars were able to remain open by paying off “strategic people” but that “when that became more difficult after the scandals in the State Liquor Authority, the bars began to operate only until they were raided, at which time they would pick up the entire operation, bar, employees, clientele and all, and move to another place in the same neighborhood, with the licenses in another name.”  Leitsch later commented in a lecture that whenever a crackdown occurred, “homosexuals knew the ‘Mafia’ would find some way to supply us with a place to meet and socialize.  The sad philosophy of the gay world was that expressed by Brecht’s Mother Courage:  ‘Our only hope lies in corruption.’”  Leitsch saw the problem as the SLA having “surround[ed] the liquor business with so many rules and petty restrictions that honest men cannot survive,” so that business “reverts to the hands of those crooked enough to have the knowledge and lack of scruples to ferret out and work with crooked liquor agents.” 

"[t]hough the usual straight owners of the gay bars hold the 'faggots' in contempt, they count on their trade"

In The Sixth Man:  A Startling Investigation of the Spread of Homosexuality in America (Doubleday & Co. 1961) Jess Stearn writes:

The bars of New York are the “country clubs” where the gay boys meet to make friends and influence people.  East Side, West Side, all around the town, these gay bars thrive when other bars in the same district go begging for customers.  Many bars specializing in the gay trade are so busy during cocktail hours that doors are locked tight and signs ironically announce:  “Sorry, but we have reached our legal capacity.”  From time to time, due to public outcries, some bars are briefly shuttered while their trade drifts off to other gay bars or straight bars which soon become gay.  * * *  The bars flourishing on homosexual traffic are often carefully, even ingeniously, run.  The sophisticated bars, on the upper East Side, generally hire only straight help—waiters, bartenders, and floormen (actually bouncers) who keep proceedings within propriety and the law.  * * *  Before homosexuality was in style, many queer bars were secretly identified by bird names, which provided a clue only for the initiated.  * * *  But with a growing easiness about homosexuality there is no longer reason for a code and the bars have fanned out over the city—along Eighth Street, the main artery of Greenwich Village; in the West Seventies, not far from Central Park; along Lexington, Third, and Second avenues.

In scores of these bars are customers packed four or five deep around the polished mahogany with the only woman in the place more often than not a dishwasher or scullery maid.  The bars vary widely in décor.  However, in all, men are eying other men as men ordinarily study women.  In some of these bars, particularly in the West Seventies, all pretense is abandoned.  Swishy faggots, with rouged faces, predominate.  A few come in drag, female attire, and dance together to the roistering strains of the jukebox.  Though the usual straight owners of the gay bars hold the “faggots” in contempt, they count on their trade.  * * *  Many bars find the queer business so profitable that they not only welcome it but hire well-known queens to keep the trade coming.  Some bars set special hours aside for specific homosexual groups.  The queens, drawing a salary or percentage, serve as greeters and send out cards to announce “meeting nights.”   * * *

The police, periodically closing homosexual haunts, still realize they are only transferring the traffic to bars which may have to be closed later.  “It’s like a game of musical chairs,” a high police official observed.  “We close one place and they pop up somewhere else.”  * * *

We . . . headed for the Village, a small tastefully appointed restaurant in Bleecker Street.  * * *  At the bar they were packed two and three deep, all men.  Two young Negroes, who were together, made room for us as we squeezed up to the bar.  * * *  Nearly everybody at the tables, beyond the low partition separating the bar from the dining room, was male without being masculine.  The boys, sitting tete-a-tete, needed haircuts, as a rule.  The more delicate young men seemed to fancy oversized crew sweaters, which appeared to enhance their delicacy.  There were not more than four or five women in the restaurant part and perhaps a hundred men, all neatly groomed.  * * *

We walked a couple of blocks and descended rickety steps into a small, smoke-filled room with a few tables snaked around the bar.  * * *  There were no women in the place and the males, none apparently over thirty-five, were dressed for the most part in sweaters and tight chino pants or denims.  Some were standing away from the bars near the tables, holding their drinks and boldly staring around the room.  One young husky about twenty-five—in a T shirt, flexing his muscles and rocking back and forth on his toes like Marlon Brando—had placed himself in front of the jukebox which over and over again was playing a popular jazzed-up version of “Mack the Knife.”  The young man’s chinos were so tight they bulged.  * * *  We had barely turned back to our drinks when two young sailors, the down still on their cheeks, sauntered in and tentatively approached the bar.  They carried the insignia of Her Majesty’s Navy on their hats.  Tight Pants looked them over as they rather timidly edged their way forward and ordered a couple of beers.  * * *  With a last look at the two innocents of the Queen’s Navy I gulped down my beer and said, “Let’s go.”  * * * As we hit the street, George said, “There’s another spot around the corner . . . lesbians . . . you shouldn’t miss it.”  * * *

This was another walkdown, but visible from the street.  At the bar through a haze of blue smoke I could distinguish three females with mannish—butch—haircuts and two boys with permanent waves.  As the lesbians got off the stools, heading for a door opposite the bar, a blond boy barred the way.  The bartender, who had a broad lisp, leaned over and advised George confidentially, “We had to close the private room because the heat is on.”  He peered down the bar at the blond and, busily wiping a glass, said with a grimace, “He’s the owner, and it’s got him petrified.  All this lost business.”  “I don’t want to appear naïve,” I whispered, “but what goes on behind those doors?”  George laughed harshly.  “Nothing, really.  The lesbians camp it up a bit, dancing and grabbing each other.”  With one arm he took in the tiny place.  “They got everybody here, squares, lezzes, faggots.  Even the fairies like to watch the lezzes.”  * * *

In Greenwich Village gay boys laughingly pass around cards which read:  “Nobody loves you when you’re old and gay.”  To many, including the homosexual colony, the aging homosexual is an object of scorn and derision.  Though his loneliness is often abject, he seldom arouses sympathy or interest, unless he has money or influence.  * * *  Through the homosexual underground the aging but well-preserved homosexual learns of haunts where he will be welcomed by others of his own stripe.  These are usually little offbeat bars.  To the cognoscenti, one is known as the “Mustache Bar,” where full-blooded, middle-aged men of apparent robust natures meet over drafts of heavy ale.  Then there is a “Wrinkle Bar,” where the truly older set get together, and a “White Haired” bar which attracts not only distinguished-looking older men but some younger homosexuals with a father complex.

"[a]gents of crime syndicates have controlling interest in many of the bars in our larger cities"

In The Homosexual and His Society:  A View From Within (Citadel Press:  1963), Donald Webster Cory and John P. LeRoy write:

In some respects, the gay bars may operate similarly to the speakeasies of the prohibition era.  * * *  Although as many as thirty or forty gay bars have been said to flourish at one time in a large American city, in most municipalities the number of bars that succeed in achieving any kind of fame rarely surpasses ten or twelve and, more often, is limited to five or six.  * * *  The liquor authorities watch gay bars with special scrutiny so that they will have a pretext, if one is needed, to close their doors.  The vice squad of the local police department is constantly hovering over the gay bars, sending plainclothesmen to entrap the unwary homosexual or to catch the owner in any minor violation which can be used as evidence for the closing of the bar.  In large cities this gives rise to a complex system of graft, bribery, pay-offs, corruption, and underworld skullduggery.  Raids occur from time to time (although with the changing social scene they are now less frequent than in the 1940s or even 1950s), and the death of a gay bar can come swiftly over the slightest infraction of regulations.  Some bars have flourished for years only to have a padlock suddenly placed on the door and a sign posted in the window saying in legal jargon that some form of illegal act has taken place within its walls.  There is an uncanny coincidence between the occurrence of such events and political campaigning.  * * *  Yet they have amazing regenerative power, for no sooner is one closed down than another springs up nearby to take its place.

A now defunct place on New York’s West Side catered almost exclusively to homosexuals of the most effeminate, “swishy” variety.  Young fair-skinned men, many of whom were scarcely out of their teens, adorned themselves with rouge, lipstick, and mascara, all ineptly applied.  Their hair showed the effects of tonics, creams, shampoos, dyes, and rinses, and was curled, waved, and set in every imaginable style.  To enter this bar, it was necessary to walk down a stairway, on the walls of which there hung a weird array of feminine caricatures, a feast for the eyes of the most militant misogynist.  The homosexuals found in this bar not only fulfilled the effeminate stereotype, but surpassed it!  They screamed, chattered, jabbered, and howled in hoarse, piercing tones in the highest register of their voices that they could manage.  They strutted, twisted, and cavorted about, in and out of the ladies’ room, around chairs and tables, and out onto the street.  The juke box blared the latest rock-and-roll hits, continually pounding away at the eardrums to the threshold of pain.

In complete contrast to this, there are numerous other bars where any allusion to effeminate behavior in an overt manner arouses strong disapproval.  A modicum of effeminacy is tolerated, but not encouraged; the standards of middle-class propriety are enforced, either directly by ejecting the offender from the bar, or indirectly by means of ostracism, by refusing to serve, or by giving polite warnings, which if allowed to go unheeded, will result in banishment.

At the other extreme, there are a few bars where masculinity reigns supreme.  Here, sturdy swaggering males dressed in tight dungarees, leather jackets, boots or heavy shoes, dark-hued woolen shirts, and sometimes motorcycle helmets, aspire toward a super-masculine ideal.  Faces are often rough and scowling, fingernails uneven and dirty, voices gruff, languahe ribald and vulgar.  Boasts are heard about exploits, conquests, drag races, fights, and gambling.  Behind the façade of robust exploits, the uniform of pretentious male prowess, the mask of toughness, there sometimes lies a dangerous personality that can express itself physically by substituting violence for erotic pleasure; capable of receiving sexual pleasure only by inflicting pain (or receiving it).  The general atmosphere in such places is restless and brooding, and one can never be sure when the dynamite of violence will erupt.  Bars of this type are also rare, but they serve to illustrate the extremes between masculine and effeminate homosexuals as they are seen in the gathering places which often form a center for their activities.  * * *

Then, on rare occasions, one finds the way to the bar where men dance with men; or, more frequently, women dance with women.  * * *  Some of these “dancing bars” are run like private clubs, with the air of speakeasies about them.  They are effectively concealed from the public; only the initiate enters.  Others are open to anyone who happens to wander in, though the management tries to screen out those who do not “belong.”  * * *  Most dancing places have a regular bar in the front with a dance floor in the rear, usually concealed behind a curtain or a wall.  The music emanates from a juke box.  Live entertainment is rare.  On a weekend, it is sometimes necessary to pay an admission price, cover charge, or minimum.  The price of drinks is higher than in non-dancing bars, for it is rumored, and seems logical, that the price of protection, bribery, and graft is higher.  On a Friday or Saturday night, the sight is one of fun and pleasure seeking.  Men of all ages crowd around the periphery of the dance floor, filling all the available seats, and occupying all, or nearly all, the available standing room.  Uniformed waiters, usually youthful and handsome, push and squeeze their way through the throng as well as they can, bearing trays filled with brimming cocktail glasses and foamy beer bottles.  They shout their orders and try their best to get the crowd to allow them to pass so that they may deliver the drinks and refreshments.  By the time the evening is over, they often have a customer waiting for them, perhaps planning to augment their salary and tips by working extra hours performing other services.  * * *  Suddenly, in the middle of a dance, the lights are turned up, the juke box is silenced, and an air of surprise and bewilderment grips the newcomers and strangers.  Interruptions such as these signify the presence of a policeman, plainclothesman, detective, officer, or some other law-enforcement official, either on the premises or nearby.  The atmosphere becomes more subdued.  People converse in lower tones.  Dancing stops.  There is a period of waiting for the danger to subside.  As suddenly as it came, the dimming of the lights, the return of the music, and the resumption of the dancing signify that it is one again safe.  The all-clear siren has rung; the air raid danger has passed.  * * *

But with all the safeguards of payoffs and palm-oiling, with the safety of numbers and the hidden appearances, gay bars are often no more safe and stable than the people who frequent them.  Not long ago, a columnist of a tabloid newspaper in New York mentioned in his column the names of several bars and gave lewd descriptions of what allegedly took place inside.  Within a few weeks, the police were pressured by irate, puritanically-minded citizens to close all the bars mentioned.  Shouting that such places were “corrupting the youth, perverting their morals, and spreading homosexuality,” these reformers stirred up a small hornet’s nest, which soon began to take on political overtones.  Rumors of the misdeeds of the underworld, corruption in the police department, and symptoms of moral decadence were fanned, thereby increasing the circulation of the newspaper and forcing the closing of numerous bars.  * * *

Because the practice of homosexuality is held to be a criminal activity in most states, the operation of gay bars is often in the hands of criminals.   Agents of crime syndicates have controlling interest in many of the bars in our larger cities.  Being led to a semi-underworld in pursuit of harmless sexual activity, the homosexual must depend, albeit indirectly, upon the professional criminal.  This corruption has been known to spread to high city officials, who secretly accept bribes not to enforce the law, which leads to a disrespect for law and order.  * * *  Legalization will serve to make the gay bar a better place to make friends rather than to seek impersonal, anonymous partners for a furtive experience . . . and the oayment of bribes and other underworld skullduggery that often plagues gay bars would be lessened.  * * *

One last look and we will have covered the major public and semi-public hangouts.  For there are still some places where homosexuality is the expected order of the day.  They are known as the gay baths; they may be situated in the Turkish baths, or in an athletic club, or at a particular and specifically known “Y.”  * * *  In a few of the larger cities . . . one or two such places begin to cater so much to the homosexual that all others stay away.  Protected by the complexity and anonymity of the large urban population, people go to such places without fear of being seen by those who know them.  In the corridors they wander robed in sheets, or they go into the swimming pools and the steam rooms, completely nude.  They look alike, the executive and the laborer, the rich and the poor, and age and physical appearance become the only attributes that are recognized as having value.  In private rooms, people make their first acquaintance in erotic embrace; but although they have come for sex, here too it is carried out furtively.  Men roam the corridors or lie on the beds in their rooms, the doors slightly ajar, or more so.  Solicitations could not be more open.  Sex is taking place in the steam room at temperatures almost intolerably high.  And there are spectators, who can manage only with the greatest of difficulty to see through the dense vapor.  Occasionally there is a police raid, a gay bath is closed, and several people are arrested.  Then there are rumors of payoffs and bribes.  The agitation dies down, and another place opens, and the cost of protection is considered merely part of the overhead.

"the atmosphere was that of a speakeasy: dim lights, loud noise, cigarette smoke, music"

In a March 1963 article (“New York’s ‘Middle-Class’ Homosexuals”) from Harper's Magazine, reprinted in Social Problems:  Persistent Challenges (Holt, Reinhart and Winston:  1965), William J. Helmer writes:

New York probably has the country’s largest homosexual community . . . .  * * *  In New York, as in other cities, bars are an important part of gay life, especially for young men who have just discovered homosexual society and for those new to the city who want to get acquainted.  In Manhattan, about twenty bars cater to homosexuals exclusively, and about twice that number are “mixed.”  They are scattered around the city with concentrations in the Greenwich Village area and the Upper East Side.  * * *  A few gay bars have private back rooms where homosexuals can dance with one another.  These, more than the other bars, seem to be dominated by a young crowd of regular patrons whom my guide referred to as “bar society,” and the first one we visited proved to be fairly typical.  It was an inconspicuous but very busy street-corner tavern near the Hudson River in West Greenwich Village.  Although we went on a Thursday night, the back room was so crowded that many were standing, and the atmosphere was that of a speakeasy:  dim lights, loud noise, cigarette smoke, music, and, I was told, a signal to stop dancing in the event of a police raid.  * * *  [E]veryone resembled the dashing young men in college sportswear advertisements.  At other bars I did see a few obviously effeminate persons, but they were not flamboyant, and I was told that the better class of gay bar usually discourages conspicuous homosexuals in order to avoid police crackdowns.  Word spreads quickly once a bar becomes gay, and many are opened with the intention of catering to homosexuals who will keep a place busy until closing every night of the week.  * * *  New York’s gay bars are periodically closed by the police, but no serious effort has been made to eliminate them—either because the owners pay off the police (as customers widely assume, and as bartenders sometimes intimate in justifying their dollar-a-bottle price for beer in the back rooms), or because the police believe they can be more easily watched and controlled if a few are permitted to operate in the open.  A police cruiser was parked in front of one of the dancing bars I visited and its driver was standing inside the door talking to the proprietor as I entered, but no one in the back room, where about twenty-five male couples were dancing, paid any notice to this.  * * *  Some New York nightclubs feature female impersonators and other “gay entertainment,” but these are strictly offbeat tourist attractions for heterosexuals.  * * *  In gay society an individual is often typed (not always accurately) according to his neighborhood.  The “East Side Snob” is described as an elegant, high-class dandy, or a bland, pseudo-sophisticated “organization man with a flair,” and both tend to confine themselves to their own more private social circles. The West Sider is thought to be a lower-class, sometimes bizarre person, and the two extremes seem to meet in the Village where stereotypes mix.  To some homosexuals, Forty-second Street between Sixth and Eighth Avenues is practically a taboo area because of the hustlers, hoodlums, and generally undesirable types who congregate there.  The West Seventies are said to be a “pansy patch” because of the number of obviously effeminate homosexuals, often Puerto Rican, who live there; and some areas of the Upper East Side are called “fairy flats” because they are supposedly inhabited by “conspicuously elegant types usually walking poodles,” as one informant put it.  Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River from Lower Manhattan, is thought of as a kind of homosexual surburbia popular with “young marrieds.”

S.L.A. Tells Role Of Theft Suspect

An April 9, 1963 article (“S.L.A. Tells Role Of Theft Suspect”) by Charles Grutzner from the New York Times states:

Guenther Reinhardt, charged with theft of records of the State Liquor Authority, was described yesterday by Donald S. Hostetter, the authority chairman, as “a volunteer informer who gave us a lot of accurate information and some that was pure fantasy.”  Mr. Hostetter said that Reinhardt had never been on the authority’s staff and had not been issued credentials.  * * *  The one confidential document contained information about gangster activities in the liquor and entertainment fields.  According to police, this contained information about activities of John (Sonny) Franzese, described as former associate of the late Joseph Profaci, Brooklyn underworld figure.  Reinhardt was arrested after allegedly peddling S. L. A. files to Detectives Joseph Ryan and Louis Tosi, who had posed as gangster friends of Franzese.  The detectives found the other authority documents and a blackjack in his apartment at 95 Christopher Street.  Mr. Hostetter, a former special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was appointed S. L. A. chairman in December after the ouster of Martin C. Epstein.  He said he found that Reinhardt had “been around [the Authority] for a long time” and had supplied information “right along” about “joints where homosexuals hang out.”

Racketeers Said to Drain Millions in Liquor Profits

An October 2, 1963 article (“Racketeers Said to Drain Millions in Liquor Profits”) by Charles Grutzner from the New York Times states:

The underworld was described yesterday as draining millions of dollars in profits from the beer taps and liquor bottles of New York bars and nightclubs and from the wholesale liquor trade across the country.  Donald S. Hostetter, said in an interview that it was “pretty obvious” that many liquor licenses were held by persons who were fronts for the real owners but that it was impossible in many cases to prove it.  * * *  In a continuing search for proof of veiled ownership the S.L.A. has revoked or canceled the licenses at 60 places, most of them in this city, during the first six months of this year.  The number of revocations or cancellations for all of last year was 73, and in 1961 it was 87.  * * *  One way in which racket money is put to work in the liquor industry was described by Mr. Hostetter as follows:  “A racketeer with a suitcase full of money that isn’t working for him will say to a bartender:  ‘Joe, I’m going to set you up in business.  Here’s $20,000.  You get a license and open your own place.  You keep $200 a week and the rest goes to me.  Legally you are the owner of the joint, but if you hold out on me you’ll be killed.’”  The threat of death gives the racketeer a firmer guarantee than would a signature on a note for $20,000.

S.L.A. Cancels 6 Cafe Licenses Here and Upstate

An October 8, 1963 article (“S.L.A. Cancels 6 Café Licenses Here and Upstate”) from the New York Times states:

The State Liquor Authority said yesterday that it had cancelled the liquor license of Tropical Paradise, a Broadway nightspot between 48^th and 49^th Streets, because its owner had refused to disclose the source of a $50,000 “loan.”  The license was one of six canceled because of the alleged hidden ownerships.  Donald S. Hostetter, the authority chairman, said last week that millions of dollars of liquor trade profits were going to undisclosed underworld owners of bars and other licensed places.  Yesterday, Mr. Hofstetter said that not all recent cancellations had been made because of investment by the organized underworld; in some cases, he said, licensees had lied for other reasons about the sources of their financing.   * * *  Among 16 licenses suspended for various periods was that of the Faison d’Or bar and restaurant at 14 East 52d St.  It was ordered shut for 30 days, beginning Oct. 14, for having allegedly permitted homosexuals and other undesirables to congregate and conduct themselves in an offensive and indecent manner.  The Tropical Paradise received a license last Oct. 14, pending further investigation, to operate a restaurant and serve liquor at 1604 Broadway, an address at which the China d’Or operated until the previous August.    The application for the Tropical Gardens listed Angelo Barone as President and sole stockholder of the operating corporation, with Nicholas Paduca as vice president and Lena Barone as secretary-treasurer.  The authority’s complaint alleged that there was hidden ownership, a false material statement in the application, a failure to keep accurate books and records, and unauthorized alteration of the premises, and that the licensee “ceased to conduct a bona fide restaurant.”  Records of the authority indicate that Mr. Barone had first challenged the allegations, but had subsequently entered a “no contest” plea rather than testify at a hearing into the source of the alleged $50,000 loan.