Gay History

Organized Crime

Posts categorized "Gambino Crime Family"

December 26, 2007

Carlo Gambino Buys Into Gay Bars

Carlogambino1930s_4A 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.

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:

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

Timessquare1970s_2In Down 42nd Street (Grand Central Publishing:  2001), Marc Eliot writes:

Down42ndstreeteliotIn 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.

Hookers_times_square_signsPhotobyeddiehausner_2Oldtimessquare_2

Owner of Nightclub is Accused of Arson

Anthony_tony_bender_strollo_with_haA June 8, 1965 article (“Owner of Nightclub is Accused of Arson”) from the New York Times states:

An eight-month investigation by Nassau County authorities into fires that destroyed five nightclubs reportedly catering to sexual deviates resulted in the arrests early today of a reputed member of Cosa Nostra and two of his aids.  District Attorney William Cahn said the fires had resulted from a struggle among underworld figures for control of places catering to deviates.  Arrested and charged with keeping a disorderly house . . . were Edward De Curtis, 51 years old, of 185 West Houston Street, Manhattan; Danny Fatico, 45, of 92 Schenk Avenue, Brooklyn, and John Virgini, 47, of 335 Avenue W, Brooklyn.  Mr. Cahn said that De Curtis, owner of The Magic Touch in Island Park, had represented the interests of Anthony Strollo (Tony Bender), a former underling of Cosa Nostra-controlled Greenwich Village establishments catering to deviates.

An October 8, 1967 article (“Mafia Increasing Investments in Business on L.I.”) by Charles Grutzner from the New York Times states:

[John “Sonny”] Franzese [of the Columbo crime family] is reported to have a concealed stake in several bars, motels and cocktail lounges, including places patronized by homosexuals.  A sideline in the operation of such spots is the blackmailing of wealthy or prominent patrons.  * * *  The Genovese family, which is reported to control many of the bars and nightclubs in Greenwich Village and on Manhattan’s fashionable East Side catering to sex deviates, has extended its operations to Long Island.  A member of the family, Edward (Eddie Toy) DeCurtis, is to go on trial this fall in Nassau County Court with Danny Fatico and John (Vicious Vivian) Vignini on charges of keeping a disorderly house and conspiracy to violate the alcoholic beverage control law.  The charges resulted from a raid two years ago at the Magic Touch, an Island Park nightclub described by Mr. [District Attorney of Nassau County William] Cahn as “a cesspool of depravity.” DeCurtis has been named by the police as the concealed owner of the Magic Touch.

A January 31, 1968 article (“3 Guilty in Homosexual Case”) from the New York Times provides:

Eddie DeCurtis, a reputed member of the Mafia, and two co-defendants were found guilty today of two counts involving the operation of a disorderly house catering to homosexuals.  They were found guilty of misdemeanor charges.  DeCurtis is 53 years old and lived at 185 West Houston Street, Manhattan.  Also found guilty were John (Vicious Vivian) Vignini, 44, of 335 Avenue W., Brooklyn, and Daniel (Danny Wagons) Fatico, 47, of 92 Schenck Avenue, Brooklyn.

NOTE:  Danny Fatico was the brother of Gambino capo Carmine Fatico.

The FBI Files: Mattachine Foundation - Mattachine Society

An August 1965 article from the Eastern Mattachine Magazine states:

In June, the Nassau County police department reportedly completed an investigation into fires which destroyed five nightclubs “catering to sexual deviates.” (See Eastern MATTACHINE Magazine, July 1965, page 9.)  A reputed member of the Cosa Nostra and two aides were arrested as a result of this investigation in which a famous establishment in Island Park, New York was closed.  * * *  Arson and the connections of the proprietors are acknowledged facts about south shore bars.  It is the public and the State Liquor Authority who are responsible for criminal activity by their denial of our right to assemble and – just as those other “keepers of our morality” who banned alcoholic beverages in the 1920’s – they are no better than the criminals they engender.

Download Mattachine Foundation - Mattachine Society FBI Files Part I

Download Mattachine Foundation - Mattachine Society FBI Files Part II

Download Mattachine Foundation - Mattachine Society FBI Files Part III

Download Mattachine Foundation - Mattachine Society FBI Files Part IV

Download Mattachine Foundation - Mattachine Society FBI Files Part V

Download Mattachine Foundation - Mattachine Society FBI Files Part VII

Download Mattachine Foundation - Mattachine Society FBI Files Part VIII

Carmine Fatico: 1910 - 1991: "Fatico’s discreet string of private gay clubs, where exotic stage acts could be seen by men prepared to pay exotic prices for admission and drinks, was highly lucrative"

In The World’s Greatest True Crime (Barnes & Noble Publishing:  2004) Ian Young writes:

The_worlds_greatest_true_crimeQuite apart from his canniness and naked aggression he [John Gotti] stood out for his appalling taste in clothing:  he wore anything, so long as it was loud, colourful and stolen.  Purple suits were a favorite.  He attracted the attention of Carmine “Charley Wagons” Fatico, an associate of the late Alberto Anastasia.  Although only seventeen, Gotti quickly proved his worth as a strong man, performing one or two spectacular beatings, and became one of the 120 men Fatico had working for him.  Fatico had a well-established organization, which grossed him around thirty million dollars annually.  The money came from hijacking, illegal gambling and loan-sharking, but Fatico had a special line in gay bars.  Homosexuality was still illegal in America, and Fatico’s discreet string of private gay clubs, where exotic stage acts could be seen by men prepared to pay exotic prices for admission and drinks, was highly lucrative.

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The FBI Files: Carmine Fatico: Part I

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The FBI Files: Carmine Fatico: Part II

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December 25, 2007

Martin Duberman's Stonewall

Stonewallinn3_2 In Stonewall , historian Martin Duberman writes:

MartindubermanstonewallCraig Rodwell—like Leo Laurence in San Francisco—wanted militant activism to be the touchstone of New York's homophile movement. He was thoroughly fed up with Dick Leitsch's controlling influence over Mattachine, for if Leitsch had once been a militant, he was now, in Craig's view, interested solely in the advancement of Leitsch. He had become a mere politician, concerned more with protecting and inflating his own role as the broker between gays and the city administration than with empowering gays themselves, through confrontational action, to build a proud, assertive movement.  Craig was also fed up with the gay bar scene in New York— with Mafia control over the only public space most gays could claim, with the contempt shown the gay clientele, with the speakeasy, clandestine atmosphere, the watered, overpriced drinks, the police payoffs and raids. His anger was compounded by tales he heard from his friend Dawn Hampton, a torch singer who, between engagements, worked the hatcheck at a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Because Dawn was straight, the Mafia men who ran Stonewall talked freely in front of her—talked about their hatred for the ”faggot scumbags” who made their fortunes.  Indeed, the Stonewall Inn, at 53 Christopher Street, epitomized for Craig everything that was wrong with the bar scene. When a hepatitis epidemic broke out among gay men early in 1969, Craig printed an angry article in his newsletter, New York Hymnal, blaming the epidemic on the unsterile drinking glasses at the Stonewall Inn. And he was probably right. Stonewall had no running water behind the bar; a returned glass was simply run through one of two stagnant vats of water kept underneath the bar, refilled, and then served to the next customer. By the end of an evening the water was murky and multicolored.  Craig also thought Stonewall was a haven for ”chicken hawks” —adult males who coveted underage boys. Jim Fouratt shared that view. He characterized Stonewall as ”a real dive, an awful, sleazy place set up by the Mob for hustlers, chickens to be bought by older people.” But this was, at most, a partial view. One segment of Stonewall's varied clientele did consist of street queens who hustled; but even for that contingent Stonewall was primarily a social, not a business place. Some sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds did frequent Stonewall, and were admitted with the friendly complicity of somebody at the door (the drinking age was then eighteen)—but not for purposes of prostitution. As in any club, of course, the occasional cash transaction undoubtedly took place.  Figuring prominently in Craig and Jim's scenario is the figure of Ed Murphy, one of the bouncer-doormen at the Stonewall Inn, whom they accuse of purveying drugs and young flesh there. The indictment, though overdrawn, has some substance. Murphy did deal drugs, did lech after teenagers, did make ”introductions” (for which he accepted ”tips”), and was involved in corruption, simultaneously taking payoffs from the Mafia and the New York Police Department. (That is, until the police badly beat him up one night, and he stopped informing for them.)  Sascha L., who in 1969 briefly worked the door at Stonewall alongside Murphy, began by thinking of him as a father figure— posing as a cop, Murphy had once rescued Sascha from an angry John wanting more than Sascha had been willing to give—but finally decided that Murphy was a run-of-the-mill crook. Sascha was eyewitness one night to an underage boy named Tommy turning over to Murphy, in the Stonewall basement, a bag of wallets stolen during the evening.  But Murphy and the Stonewall Inn had many defenders. Murphy had been employed in gay bars and after-hours places since 1946 and in the course of that long career had made—along with detractors and enemies—some staunch friends. (Indeed, in later years the Christopher Street Heritage of Pride Committee would canonize Murphy as an originating saint of the gay movement.) And as for the Stonewall Inn, it had, in the course of its two-and-a-half-year existence, become, the most popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. Many saw it as an oasis, a safe retreat from the harassment of everyday life, a place less susceptible to police raids than other gay bars and one that drew a magical mix of patrons ranging from tweedy East Siders to street queens. It was also the only gay male bar in New York where dancing was permitted.  Sylvia Rivera was among the staunchest defenders of Stonewall, and of its omnipresent bouncer Ed Murphy. When down on their luck, which was often, Sylvia and her street-queen friends always knew they could turn to Murphy for a handout. Some of them called him Papa Murphy, and Sylvia's friend Ivan Valentin seems to have been his special favorite. ”To me,” Ivan says, ”Ed Murphy never did anything wrong.” Murphy had a soft spot in general for hispanics like Ivan, and also for blacks; indeed, later gay bar owners who employed Murphy would worry that he would ”turn the club black” and—since racism has always been alive and well in the gay world—frighten off the white clientele.  But though Sylvia and her friends enjoyed going to Stonewall, their bars of choice were in fact Washington Square, on Broadway and Third Street and, to a lesser extent, the Gold Bug and the Tenth of Always (an after-after-hours place that catered to all possible variations of illicit life and stayed open so late it converted by nine a.m. into a regular working-class bar). The Washington Square was owned by the Joe Gallo family, which also controlled Tony Pastor's and the Purple Onion (whereas the Genovese family operated Stonewall, Tele-Star, the Tenth of Always, the Bon Soir on Eighth Street, and—run by Anna Genovese—the Eighty-Two Club in the East Village, which featured drag shows for an audience largely composed of straight tourists). Washington Square was Sylvia's special favorite. It opened at three in the morning and catered primarily (rather than incidentally, as was the case with Stonewall) to transvestites; the more upscale ones would arrive in limos with their wealthy Johns and spend the evening ostentatiously drinking champagne. But others, like Sylvia, went there for relaxing nightcaps and gossip after a hard evening of hustling on the streets.  The Mob usually provided only a limited amount of money to Family members interested in opening a club; it thereafter became the individual's responsibility to turn a profit. That meant, among other things, not investing too heavily in liquor. When Washington Square first opened, the Mafia members who ran the place lost twelve cases of liquor and fifty cases of beer during the first police raid. Thereafter, only a few bottles were kept in the club and the rest of the liquor was stored in a nearby car; when the bartender was about to run out, someone would go around the corner to the parked car, put a few bottles under his arm, and return to the club. (Other bars had different strategies, such as keeping the liquor hidden behind a panel in the wall.) By thus preventing the police from confiscating large amounts of liquor during any one of their commonplace raids, it was possible—and also commonplace—to open up again for business the next day.  The Stonewall Inn had, in its varied incarnations during the fifties, been a straight restaurant and a straight nightclub. In 1966 it was taken over by three Mafia figures who had grown up together on Mulberry Street in Little Italy: ”Mario” (the best-liked of the three), Zucchi, who also dealt in firecrackers, and ”Fat TonyLauria, who weighed in at 420 pounds. Together they put up $3,500 to reopen the Stonewall as a gay club; Fat Tony put up $2,000, which made him the controlling partner, but Mario served as Stonewall's manager and ran the place on a day-to-day basis.  Tony Lauria was the best-connected of the three. He had gotten a B.A. at Xavier, had married and divorced, and lived at 136 Waverly Place, a Mob-owned apartment building. It was home to a host of related Mafia figures involved in assorted rackets: vending machines, carting companies, and sanitation. Tony's two uncles and his father also lived in the building; the latter (whose other son was a stockbroker) was high up in Mob circles and sat on the board of the Bank of Commerce on Delancey Street, a bank that laundered a fair share of Mafia money. Lauria Senior did not approve of his wayward son's penchant for hanging around street mobsters and getting involved in the ”fag bar” scene.  Fat Tony lived from 1966 to 1971 with Chuck Shaheen, an openly gay man in his mid-twenties of Italian descent. The relationship was secretarial, not erotic. Shaheen acted as a man Friday, serving at different times as everything from a Stonewall bartender to the trusted go-between who ”picked up the banks”—the accumulated cash—at the bar several times a night and carried the money home to his boss. According to Shaheen, Tony developed a heavy methamphetamine habit, shooting the crystal several times a day into his veins. Under the drug's influence, Tony lost about two hundred pounds, stayed up all night at clubs (at Stonewall, his favorite hangout, he would embarrass his partners by insistently doing parlor tricks, like twirling cigarettes in the air), and began, for the first time in his life, to go to bed with men—though, to Shaheen's relief, not with him. Tony's father stopped speaking to him altogether and Shaheen had to carry messages between them. Increasingly shunned, Tony, so the rumor mill had it, was later killed by the Family.  Tony and his partners, Mario and Zucchi, had opened Stonewall as a private ”bottle club.” That was a common ruse for getting around the lack of a liquor license; bottles would be labeled with fictitious names and the bar would then—contrary to a law forbidding bottle clubs from selling drinks—proceed to do a cash business just like any other bar. The three partners spent less than a thousand dollars in fixing up the club's interior. They settled for a third-rate sound system, hired a local electrician and his assistant to build a bar and raise the dance-floor stage, and got their jukebox and cigarette machines— had to get them—from the local don, Mattythe HorseIannello.  As the man w ho controlled the district in which Stonewall was located, Iannello was automatically entitled to a cut in the operation. Shaheen never once saw Iannello in Stonewall, nor did he ever meet him, but Matty the Horse got his percentage like clockwork. The Stonewall partners also had to pay off the notoriously corrupt Sixth Precinct. A patrolman would stop by Stonewall once a week to pick up the envelopes filled with cash—including those for the captains and desk sergeants, who never collected their payoffs in person. The total cash dispensed to the police each week came to about two thousand dollars.  Despite the assorted payoffs, Stonewall turned a huge weekly profit for its owners. With rent at only three hundred dollars a month, and with the take (all in cash) typically running to five thousand dollars on a Friday night and sixty-five hundred on a Saturday, Stonewall quickly became a money machine. Some of the profit was made through side gigs for which Stonewall as a place was merely the occasion. In Shaheen's words, ”all kinds of mobsters used to come in. There were all kinds of deals going on. All kinds of hot merchandise. They would deal the stuff out of the trunks of cars parked in front of the bar. You could buy all kinds of things at Stonewall.” Shaheen recalls vividly the time a Cuban couple was swindled out of a clay plate with multicarat diamonds hidden under the glaze; they had taken the plate with them when fleeing Castro. Fat Tony had a ring made from one of the bigger (five-carat) stones and, when he later fell on hard times, had Shaheen negotiate its sale to Cartier.  Some of the Mob members who worked gay clubs were themselves gay—and terrified of being found out. ”Big Bobby,” who was on the door at Tony Pastor's, a Mafia-run place at Sixth Avenue and MacDougal Street, almost blew his cover when he became indiscreet about his passion for a Chinese drag queen named Tony Lee (who, though going lamentably to fat, was famed for her ballerina act). The Stonewall Inn seems to have had more than the usual number of gay mobsters. ”Petey,” who hung out at Stonewall as a kind of free-lance, circulating bouncer, had a thick Italian street accent, acted ”dumb,” and favored black shirts and ties; he was the very picture of a Mafia mobster—except for his habit of falling for patrons and coworkers.  He took a shine to Sascha L., but they would have sex only when Petey was drunk, and no mention could be made of it afterward. Some of the other mobsters would take Sascha aside and question him—Sascha was openly gay—about whether Petey ”didn't seem a little funny.” Sascha would dutifully answer no, and as a reward—and perhaps, too, because his presence made Petey nervous—Petey got Sascha a better-paying job at Washington Square.   Petey turned his attentions to a drag queen named Desiree, apparently figuring that if he were caught, getting a blow job from a drag queen would be far more forgivable than giving a blow job to a stocky male doorman. Besides, Desiree was Italian. A beautiful boy with shoulder-length hair and huge amber eyes, she had a figure so stunningly ”feminine” that she passed as a woman—as a gorgeous woman—in broad daylight.  But even the beautiful Desiree was outclassed by blond Harlow. (Petey had developed a huge lech for Harlow, too, but he couldn't get near her.) Harlow rarely came to Stonewall, preferring a tonier, straight uptown scene, but when she did, her chic black dresses and real jewelry set the standard for aspiring queens on the Washington Square-Stonewall circuit. Harlow never had the luck to catch Andy Warhol's eye, and so never achieved the widespread notoriety of Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, and Candy Darling, who made it into Warhol's movies and were thereby elevated into mainstream New York stardom. But Harlow—at least according to drag-queen mythology—later achieved her own kind of stardom, purportedly marrying a congressman, getting a sex-change operation at his expense, and buying (again courtesy of the congressman) a club in Philadelphia.  As for Desiree, she and Petey eventually ran off together to live outside of New York as a heterosexual couple. But—again according to the rumor mill—theirs was not a storybook ending: Petey subsequently turned ”bad” and, in a fit of jealousy, shot and killed Desiree.  Most of the employees at Stonewall, and some of the customers, did drugs, primarily ”uppers.” Desbutal—a mix of Desoxyn and Nembutal—was a great favorite (though later banned by the FDA), and the bar was also known as a good place to buy acid. The chief supplier was Maggie Jiggs, a famous queen who worked the main bar at Stonewall, along with her partner. Tommy Long. (Tommy kept a toy duck on the bar that quacked whenever someone left a tip.) They were a well-known team with a big following. Maggie, blonde, chubby, and loud, knew everybody's business and would think nothing of yelling out in the middle of the crowded bar, ”Hey, girl, I hear you got a whole new plate of false teeth from that fabulous dentist you been fucking!” But Maggie loved people, had good drugs, was always surrounded by gorgeous men, and arranged wonderful threeways, so her outspokenness, and even her occasional thievery, were usually forgiven.  Maggie and Tommy were stationed behind the main bar, one of two bars in the Stonewall. But before you could get to it, you had to pass muster at the door (a ritual some of the customers welcomed as a relief from the lax security that characterized most gay bars). That usually meant inspection, through a peephole in the heavy front door by Ed Murphy, ”Bobby Shades,” or muscular Frank Esselourne. ”Blond Frankie,” as he was known, was gay, but in those years not advertising it, and was famous for being able to spot straights or undercover cops with a single glance.  If you got the okay at the door—and for underage street kids that was always problematic—you moved a few steps to a table, usually covered by members of what one wag called the Junior Achievement Mafia team. That could mean, on different nights, Zucchi; Mario; Ernie Sgroi, who always wore a suit and tie and whose father had started the famed Bon Soir on Eighth Street; ”Vito,” who was on salary directly from Fat Tony, was hugely proud of his personal collection of S.S. uniforms and Nazi flags, and made bombs on the side; or ”Tony the SniffVerra, who had a legendary nose for no-goods and kept a baseball bat behind the door to deal with them. At the table, you had to plunk down three dollars (one dollar on weekdays), for which you got two tickets that could be exchanged for two watered-down drinks. (According to Chuck Shaheen, all drinks were watered, even those carrying the fanciest labels.) You then signed your name in a book kept to prove, should the question arise in court, that Stonewall was indeed a private ”bottle club.” People rarely signed their real names. ”Judy Garland,” ”Donald Duck,” and ”Elizabeth Taylor” were the popular favorites.  Once inside Stonewall, you took a step down and straight in front of you was the main bar where Maggie held court. Behind the bar some pulsating gel lights went on and off—later exaggeratedly claimed by some to be the precursor of the innovative light shows at the Sanctuary and other gay discos that followed. On weekends, a scantily clad go-go boy with a pin spot on him danced in a gilded cage on top of the bar. Straight ahead, beyond the bar, was a spacious dancing area, at one point in the bar's history lit only with black lights. That in itself became a subject for camp, because the queens, with Murine in their eyes, all looked as if they had white streaks running down their faces. Should the police (known as Lily Law, Alice Blue Gown—Alice for short—or Betty Badge) or a suspected plainclothesman unexpectedly arrive, white bulbs instantly came on in the dance area, signaling everyone to stop dancing or touching.  The queens rarely hung out at the main bar. There was another, smaller room off to one side, with a stone wishing well in the middle, its own jukebox and service bar, and booths. That became headquarters for the more flamboyant contingent in Stonewall's melting pot of customers. There were the ”scare drag queens” like Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, Birdie Rivera, and Martin Boyce—”boys who looked like girls but who you knew were boys.” And there were the ”flame” (not drag) queens who wore eye makeup and teased hair, but essentially dressed in male clothes—if an effeminate version with fluffy sweaters and Tom Jones shirts.  Only a few favored full-time transvestites, like Tiffany, Spanola Jerry, a hairdresser from Sheepshead Bay, and Tammy Novak, who performed at the Eighty-Two Club, were allowed to enter Stonewall in drag (Tammy sometimes transgressed by dressing as a boy). Not even ”Tish” (Joe Tish) would be admitted, though he had been a well-known drag performer since the early fifties, when he had worked at the Moroccan Village on Eighth Street, and though in the late sixties he had a long-running show at the Crazy Horse, a nearby cafe on Bleecker Street. Tish was admitted into some uptown straight clubs in full drag; there, as he sniffily put it, his ”artistry” was recognized.  Some of the younger queens were homeless and more or less camped out in the small park directly opposite the Stonewall bar. Bob Kohler, a gay man in his early forties who lived nearby, became something of a protector. (Kohler would later be prominent in the Gay Liberation Front, but had long since developed empathy for outsiders: In the early sixties, his talent agency on West Fifty-seventh Street represented a number of black artists no one else would take on.) Kohler would give the young queens clothing and change, or sometimes pay for a room in a local fleabag hotel; and when out walking his dog, he would often sit on a park bench with them and listen to their troubles and dreams. He was able to hear their pain even as he chuckled at their antics. Once, when he went down to bail out Sylvia Rivera's good friend, Marsha P. Johnson, he heard Judge Bruce Wright ask Marsha what the ”P” was for. ”Pay it no mind,” Marsha snapped back; Judge Wright broke up laughing and told Kohler to “get her out of here.”  Yet for all their wit and style, Kohler never glamorized street queens as heroic deviants pushing against rigid gender categories, self-conscious pioneers of a boundary-free existence. He knew too much about the misery of their lives. He knew a drugged-out queen who fell asleep on a rooftop and lay in the sun so long that she ended up near death with a third-degree burn. He knew ”cross-eyed Cynthia,” killed when she was pushed out of a window of the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn—and another ”Sylvia,” who jumped off its roof. He knew Dusty, ”ugly as sin, never out of drag, very funny, big mouth,” who made the mistake of calling the wrong person ”nigger” and was stabbed to death. And he knew several queens who had themselves stabbed a recalcitrant customer—or a competitive sister.  The queens considered Stonewall and Washington Square the most congenial downtown bars. If they passed muster at the Stonewall door, they could buy or cajole drinks, exchange cosmetics and the favored Tabu or Ambush perfume, admire or deplore somebody's latest Kanecalon wig, make fun of six-foot transsexual Lynn's size-12 women's shoes (while admiring her fishnet stockings and miniskirts and giggling over her tales of servicing the firemen around the corner at their Tenth Street station), move constantly in and out of the ladies room (where they deplored the fact that a single red light bulb made the application of makeup difficult), and dance in a feverish sweat till closing time at four a.m.  The jukebox on the dance floor played a variety of songs, even an occasional ”Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” to appease the romantics. The Motown label was still top of the heap in the summer of 1969; three of the five hit singles for the week of June 28—by Marvin Gaye, Junior Walker, and the Temptations—carried its imprint. On the pop side, the Stonewall jukebox played the love theme from the movie version of Romeo and Juliet over and over, the record's saccharine periodically cut by the Beatles' ”Get Back” or Elvis Presley's ”In the Ghetto.” And all the new dances—the Boston Jerk, the Monkey, the Spider—were tried out with relish. If the crowd was in a particularly campy mood (and the management was feeling loose enough), ten or fifteen dancers would line up to learn the latest ritual steps, beginning with a shouted “Hit it, girls!”  The chino-and-penny-loafer crowd pretty much stayed near the main bar, fraternizing with the queens mostly on the dance floor, if at all. (”Two queens can't bump pussy,” one of them explained. ”And I don't care how beefy and brawny the pussy is. And certainly not for a relationship.”) The age range at Stonewall was mostly late teens to early thirties; the over-thirty-five crowd hung out at Julius', and the leather crowd (then in its infancy) at Keller's. There could also be seen at Stonewall just a sprinkling of the new kind of gay man beginning to emerge: the hippie, long-haired, bell-bottomed, laid-back, and likely to have ”weird,” radical views.  Very few women ever appeared in Stonewall. Sascha L. flatly declares that he can't remember any, except for the occasional ”fag hag” (like Blond Frankie's straight friend Lucille, who lived with the doorman at One-Two-Three and hung out at Stonewall), or ”one or two dykes who looked almost like boys.” But Chuck Shaheen, who spent much more time at Stonewall, remembers—while acknowledging that the bar was ”98 percent male”—a few more lesbian customers than Sascha does, and, of those, a number who were decidedly femme. One of the lesbians who did go to Stonewall ”a few times,” tagging along with some of her gay male friends, recalls that she ”felt like a visitor.” It wasn't as if the male patrons went out of their way to make her feel uncomfortable, but rather that the territory was theirs, not hers: ”There didn't seem to be hostility, but there didn't seem to be camaraderie.”  *       *      *  The Stonewall management had always been tipped off by the police before a raid took place—this happened, on average, once a month—and the raid itself was usually staged early enough in the evening to produce minimal commotion and allow for a quick reopening. Indeed, sometimes the ”raid” consisted of little more than the police striding arrogantly through the bar and then leaving, with no arrests made. Given the size of the weekly payoff, the police had an understandable stake in keeping the golden calf alive.  But this raid was different. It was carried out by eight detectives from the First Division (only one of them in uniform), and the Sixth Precinct had been asked to participate only at the last possible second. Moreover, the raid had occurred at one-twenty a.m.—the height of the merriment—and with no advance warning to the Stonewall management. (Chuck Shaheen recalls some vague tip-off that a raid might happen, but since the early-evening hours had passed without incident, the management had dismissed the tip as inaccurate.)”  *     *     *  But evidence has surfaced to suggest that the machinations of the Sixth Precinct were in fact incidental to the raid. Ryder Fitzgerald, a sometime carpenter who had helped remodel the Stonewall interior and whose friends Willis and Elf (a straight hippie couple) lived rent-free in the apartment above the Stonewall in exchange for performing caretaker chores, was privy the day after the raid to a revealing conversation. Ernie, one of Stonewall’s Mafia team, stormed around Willis and Elf's apartment, cursing out (in Ryder's presence) the Sixth Precinct for having failed to provide warning in time. And in the course of his tirade, Ernie revealed that the raid had been inspired by federal agents. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATE) had apparently discovered that the liquor bottles used at Stonewall had no federal stamps on them—which meant they had been hijacked or bootlegged straight out of the distillery. Putting Stonewall under surveillance, BATE had then discovered the bar's corrupt alliance with the Sixth Precinct. Thus when the feds decided to launch a raid on Stonewall, they deliberately kept the local police in the dark until the unavoidable last minute.  When the raid, contrary to expectations, did get going, the previous systems put in place by the Mafia owners stood them in good stead. The strong front door bought needed time until the white lights had a chance to do their warning work: Patrons instantly stopped dancing and touching; and the bartenders quickly took the money from the cigar boxes that served as cash registers, jumped from behind the bar, and mingled inconspicuously with the customers. Maggie Jiggs, already known for her ”two for the bar, one for myself” approach to cash, disappeared into the crowd with a cigar box full of money; when a cop asked to see the contents, Maggie said it contained her tips as a ”cigarette girl,” and they let her go. When questioned by her employers later, Maggie claimed that the cop had taken the box and the money. She got away with the lie.  The standard Mafia policy of putting gay employees on the door so they could take the heat while everyone else got their act together, also paid off for the owners. Eddie Murphy managed to get out (”Of course,” his detractors add, ”he was on the police payroll”), but Blond Frankie was arrested. There was already a warrant outstanding for Frankie's arrest (purportedly for homicide; he was known for ”acting first and not bothering to think even later”). Realizing that this was no ordinary raid, that this time an arrest might not merely mean detention for a few hours at Centre Street, followed by a quick release, Frankie was determined not to be taken in. Owners Zucchi and Mario, through a back door connected to the office, were soon safely out on the street in front of the Stonewall. So, too, were almost all of the bar's customers, released after their IDs had been checked and their attire deemed ”appropriate” to their gender—a process accompanied, as in Sylvia's case, by derisive, ugly police banter.”  As for ”Fat Tony,” at the time the raid took place he had still not left his apartment on Waverly Place, a few blocks from the Stonewall. Under the spell of methamphetamine, he had already spent three hours combing and recombing his beard and agitatedly changing from one outfit to another, acting for all the world like one of those ”demented queens” he vilified. He and Chuck Shaheen could see the commotion from their apartment window but only after an emergency call from Zucchi could Tony be persuaded to leave the apartment for the bar.  *     *     *  As for ”Fat TonyLauria, he was quick to see the handwriting on the wall. He and his partners, Mario and Zucchi, decided that with the pending investigation of corruption within the police department by a special commission, and with Stonewall now notorious, the bar could never again operate profitably. Fat Tony soon sold the Stonewall lease to Nicky de Martino, the owner of the Tenth of Always, and had the satisfaction of watching him fail quickly—even though, with the help of Ed Murphy, de Martino got some street queens to parade around in front of Stonewall with balloons for a week or two.

The FBI Files: Gay Liberation Front: "an alternative to the tacky, overpriced Mafia run bars"

Gay_liberation_front_circa_1971_0_2One of the principal goals of the Gay Liberation Front – as well as other homophile groups such as the Gay Activists Alliances which formed subsequent to the Stonewall Inn Riots – was to eliminate the monopoly involvement of the Mafia from the gay bars.  Included within the FBI files on the Gay Liberation Front is an excerpt from an article which appeared in the August 12-26, 1969 issue of the Rat – a publication by the Students for a Democratic Society – entitled “Gay Revolution Comes Out” which states:

Q:  I’ll begin with this question:  what is the Gay Liberation Front?

A:  We are a revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished.  We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature.  We are stepping outside these roles and simplistic myths.  We are going to be who we are.  At the same time, we are creating new social forms and relations, that is, relations based upon brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality.  Babylon has forced us to commit ourselves to one thing . . . revolution.

Q:  What does the GLF intend to do?

A:  We are relating the militancy generated by the bar bust and by increasing pig harassment to a program that allows homosexuals and sexually liberated persons to confront themselves and society through encounter groups, demonstrations, dances, a newspaper, and by just being ourselves on the street.  The program will create revolution of mind and body as we all confront the opposition.  At this time we have specific plans to open a coffee house, a working commune, and experimental living communes.  We hope to extend the coffee house idea as an alternative to the exploitative over-priced syndicate run gay bar.

The FBI files also contain leaflets, pamphlets and newsletters of the Gay Liberation Front including GLF News, Gay Flames, Come Out!, Red Butterfly and Gay Journal.  One GLF newsletter promotes an August 16, 1969 dance, and states:

We are holding this dance to raise money to further the work of the Gay Liberation Front’s work in the gay community and also to provide you with an alternative to the tacky, overpriced Mafia run bars.

And a 1970 pamphlet – Gay Liberation – by the Gay Liberation Front states:

The movement fully came to light in June 1969 when, after much of the usual police harassment of closing bars and arresting people for being in certain neighborhoods, the police raided the Stonewall bar on Christopher Street in New York City.  The police thought this would be just another routine matter, but this was not the case.  The people in the bar started to push the pigs back and onto the street.  The police warned the crowd that was gathering to disperse or be arrested.  The people ignored the warning, and more people joined the crowd that had assembled to confront the pigs.  They had taken enough shit.  The police called in reinforcements to put the crowd back in place, but found out that word had spread throughout the West Village, and many more sisters and brothers came down to help those defending the bar from pig invasion.  It was not the Mafia bar as such which was being defended.  Rather, it was the idea of defending just one place, even in a gay ghetto, where people could meet without harassment and intimidation.

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Robert Wood & The Salvation

The New York Times ran three articles in March 1970 on the murder of Robert Wood – a former used-car dealer in the Bronx -- who owned and operated The Salvation which was a gay club at 1 Sheridan Square.  Mr. Wood had left a letter to his attorney prior to his murder with the request that it be delivered to law enforcement in the event of his death, and in that letter Mr. Wood

named several men listed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as members of the Mafia, described “a classic case of how organized crime moves in on bars and nightspots, puts its members or associates on the payroll, and eventually takes over.”  [The letter further describes] the reported harassment of John Addison, operator of a 59th Street discotheque known as The Together.

A March 18, 1970 article (“2 Detectives Accused in Letter ‘From Grave’ Known to Police”) by Charles Grutzner from the New York Times states:

The identity of two detectives accused in letters from a murdered discotheque operator of having extorted $8,000 from him is known to District Attorney Frank S. Hogan of Manhattan and Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary, a source close to the investigation said last night.  Neither of the detectives has been suspended from duty or arrested pending investigation of the credibility of the accusation made by Robert Wood, a cocaine addict, who was murdered Feb. 18, several months after the Mafia had allegedly forced him to give up control of the Salvation Discotheque at 1 Sheridan Square.  In two identical letters dated Jan. 16 and delivered after his death, Wood had accused the detectives, whom he identified only as “Jerry” and “Charlie,” of having shaken him down after finding heroin in his apartment last April 29.  The letters, also containing alleged information about narcotics dealings and Mafia interests in bars and nightclubs, were forwarded after Wood’s murder to Mr. Hogan and to United States Attorney Whitney North Seymour Jr.  * * *  “Should I meet with a violent death or disappear, certainly one or a combination of these men are responsible.  However, I pray there is retribution.

A March 23, 1970 article (“Slain Man’s Letters Give Impetus to Local and Federal Investigations of After-Hours Clubs Here”) by Charles Grutzner from the New York Times states:

Scores of bottle clubs, after-hours dives and mingling places for homosexuals are operating illegally here, Federal and local authorities disclosed yesterday as they pressed their investigations of the seamy side of New York’s after-dark entertainment.  The investigations, some of which had already started were given high priority following the turning over of “letters from the grave” to law enforcement officials by the attorney for Robert J. Wood whose bullet-riddled body had been found in a Queens street on Feb 18.  Wood, operator of the Salvation discotheque in Greenwich Village, left a legacy of accusations of Mafia control of bars and nightclubs, narcotics traffic in drinking places and police corruption.  The State Liquor Authority, which is taking a new look at the books and ownership declarations of several licensed places where it suspects that members of organized crime have secret investments or have seized control, said that it was powerless to take action against many places because they kept out of its jurisidiction by operating without liquor licenses.  * * *  It has been estimated there are more than 100 such illegal bottle clubs, after-hours clubs and homosexual clubs where liquor is consumed in this city.  * * *  The Salvation, which surrendered its license last Dec. 1, continued to operate thereafter as an unlicensed place that catered to homosexuals.  Although Woods, who had made a fortune as a used car dealer in the Bronx, said in his letters that he had “bought” the discotheque and had lost $250,000 when the Mafia took control, his name does not appear in any S.L.A. record as having purchased an interest in the operation.  The authority began an investigation into hidden financing in November but this lapsed when the license was surrendered.  The letters, written by Wood on Jan. 16 with instructions to his lawyer to give them to authorities if he was murdered, describe how the underworld takes control and drains off the profits.  The letters relate that last October Wood “met a young man named Jogn Riccobono” who inspired such trust that he hired him to manage the Salvation at $300 a week with the option of buying 10 percent of the discotheque out of his earnings.  They say that Riccobono induced him to hire Andy B_______ as doorman.  John Riccobono is described in the letters as the son of one important Mafioso and the nephew of another.  Joseph (Staten Island Joe) Riccobono is listed by the Department of Justice as consigliere (counselor) of the Mafia “family” headed by Carlo Gambino.  The letters allege that John Riccobono and Andy paid so little attention to their duties at the Salvation “that I finally had to hire other men to do their jobs while continuing to pay their salaries.”  The narrative continued:  “It became so ludicrous that I told Andy that our relationship was ended.  He thereupon told me that I couldn’t do that.”  A few days later Riccobono and Andy allegedly walked into the discotheque with the two elder Riccobonos and four or five other Mafia members.  Wood, who apparently was uncertain of the exact relations or identities of the Riccobonos, described one as “the purported Gambino underboss” and the other as “a button man to Tommy Ryan and formerly [to] Vito Genovese.”  Thomas (Tommy Ryan) Eboli oversees the bar and nightclub interests of the Mafia “family” of the late Vito Genovese, according to the police Central Investigation Division.  * * *  “He (Andy) started using the club to sell drugs and forced one of my trusted employees to steal $900 from my safe,” wrote Wood, himself an admitted user of cocaine.  * * *  In talking about the investigation of the infiltration of the Mafia into nightclubs, a police official said:  “Several of the Mafia ‘families’ are in the act and they’re spreading their infiltration so fast and so far that sometimes they don’t even know whose joint is whose.”  As a result, any bar or club, especially after-hours joints and the homosexual clubs, where profits are high and opportunities for blackmail abundant, is regarded as fair game for any gang unless the operator can show that he has already become affiliated.

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December 24, 2007

The Stonewall Inn Lease Agreement

The Stonewall Inn was established and controlled by the Genovese crime family; however, after the June 1969 riots, the Genovese crime family sold the Stonewall Inn to the Gambino crime family.  The Gambino crime family operated the Stonewall Inn under the corporate name of Tel-Star Holding Corp. the vice-president of which was Nicholas DeMartino.  On August 1, 1970, Nicholas DeMartino, as tenant, executed a lease agreement with Manny E. Duell, as landlord, on the 53 Christopher Street property from which the Stonewall Inn operated.  Download Stonewall Inn Lease.pdf  Nicholas DeMartino, on behalf of the Gambino crime family, controlled several gay bars in the West Village, including The Haven at One Sheridan Square and the New Showplace (and later Scotland Yard) at 146 West Fourth Street.  Manny E. Duell, a large property holder in the West Village, owned many of the area buildings from which gay bars operated, including the Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street, the New Showplace (and later Scotland Yard) at 146 West Fourth Street, the Duplex at 61 Christopher Street, and Uncle Paul's at 8 Christopher Street.  According to one account, Uncle Paul's in the 1970s was "a notorious hustler/chicken pick-up" enterprise that "had very old men purchasing for the evening kids that couldn't have been older than 14 or 15."

Mafia Control of the Mineshaft at 835 Washington Street

Sopranos_3The Mafia control of the Mineshaft at 835 Washington Street is confirmed by Jack Fritscher in Leather Dolce Vita.  Indeed, Fritscher writes that “[t]he original gay leather bar was an Italian-American invention inspired by the leather world’s nicely capitalistic drive to make money.  Ask the Mafia.”

In regard to the Mineshaft, Fritsher documents a conversation that he had with Harold Cox – a partner with Wally Wallace, the former manager of the Mineshaft, in leather bar The Lure – specifically naming it as “a Mafia bar”:

When it came to money, Wally was no crook. He was personally very honest, but he had worked for some shady types. So when we started The Lure, kind of to give him a job after the Mineshaft closed, we had to tell him he did not need to drive to New Jersey to buy liquor, and he did not have to pay people under the table. We were not a Mafia bar.

Fritscher further recounts a story on Wally Wallace having to explain to the Mafia that the drop in revenue at the Mineshaft was not due to employee skimming but loss of customers due to AIDS:

I wouldn’t say the Mafia was slow on the pick up, but in 1984 profits dropped so sharply at the Mineshaft that the good fellas called in Wally Wallace and his staff, one by one, and accused them of skimming the cash register. It took nearly six months for the godfather to believe what Wally Wallace said: AIDS was killing their paying customers.

Of course, even when the Mineshaft first opened in 1977, it was no surprise that it was operated by the Mafia; after all, the 835 Washington Street location previously had been home for numerous Gambino gay bars, and at one point law enforcement dug up the concrete basement floor of the gay bar the Den on reports it would find the body of an unfortunate soul whacked by the good fellas.  Although prior bars out of the 835 Washington Street property clearly were operated by the Gambino crime family there is some support -- which I am not at liberty to disclose at this time -- that the Mineshaft actually was a Genovese crime family operation.  (Of course, both of these crime families could have been involved with the Mineshaft as it was not uncommon for the two to share interests in some gay bar enterprises.)

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Modern Perils Distress Old "Village"

A September 28, 1970 article (“Modern Perils Distress Old ‘Village’”) by Grace Lichenstein from the New York Times discusses how Greenwich Village “is now confronted with a new set of social and economic problems so severe that some local leaders believe they could destroy the unique character of the historic neighborhood.”  Among the identified problems:

Half a dozen private, all-night, after-hours “social clubs,” which residents accuse of operating illegally and of drawing hordes of noisy patrons into quiet neighborhoods.  * * *  In the heart of the West Village at Sheridan Square, the issue residents are most distressed about is that of the private after-hours clubs.  In May, the Haven, which calls itself “the ultimate teenage club,” opened at One Sheridan Square.  The club, which stays open until 7:00 A.M., attracted hundreds of flashily dressed teen-agers on weekend nights during the  summer both inside and in the square itself.  Residents complained repeatedly about noise, heavy traffic and harassment by the youths.  “Kids are roaming the streets, carrying weapons, high on drugs at all hours of the night,” according to one boutique owner who said she has been forced to close her shop after being robbed several times.  * * *  Last week, 10 residents and shopkeepers gave testimony about the Haven to deputies of Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz, since private clubs are chartered by the state.  Mr. Lefkowitz said an investigation was “going ahead full blast.”  Early in September, the police raided the Haven, arresting several patrons and employees on charges of possession of drugs.  (The Haven serves no liquor.)  A spokesman for the club accused the police of harassment, pointing to banquettes and barstools apparently slashed with razors.  Last weekend, two patrol cars remained in Sheridan Square all night and policemen asked knots of youths to move on each time they gathered outside the club’s door.  Inside, scores of youths packed the sunken dance floor, gyrating to piped-in rock music while strobe lights flashed in semi-darkness.  “I’m sure there are kids here who are high on drugs, but we live in a drug culture,” said Joseph Domanti, a lawyer for the Haven.  “We try to keep known drug dealers out.

A July 31, 1971 article (“Court Order Shuts After-Hours Club”) from the New York Times states:

The Haven, one of the more controversial of the Greenwich Village after hours clubs, was ordered immediately and permanently closed yesterday by the State Supreme Court.  Acting on a complaint by State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkolitz, Justice Harry B. Frank signed a consent judgment revoking the club’s charter, which was issued by the state, and directing its owner, Telstar Social Club Inc., to vacate the premises at 1 Sheridan Square.  Nicholas DeMartino, the club’s president, did not dispute the order but did not admit to the allegations made by the Attorney General that led to the court action.  Earlier this week, Assistant Attorney General James J. Burke Jr. described the area around the club as “a virtual congregation of narcotic addicts who roam the streets at will, threatening the residents.”  Yesterday’s court action followed by almost a year a police raid on the club that resulted in the arrest of several persons on charges of drug possession.  The Haven opened in May, 1970, calling itself “the ultimate teen-age club.”  It stayed open until 7 A.M., but served no alcohol.

In Love Saves the Day (Duke University Press:  2003), Tim Lawrence writes:

The Haven opened on the site of the old Salvation in May 1970, the Salvation having lost its liquor license in December 1969 and its operator a couple of months later.  * * *  [Nicholas] Di Martino – the stepson of Paul Di Bella, a soldier in the Mafia family of Carlo Gambino, the reputed “boss of bosses” according to law enforcement officials – initially marketed the Haven as “the ultimate teen-age club,” but by the end of the summer it had become a cliquish after-hours spot that attracted a mixed crowd of street people, gay men, and high society speed freaks.  “It was the spot,” says Steve D’Acquisto, a twenty-six-year-old cabbie who heard about the venue from a succession of passenger-revelers.  An established record fanatic, D’Acquisto quickly befriended the DJ, and the duo became a trio when the driver initiated a beautiful and not especially innocent sixteen-year-old called Michael Cappello to visit the club.  “I went to the Haven with Steve and fell in love with Francis Grasso,” says Cappello, who had previously hung out at the Electric Circus.

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

Growing like violets next to Venus Flytraps, in the same garden of delights with the orgy bars are the fruit juice "bars."  Not that they’re all that innocent.  The big difference (aside from the fact that they provide no back room facilities whatever) is that The Haven and its ilk (there aren’t many) operate under a charter granted by the State as private clubs, and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the State Liquor Authority; thus they cannot be busted on pretexts of irregular sale of booze.  It takes the subterfuge of narcotics raids or Fire Department "investigations" of violations to close them down.  Supposedly.  Because they’re private they can stay open all night without pressure.  Theoretically. * * *  The Haven hasn’t had it easy.  Raking in all that bread and skirting the SLA regulations, a place like this inspires a lot of envy.  But The Haven’s management has been around a long time, for all its youth, and has dug in.  They reopened immediately after the late August raid which provided the horrifying spectacle to TV viewers of Police Department destructiveness.  What had been a carefully put-together interior with Florentine balustrades and spaced out murals by Rick Kessler, was wrecked in one invasion.  Twenty thousand dollars worth of damage.  So the cops claimed to have found some pills and marijuana lying around.  So what?  * * * The Haven is in the fabled West Village, domain of the New Free gay street people as well as disoriented teeny-boppers.  * * *  The Haven attracts not only sub-adults of various sexual orientations, but also those who seek their nubile company.  The high admission price may keep a lot of people out, the bad publicity may make skeptics of militant gays who might be otherwise supportive, but despite its drawbacks, The Haven is unassailably hospitable, in a variety of ways.  For instance, as long as it isn’t being smashed by the cops, there is an elaborate up-to-the-minute sound system, complete with light-sound console that blends the pitches and peaks of audio-visual excitement as the frenzy of striplings’ dancing builds. The minimum under its original policy was the same as at the other few clubs of this kind:  on weekends three bucks for two drinks.  They sometimes admit the first fifty members and guests without charge just to get things going.  When they “go” they don’t stop.

1971: The Roundtable at 151 East 50th Street

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

Gayinsiderjohnfrancishunter_9It is a heterosexual clip joint that has been deftly turned into a gay clip joint, as a trickster works quarters through his fingers and pulls one out of your car.  In this case somebody has shoved something up the ass of the gay community, and it ain’t a Roman candle.  Maybe Sicilian.  * * *  It’s the hot breath of the syndicate you feel here, palpable as the presence of plainsclothes vice in a neighborhood bar or special riot control pigs in mufti at a peace demonstration.  You just know.  Not that it takes much perspicacity, when they called the Central Casting people in on hiring the bouncers.  They don’t say, “Excuse me, sir, but you can’t bring dat drink back inta da dining arrier,” they block your path like a Brink’s man stopping the most eanted bank robber in Cristendom and growl, “Hey where day a tink yer goin wid dat drink?” It is so painfully familiar, so exacerbating to the sensibilities of someone working toward Gay Liberation, that you see red, you could kill.  Won’t the Mafia ever learn the number is up on this kind of game?  That they are not dealing any longer with submissive, frightened, guilt-ridden pansies, but with proud men who now tolerate certain bars.  Not because they are any longer intimidated by the dull brutish stares, the assembly-line handling as you file through the portals offering your bread, the unconcealed contempt displayed by all but the most refined “fronts.”  They think we’re still hiding out in their dens, and we know it!  The very idea of a grotesque like the above-described bouncer telling me I couldn’t cross an invisible line with beer in hand appalls me.  I am appalled that I have gone back, risking being told once again that such-an-such an area—the dining area, I suppose, though I don’t propose ever to dine there or regard this reeking night club as a restaurant—is out-of-bounds.  Who do they think they are, aside from the co-regents . . . of our destiny?  Once these terrible men could with some right have asked back, “Who do you think you are?” and I’d have trembled.  A faggot.  A criminal like yourself, only perhaps more widely scorned and easier to nail.  BUT NOT ANYMORE!

In Love Saves the Day (Duke University Press:  2003), Tim Lawrence writes:

Lovesavestheday_4[Nicky] Siano regarded the porn-star-cum-mixer Tony Mansfield – who played at the Round Table, a cabaret club that featured the La Fleur sisters and attracted a crowd of mainly white but also Latino gay men – as being much less than a DJ.  * * *  Sensing an opening for her music-mad boyfriend, [Robin] Lord – who says that Siano was “already collecting records and knew all the titles, artists, and labels by heart” – approached Freddy, the club’s mobster manager, and told him that Mansfield was an “asshole” who needed to be sacked.  “The Mafia guy didn’t like Mansfield, who was a prima donna, and he was also after Robin,” says Siano.  “She looked good.  She had a thin waist, a big chest, and she was all of sixteen.”  So when the manager made a pass Lord proposed a trade.  “I got Nicky the job at the Round Table,” she says.  “Nicky had a gift, I recognized his gift, and I was the kind of friend who would use my influence to help him get a foot in the door.  I was experimenting with my own powers and quickly learned that I didn’t have to do much to wrap an old guy like Freddy around my finger.”  An exchange of favors took place.  “Had it not been for me being the type of sixteen-year-old girl that dirty old men were very attracted to Nicky would not have got his start at the Round Table.

Michael Umbers & The Gambino Crime Family

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The above and below photos was taken by Diana Davies at a 1971 rally by the Gay Activists Alliance protesting the Mafia control of Christopher's End at 180 Christopher Street by Gambino crime family associate Mike Umbers who, in addition to fronting gay bars, was a drug dealer, ran several prostitution rings, and produced and distributed pornography.

Christophers__end_1971_4A January 9, 1971 article (“Lefkowitz Accuses Club”) from the New York Times states:

State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz is seeking to close down a Greenwich Village restaurant and club where he charges deviate sexual acts were exhibited on stage for a fee.  Mr. Lefkowitz complained that Christopher’s End, a club at 180 Christopher Street, constituted a public nuisance that imperiled the physical and emotional well-being of thousands of Greenwich Villagers.

A July 26, 1971 article from the New York Times covers a protest by gay activists against the mafia control of gay bars; specifically, Christopher’s End at 180 Christopher Street:

Saturday night more than 1,000 chanting “gay activists” marched down Christopher Street to protest what they consider their “exploitation by the syndicate,” which they say controls the after-hours clubs frequented by homosexuals.  Their chief targets were Christopher’s End, an after-hours club at the river end of the street that Federal agents closed the previous weekend for liquor violations, and the club’s proprietor, Michael Umbers, whom the Gay Activists Alliance calls “a front man for the syndicate.”  * * *  The bar is on the street floor of the Christopher Hotel, the last known address of Jerome A. Johnson who was shot to death after allegedly firing the shots that felled Joseph A. Colombo Sr.  * * *  [Michael Umbers] bought the building next door [at 178 Christopher Street].  * * *  Umbers, who admits to five years in prison, says he doesn’t allow drugs, “hard or soft,” because they don’t mix with liquor.  James Owles, president of the gay alliance, said:  “I know Mike Umber’s bar has been used as a drug drop.  And he’s perfectly willing to see gay people get their head split while he takes their money.  He comes on like a father figure to these young kids and turns them into flunkies for himself.”

An August 2, 1971 article (“Last Hours of Suspect Offer Little Hint of Colombo Shooting”) by Barbara Campbell from the New York Times states:

[L]ast Friday Deputy Commissioner Daley said that [Jerome A.] Johnson’s [the shooter of crime boss Joseph A. Colombo Sr.] last known address was the Christopher Hotel at 180 Christopher Street.  It is run by Michael Umbers, who, the police said, has ties with organized crime and was an “associate” of Johnson’s.

A September 28, 1971 article (“Kerkorian Is Named at Crime Hearing”) by Nicholas Gage from the New York Times states:

Michael Umbers, who is of English extraction, did not appear at the hearing [before the State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime concerning “the involvement of non-Italians in organized crime”] Mr. McKenna said that if he did not offer a good excuse for his absence he would be cited for contempt.  Umbers, who was questioned by the police after the shooting of Joseph Colombo Sr., was said by Mr. McKenna to be involved in pornography with organized crime figures.

An August 22, 1972 article (“Hogan Aide Says Officials Fight Crime Wrong Way”) by Nicholas Gage from the New York Times states:

[T]he police yesterday listed the first arrest of a reputed organized-crime figure since Mayor Lindsay and Commissioner Murphy announced their drive against gangsters when Michael Umbers, who had been sought on pornography charges, gave himself up at the East 67th Street Station.  Umbers, 40 years old, who the police said was associated with members of the Gambino family, was charged with promoting obscenity, a felony.

A September 1, 1973 article (“Bail of $50,000 Set in Drug Case For ‘Village’ Man”) from the New York Times states:

Bail of $50,000 was set in Federal court here yesterday for a Greenwich Village magazine distributor who had been arrested on a charge of conspiracy to sell phendimetrazine pills, which narcotics agents described as illegal stimulants and that the suspect called “vice spice aphrodisiacs.”  The suspect is Michael Umbers, 42-year-old owner of a bookshop at 180 Christopher Street, who said at his bail hearing that he was in “the sex business” and that he distributed a weekly magazine “that’s not pornography.”  Umbers was arrested Thursday night, outside the Riviera Café, at Sheridan Square, when he allegedly delivered a carton containing 75,000 pills to undercover agents for $9,500.  He reportedly told the agents he wanted to get rid of the pills before the state’s new narcotics law went into effect today.  Police officials described Umbers, who served five years in prison for larceny, as a major pornography dealer with suspected links to organized crime.  Bail of $10,000 was set for an Umbers employee, Doris Weinstable, 25, of Teaneck, N.J., who was arrested with him.

In Mafia Dynasty:  The Rise and Fall of the Gambino Crime Family, John H. Davis states:

MafiadynastydavisThe deeper the detectives delved into the shooting, the more it became apparent that the only white mobsters Jerome Johnson was known to deal with were members of the Gambino crime family.  The detectives found out that Johnson used to frequent a gay establishment on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village owned by Gambino soldier Paul DiBella and managed by a Gambino associate Michael Umbers, a known dealer in pornography.  Johnson and Umbers had been seen together at the after-hours places during the weeks prior to the attack on Colombo.  But for all their expert sleuthing, the New York police were unable to link Jerome Johnson to the man police were convinced ordered the hit, Carlo Gambino.

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

Gayinsiderjohnfrancishunter_10It gets raided now and then, but with the sangfroid of an oft-ravaged country on the Great Plain of Europe it re-opens and gradually eases back into the modus operandi that got it busted in the first place.  Sometimes even the same personnel.  * * * The End is an afterhours joint.  Don’t expect much of anything before morning.  It’s forever changing gears, going with a fad but still remaining essentially the same joint.  In one of its recent phases there was a charge of five bucks at the door, for which you got to drink as much as you wanted without any money passing hands over the bar. Most recently there has been a three-buck minimum, for which you get two drink chits.  * * * In earlier days in the back room, after the movies showing everything about the sex act including the coming, a go-go boy would make himself available for sucking, which would urge the panting audience over the cliff into really tempestuous orgiastic breakers.  Then the NYPD infiltrated with two humpy vice officers posing as lovers, and after they had gotten their rocks off a few mornings they pulled a raid.  The raid (which bagged a roomful of mixed couples down slumming as well as regular homosexual patrons) served two purposes:  to discourage the straights and stop the movies.  The back room is still there, but just now the partition has been knocked down, and it’s exposed to the dance floor.  There are, however, inviting bleachers in the shadows.

A July 20, 1971 article (“Suspect in Shooting of Colombo Linked to Gambino Family”) by Fred Ferretti from the New York Times ties the shooter to the West Village gay bars operated by the Gambinos and Mike Umbers, and states:

Jerome A. Johnson, the man who the police say shot Joseph A. Colombo on June 28, was “associated with people known to be connected to” the alleged Mafia family of Carlo Gambino, Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman reported yesterday.  * * *  Yesterday, Chief Seedman disclosed what he called Johnson’s link to organized crime.  “Johnson hung out in a club raided over the weekend that was controlled by Paul Di Bella, who is reputed to be a ‘soldier’ in the Gambino crime family,” he said.  The club referred to is Christopher’s End, at 180 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village.  It was one of nine after-hours clubs raided by a joint Federal-city strike force on Sunday.  The 180 Christopher Street address was the first given by the police for Johnson after the shooting.  Mr. Seedman said that “Johnson frequented the Christopher’s End in the weeks immediately preceding the shooting.”  He also said Johnson was “associated” with Michael Umbers, whom he called the “front man and operator” of the after-hours bar, “which was in reality controlled by Paul Di Bella, supposedly a soldier in the Gambino family.  He asserted that “Johnson associated with people known to be connected to that family.”  Asked if he meant Carlo Gambino, Chief Seedman said, “Yes.”  * * * He [Chief Seedman] was asked if the police had questioned Mike Umbers, who the chief said was Johnson’s link to the Gambino family, and he answered:  “Yes, but we’re interested in speaking to him again.  He’s easy to find.  We reached out and found him last week.  Found him physically but it was hard to reach him mentally.”  A reporter at the news conference at Police Headquarters suggested that Johnson’s link to Umbers had been in the area of “weirdo sex,” and Mr. Seedman agreed.  * * *  Earlier, Commissioner Daley had said of Umbers:  “He didn’t look too good at first.  He looks better now,” and “Johnson was known to have been an intimate of Umbers.”  Umbers served a sentence in Sing Sing Prison and in Greenhaven prison in 1961 for grand larceny.  He was paroled in 1962.  The following year he was arrested for parole violations and returned to Sing Sing, then transferred to prison at Clinton and at Auburn.  He was released in 1965.  In 1969, he was arrested after a quantity of pornographic materials were found in a car in which he was sitting.  A conviction on obscenity charges was reversed by a higher court.  He was accused by District Attorney Frank S. Hogan’s office of conspiring to commit obscenity, but pleaded to a lesser charge of obscenity as a misdemeanor.  His case is due in September.

The FBI Files: Michael E. Umbers

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Raids Close 9 After-Hours Bars Linked To Mafia

835_washington_street_early_1970s_4A July 19, 1971 article (“Raids Close 9 After-Hours Bars Linked to Mafia”) from the New York Times discusses a raid on nine after-hours gay bars by a “joint strike force of nearly 400 federal and city police officers”:

Officials said the tawdry, ill-lit gathering places, most of them in Greenwich Village, were a lucrative source of income for the Mafia.  * * *  According to the Federal complaint, undercover agents at one club – the New Showplace at 146 West Fourth Street – last month purchased an interest in the operation to establish ownership links to Paul DiBella, who is carried on Federal Lists as a soldier in the Mafia family of Carlo Gambino.  The other clubs raided were:  Christopher’s End, 180 Christopher Street; Come Back, 185 West 10th Street; Tenth of Always, 82 West Third Street; Zodiac, 835 Washington Street; Thesbian, 679 Broadway; Never Too Late, 246 East Ninth Street; Silver Palace, 350 East 81st Street; and a club known only by its address, 15-15 ½ Barrow Street.  * * *  The Joint Task Force is one of 19 in the nation formed by the Justice Department in 1969 to battle organized crime.  * * *  complaint said that the agents had noticed that Mr. Di Bella (who appears in the Federal warrant as De Bella) had appeared often at the club [the New Showplace] and seemed to have an interest in its operation.  * * *  His stepson, Nicholas Di Martino, apparently was part owner of the building that houses the club.  * * *  The agents said Mr. [Joseph] Murray [the manager of the New Showplace] had told them that he paid $700 a month to Mr. Di Martino, and $100 a week to Mr. Di Bella for “protection.”  They also said that they had found other, unspecified, connections of Mr. Di Bella with other clubs.  * * *  Mr. [Daniel] Hollman [Chief of the New York Joint Strike Force against organized crime] said the undercover men had faced “considerable danger” in their assignment.  At one point, according to the complaint, there was a murder attempt against Mr. Murray and he later had to get a bodyguard.

In conducting the undercover operation and bar raid the New York Times article states that the members of the Joint Task Force deliberately kept the local police from the precincts which specifically covered the gay bars in question out of the informational loop for fear that corrupt officers would compromise the investigation.

After the New Showplace at 146 West Fourth Street was shut down, the space later re-opened as Scotland Yard.  In The Gay Insider (Olympia Press, Inc.:  New York, 1971), John Francis Hunter writes:

Gayinsiderjohnfrancishunter_13Ah, the memories here!  And not of sex, but the glories of another career, of vanity inestimable.  Telegrams waiting at curtain, stage door johnnies lingering, producers asking me over to their table and setting up auditions (two misses, one hit, which was an Off-Broadway  revue that led to the Ed Sullivan Show and accolades in the paper).  When I was onstage upstairs of what was then the never-to-be-forgotten Showplace.  In the days when there were a half-dozen little professional showcase cabaret theaters in the Village. When I was upstairs co-starring in a revue with Ruth Buzzi, Cass Elliot was hat-check girl downstairs!  Joan Rivers played the room for months on end.  Vaughn Meader and Rodney Dangerfield and Jackie Mason dropped in to try out new material.  Also Paul Dooley.  Marian Mercer was there with R. G. Brown. Downstairs the revue writers gathered, most of them later to become names on Broadway and in TV.  It was a broadly integrated place, but, as I point out later vis-à-vis theater crowd bars . . . there is no such thing as a straight one.  Terribly frustrating to the females.  Tantalizing to the males. * * *  The curator of memories of other bars, all gay—like The Camp—and of matings and flirtations and two decades of lore, is the irrepressible and lovable Jay.  Just Jay.  Whose bullhorn voice and brassy manner on greeting you, admitting you cautiously to his premises, ill-conceal his generous nature.  He’s a friendly spirit. This is his private party, this unassuming little nook with its pool-playing hustlers and rich johns down from the UES or in from Majorca.  Pickings are slim some nights, it’s rather dead some nights, but if you like to talk and maybe even aspire to score with one of the studs for free, it’s a hospitable place. You have to become a member, you have to bring your own booze, buy setups, which are cheap. “Dues” are three bucks each visit.

Di Bella, Held In Raids, Called "Soldier In The Gambino Family

A July 19, 1971 article (“Di Bella, Held in Raids, Called ‘Soldier in the Gambino Family’”) by James M. Markham from the New York Times states:

Among the 28 persons arrested in connection with raids on after-hours clubs yesterday was Paul Di Bella, whom law enforcement officials described as a soldier in the Mafia family of Carlo Gambino, the reputed “boss of bosses.”  Officials said that Mr. Di Bella was known as the “Red Hook Slasher,” and that he was the prime catch of the raid, carried out by a joint task force of city and Federal agents.  He was arrested at his summer residence in Greenwood Lake, N.J., at 4 A.M., while the raids were under way.  Along with his stepson, Nicholas Di Martino, who was also arrested, Mr. Di Bella, who is 50 years old, is listed as a “corporate officer” of TelStar Holding Corporation, which owns the building at 148 West Fourth Street that houses the after-hours bar known as the New Showplace.  According to a Federal cmoplaint, on June 10, an alleged intermediary for the two men, Joseph Murray – alias Joseph Boccino – agreed to sell an interest in the Greenwich Village bar to two Federal undercover agents.  Mr. Di Martino, who was described as “unimportant” by law enforcement officials, was arrested in his apartment above the New Showplace bar.  To snare Mr. Di Bella, undercover agents were said to have gone to great lengths to observe him checking locks on the bar’s doors, carrying “a brown manila envelope” out of the club and making a deposit at a nearby bank.  The undercover patrolmen from the Police Department failed last March to buy into the New showplace because they were “unacceptable” to Mr. Di Bella, the complaint quotes Mr. Murray as having said.  According to the complaint filed before the raid, Mr. Murray described Mr. Di Bella as “a man with a lot of power in a family,” and “the man who runs this part of town, especially the after-hours clubs.”  The complaint also records that Mr. Di Bella had also been seen in “other premises of a like nature as ‘The New Showplace,’” implying that his interests extended beyond the one club.  On Friday night, officials said, about 500 persons crammed themselves into the New Showplace, paying $3 apiece for entry and $1.25 to $1.50 for each drink.  In an interview later, Joseph Di Bella, the arrested man’s brother, said:  “Why did they have to go and waste the taxpayers’ money in making that arrest?  Why don’t they go out and arrest the ones who burn the flags, the Communists?  All they had to do was ask him to come down and he would have—to the F.B.I., to anyone,” he added.  “There was no need to arrest him.”  Mr. Di Bella said that his brother had no legal connection with the New Showplace itself, that he was simply an owner of a corporation that owned the building at 148 West Fourth Street.  Paul Di Bella, who lives at 33-52 85th Street, Jackson Heights, Queens, is a non-working longshoreman on the Manhattan docks who continues to receive a salary for reasons of seniority, law enforcement officials said

28 Arraigned Here After Raid On Bars

A July 20, 1971 article (“28 Arraigned Here After Raid On Bars”) from the New York Times states:

The 28 alleged owners and employees of nine after-hours bars arrested in a joint Federal-city raid early Sunday morning were arraigned in Federal Court here yesterday.  United States Magistrates Harold J. Raby and Martin Jacobs set bonds of $5,000 for six of the men and released the others in their own recognizance.  All are charged with violation of the Federal law that requires places that sell liquor to buy and display a $56-a-year tax stamp.  Those released in $5,000 bond were Paul Di Bella, 33-52 85th Street, Jackson Heights, Queens; Nicholas Di Martino, 146 West Fourth Street; Hubertus Schied, no address; Thomas Fitzsimmons, 435 West 46th Street; Joseph Murray, 226 East 26th Street; and Vincent Garofalo Jr., 240 Waverly Place.  Federal officials have said that Mr. Di Bella, allegedly a member of the crime family of Carlo Gambino, is the principal link between the underworld and the illegal clubs.  Patrick Burke, a lawyer with the Joint Strike Force Against Organized Crime, said the nine clubs were selected from hundreds operating in the city because they were among the busiest and because the strike force had word that they had links with organized crime

The FBI Files: Paul Di Bella

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Dog Day Afternoon

An August 24, 1972 article (“A Blighted ‘Affair’ Led To Bank Holdup”) from the New York Times states:

Ernestaronlizeden_2In the dismal, all-male rooming house at 250 West 10th Street, friends of John Wojtowicz were amazed yesterday that he had been charged with bank robbery and abduction in connection with the attempted robbery of a Brooklyn bank on Tuesday.  “Little John was a hell of a pleasant guy,” said a resident of the building where Wojtowicz had a room.  “Very friendly.  I never knew him to hurt anyone.  I can’t believe he would have shot any of the hostages, but maybe he would have tried to shoot one of the cops.”  In the morgue, Wallace Hamilton, a middle-aged man who identified the body of 18-year-old Salvatore Natuarale, the other bank robber, said:  “He was a six-time loser and nobody gave a damn about him.  He got out about six months ago.  He was trying to stay out of jail and he was doing it.  * * *  The murky backgrounds of the two young men emerged in blotchy patterns from interviews with friends, police officers and hostages.  In the case of 27-year-old Wojtowicz, the anguish of his avowed homosexual love affair was an important factor in a quest for money.  And for the accomplice, who was slain by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, police authorities in New Jersey traced a career backward from grand larceny and possession of burglars’ tools, to possession of dangerous drugs, to truancy and to a childhood of moving around a lot with his mother.  “He was an outlaw,” recalled a detective in Keansburg, NJ, where Naturale had lived two years as a teenager.  “Always in trouble and always a headache.”  The youth, who sported a faint blond mustache and crude tattoos on his arms and thigh drifted toward Manhattan.  * * *  There was little secrecy about Wojtowicz’s blighted homosexual romance among his friends at the Greenwich Village rooming house that the police call “Boystown.”  They talked with great admiration of the thousands of dollars Wojtowicz spent last spring for what they called his wedding gift to Ernest Aron in a large restaurant and bar.  “Little John bought Ernie a beautiful gown,” said one of his friends. “He had gowns for the bridesmaids – they came in drag.  He had a movie made and a photograph album.  He very clearly loved Ernie.”  In less than two months the couple had split up and Wojtowicz hitchhiked to Florida and then up to Maine to persuade his “wife” to rejoin him.  “They spit up, they got together,” a friend said.  “Relationships among gay people are different from heterosexuals.”  On Tuesday night, Wojtowicz released a hostage to induce his “wife” to rejoin him, but Mr. Aron refused.  Mr. Aron was brought to the scene from Kings County Hospital, where he is a patient.  A hostage said that Mr. Wojtowicz needed money because he wanted to take Mr. Aron to Denmark and  have a “sex operation” performed.

An August 26, 1972 article (“A Mobster Is Linked To Bizarre Holdup”) from the New York Times states:An acquaintance of John Wojtowicz – who has been charged with robbing a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Brooklyn last Tuesday and holding nine persons hostage – reportedly told the Federal Bureau of Investigation yesterday that an underworld figure supplied the guns used by Wojtowicz and two accomplices in the holdup.  The acquaintance, Gary Badger, was questioned by F.B.I. agents yesterday afternoon, but the bureau would not comment.  A fried of Mr. Badger, however, said that five men, including Wojtowicz, began planning the robbery last April, but that two of the men later bowed out.  Wjtowicz was pressed to carry out the robbery by the underworld figure, who owns Greenwich Village bars and is involved in pornography, Mr. Badger reportedly told the agents Wojtowicz owed the gangster money.  Wojtowicz and several of his friends have claimed that the idea for the bank robbery was provided by a middle-aged man claiming to be a Chase Manhattan executive whom he met in a Greenwich Village homosexual bar.

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In reviewing the film Dog Day Afternoon, critic Eric Holm in 1976 publishes the article “Dog Day Afternoon:  Dog Day Aftertaste” in Jump Cut:  A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 10-11, which states:

Left out of the film [Dog Day Afternoon] entirely is any mention of [John] Wojtowicz’ reported Mafia connections. Wojtowicz had decidedly fallen out of favor with the Gay Activist’s Alliance in Summer 1971 over his association with Mike Umbers, the Mafioso manager of Christopher’s End (a gay bar) and various callboy and porno operations. After a period when Christopher’s End was closed by a police raid, Umbers had announced the reopening of his bar with an ad promising ‘Weird Sex Now.’ According to Bell, the GAA immediately organized a demonstration outside the bar against Mafia exploitation of gays. Wojtowicz attended the planning meeting but appeared at the demonstration carrying a sign supporting Umbers, meanwhile having passed along information about the organizers’ plans to the mobster.  After the bank robbery Bell investigated claims by Wojtowicz’ friends that Umbers and soldiers of the Gambino family (New York-based Mafiosi owning many gay bars, including the renowned Stonewall) had set Wojtowicz and Sal up for the job at the Chase Manhattan branch bank. (Carlo Gambino, the godfather, was under indictment at the time for conspiracy to rob a Chase armored truck). Bell’s investigations brought bomb threats to the Village Voice, produced one scared witness who talked at length to the FBI and occasioned a perfunctory police raid on Umber’s porn publishing plant. Bell participated in several GAA business meetings in which conservative and radical gays debated over whether Wojtowicz was a counterrevolutionary lumpen adventurer victimized by the mob or a proud gay superfly caught in an act of righteous expropriation, but the debate was inconclusive.

A 1975 letter by John Wojtowicz to the New York Times (which it refused to published) states:

The main reason I did what I did on 8/22-23/72 is never explained in the movie, and instead you the viewer are left with many questions. I did what a man has to do in order to save the life of someone I loved a great deal. His name was Ernest Aron (now known as Ms. Liz Debbie Eden) and he was Gay. He wanted to be a woman through the process of a sex-change operation and thus was labeled by doctors as a Gender Identity Problem. He felt he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. This caused him untold pain and problems which accounted for his many suicide attempts. I met him in 1971 at an Italian Bazaar in N.Y.C. after two years of separation from my female wife, Carmen, and two children.  * * *  I regret the things that happened, but most of all that my friend, Sal Naturale, who was only 18 years old was murdered by the F.B.I.. It was not necessary for then to murder him, because he had been immobilized and unable to do anything, but yet the F.B.I. murdered him before my eyes. I was also immobilized and unable to do anything. The movie never shows this as it truly happened, as it does with so many other scenes in it. I estimate the movie to be only 30% true, even though it states - “This movie is based on a true incident that occurred in Brooklyn, N.Y. on 8/22/72.” All through the movie they take facts that were true but then present them differently.   * * *  Now to one of the most despicable parts of the film. In it they hint very dramatically that I made some kind of a deal to betray my partner, Sal. It hurt me that the same F.B.I. who cold-bloodedly killed an 18-year-old boy can be depicted as having me help then. This is not true and there is no human being low enough in this world who would let the F.B.I. kill his partner in order for him to survive. It can be labeled as just Hollywood trying to sell a movie or just to increase the drama, but I call it sick.

The FBI Files: John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Naturale

John Wojtowicz and his 18-year-old partner-in-crime Sal Naturale – a "slender, fair-haired youth" with a long history of juvenile delinquency and barbituate abuse – met a month prior to the August 22, 1972 Chase Manhattan Bank robbery at the gay bar Danny's at 140 Seventh Avenue South, and Naturale moved into Wojtowicz's apartment.  At the time Naturale was employed as a stock clerk and errand boy at the Penny Candy Store at 136 Seventh Avenue South which was owned by Joseph Manganello.

Wojtowicz was a close associate of Mike Umbers who fronted several gay bars, callboy rings and smut operations for the Gambino crime family.  At the time of Wojtowicz's arrest he was in the possession of a handwritten list of several gay bars, bathhouses and restaurants with their telephone numbers and the names – albeit redacted -- of the individuals associated with those enterprises.  The list reads like a gay guide for 1972:  Country Cousin Restaurant at 75th Street & Third Avenue; Beacon Baths and Health Club at 227 East 45th Street; Lambda Club, Ltd.; Roundtable at 151 East 50th Street; Christopher’s End; Club Baths at 24 First Avenue; Wine Cellar; Gay Dogs; Silver Dollar; Comeback at 185 West 10th Street; New Showplace at 146 West 4th Street; Tenth of Always at 82 West 3d Street; Never Too Late at 246 East Ninth Street; Silver Palace at 350 East 81st Street;  Sanctuary at 43d Street between Ninth & Tenth Avenues; Year 2000 at 49th Street & Eighth Avenue; Heat Wave at West 3d Street; Zoo-at-Zodiac; Continental Baths at 230 West 74th Street; Danny’s at 108 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights; and Man’s Country Ltd. at 53 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights.

The inventory of items found on Naturale hauntingly reflects one who was only 18 at the time of his death, and included a pair of aviator style sunglasses, a blue pocket comb, a sales receipt for a pair of sneakers from Morris Department Store at 328 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, and a business card for the Golden Disc at 163 West 10th Street with the following handwritten words on the back:  "Summer Surfing Sand, by the Beach Boys 1964."

Upon Wojtowicz's arrest he apparently was contemplating suicide or otherwise expecting his imminent death because he wrote a last will and testament on September 12, 1972 at the Federal Detention Headquarters on 427 West Street in which he allotted a portion of the proceeds from his life insurance policy to his lover Ernest Aron for his sex change surgery:

I love you with a Passion as no other has loved another man in all eternity.  My love will live on forever, & we shall be together once more in the hereafter.  I will always be by your side in spirit & will watch over you, till you join me in the hereafter.  I leave you $2,700 from my $10,000 life insurance policy at the Richburg Savings Bank of which [redacted] is the beneficiary.  This money is only to be used for your Sex Change or Sex Reassignment Operation.  The first Part – Castration ($700) shall be done within 60 days after my death or no money shall be given to you.  It shall be performed by any doctor you choose but hopefully [redacted] shall accompany you to Pay deposit & also for day of Castration.  * * *  Main “& final stage of Sex Change or Sex Reassignment operation must be completed within 8 months after my death or no money shall be given to you.  * * *  If Operation costs less than $2,700.00, the remainder shall be given to him in full on the 1st Anniversary of my death only at my grave side.  I expect you to be a real woman by then & happy.  That your life from that point on Shall be full of happiness & Joy.  I hope you will visit my grave on My birthday, March 9, & on our Anniversary December 4.  May God Bless you & watch over you as I will, till we are reunited in the hereafter.

Download John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Naturale FBI Files Part I

 

Download John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Naturale FBI Files Part II

Nite Life at 85 Washington Place: "Lively, active crowd"

Nite_life_5Eddie DeCurtis was a Gambino crime family member who had interests in gay bars in Manhattan and on Long Island since at least the mid-1960s, and he often partnered with Genovese crime family members such as Anthony “Tony Bender” Strollo and Joseph Cataldo.  In 1973 the FBI investigated DeCurtis for his "possible connection with" the popular gay disco Nite Life at 85 Washington Place.  Michael’s Thing – the fag rag of the times – characterized Nite Life this way:  “Very popular discotheque.  Two rooms of fun.  Beautiful décor.  Lively, active crowd.”  In addition to maintaining interests in gay bars and clubs, DeCurtis provided the muscle behind the Gambino crime family’s takeover of the pornography rackets in the early 1970s.  Although never charged DeCurtis was widely believed as the one behind the August 1972 murder of New York State Assemblyman Robert Newmark.

The FBI Files: Edward DeCurtis: Part I

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