I WILL BE SIGNING BOOKS AT THE DEEP RIVER CT. LIBRARY, SAT. NOV. 14 FROM 2-4
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
John
William Tuohy is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in
writing from Lindenwood University.
He is
the author of No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care and
Short Stories from a Small Town. He is also the author of numerous non-fiction
on the history of organized crime including the ground break biography of
bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and
"Guns and Glamour: A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."
His
non-fiction crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist, American
Mafia and other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic Playfest
for his work The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction work, Karma
Finds Franny Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of 2008.
His
play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel
in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New
York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First
Amendment Award for best new play.
Contact
John:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM
HERE'S MY LATEST BOOKS.....
This is a book of
short stories taken from the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the
factory town of Ansonia in southwestern Connecticut.
Most of these
stories, or as true as I recall them because I witnessed these events many
years ago through the eyes of child and are retold to you now with the pen and
hindsight of an older man. The only exception is the story Beat Time which is based on the disappearance of Beat poet Lew
Welch. Decades before I knew who Welch was, I was told that he had made his
from California to New Haven, Connecticut, where was an alcoholic living in a
mission. The notion fascinated me and I filed it away but never forgot
it.
The collected stories
are loosely modeled around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners
(I also borrowed from the novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my
character in “Local Orphan is Hero” is also the name of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like Joyce I wanted
to write about my people, the people I knew as a child, the working class in
small town America and I wanted to give a complete view of them as well. As a
result the stories are about the divorced, Gays, black people, the working
poor, the middle class, the lost and the found, the contented and the
discontented.
Conversely many of
the stories in this book are about starting life over again as a result of
suicide (The Hanging Party, Small Town
Tragedy, Beat Time) or from a near death experience (Anna Bell Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade, A Brief Summer)
and natural occurring death. (The Best
Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)
With the exception of
Jesus Loves Shaqunda, in each story
there is a rebirth from the death. (Shaqunda is reported as having died of
pneumonia in The Winter Years)
Sal, the desperate
and depressed divorcee in Things Change,
changes his life in Lunch Hour when
asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time,
the last story in the book) In The
Arranged Time, Thisby is given the option of change and whether she takes
it or, we don’t know. The death of Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the diner and into the waiting arms
of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.
Although the book is
based on three sets of time (breakfast, lunch and dinner) and the diner is
opened in the early morning and closed at night, time stands still inside the
Diner. The hour on the big clock on the wall never changes time and much like
my memories of that place, everything remains the same.
http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Small-William-Tuohy/dp/1517270456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444164878&sr=1-1&keywords=short+stories+from+a+small+town
The Valley
Lives
By Marion Marchetto, author of The
Bridgewater Chronicles on October 15, 2015
Short
Stores from a Small Town is set in The Valley (known to outsiders as The Lower
Naugatuck Valley) in Connecticut. While the short stories are contemporary they
provide insight into the timeless qualities of an Industrial Era community and
the values and morals of the people who live there. Some are first or second
generation Americans, some are transplants, yet each takes on the mantle of
Valleyite and wears it proudly. It isn't easy for an author to take the reader
on a journey down memory lane and involve the reader in the life stories of a
group of seemingly unrelated characters. I say seemingly because by book's end
the reader will realize that he/she has done more than meet a group of loosely
related characters.
We
meet all of the characters during a one-day time period as each of them finds
their way to the Valley Diner on a rainy autumn day. From our first meeting
with Angel, the educationally challenged man who opens and closes the diner, to
our farewell for the day to the young waitress whose smile hides her despair we
meet a cross section of the Valley population. Rich, poor, ambitious, and not
so ambitious, each life proves that there is more to it beneath the surface.
And the one thing that binds these lives together is The Valley itself. Not so
much a place (or a memory) but an almost palpable living thing that becomes a
part of its inhabitants.
Let
me be the first the congratulate author John William Tuohy on a job well done.
He has evoked the heart of The Valley and in doing so brought to life the
fabric that Valleyites wear as a mantle of pride. While set in a specific
region of the country, the stories that unfold within the pages of this slim
volume are similar to those that live in many a small town from coast to coast.
An award winning full length play.
"Cyberdate.Com is the story of six
ordinary people in search of romance, friendship and love and find it in very
extraordinary ways. Based on the real life experiences of the authors
misadventures with on line dating, Cyber date is a bittersweet story that will
make you laugh, cry and want to fall in love again." Ellis McKay
Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public at the Actors Chapel in
Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York
project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First
Amendment Award for best new play. The play was also given a full reading at
The Frederick Playhouse in Maryland in March of 2007.
In
1962, six year old John Tuohy, his two brothers and two sisters entered
Connecticut’s foster care system and were promptly split apart. Over the next
ten years, John would live in more than ten foster homes, group homes and state
schools, from his native Waterbury to Ansonia, New Haven, West Haven, Deep
River and Hartford. In the end, a decade later, the state returned him to the
same home and the same parents they had taken him from. As tragic as is funny
compelling story will make you cry and laugh as you journey with this child to
overcome the obstacles of the foster care system and find his dreams.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/0692361294/
http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/
AMAZON
REVIEWS
By
jackiehon October 13, 2015
After reading about John's deeply
personal and painful past, I just wanted to hug the child within him......and
hug all the children who were thrown into the state's foster system....it is an
amazing read.......
By
Jane Pogodaon October 9, 2015
I truly enjoyed reading his
memoir. I also grew up in Ansonia and had no idea conditions such as these
existed. The saving grace is knowing the author made it out and survived the
system. Just knowing he was able to have a family of his own made me happy. I
attended the same grammar school and was happy that his experience there was
not negative. I had a wonderful experience in that school. I wish that I could
have been there for him when he was at the school since we were there at
probably at the same time.
By
Sueon September 27, 2015
Hi - just finished your novel
"No time to say goodbye" - what a powerful read!!! - I bought it for
my 90 year old mom who is an avid reader and lived in the valley all her
life-she loved it also along with my sister- we are all born and raised in the
valley- i.e. Derby and Ansonia
By
David A. Wrighton September 7, 2015
I enjoyed this book. I grew up in
Ansonia CT and went to the Assumption School. Also reconized all the places he
was talking about and some of the families.
By
Robert G Manleyon September 7, 2015
This is a wonderfully written
book. It is heart wrenchingly sad at times and the next minute hilariously
funny. I attribute that to the intelligence and wit of the author who combines
the humor and pathos of his Irish catholic background and horrendous
"foster kid" experience. He captures each character perfectly and the
reader can easily visualize the individuals the author has to deal with on
daily basis. Having lived part of my life in the parochial school system and
having lived as a child in the same neighborhood as the author, I was vividly
brought back to my childhood .Most importantly, it shows the strength of the
soul and how just a little compassion can be so important to a lost child.
By
LNAon July 9, 2015
John Tuohy writes with compelling
honesty, and warmth. I grew up in Ansonia, CT myself, so it makes it even more
real. He brings me immediately back there with his narrative, while he wounds
my soul, as I realize I had no idea of the suffering of some of the children
around me. His story is a must read, of courage and great spirit in the face of
impoverishment, sorrow, and adult neglect. I could go on and on, but just get
the book. If you're like me, you'll soon be reading it out loud to any person
in the room who will listen. Many can suffer and overcome as they go through
it, but few can find the words that take us through the story. John is a gifted
writer to be able to do that.
By
Barbara Pietruszkaon June 29, 2015
I am from Connecticut so I was
very familiar with many locations described in the book especially Ansonia
where I lived. I totally enjoyed the book and would like to know more about the
author. I recommend the book to everyone
By
Joanne B.on June 28, 2015
What an emotional rollercoaster.
I laughed. I cried. Once you start reading it's hard to stop. I was torn
between wanting to gulp it up and read over and over each quote that started
the chapter. I couldn't help but feel part of the Tuohy clan. I wanted to
scream in their defense. It's truly hard to believe the challenges that foster
children face. I can only pray that this story may touch even one person facing
this life. It's an inspiring read. That will linger long after you finish it.
This is a wonderfully written memoir that immediately pulls you in to the lives
of the Tuohy family.
By
Dr. Wm. Anthony Connolly
This incredible memoir, No Time
to Say Goodbye, tells of entertaining angels, dancing with devils, and of the
abandoned children many viewed simply as raining manna from some lesser god.
The young and unfortunate lives
of the Tuohy bruins—sometimes Irish, sometimes Jewish, often Catholic,
rambunctious, but all imbued with Lion’s hearts—told here with brutal honesty
leavened with humor and laudable introspective forgiveness. The memoir will
have you falling to your knees thanking that benevolent Irish cop in the sky,
your lucky stars, or hugging the oxygen out of your own kids the fate foisted
upon Johnny and his siblings does not and did not befall your own brood. John
William Tuohy, a nationally-recognized authority on organized crime and Irish
levity, is your trusted guide through the weeds the decades of neglect ensnared
he and his brothers and sisters, all suffering for the impersonal and often
mercenary taint of the foster care system. Theirs, and Tuohy’s, story is not at
all figures of speech as this review might suggest, but all too real and all
too sad, and maddening. I wanted to scream. I wanted to get into a time
machine, go back and adopt every last one of them. I was angry. I was
captivated. The requisite damning verities of foster care are all here, regretfully,
but what sets this story above others is its beating heart, even a bruised and
broken one, still willing to forgive and understand, and continue to aid its
walking wounded. I cannot recommend this book enough.
By
Paul Dayon June 15, 2015
Great reading. Life in foster
care told from a very rare point of view.
By
Jackie Malkeson June 5, 2015
This book is definitely a must
for social workers working with children specifically. This is an excellent
memoir which identifies the trails of foster children in the 1960s in the
United States. The memoir captures stories of joy as well as nail biting
terror, as the family is at times torn apart but finds each other later and
finds solace in the experiences of one another. The stories capture the love
siblings have for one another as well as the protection they have for one
another in even the worst of circumstances. On the flip side, one of the most
touching stories to me was when a Nun at the school helped him to read-- truly
an example of how a positive person really helped to shape the author in times
when circumstances at home were challenging and treacherous. I found the book
to be a page turner and at times show how even in the hardest of circumstances
there was a need to live and survive and make the best of any moment. The
memoir is eye-opening and helped to shed light and make me feel proud of the
volunteer work I take part in with disadvantaged children. Riveting....Must
read....memory lane on steroids....Catholic school banter, blue color
towns...Lawrence Welk on Sundays night's.
By
eileenon June 4, 2015
From ' No time to say Goodbye
'and authors John W. Touhys Gangster novels, his style never waivers...humorous
to sadness to candidly realistic situations all his writings leaves the reader
in awe......longing for more.
By
karen pojakeneon June 1, 2015
This book is a must-read for
anyone who administers to the foster care program in any state. This is not a
"fell through the cracks" life story, but rather a memoir of a life
guided by strength and faith and a hard determination to survive. it is
heartening to know that the "sewer" that life can become to steal our
personal peace can be fought and our peace can be restored, scarred, but
restored.
By
Michelle Blackon
A captivating, shocking, and
deeply moving memoir, No Time to Say Goodbye is a true page turner. John shares
the story of his childhood, from the struggles of living in poverty to being in
the foster care system and simply trying to survive. You will be cheering for
him all the way, as he never loses his will to thrive even in the darkest and
bleakest of circumstances. This memoir is a very truthful and unapologetic
glimpse into the way in which some of our most vulnerable citizens have been
treated in the past and are still being treated today. It is truly eye-opening,
and hopefully will inspire many people to take action in protection of
vulnerable children.
By
Kimberlyon May 24, 2015
I found myself in tears while
reading this book. John William Tuohy writes quite movingly about the world he
grew up in; a world in which I had hoped did not exist within the foster care
system. This book is at times funny, raw, compelling, heartbreaking and
disturbing. I found myself rooting for John as he tries to escape from an
incredibly difficult life. You will too!
By
Geoffrey A. Childson May 20, 2015
I found this book to be a
compelling story of life in the Ct foster care system. at times disturbing and
at others inspirational ,The author goes into great detail in this gritty
memoir of His early life being abandoned into the states system and his
subsequent escape from it. Every once in a while a book or even an article in a
newspaper comes along that bears witness to an injustice or even something
that's just plain wrong. This chronicle of the foster care system is such a
book and should be required reading for any aspiring social workers.
Editorial
Reviews
From
Publishers Weekly
JFK's
pardons and the mob; Prohibition, Chicago's crime cadres and the staged
kidnapping of "`Jake the Barber'" Factor, "the black sheep
brother of the cosmetics king, Max Factor"; lifetime sentences, attempted
jail busts and the perseverance of "a rumpled private detective and an
eccentric lawyer" John W. Tuohy showcases all these and more sensational
and shady happenings in When Capone's Mob Murdered Roger Touhy: The Strange
Case of Touhy, Jake the Barber and the Kidnapping that Never Happened. The
author started investigating Touhy's 1959 murder by Capone's gang in 1975 for
an undergrad assignment. He traces the frame-job whereby Touhy was accused of
the kidnapping, his decades in jail, his memoirs, his retrial and release and,
finally, his murder, 28 days after regaining his freedom. Sixteen pages of
photos.
From
Library Journal
Roger
Touhy, one of the "terrible Touhys" and leader of a bootlegging
racket that challenged Capone's mob in Prohibition Chicago, had a lot to answer
for, but the crime that put him behind bars was, ironically, one he didn't
commit: the alleged kidnapping of Jake Factor, half-brother of Max Factor and
international swindler. Author Tuohy (apparently no relation), a former staff
investigator for the National Center for the Study of Organized Crime, briefly
traces the history of the Touhys and the Capone mob, then describes Factor's
plan to have himself kidnapped, putting Touhy behind bars and keeping himself
from being deported. This miscarriage of justice lasted 17 years and ended in
Touhy's parole and murder by the Capone mob 28 days later. Factor was never
deported. The author spent 26 years researching this story, and he can't bear
to waste a word of it. Though slim, the book still seems padded, with
irrelevant detail muddying the main story. Touhy is a hard man to feel sorry
for, but the author does his best. Sure to be popular in the Chicago area and
with the many fans of mob history, this is suitable for larger public libraries
and regional collections. Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L., OH
BOOK
REVIEW
John
William Tuohy, one of the most prolific crime writers in America, has penned a
tragic, but fascinating story of Roger Touhy and John Factor. It's a tale born
out of poverty and violence, a story of ambition gone wrong and deception on an
enormous, almost unfathomable, scale. However, this is also a story of triumph
of determination to survive, of a lifelong struggle for dignity and redemption
of the spirit.
The
story starts with John "Jake the Barber" Factor. The product of the
turn of the century European ethnic slums of Chicago's west side, Jake's
brother, Max Factor, would go on to create an international cosmetic empire.
In
1926, Factor, grubstaked in a partnership with the great New York criminal
genius, Arnold Rothstien, and Chicago's Al Capone, John Factor set up a stock
scam in England that fleeced thousands of investors, including members of the
royal family, out of $8 million dollars, an incredible sum of money in 1926.
After
the scam fell apart, Factor fled to France, where he formed another syndicate
of con artists, who broke the bank at Monte Carlo by rigging the tables.
Eventually,
Factor fled to the safety of Capone's Chicago but the highest powers in the
Empire demanded his arrest. However, Factor fought extradition all the way to
the United States Supreme Court, but he had a weak case and deportation was
inevitable. Just 24 hours before the court was to decide his fate, Factor paid
to have himself kidnapped and his case was postponed. He reappeared in Chicago
several days later, and, at the syndicates' urging, accused gangster Roger
Touhy of the kidnapping.
Roger
"The Terrible" Touhy was the youngest son of an honest Chicago cop.
Although born in the Valley, a teeming Irish slum, the family moved to rural
Des Plains, Illinois while Roger was still a boy. Touhy's five older brothers
stayed behind in the valley and soon flew under the leadership of
"Terrible Tommy" O'Connor. By 1933, three of them would be shot dead
in various disputes with the mob and one, Tommy, would lose the use of his legs
by syndicate machine guns. Secure in the still rural suburbs of Cook County,
Roger Touhy graduated as class valedictorian of his Catholic school.
Afterwards, he briefly worked as an organizer for the Telegraph and
Telecommunications Workers Union after being blacklisted by Western Union for
his minor pro-labor activities.
Touhy
entered the Navy in the first world war and served two years, teaching Morse
code to Officers at Harvard University.
After
the war, he rode the rails out west where he earned a living as a railroad
telegraph operator and eventually made a small but respectable fortune as an
oil well speculator.
Returning
to Chicago in 1924, Touhy married his childhood sweetheart, regrouped with his
brothers and formed a partnership with a corrupt ward heeler named Matt Kolb,
and, in 1925, he started a suburban bootlegging and slot machine operation in
northwestern Cook County. Left out of the endless beer wars that plagued the
gangs inside Chicago, Touhy's operation flourished. By 1926, his slot machine
operations alone grossed over $1,000,000.00 a year, at a time when a gallon of
gas cost eight cents.
They
were unusual gangsters. When the Klu Klux Klan, then at the height of its
power, threatened the life of a priest who had befriended the gang, Tommy
Touhy, Roger's older brother, the real "Terrible Touhy," broke into
the Klan's national headquarters, stole its membership roles, and, despite an
offer of $25,000 to return them, delivered the list to the priest who published
the names in several Catholic newspapers the following day.
Once,
Touhy unthinkingly released several thousand gallons of putrid sour mash in to
the Des Plains River one day before the city was to reenact its discovery by
canoe-riding Jesuits a hundred years before. After a dressing down by the towns
people Touhy spent $10,000.00 on perfume and doused the river with it, saving
the day.
They
were inventive too. When the Chicago police levied a 50% protection tax on
Touhy's beer, Touhy bought a fleet of Esso gasoline delivery trucks, kept the
Esso logo on the vehicles, and delivered his booze to his speakeasies that way.
In
1930, when Capone invaded the labor rackets, the union bosses, mostly Irish and
completely corrupt, turned to the Touhy organization for protection. The
intermittent gun battles between the Touhys and the Capone mob over control of
beer routes which had been fought on the empty, back roads of rural Cook
County, was now brought into the city where street battles extracted an awesome
toll on both sides. The Chicago Tribune estimated the casualties to be one
hundred dead in less then 12 months.
By
the winter of 1933, remarkably, Touhy was winning the war in large part because
joining him in the struggle against the mob was Chicago's very corrupt, newly
elected mayor Anthony "Ten percent Tony" Cermak, who was as much a
gangster as he was an elected official.
Cermak
threw the entire weight of his office and the whole Chicago police force behind
Touhy's forces. Eventually, two of Cermak's police bodyguards arrested Frank
Nitti, the syndicate's boss, and, for a price, shot him six times. Nitti lived.
As a result, two months later Nitti's gunmen caught up with Cermak at a
political rally in Florida.
Using
previously overlooked Secret Service reports, this book proves, for the first
time, that the mob stalked Cermak and used a hardened felon to kill him. The
true story behind the mob's 1933 murder of Anton Cermak, will changes histories
understanding of organized crimes forever. The fascinating thing about this
killing is its eerie similarity to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas thirty
years later, made even more macabre by the fact that several of the names
associated with the Cermak killing were later aligned with the Kennedy killing.
For
many decades, it was whispered that the mob had executed Cermak for his role in
the Touhy-syndicate war of 1931-33, but there was never proof. The official
story is that a loner named Giuseppe Zangara, an out-of-work, Sicilian born
drifter with communist leanings, traveled to Florida in the winter of 1933 and
fired several shots at President Franklin Roosevelt. He missed the President,
but killed Chicago's Mayor Anton Cermak instead. However, using long lost
documents, Tuohy is able to prove that Zangara was a convicted felon with long
ties to mob Mafia and that he very much intended to murder Anton Cermak.
With
Cermak dead, Touhy was on his own against the mob. At the same time, the United
States Postal Service was closing in on his gang for pulling off the largest
mail heists in US history at that time. The cash was used to fund Touhy's war
with the Capones.Then in June of 1933, John Factor en he reappeared, Factor
accused Roger Touhy of kidnapping him. After two sensational trials, Touhy was
convicted of kidnapping John Factor and sentenced to 99 years in prison and
Factor, after a series of complicated legal maneuvers, and using the mob's
influence, was allowed to remain in the United States as a witness for the
prosecution, however, he was still a wanted felon in England.
By
1942 Roger Touhy had been in prison for nine years, his once vast fortune was
gone. Roger's family was gone as well. At his request, his wife Clara had moved
to Florida with their two sons in 1934. However, with the help of Touhy's
remaining sister, the family retained a rumpled private detective, actually a
down-and-out, a very shady and disbarred mob lawyer named Morrie Green.
Disheveled
of not, Green was a highly competent investigator and was able to piece
together and prove the conspiracy that landed Touhy in jail. However, no court
would hear the case, and by the fall of 1942, Touhy had exhausted every legal
avenue open to him.Desperate, Touhy hatched a daring daylight breakout over the
thirty foot walls of Stateville prison.The sensational escape ended three
months later in a dramatic and bloody shootout between the convicts and the
FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover.
Less
then three months after Touhy was captured, Fox Studios hired producer Brian
Foy to churn out a mob financed docudrama film on the escape entitled,
"Roger Touhy, The Last Gangster." The executive producer on the film
was Johnny Roselli, the hood who later introduced Judy Campbell to Frank
Sinatra. Touhy sued Fox and eventually won his case and the film was withdrawn
from circulation. In 1962, Columbia pictures and John Houston tried to produce
a remake of the film, but were scared off the project.
While
Touhy was on the run from prison, John Factor was convicted for m ail fraud and
was sentenced and served ten years at hard labor. Factor's take from the scam
was $10,000,000.00 in cash.
Released
in 1949, Factor took control of the Stardust Hotel Casino in 1955, then the
largest operation on the Vegas strip. The casino's true owners, of course, were
Chicago mob bosses Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo, Murray Humpreys and Sam Giancana.
From 1955 to 1963, the length of Factor's tenure at the casino, the US Justice
Department estimated that the Chicago outfit skimmed between forty-eight to 200
million dollars from the Stardust alone.
In
1956, while Factor and the outfit were growing rich off the Stardust, Roger
Touhy hired a quirky, high strung, but highly effective lawyer named Robert B.
Johnstone to take his case. A brilliant legal tactician, who worked incessantly
on Touhy's freedom, Robert Johnstone managed to get Touhy's case heard before
federal judge John P. Barnes, a refined magistrate filled with his own
eccentricities. After two years of hearings, Barnes released a 1,500-page
decision on Touhy's case, finding that Touhy was railroaded to prison in a
conspiracy between the mob and the state attorney's office and that John Factor
had kidnapped himself as a means to avoid extradition to England.
Released
from prison in 1959, Touhy wrote his life story "The Stolen Years"
with legendary Chicago crime reporter, Ray Brennan. It was Brennan, as a young
cub reporter, who broke the story of John Dillenger's sensational escape from
Crown Point prison, supposedly with a bar of soap whittled to look like a
pistol. It was also Brennan who brought about the end of Roger Touhy's mortal
enemy, "Tubbo" Gilbert, the mob owned chief investigator for the Cook
County state attorney's office, and who designed the frame-up that placed Touhy
behind bars.
Factor
entered a suit against Roger Touhy, his book publishers and Ray Brennan,
claiming it damaged his reputation as a "leading citizen of Nevada and a
philanthropist."
The
teamsters, Factor's partners in the Stardust Casino, refused to ship the book
and Chicago's bookstore owners were warned by Tony Accardo, in person, not to
carry the book.
Touhy
and Johnstone fought back by drawing up the papers to enter a $300,000,000
lawsuit against John Factor, mob leaders Paul Ricca, Tony Accardo and Murray
Humpreys as well as former Cook County state attorney Thomas Courtney and Tubbo
Gilbert, his chief investigator, for wrongful imprisonment.
The
mob couldn't allow the suit to reach court, and considering Touhy's
determination, Ray Brennan's nose for a good story and Bob Johnstone's legal
talents, there was no doubt the case would make it to court. If the case went
to court, John Factor, the outfit's figurehead at the lucrative Stardust
Casino, could easily be tied in to illegal teamster loans. At the same time,
the McClellan committee was looking into the ties between the teamsters, Las
Vegas and organized crime and the raid at the mob conclave in New York state
had awakened the FBI and brought them into the fight. So, Touhy's lawsuit was,
in effect, his death sentence.
Twenty-five
days after his release from twenty-five years in prison, Roger Touhy was gunned
down on a frigid December night on his sister's front door.
Two
years after Touhy's murder, in 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered
his Justice Department to look into the highly suspect dealings of the Stardust
Casino. Factor was still the owner on record, but had sold his interest in the
casino portion of the hotel for a mere 7 million dollars. Then, in December of
that year, the INS, working with the FBI on Bobby Kennedy's orders, informed
Jake Factor that he was to be deported from the United States before the end of
the month. Factor would be returned to England where he was still a wanted
felon as a result of his 1928 stock scam. Just 48 hours before the deportation,
Factor, John Kennedy's largest single personal political contributor, was
granted a full and complete Presidential pardon which allowed him to stay in
the United States.
The
story hints that Factor was more then probably an informant for the Internal
Revenue Service, it also investigates the murky world of Presidential pardons,
the last imperial power of the Executive branch. It's a sordid tale of abuse of
privilege, the mob's best friend and perhaps it is time the American people
reconsider the entire notion.
The
mob wasn't finished with Factor. Right after his pardon, Factor was involved in
a vague, questionable financial plot to try and bail teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa
out of his seemingly endless financial problems in Florida real estate. He was
also involved with a questionable stock transaction with mobster Murray
Humpreys. Factor spent the remaining twenty years of his life as a benefactor
to California's Black ghettos. He tried, truly, to make amends for all of the
suffering he had caused in his life. He spent millions of dollars building
churches, gyms, parks and low cost housing in the poverty stricken ghettos.
When he died, three United States Senators, the Mayor of Los Angles and several
hundred poor Black waited in the rain to pay their last respects at Jake the
Barber's funeral.
Interesting
Information on A Little Known Case
By Bill Emblom
Author John Tuohy, who has a
similar spelling of the last name to his subject Roger, but apparently no
relation, has provided us with an interesting story of northwest Chicago beer
baron Roger Touhy who was in competition with Al Capone during Capone's heyday.
Touhy appeared to be winning the battle since Mayor Anton Cermak was deporting
a number of Capone's cronies. However, the mob hit, according to the author, on
Mayor Cermak in Miami, Florida, by Giuseppe Zangara following a speech by
President-elect Roosevelt, put an end to the harrassment of Capone's cronies.
The author details the staged "kidnapping" of Jake "the
Barber" Factor who did this to avoid being deported to England and facing
a prison sentence there for stock swindling, with Touhy having his rights
violated and sent to prison for 25 years for the kidnapping that never
happened. Factor and other Chicago mobsters were making a lot of money with the
Stardust Casino in Las Vegas when they got word that Touhy was to be parolled
and planned to write his life story. The mob, not wanting this, decided Touhy
had to be eliminated. Touhy was murdered by hit men in 1959, 28 days after
gaining his freedom. Jake Factor had also spent time in prison in the United
States for a whiskey swindle involving 300 victims in 12 states. Two days
before Factor was to be deported to England to face prison for the stock
swindle President Kennedy granted Factor a full Presidential Pardon after
Factor's contribution to the Bay of Pigs fund. President Kennedy, the author
notes, issued 472 pardons (about half questionable) more than any president
before or since.
There are a number of books on
Capone and the Chicago mob. This book takes a look at an overlooked beer baron
from that time period, Roger Touhy. It is a very worthwhile read and one that
will hold your interest.
GREAT
BOOK FROM CHICAGO AND ERA WAS MY DAD'S,TRUE TO STORY
Eight long years locked up for a
kidnapping that was in fact a hoax, in autumn 1942, Roger Touhy & his gang
of cons busted out of Stateville, the infamous "roundhouse" prison,
southwest of Chicago Illinois. On the lam 2 months he was, when J Edgar &
his agents sniffed him out in a run down 6-flat tenement on the city's far
north lakefront. "Terrible Roger" had celebrated Christmas morning on
the outside - just like all square Johns & Janes - but by New Year's Eve,
was back in the bighouse.
Touhy's arrest hideout holds special
interest to me because I grew up less than a mile away from it. Though I never
knew so til 1975 when his bio was included in hard-boiled crime chronicler Jay
Robert Nash's, Badmen & Bloodletters, a phone book sized encyclopedia of
crooks & killers. Touhy's hard scrabble charisma stood out among 200 years'
worth of sociopathic Americana Nash had alphabetized, and gotten a pulphouse
publisher to print up for him.
I read Nash's outlaw dictionary
as a teen, and found Touhy's Prohibition era David vs Goliath battles with
ultimate gangster kingpin, Al Capone quite alluring, in an anti-hero sorta way.
Years later I learned Touhy had written a memoir, and reading his The Stolen
Years only reinforced my image of an underdog speakeasy beer baron - slash
suburban family man - outwitting the stone cold killer who masterminded the St.
Valentine's Day Massacre.
Like most autobiographies tho,
Touhy's book painted him the good guy. Just an everyday gent caught up in
events, and he sold his story well. Had I been a saloonkeeper back then I could
picture myself buying his sales pitch - and liking the guy too. I sure bought
into his tale, which in hindsight criminal scribe Nash had too, because both
writers portray Touhy - though admittedly a crook - as never "really"
hurting anybody. Only doing what any down-to-earth bootlegger running a million
dollar/year criminal enterprise would have.
What Capone's Mob Murdered Roger
Touhy author John Tuohy does tho is, provide a more objective version of
events, balancing out Touhy's white wash ... 'er ... make that subjectively ...
remembered telling of his life & times. Author Tuohy's account of gangster
Touhy's account forced me - grown up now - to re-account for my own original
take on the story.
As a kid back then, Touhy seemed almost
a Robin Hood- ish hood - if you'll pardon a very lame pun. Forty years on tho
re-considering the evidence, I think a persuasive - if not iron-clad convincing
- case can be made for his conviction in the kidnapping of swindler scumbag
Jake the Barber Factor. At least as far as conspiracy to do so goes, anyways.
(Please excuse the crude redundancy there but Factor's stench truly was that of
the dog s*** one steps in on those unfortunate occasions one does.)
Touhy's memoir painted himself as
almost an innocent bystander at his own life's events. But he was a very smart
& savvy guy - no dummy by a long shot. And I kinda do believe now, to not
have known his own henchmen were in on Factor's ploy to stave off deportation
and imprisonment, Touhy would have had to be as naive a Prohibition crime boss
- and make no mistake he was one - as I was as a teenage kid reading Nash's
thug-opedia,
On the other hand, the guy was
the father of two sons and it's repulsive to consider he would have taken part
in loathsomeness the crime of kidnapping was - even if the abducted victim was
an adult and as repulsively loathsome as widows & orphans conman, Jake
Factor.
This book's target audience is
crime buffs no doubt, but it's an interesting read just the same; and includes
anecdotes and insights I had not known of before. Unfortunately too, one that
knocks a hero of mine down a peg or two - or more like ten.
Circa 1960, President Kennedy
pardoned Jake the Barber, a fact that reading of almost made me puke. Then
again JFK and the Chicago Mob did make for some strange bedfellowery every now
& again. I'll always admire WWII US Navy commander Kennedy's astonishing
(word chosen carefully) bravery following his PT boat's sinking, but him
signing that document - effectively wiping Factor's s*** stain clean - as
payback for campaign contributions Factor made to him, was REALLY nauseating to
read.
Come to think of it tho, the
terms "criminal douchedog" & "any political candidate"
are pretty much interchangeable.
Anyways tho ... rest in peace
Rog, & I raise a toast - of virtual bootleg ale - in your honor:
"Turns out you weren't the hard-luck mug I'd thought you were, but what
the hell, at least you had style." And guts to meet your inevitable end
with more grace than a gangster should.
Post Note: Author Tuohy's
re-examination of the evidence in the Roger Touhy case does include some heroes
- guys & women - who attempted to find the truth of what did happen.
Reading about people like that IS rewarding. They showed true courage - and decency
- in a world reeking of corruption & deceit. So, here's to the lawyer who
took on a lost cause; the private detective who dug up buried facts; and most
of all, Touhy's wife & sister who stood by his side all those years.
Crime
don't pay, kids
Very good organized crime book. A
rather obscure gangster story which makes it fresh to read. I do not like these
minimum word requirements for a review. (There, I have met my minimum)
Chicago
Gangster History At It's Best
ByJ. CROSBYon
As a 4th generation Chicagoan, I
just loved this book. Growing up in the 1950's and 60's I heard the name
"Terrible Touhy's" mentioned many times. Roger was thought of as a
great man, and seems to have been held in high esteem among the old timer
Chicagoans.
That said, I thought this book to
be nothing but interesting and well written. (It inspired me to find a copy of
Roger's "Stolen Years" bio.) I do recommend this book to other folks
interested in prohibition/depression era Chicago crime research. It is a must
have for your library of Gangsters literature from that era. Chock full of
information and the reader is transported back in time.
I'd like to know just what is
"The Valley" area today in Chicago. I still live in the Windy City
and would like to see if anything remains from the early days of the 20th
century.
A good writer and a good book! I
will buy some more of Mr. Tuohy's work.
Great
story, great read
ByBookreaderon
A complex tale of gangsters,
political kickback, mob wars and corrupt politicians told with wit and humor at
a good pace. Highly recommend this book.
One
of the best books I've read in a long time....
If you're into mafioso, read
this! I loved it. Bought a copy for my brother to read for his
birthday--good stuff.
READERS REVIEWS FROM AMAZON BOOKS
There are more intense books that go
into supposed motivation and recording techniques and equipment, but this is a
lovely work that illuminates the songs and the stories behind them without
being overbearing in doing so. I really enjoyed it - bought several copies to
give as gifts. Well done!
READERS REVIEWS FROM
AMAZON BOOKS
Any book about Joe Petrosino can't be
all bad. Far too little attention is paid to Petrosino these days. The foolish
Public remembers names of scumbags like Capone, Gotti, Valachi, Tony Soprano,
etc. Far too few people remember New York Cop Joe Petrosino. In a time when
Italians were segregated, harassed by Cops and treated as second class
citizens, Petrosino arose as the first Italian anti-gangster Cop. Then, as now,
gangsters claimed they were the victims of prejudice, discrimination and
profiling. Petrosino rose above his times to become a Pioneer in anti-Mafia
police work. Tough as nails, un-corruptible, and utterly fearless, Petrosino
was assassinated by the Mafia in their usual cowardly style.
This book is a welcome bit of
scholarship on the great Petrosino. Tuohy's book does contain an, apparent,
misprint. There is a lone word, without authority, regarding Petrosino being
"corrupt," perhaps a reference to his tough police tactics.
Corruption, however, implies a personal power or profit motive. Tuohy provides
no evidence or argument of any such motive or activity on Petrosino's part. On
the contrary, the only evidence is that Petrosino was a good, honest Cop.
Petrosino is a role model for young and old alike, oppressed immigrants, and
even whining minority gangsters and their sympathizers, such as Sharpton,
Obama, Jackson, and Holder.
I have several books from The Mob Files
Series and I have really enjoyed reading them. The Joe Petrosino story is
definitely one worth reading. He had an interesting life working against the
mafia. I enjoyed seeing the pictures in the book and they helped bring the
story to life.
What literature makes of the food we eat
Catherine Conroy, The Irish Times
“When all the others were away at Mass I was
all hers as we peeled potatoes . . . ”
You insist that they read this
Seamus Heaney poem at your mother’s funeral. You think of looking out the
window from the kitchen sink, your hands scooping up the mulch of the peelings,
the ends of your sleeves wet with grey water.
No more of that. But you and your
little sister still go home at Christmas to peel spud after spud like this at
the kitchen table. You drink lots of wine and have happy calluses on your
hands.
In a friend’s house on Christmas
Eve, there are so many of them to feed, the spuds are peeled in the bath. When
the sack is emptied into the tub, the noise is like a roll of thunder.
Food is life. The madeleine
memories it brings are involuntary, deep in your bones.
People talk too much about the
writing of old white men, but if you could never taste again, it is Hemingway
who could tell you about food. In A Moveable Feast, his ode to appetite, he
writes, “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and . . .
drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste
of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
Dinner parties
In Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms,
a wine shop in the early morning is “swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and
the wet circles left by wine glasses”.
That is also a kitchen the
morning after a dinner party, red wine and cigarettes, crumpled up napkins with
greasy spots of stale cream.
Your friend has had a baby boy.
You come over for a glass of wine. He tells you he imagines a dinner party in
the near future when his boy is a little older. He will come into the room in
his pyjamas before he goes to bed. My friend will say, “ ‘Okay, you can have a
bit of dessert and then say good night to Catherine and off with you now, down
to your room.’ That’s who we are now,” he says, delighted with his summation.
All grown-up things contained in
a moment like that. Like the line from James Salter’sLight Years, “Life is
weather. Life is meals”.
Sandwiches
Holden Caulfield’s simple Swiss
cheese sandwiches in Catcher in the Rye and Leopold Bloom’s “stripes of
sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety
savour of green cheese”, tell us things about the character.
You remember sandwiches you made
with great disinterest. You are eight and you come in from playing down the
field. You don’t have time to talk. You slather a piece of white bread with jam
and fold it over. You stick your head under the tap for a quick drink and then
you run off. Nothing will ever be as important again as that hut and that game.
Your cousin says, “It’s
ridiculous isn’t it? Our idyllic childhood. We actually brought flasks down
fields, we ate sandwiches sitting on bales of hay.”
Food is the other character: Mrs
Dalloway’s dinner party, Ms Havisham’s cobwebbed wedding cake, Bridget Jones’s
guilty calories.
Puddings
In Ulysses, the Queen of Puddings
is Gerty. Her “Queen Ann’s pudding of delightful creaminess had won golden
opinions from all . . . though she didn’t like the eating part when there were
many people that made her shy and often she wondered why you couldn’t eat something
poetical like violets or roses . . .”
The pudding you remember most is
one you didn’t eat. You are 10. You go around the houses with your dad when he
does meals on wheels. He lets you hold the warm containers and you think the
jam sponge and custard looks delicious, if meagre, in its polystyrene tub. You
want to steal it for yourself.
You sometimes stand at a front
door for a long time, waiting. Your dad cups his hands to peer in the windows.
How frequent the darkness inside of those houses, the heavy curtains drawn.
Then the relief when the front door finally opens and a gentle conversation can
begin.
Memory is only our take on things
and a story changes each time you circle it. But the food is fact: colour,
texture, taste. The food is undeniable.
Eating alone
Yes, your friends are right. You
might have travelled around Italy alone because of Eat Pray, Love, full of the
intent of finding that one perfect pizza she buys in Naples.
Maybe you went because of the
figs in Under the Tuscan Sun, or the fiascos of chianti inA Farewell to Arms or
the cannoli of the Ferrante novels. The Italian bookshop owners know. They
stack these books together. You meet a lot of people in Italy sitting quietly
alone, eating something simple and delicious. The meal itself provides the
company.
When you finally find the famous
pizzeria late at night, it is on a dangerous street and it is closed for
August. You stand beside some disappointed Japanese people who take photos of
the closed shutters. You eat at a place across the road that is supposed to be
just as good.
Being alone, you worry about how
fine you are with being alone. Eating dinner on a quiet terrace in Lipari,
looking out at the port, you do that thing where you are being so consciously
present that you are almost ruining it for yourself. “Isn’t this truly
beautiful?” you say. “Remember this for the next bad time. How lucky you are.”
The sort of thinking that feels
like it’s at one remove from actual appreciation and enjoyment.
You are tanned from the day, in a
new easy dress that you found on a sale rail in the supermarket. You eat
something simple, a tomato salad; the way the tomatoes are delicious in Italy,
the way in Italy you believe in their classification as a fruit more truly; the
sweetness, the juice. People are always on the look out for old-fashioned eggs,
tomatoes, potatoes – the side of the road foods that don’t taste like they used
to.
People are looking at you sitting
alone in a restaurant on holidays because they’ve been staring into each
other’s faces for days now and they need some fresh material outside
themselves.
But then some other Shirley
Valentines arrive into the restaurant, and even a man-Shirley with his laptop.
You suddenly feel just as much within the company of these other souls than if
you’d all been seated together.
Food and grief
In Anne Enright’s The Green Road,
Constance spends pages upon pages in a supermarket doing the Christmas shop.
She’s at the till and back she goes again for the sausages and then some
Brussels sprouts. Halfway down the ramp of the carpark and back she goes again
for someone else’s Christmas wants.
You read this and are
unexpectedly moved at all the stubborn effort. It makes you think of the day a
friend cried into the broccoli in a vegetable shop the first Christmas after
her mother died, fiddling with the opening of the little plastic bag.
Every Christmas since, I ask her,
“How are you this year? Have you cried into the broccoli?”
This is Charles Bowden writing in
his essay, The Bone Garden of Desire, about a defiant appetite in the face of
grief. “I would believe in the words of solace if they included fresh polenta
with a thickened brown sauce with shiitake and porcini mushrooms . . .” He
pleads with us to always go to the garden and the kitchen. There is affirmation
of life in both.
You are sitting with a
heartbroken friend on a hospital bed on a hot day. A fan whirrs; you are both
eating Cornettos. The ice cream dribbles down your fingers.
What better way to show the
animal of the body, how the ordinary continues, than to force your characters
to return to the dinner table.
Homer writes, “There’s no part of
man more like a dog than brazen belly, crying to be remembered.”
Heartburn is Nora Ephron’s roman
à clef about a pregnant woman who leaves her cheating husband. The tale is
interwoven with standard recipes for well-loved dishes, some semblance of
certainty when there suddenly is none. The recipes affirm a belief in method
and order. They provide a slow-stirring comfort. They require a deliberateness
of thought.
Knowing she was sick, Ephron’s
last book, I Remember Nothing ends with a list of the things she will miss.
One-third relate to food and eating.
• Waffles
• The
concept of waffles
• Bacon
• Butter
• Dinner
at home just the two of us
• Dinner
with friends
• Dinner
with friends in cities where none of us lives
• Thanksgiving
dinner
• One
for the table
• Pie
Robots To Eat All The Jobs?
by Kim-Mai Cutler (@kimmaicutler)
In the face of rising U.S. income
inequality and concerns about job loss to automation, some of Silicon Valley’s
best-known names including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman havespoken up in favor of
a universal basic income that would give people a baseline standard of living
in an economy that may not be able to produce enough decently compensated work
for everyone.
A mix of technologists, policy
wonks and creatives are trying to kickstart a bigger movement around that idea
this coming weekend with a Basic Income Createathon.
“Everyone in the country having
jobs is not going to make sense anymore because we’re going to have computers
and robots doing what we’re doing most of what we’re doing today,” said Jim
Pugh, who got a Ph.D in distributed robotics before he worked on the original
2008 Obama campaign. “If you accept that as a premise, what we need to do as a
society is not made up of small changes. It’s actually a fairly radical change
and basic income seems to be an elegant solution for doing that.”
A basic income is a kind of
Social Security system where all citizens or residents get an unconditional
amount of money on top of whatever their wages are from elsewhere. It assumes
that, above this minimum level of income, people will still be motivated to
work for more money or on more meaningful projects.
The Createathon is very
deliberately not called a “hackathon,” because Pugh wants to make non-technical
folks feel welcome into the fold.
“We are strongly encouraging
participating from writers, artists, musicians, videographers and people who
might not normally gravitate toward hackathons,” he said. “If your focus is
building an app, our hope is that we’ll have some technology projects. But we
also hope that people will be working on long-form content. People will be
making videos, writing songs, or painting paintings. There can be all sorts of
different ways of expressing interest and support for the idea.”
There are some early experiments
with cities in the European Union, like in Utrecht, which is starting to give
“no strings attached” money to some of its residents. Then there have been
studies on unconditional cash transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa through programs
like GiveDirectly, which Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari
Tuna recently backed with $25 million after some early tests. Pugh also pointed
to an American example with the Alaska Permanent Fund, which was established in
1976 to re-distribute some of the state’s oil revenue to Alaskans in the form
of dividends.
Pugh said the point of the
Createathon is to build energy for a broader political movement that will
advocate for universal basic income and push for small pilots to test the idea
out in the United States.
To be fair, not everyone
prominent in the tech industry agrees with the premise that there won’t be
enough jobs for everyone. Marc Andreessen regularly ridicules this idea on
Twitter. But there are still a number of influential folks who are concerned
about the 3.5 million truck driving jobs that may be lost to self-driving
vehicles, or the millions of factory jobs that might be lost to improved
robotics.
Nor does everyone believe that a
basic income is the right solution to the problem. MIT professor Andrew McAfee,
who raised many concerns about increasing automation in his book, “The Second
Machine Age,” favors an expansion of the earned income tax credit over a
universal basic income. The earned income tax credit functions like a negative
income tax; it’s still tied to whether you work or not. That’s because McAfee
still wants a system that incentivizes people to do something, regardless of
whatever it is. He argues that people exhibit depression or worse levels of
health without some kind of bigger purpose.
Then, of course, institutionally
speaking, it’s very hard to remove an entitlement once it is offered. In other
countries where there is a clientelistic form of politics with huge swaths of
the labor force that are dependent on public sector income, it’s very
politically difficult to correct spending and entitlements if broader economic
circumstances change.
A movement for a universal basic
income would represent a fundamental shift in the way Silicon Valley, and
perhaps the U.S., thinks about the value of work and unconditional cash grants.
More than thirty years ago, former Californian governor Ronald Reagan was
elected U.S. president on campaign speeches that ridiculed mothers and women
who abused the welfare system. Under Clinton Administration, welfare reform was
centered on getting clientele off the rolls.
Today the thinking is quite
different.
Do people need to work for the sake
of work, especially if jobs with livable wages are not widely available?
“One of the big hurdles we face
is that there’s such an ingrained belief in people that they should work,” Pugh
said. “The idea of getting money unconditionally is completely counter to a lot
of people’s world views.”
Absolve \ub-ZAHLV\ 1: to set free from an obligation or the consequences of guilt, to remit (a sin) by absolution. Absolve was adopted into Middle English in the 15th century from the Latin verb absolvere, formed by combining the prefix ab- ("from, away, off") with solvere, meaning "to loosen." (Absolvealso once had additional senses of "to finish or accomplish" and "to resolve or explain," but these are now obsolete.) Solvereis also the ancestor of the English words solve, dissolve, resolve, solvent, and solution.
Umami
\oo-MAH-mee\ noun: A taste sensation that is meaty or savory and is produced by
several amino acids and nucleotides (such as glutamate and aspartate) Japanese
scientist Kikunae Ikeda is credited with identifying as a distinct taste the
savory flavor of the amino acid glutamic acid, which he first noticed in soup
stocks made with seaweed. This fifth basic taste—alongside sweet, sour, salty, and
bitter—was named umami, meaning "savoriness" in Japanese. Umami can
be experienced in foods such as mushrooms, anchovies, and mature cheeses, as
well as in foods enhanced with monosodium glutamate, or MSG, a sodium salt
derived from glutamic acid.
Affectious: (uh-FEK-shuhs)
adjective: Affectionate or cordial. Via French, from Latin afficere (to affect
or influence).
THE BEAT POETS
Beat poetry evolved during the 1940s in both New York City and on the west coast, although San Francisco became the heart of the movement in the early 1950s. The end of World War II left poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso questioning mainstream politics and culture. A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets | Academy of American Poets https://www.poets.org/poetsorg
Beat poet Michael McClure tries
new style at 83
Photo Nathaniel Y. Downes, The Chronicle
By Sam Whiting
In the 60 years since the famed
Six Gallery reading that introduced the Beat poets, Michael McClure has read
his words in any number of forms and settings.
But he’d never done anything
close to what he was doing Saturday, Nov. 7, which was to walk around a room
reading his words as they hung on a wall. McClure, 83, had put poetry to 24
abstract horse monoprints by his wife, Amy Evans McClure, 60. The words and the
image merge on the same print. But McClure’s words on paper don’t have the
impact of McClure’s words on paper as read aloud by McClure.
“Ripple. Grullo. Thicket,” he
reads from one painting in a voice that is as commanding as Richard Burton
reading Shakespeare. “Houyhnhnm,” he neighs, as proof that he is now also
fluent in the horse dialect.
“You have to understand that Michael is the
most amazing trickster of a man,” says Jack Foley, who came from Oakland down
to Palo Alto for the event. “He’s so connected to words and to language that he
can pull off something like this and make it quite beautiful.”
The show, titled “Sculpture &
Monotypes by Amy Evans McClure, Words by Michael McClure,” is at Smith Andersen
Editions through Nov. 25, but McClure was only there to open the show on
Saturday. He has no other Bay Area readings scheduled, and if this turns out to
be his last, it will have been the right setting. Smith Andersen is in a
converted auto garage, and so was his first public reading.
That was on Oct. 7, 1955. McClure
was 22 and fresh out of San Francisco State, living at Scott and Haight streets
and coming over the hill to Six Gallery, which had sculptures hanging from the
rafters and a plank stage on the floor, on Fillmore at Greenwich.
McClure had met Allen Ginsberg at
a party, where they bonded over mutual admiration for William Blake. McClure
and Ginsberg used to meet for coffee in North Beach. “He’d read me Jack
Kerouac’s letters, which were fascinating to me.”
Beats’ beginning
During one of these meetings,
McClure told Ginsberg he’d been asked to organize a poetry reading at Six
Gallery but he didn’t have the time, because his then-wife was expecting.
“Allen said, ‘Do you want me to
put together the reading?’ and I said, ‘Absolutely, man, that would be good.’”
And so began an event that was
neither recorded nor filmed but is generally considered to be the moment that
sparked the Beat Generation. On the bill that Friday night were Ginsberg,
McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, with Kenneth Rexroth
as emcee. A historic plaque marking the spot notes that Kerouac was also on the
bill, but he did not read. What Kerouac did was drink from a jug of garage wine
and free-form his own poetry by yelling out words like “Dig it” and “Go, go,”
during the readings.
McClure read “For the Death of
100 Whales,” which presaged the Greenpeace Save the Whales movement by about 20
years, but that was all but forgotten in the wake of “Howl,” which Ginsberg
introduced that night.
“As we spoke, we realized from
the results that we were speaking for the people,” McClure says. “We were
saying what they needed and wanted to hear, and that encouraged us. We drew a
line in the sand and decided not to back off that line.”
Now they are all dead and gone
except for Snyder, who is a practicing Buddhist in the Sierra foothills, and
McClure, who is a practicing Buddhist in the Oakland hills. He likes to start
his day with meditation and a hike in the forest behind his house, which is
what he was doing under the redwoods last March when he took a step on slick
footing and his legs went out from under him.
“I was temporarily suspended in
the air like Wile E. Coyote and then dropped.”
Hip surgery, rehab
He cracked a bone and had to have
hip surgery. He spent three days in the hospital and 10 in a rehab facility,
and nine months later, the early morning hours he once devoted to meditation
are devoted to working out in a gym to get his leg back under him.
He has been walking with a cane,
and the surgery left him with a tremor that makes it impossible for him to read
his own handwriting.
But he’s not complaining. “Until
I was 27, I thought I was going to die before I was 28,” he says. But he’s now
been married for 29 years and decided the time was right for his first-ever
collaboration with Evans McClure, an accomplished artist in her own right.
For 15 years, Evans McClure has
been making sculptures of horses, which she can hear from her studio window,
facing Butters Canyon. Her horses can be seen outside the Orinda Public Library
and inside the McClure home. One such horse, an Appaloosa, sits in the living
room, and the three of them — McClure, McClure Evans and the horse head — were
sitting together when McClure had a revelation.
“I said I love the spots that are
painted on there because they remind me of gestural art, like Pollock or
Clyfford Still,” he recalls while sitting outside before his reading. “Maybe we
could do a series of paintings of spots like you paint on the horses.”
Paula Kirkeby, who owns Smith
Andersen and represented the late Bruce Conner, invited the McClures to do a
joint print project, and suddenly they had their theme.
“We were totally serious about
it,” he says, “and devoted to the idea.”
Evans McClure put the spots and
patterns of an Appaloosa onto paper, in ink and water color. To fix them with
the right words, McClure got a series of note cards and on each card wrote two
words.
“I wanted to put the
consciousness and the perceptions of a wild horse, not a domesticated horse,
into a deck of cards that I could flip through,” he says.
The words and images were
combined in the print shop at Smith Andersen. As each of 24 unique images
rolled off the press, McClure went through the cards to find the words to go
with it. It was performance art with no one there to witness it.
Once the prints had their words,
the McClures decided to do it again in reverse order, this time applying a
print to each of the cards. This forms a series called “Appaloosa Deck.” There
are four decks of 32 cards.
The prints and the cards moved
from the shop to the gallery on the other side of a wall. Also in the show are
Evans McClure’s horse sculptures, greeting people as they walk in the door.
As the crowd built on Saturday,
McClure rested in a side room. Then he came out, without the aid of his cane,
and leaned against a display case.
“Am I clear?” he asked at the
start, warming up his voice. He introduced the artwork, then left the safety of
the display case and walked around the room, looking at each of the 24 prints
and reading the words behind glass.
It was all over too soon. Nobody
wanted to stop hearing his voice applied to his verse. The audience stood there
awaiting a poetry encore. McClure thought he had left his anthology, “Of Indigo
and Saffron,” at home, but a copy magically turned up.
He read several haikus, and a
poem that fit the theme of the “Appaloosa Deck.” “Horse heads swirling in
rainbows,” it began.
The audience still wanted more,
so he reached for a second book, “Ghost Tantras,” just reprinted by City Lights
in a 50th-anniversary edition. His hands were so shaky they could barely turn
the page, but they found their way to Page 39.
“This poem comes from 1962,” he
announced:
“MARILYN MONROE, TODAY THOU HAS
PASSED
THE DARK BARRIER
— diving in a swirl of golden
hair.
I hope you have entered a sacred
paradise for full
warm bodies, full lips, full
hips, and laughing eyes!”
That was just the first stanza,
and the audience was entranced.
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco
Chronicle staff writer. E-mail:swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@samwhitingsf
Sculpture & Monotypes by Amy
Evans McClure, Words by Michael McClure:Through Nov. 25. Smith Andersen
Editions, 440 Pepper Ave, Palo Alto.www.smithandersen.com
Beat Poets Are Topic of 1965 Doc
The world’s leading Beat poets
gathered under one roof one day in 1965, at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The
short film that documented this historic event will screen at Emerson College
on Tuesday, November 10, as part of the Bright Lights Film Series.
Wholly Communion (1965), directed
by Peter Whitehead, will be screened in 35mm with a live poetry reading by
Emerson alumnus Janaka Stucky ’00. The event starts at 7:00 pm.
This 50th anniversary screening
and poetry reading commemorate “The International Poetry Incarnation,” which
was known as Great Britain’s first full-scale “happening.” The evening of June
11, 1965, was remembered for its “near-hallucinatory” revelry and came to be
seen as one of the cultural high points of the 1960s.
Stucky participated in the Poetry
Reincarnation 50th anniversary event in London this past spring.
THE ART OF PULP
DON'T YOU JUST LOVE POP ART?
ALBUM ART
HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!
Monet
Tower in Orange and Green Paul Klee 1922
THE ART OF WAR...............................
MISH MOSH..........................................
Mish Mash: noun \ˈmish-ËŒmash, -ËŒmäsh\ A : hodgepodge, jumble “The painting was just a mishmash of colors and abstract shapes as far as we could tell”. Origin Middle English & Yiddish; Middle English mysse masche, perhaps reduplication of mash mash; Yiddish mish-mash, perhaps reduplication of mishn to mix. First Known Use: 15th century
Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s blood-stained uniform, 1914.
ALLEGED MOBSTER OF THE DAY
Giancana, Sam Mob leader. As a teenager, Sam “Momo”
Giancana was a member of the notorious 42 gang, where he earned his reputation
as an outstanding gets away driver or wheelman His first arrest came in
September 1925, for grand theft auto. Before his twentieth birthday he was
picked up three more times. Once for suspicion of murdering a witness to a
robbery case and the other for the killing of Octavius Granady a black man
running for office in the heavily Italian 20th ward. On September 17, 1926,
Giancana was indicted for murder. He was the teenage wheelman in an incident
with other 42’s gang members when they robbed a middle aged barber named
William Girard. When Girard, resisted they shot and killed him. A cab driver
identified Giancana, who was arrested. The police worked him over for a few
days, but he wouldn’t squeal and did his time. In November of 1928 Giancana was
arrested for attempted burglary of a clothing store. He pleads guilty and was
sentenced to one to five at Statesville prison. He was released on Christmas
Eve, 1932, and he went to work for Paul Ricca. In May of 1939, Sam was arrested
again, and sentenced to four years in federal prison Leavenworth. The charge
was for moonshining. He had been caught in a barn in Elgin, Illinois, with 8800
gallons of mash 1000 gallons of alcohol and 1000 gallons of spirits. Giancana was transferred from Leavenworth to
Terre Haute Indiana where he tested 74 on verbal intelligence and 93 on
non-verbal. He registered for the draft, but was appointed F-4 “He is a constitutional psychopath with an
inadequate personality manifested by strong anti -social tendencies” the report
read. In 1942, gangster Murray Humphreys hired members of the 42 gang, which
still included Giancana, as well as Marshal Caifano, Teets Battaglia and
others, to guard the bosses while Roger Touhy gang was on the run from prison.
In
1943, Giancana kidnapped Jake Guzak and held him in an empty building and gave
him a choice; turn over a gift of $250,000.00 in exchange for support and
acceptance from the outfit. Otherwise they would kill him. Guzak accepted the offer for the money,
vowed his support and was driven to West Roosevelt Road and released.
In
about 1943, Giancana grew close to “Little New York” Campagna, Tony Accardo and
Joe Fusco. When it looked like Accardo would go to jail on a tax charge,
Campagna told him “Your next in line”[1] In June of 1953, Giancana may have
ordered the kidnap murder of politician Clem Graver who refused to pay his
kidnappers. They never found his
body. By 1954, Sam Giancana was under
boss to Accardo but, as his daughter wrote “I had a feeling at times that dad
was like a peon to them, yet it was during these years that they both gave Sam
more and more responsibility “[2]
She
was right of course. Paul Ricca acted as though he were found of Giancana but
he detested him according to sources, and, in
the end, Accardo probably ordered his death.
In
December 1959 Tony Accardo had a lot on his mind, the Internal Revenue was all
over him and Paul Ricca was in constant trouble with the Immigration and
Naturalization Service. After the raid
on Appalchin, the FBI snapped to life and now Chicago was crawling with agents
who were suddenly investigating every aspect of the mobs business. It was a
dangerous time to be the boss, just as it had been back in 1933 when Ricca
slyly set up Frank Nitti as the outfit’s leader so that Ricca could operate
unnoticed behind the scenes. By 1959, Ricca had learned that the federal
government’s resources were limited when it came to combating organized crime.
If federal prosecutors couldn’t nail the biggest, the most powerful bosses,
they simply went for the largest and flashiest mark
And
left the others alone. So in 1959, Ricca
and Accardo decided to make Sam Giancana the government’s newest target, they
promoted him to boss and told the world that they were retired. An FBI
informant told the Bureau in 1959 that Giancana wasn’t really the boss and that
the only person of any importance in the Mafia and the national syndicate who
believed that Giancana was the boss was Giancana himself and a few yes men who
worked under him. Accardo called his top
men to a meeting at Meo’s restaurant. (Not the Tam-O’Shanter as has been
reported in the past) [3]. However Meo’s was too staid for
Giancana’s taste. His favorite hangout was the Pink Clock bar where he would
meet his mistress for whom he kept and apartment. However, Giancana would later
put the Meo brothers in charge of the Villa Venice, a rundown place he
purchased on Milwaukee Avenue in rural Wheeling. Giancana poured a small
fortune into the place, redecorated it and opened a casino in the back.
He
could afford it. By 1959, Giancana’s personnel take from Las Vegas was
estimated to be $300,000.00 a month
After a quick dinner in Meo’s back, Accardo, a man of few words under
the bets of occasions, rose to his feet and announced that he was stepping down
as the boss and that Sam Giancana would take his place. “This is Sam” Accardo
mumbled “He’s a friend of mine” It was, as Ovid Damaris pointed out “a
coronation ceremony was deceptively simple: Accardo merely placed a hand on
Giancana’s shoulder and said, “I want you to meet my friend, Sam Giancana” [4] Giancana was 49 when he took over the
Chicago Outfit. A baby by Mafia standards. Moe Dalitz and Murray Humphreys, who
had the utmost respect for Tony Accardo, could never understand why Accardo
would sanction the rise of a dolt like Sam Giancana to head up the Chicago
family. Like most people in the
underworld they felt that Sam Battaglia should have been named Boss instead of
Giancana because Battaglia was calmer and more level headed, even though he
lacked Giancana’s intelligence. Many
soldiers in the outfit and more than a few connected guys were outraged that
Giancana got the job because they knew how hyper and hot-tempered he was. Most
considered him a danger to himself and to them.
Giancana
rise in the outfit was helped by the aging and increased wealth of the mob
elders. By 1959, he had come to power. By then he had been arrested at least 63
times and had served time for auto theft, burglary and moonshining. He had
killed an estimated 200 men and had fourteen different aliases, however his favorites
would remain Sam Flood and Mr. Gold. He could be charming and likable. He was
shy around those he didn’t know, more prone to listen then to talk. He could also be childishly vain, wearing
expensive toupees that cost him $1,000. His clothes were monogrammed and he had
a solid gold key chain and diamond chips on his wristwatch. He owned a solid
gold swizzle stick. He smoked foot long cigars and drove loud colored
Cadillac’s, wore sharkskin suites, alligator shoes and silk shirts. On his
right hand he wore a massive star sapphire pinky ring, a gift from Frank
Sinatra. Like Frank Nitti, Giancana was always trying to better himself. He was
remarkably well read, by mob standards. He studied antiques, particularly
bisque and porcelain figurines and became an avid collector. He sent his girls
to the most expensive and best catholic finishing schools in the Midwest.
When
served a dish that was expensive he would say “I wonder what the poor are
eating tonight” [5] However, he still ate in his old
neighborhood at the Vernon Park Inn at Vernon Park and Aberdeen, where the bill
seldom came to over $3.00 for an enormous meal. Sam Tufano called Papa O’Zeke a
fat robust owned the place little man who had once cooked for Al Capone. He
could encourage friends and family, he was generous. He could be caring and
find time to hear out any solders or friend or family member’s problem. After
his wife Angeline died in 1954, he was always on the make for a women and all
he asked was that she have a nice figure and a pretty face, nothing more
nothing less. He had a soundproofed cellar conference room in his Oak Park home
at 1147 Wenonah Avenue. To look at Sam
Giancana in 1957 was to see the very embodiment of a gangster, and every one
took notice including the federal government, which was exactly the plan, that
Accardo and Ricca had in mind.
Acting
as Giancana’s guide to running the mob, was Tony Accardo, who would never step
completely down from his spot as boss of the mob. Tony Accardo was a peasant
but a reserved man and a thinker. Giancana was a hyper aggressive personality.
Another difference between Sam Giancana and Accardo and Ricca, aside from
Accardo and Ricca’s superior intelligence, was that Accardo and Ricca knew how
to stick to business. Even Frank Nitti
knew how to stick to business. Giancana
didn’t and that was how he got involved with one of the stupidest affairs the
Chicago group had ever become entangled in, the CIA plot to kill Castro. Like
Accardo, Giancana lost money in Cuba, not the millions that Accardo lost, but
still it was more than he could afford to lose.
Behind
Accardo was, Paul Ricca who would act, as advisor to Giancana even though he
disliked him. Like Accardo, Ricca would remain a power behind the throne.
As
his under boss, Giancana chose Frankie Strong. Another childhood friend, Butch
Blasi, would be bodyguard, appointment secretary, driver and confidant. Blasi
was also a collector who delivered cash to Accardo, Ricca and Giancana
Giancana’s
loud style and fascination with Hollywood brought around the federal government
and in October of 1962, while Sam was out of town Accardo and Ricca met with
the political bosses who said that they “had never seen things so bad before” [6]
On
May 14, 1965, Giancana was called in before a federal grand jury in Chicago and
questioned for three days about the structure of the national commission in an
effort by the Organized crime unit “to break the inner circle of the Chicago
mafia”
In
an effort to keep outsiders from knowing who may or may not have talked the DOJ
flooded the field of potential informants by calling in everybody and anybody
related to organized crime including Charlie English Fifi Buccieri Gussy Alex
John D’Arco Pat Marcy Ben Jacobean of the first ward Anthony Tisci and Frank
Annunzio with whom Tisci was now the aid for as well. On June 1 1965 Giancana
was brought before Judge William S. Campbell
“Do
you continue to refuse?” Campbell asked.
“Yes
Sir” [7]
Giancana was ordered jailed until he talked or until the grand jury was
dismissed telling Giancana “You have the key to your own cell”
A
year passed before he was released the Justice Department had him lined up to
appear at two and half years’ worth of grand jury hearings, however Giancana
talked to the CIA and threatened to go public with the plots to kill Castro and
the Justice department backed off. According to Giancana, after he was released
from jail, Accardo had all but ordered him out of Chicago. He was humiliated
and he swore he would never forget the treatment he had suffered at Accardo’s
hand. The whole outfit was treating him “like a punk”[8]
and he resented it. He had earned them, Ricca and Accardo and other, millions,
maybe hundreds of millions, and now he was a Nobody. In fact, an FBI informant
reported that it was widely agreed “Nobody is happy with Sam’s release and that
he has to go or he’ll drag us all down the drain with him” [9] On November 16 1966 another informant
reported that “the bosses have placed a hit out on Giancana” On January 19,
1967, Giancana, told an informant that he intended to “go to an island and
relax for the rest of my life. I’ll leave everything behind. They can have
everything I got” [10] That statement, and others like it,
were reported back to Ricca and Accardo who feared it was Giancana’s way of
saying that he was going to flip over to the FBI. They also wondered openly why he had not been
subpoenaed since his release. But, by then Giancana had left Chicago for
Mexico. However, before he left, his gambling club, the Villa Venice, exploded
in a fireball for no apparent reason. John D’Arco handled the insurance claim,
through his company Arco insurance.
By
1968, Tony Accardo wanted some of the millions that were pouring in to Sam
Giancana’s gambling operations in Mexico and elsewhere. However Giancana felt
that he had built the empire of gambling cruise ships and several illegal
casinos around the world and the had no intention of splitting his share with
anyone. He did give his bodyguard Richard Cain a fair share because he had
helped to build the operation, but since Accardo had all but thrown him out of
Chicago, Giancana considered himself an independent agent. He was also still
smarting over the fact that when he taken over the black policy in the forties,
that Ricca and Accardo hadn’t supported him with any cost of judge or guns, yet
he was obligated to kick almost all of the money he made back up to them. Even
when he was the boss, he still felt that he wasn’t getting his fair percentage
from the black policy rackets and was smarting because he had to spill the
money with Capos who now ran the territory.
Accardo sent Butch Blassi, who was now his bodyguard and driver, just as
Sam had once been, to tell Giancana that Accardo wanted to have a sit down, but
Giancana told Blassi to tell Accardo “to go to hell” [11]
One
morning in 1972, Giancana awoke around 9:30 in the morning and stepped out into
the walled garden that surrounded his estate in Mexico. It had been a
reasonably good year. He had spent
Christmas in Santa Monica with his new girlfriend and New Years on the beach at
Waikiki. His casinos were earning him millions upon millions of dollars.
Suddenly to men jumped out from behind the large trees and dragged him to the
ground, handcuffed him and threw him into a car marked Immigration that had
been waiting in the front of the house. He was tossed in the back seat and
stripped of his silk pajamas and handed a blue work shirt and a pair of overall
three times his size.
Sam
demanded to see his Mexican lawyer Jorge Castillo, but Castillo was no fool.
When he found out that Mexican federal officials didn’t want any more
protection money from Giancana, he figured the end was near for the Chicago
hood and disappeared for a while. What had happened was that the United States
government had applied pressures to Mexican officials as to why a hood like
Giancana was allowed to remain in their country for eight years on a temporary
resident alien status. The Immigration
car drove to the airport and threw Giancana on the first plane bound north for
America. Thirty minutes later
Momo
Giancana was in San Antonio Texas without a penny to his name wearing a pair of
pants that would have fallen off of him had he let go of his grip. In San
Antonio two FB agents served Giancana with a subpoena and put him on a plane to
Chicago where more agents were waiting with more subpoenas. Among the agents
was Bill Roemer who had berated Giancana at that same spot twelve years before
in 1962. Roemer was shocked at what he saw “he looked like some Italian
immigrant landing at Ellis Island, destitute and frail.” [12]
The
Intelligence Unit for Chicago police hauled him away for questioning in the
Dick Cain murder. He met with the grand jury four times but was evasive
preferring a perjury charge to another contempt citation he told his children
and his in-laws that he would do anything from “rotting away in jail” [13] but kept sending word to Accardo that
he would never talk to the Fed’s but somebody close to Giancana got word to
Accardo that Giancana said he would do anything to keep from rotting in
jail. By that time, the US Senate
Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Idaho’s Frank Church was looking into
the CIA monkeyshines over the past thirty years and wanted to talk to Giancana
about his involvement in the CIA plan to kill Fidel Castro. Johnny Roselli testified first and Sam was
scheduled to go next but in May of 1975, but he fell ill with gallbladder
problems. He flew to Houston for a cholecystectomy and then returned home to
1147 South Wenonah, Oak Park, where he was taken care of by his youngest
daughter Francine.
On
the night he was killed, Sam Giancana took an early nap. Later his daughter
Francine and her husband, Jerry arrived. A few minutes later Butch Blasi and
Chuckie English showed up. Outside a unit for the Chicago Police Intelligence
unit was watching the house from across the street. They had a small party
celebrating Sam’s return to good health.
At about ten the party broke up. Seeing the guests leave, the police car
across the street drove over to up and coming hood Tony Spilotro’s house a few
blocks away and waited for Spilotro to come home. Someone returned and Giancana went to his
finished basement. About a half an hour
after his guests left, Sam cooked the Italian sausage, escarole and cece beans
that Francine had brought to over. A few minutes later Francine came back to
the house at about 10:15 to retrieve her purse. On the way back out to the car,
Francine noticed Butch Blasi returning to the house as well, but thought
nothing of it. Fifteen minutes later, at
about 10:30 Joe DePersio called down the stairs to tell Sam that he was going
to watch the Johnny Carson show on television and then go to bed. Did Sam need
anything?
No,
he replied, he was going to bed himself.
Giancana turned on one of his two favorite movies, both Sinatra films, The
Man with the Golden Arm and the Manchurian candidate. He walked over to the small stove to cook
his cece beans when somebody put the 22 to the back of his head they shot him
in the throat and mouth to show that they thought that he had been talking. The
other bullets were put into his brain, fired as the shooter stood over Sam’s
dead body.
The
killer took Sam’s wallet out of his back pocket; he ruffled through it, left
the credit cards and almost $1,500.00 in place, and then threw the wallet
across the room. The killer was
somebody that Giancana trusted otherwise he never would have been allowed in
the apartment.
Joe
DePersio called down to Sam before he went to sleep for the night. There was no
answer but the lights were on and he could smell the sausage burning on the
stove and walked down stairs to find Giancana.
The
murder weapon was found on the side of Thatcher Road, which led to River
Forrest where Butch Blasi lived. The FBI reconstructed the scene. Based on the
time that Giancana was killed, about 10:35, the killer’s car was headed down
Thatcher Road records showed that a squad car was screaming up the road as
well. The shooter panicked and tossed the murder weapon out the car window.
Butch
Blasi was the popular suspect by everyone except FBI man Bill Roemer who
suspected that although Blasi may have helped to set Giancana up for the
killing, he didn’t actually pull the trigger.
His
own men despised him. So ended the bloody reign that counted at least 79 known
murders. The mob showed its contempt for Sam Giancana by staying away from his
funeral. Of the hundreds of wise guys
that Giancana had gone up with and ruled over, only Butch Blasi and Chuckie
English showed up for his funeral.
Giancana,
the Kennedys, and Sinatra: In September of 1933, Joe Kennedy secured
the representation for Gordon’s Dry Gin, Haig & Haig and Dewers. He set up
his distributorship, Somerset Importers, with the relatively small investment
of $100,000. Within a short time, the franchises were bringing Kennedy
$250,000.00 a year. Kennedy’s southern
representative in the business was Charlie Block who was in a separate
partnership with Miami gambler, Bert Wingy Grober who was also a friend of
Kennedy’s. That connection proved helpful in 1944, when Kennedy was having a
problem breaking his Haig & Haig whisky into the Chicago market. Kennedy
asked Block to put him in contact with Grober who in turn placed Kennedy in to
touch with Tom Cassara, a Miami Beach mobster.
One of Cassara’s business
partners was Chicago gangster Rocco DeStefano. With DeStefano help, Cassara was
able to work a distribution deal for himself with the Chicago Mobs
representative, Joey Fusco. Fusco had
been one of Al Capone’s most reliable bootleggers and had begun his career as
Diamond Joe Esposito right hand man and go between for Esposito and the Genna
brother’s gang during the prohibition. In 1931 the Chicago Crime Commission
briefly named Fusco public enemy number one.
Joe Kennedy knew Fusco already
because he had been a friend with Fusco boss, Diamond Joe Esposito during the
prohibition. Before he was gunned on
Johnny Torrio’s order, Esposito took credit for saving Kennedy’s life, claiming
that Old Joe had come to him for help because the Purple Gang, Detroit’s
vicious criminal organization, had placed a contract on his life for bringing
bootleg rum into their empire without their permission or paying the usual
tribute paid to them. Esposito bragged that
Kennedy begged him to call to ask the Purple gang to call off the contract on
his life. Esposito said he did and supposedly, thereafter Kennedy was in debt
to the Chicago Organization.
The story doesn’t sound like it
has much merit and it although it may be based in some truth; overall, its
facts are very questionable. However, Joe Fusco traveled in the same company
with Murray Humphreys, and Chicago’s Mafia Don’s Paul Ricca and Tony Accardo
and was a minor owner, off the books, in the Sands Casino in Las Vegas with two
other friends of Joe Kennedy’s, Frank Sinatra and Joe Doc Starcher. (1902-1977)
(Starcher was later deported out of the US on Bobby Kennedy’s orders. Starcher
claimed it was Joe Kennedy having his revenge. It’s more likely that fate, the
Justice Department and a snitch, caught up with him)
In the summer of 1946, Tom
Cassara, the small time Miami Beach gambler, stupidly sensed that he could
become Kennedy’s partner if he could force Joe Fusco out of the picture and
distribute Kennedy’s booze in Chicago without a mob tribute, and started
talking tough to Fusco. One night Casara
was called into the Trade Winds Bar and Restaurant on Rush Street. The bars’
owners were two former 42 gang members, Marshal Caifano and Sam “Teets”
Battaglia. Cassara was shot in the head,
and was found outside of the restaurant, laying in the gutter. He recovered,
said he didn’t know how he got shot, and moved to Los Angles where he was known
to be a mob front man for Chicago in its real estate dealings.
According to Johnny Roselli, Tony
Accardo never bought Casara’s story that he was acting on his own. The Big Tuna
figured that Joe Kennedy had duped Casara into trying to bluff the Chicago. On
July 31, 1946, Joe Kennedy suddenly and unexpectedly sold his Whiskey import
business to a firm owned by New Jersey rackets boss Longy Zwillman and his
partner Joe Reinfield for a reported paltry $8,000,000 (Reinfield is still in
business) Kennedy always insisted that he got out of the extremely lucrative
import business because he had high intentions for his son’s political career,
and owning a liqueur business might hurt him in the more conservative states.
However, for decades, Joe Fusco insisted that the Chicago Mob, which, Fusco
said, put up most of the cash for Zwillman and Reinfield to buy Somerset,
forced Kennedy out.
Elmer "Bones" Renner was an old-time
gangster from San Francisco who owned the Cal-Neva lodge and Casino at Crystal
Bay on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
He also owed the IRS $800,000.00 in back taxes, and so, on paper anyway,
ownership of the Cal-Neva passed to another old time hood named Bert
"Wingy" Grober, who also, as a result of his sudden and unexplainable
ownership of a casino, ended up with his own set of tax problems. With the IRS
after him, Grober placed the Cal-Neva up for sale.
On July 13, 1960, the day Kennedy won the
democratic nomination in Los Angeles, it was announced to the newspapers that
Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Hank Sincola, a Sinatra pal and business partner,
and Skinny D'Amato, a convicted white slaver, had applied for permission from
the state of Nevada to take over the lodge.
What didn't make the papers about the deal was that Sam Giancana and the
Chicago outfit owned a secret percentage in the Cal-Neva and that it was
Giancana's influence that persuaded Wingy Grober to sell the place off for the
extremely reasonable price of $250,000.00.
What also didn't make the newspapers about the deal was the FBI
assumption that Sinatra was nothing more than a front in the Cal-Neva for New
York's mob boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno.
Sinatra had been around the Mob for a
while. In 1939, an unknown but talented
crooner named Albert Francis Sinatra left the working, poor, Italian
neighborhoods of Hoboken, New Jersey and signed an exclusive performance agreement
with the popular Tommy Dorsey Band.
Under the terms of the contract, which was written by Dorsey himself,
the band leader took an incredible 33% of all of Sinatra's earnings. Dorsey's
manager, Lenny Vannerson, took an additional 10%, and Sinatra's own agent took
another 10%. In all, 53% of the young man's earnings were gone before taxes and
expenses. Union memberships took another 30%. It was so bad for Sinatra
financially that he was forced to borrow money to buy a suit to make his stage
appearances. Over the next few months,
as his popularity grew, Sinatra spent thousands of dollars on lawyers' fees to
find ways to break the deal, but Dorsey had twice Sinatra's money and a legal
fight would have dragged on for years. The young singer went to the artist
unions for help, but they were useless. Tommy Dorsey was a very powerful man in
the entertainment business. The national depression was still lingering and
thousands of professional musicians were out of work. The unions had struck
profitable deals with Dorsey, and they were not about to jeopardize those
agreements for an unknown kid from New Jersey who might end up tomorrow's has
been.
According to Sinatra, after the
unions let him down, he took his troubles to Jules Stein, the powerful and very
mobbed up Chicagoan who had founded MCA, the world's biggest theatrical agency.
Remarkably, Stein was able to secure Sinatra's release for $60,000, in cash, an
enormous amount of money in the 1940s, and certainly far more than the $500
that Dorsey was taking out of Sinatra's weekly pay for expenses. In later years, Dorsey explained the
agreement with Stein, by saying that from a business standpoint, it was a smart
deal, because he wasn't sure how long the singer would stay on top of the
popularity heap. The way Dorsey saw it; he had been around long enough to know
that in the popular music business, one month is an eternity. Two years was
impossibility. Furthermore, kids, who
were Sinatra's primary fans, were fickle. Loyalties and followings changed
overnight. Dorsey was sure Sinatra was a flash in the pan. Dorsey said he
wasn't happy with Sinatra anyway. Stories about the married Sinatra's eye for
women were starting to show up in small pieces in the press. That sort of thing
didn't happen in the forties. At least not in public. Nor was Dorsey pleased with Sinatra's ongoing
spats with his drummer Buddy Rich. The stage wasn't big enough for both of
their egos, and that's what it was all about, really. Ego. Sinatra had taken
the spotlight away from Tommy Dorsey. As one of the band members remarked,
"It wasn't Tommy's show anymore, it was Frank's." Dorsey thought it
was his band that had made Sinatra the sensation that he was, and once Dorsey
let him go, Sinatra's star would just fade away. That was Dorsey's version of what
happened. Another version, now part of
popular lore, was that for several months Dorsey refused the $60,000 that Jules
Stein had offered him to release Sinatra from his contract, simply because
Dorsey had grown to despise Sinatra and intended to hold on to his contract and
drive the singer's career into the ground, which he could easily do by simply
keeping him off stage and radio. But,
Sinatra's strong willed and politically connected mother went to see New
Jersey's Mafia boss, Quarico Moretti, better known as Willie Moretti, who
controlled large parts of the East Coast entertainment industry. In fact, by
the early 1940s, the national syndicate still held a virtual lock on the
entertainment business unions nationwide and Mobsters were always looking to
expand their control of the industry by managing the careers of promising
entertainers.
Moretti saw that Sinatra's
prospects were good, and agreed to get the young man released from his contract
with Dorsey for a cash payment from Sinatra, plus a percentage of his future
earnings. Working through Jules Stein, Moretti's first offer to Dorsey was
$60,000 cash. When Dorsey turned that down, Moretti, who was considered, in mob
circles, to be a madman, decided to take matters into his own hands, and make
the band leader an offer he couldn't refuse.
One night after a show, Moretti pushed his way into Dorsey's dressing
room, put a gun in the band leader's mouth and told Dorsey to sell Sinatra's
contract. Which he did. For one
dollar. As for the $60,000 paid by MCA
to release Sinatra, supposedly that money, in cash, went directly from Dorsey's
bank account into Moretti's greedy little hands, after Dorsey paid the taxes on
it. Sinatra always denied the story too,
and claimed he barely knew Moretti, who lived only a few doors away from him in
suburban New Jersey. Dorsey spent the
rest of his life denying the gun in the mouth story, but in 1951, right after
Moretti was killed, Dorsey only added credence to the tale, when he told
American Mercury Magazine that he signed the contract releasing Sinatra because
one night, three men paid him in his dressing room, placed Sinatra's release in
front of him and said, "Sign it or else!"
When the National syndicate held
its conclave in Cuba in the 1940s, the Fischetti brothers were there with Frank
Sinatra. (1915-1998) Sinatra later explained that he wasn’t aware that the
Fischetti’s were gangsters and that he had first met them in Chicago during a
benefit at the Chez Paree, a night club owned and managed by the Mob. The
Fischetti’s, Sinatra claimed, were star struck and insisted Sinatra use their
cars and boats while he was in town and from that a friendship developed. In early January of 1947, Rocca Fischetti
called Sinatra and asked him to join him down in Havana. Sinatra agreed and on
January 13 1947 Sinatra requested a gun permit, saying that he sometimes
carried large sums of money and needed the gun for protection. Sinatra flew to
New York and then to Miami where he stayed at Charlie Fischetti mansion.
The night before leaving for Havana, Sinatra
and Joe Fischetti were spotted in the Colonial Inn, the casino in Hallendale
owned by Frank Costello (1891-1973) and New Jersey boss Joe Adonis (Born Joe
Doto 1902-1972) and Meyer Lansky where Sinatra put on a free concert. On
February 11, 1947, Sinatra and the Fischetti’s were photographed walking down
the steps of a Pan American clipper at the Havana airport. They checked into
Meyer Lansky’s Hotel, the Nacional, where 36 suites had been reserved for the
Mob bosses which included Albert Anastasia, (1903-1957) Carlo Gambino, Willie
Moretti, (1894-1951) Vito Genovese, (1897-1969) Frank Costello, Augie Pisano (?
-1959) Joe Fat Man Magliocco, (1898-1963) Joe Bonanno, Tommy Three finger Brown
Lucchese, (circa 1900-1967) Joe Profaci, Joe Adonis Tony Accardo, Sam Giancana,
(1908-1975) Carlo Marcello, (1910-1993) Dandy Phil Kastel, Santo Trafficante
and Meyer Lansky and Jospeh Doc Stacher who now controlled Lansky Juke boxes
and slot machines in Jersey City.
Sinatra wasn’t in the mob
meeting, in Havana, but he was in the hotel. The singer had arrived in Havana,
by plane, with the Fischetti brothers.
Another story that made the rounds, then and now and later portrayed in
the film, The Godfather, was that Rocco Fischetti had several travel bags
stuffed with two million dollars, the proceeds from narcotics sales that was
owed to Lucky Luciano. (1897-1962)
Terrified that he would be stopped and
searched as he left the United States, Fischetti had brought Sinatra along to
carry the bags into Cuba, were tailing him. Traditionally, star struck customs
agents didn’t check celebrity’s baggage.
Actually, a writer named Lee Mortimer (Born in Chicago as Mortimer
Lieberman in 1906) spread the money in the suit case story. Mortimer disliked
Sinatra intensely and at one time the dispute brought the two men to blows. The
FBI added to Mortimer’s story. Sinatra denied the story saying “if you can show
me how to get two million dollars into a briefcase, I’ll give you the two
million dollars”
The fact is the syndicate didn’t
need Frank Sinatra to lug around its dope proceeds for them. They had worked
out a transportation system years ago thanks to the genius of Meyer Lansky. If
they had to lug it across the country, as Sam Giancana said later “Sinatra is
the last guy you would use for that. He would draw attention. When you
transport money you always use a woman with a child or a grandmotherly type.
Not movie stars” As for Giancana's
interest in the money-losing casino, he was probably only in the deal to keep
next to Sinatra, who was trying, desperately, to keep next to Kennedy, which
everybody in the Chicago outfit wanted.
Before the deal was signed, Dean Martin saw the mob's interests in the
casino and pulled out of the deal. Sinatra was convinced that the Cal-Neva, a
seasonal place, could be turned around, that it could produce a hefty profit,
even with the mob connected pit bosses stealing the place blind, and he told
Giancana that with the right investment the place could become a year-round
operation. To draw attention to the place, on opening night, Sinatra's
personality guests included Marilyn Monroe, Joe Kennedy, and his son John. Also
there that weekend was Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. Uninvited and hiding up
in the hills around the casino lodge, was Hoover's FBI. What the agents couldn't see is what went on
inside the Cal-Neva secluded bungalows after the opening night party had ended.
Sam Giancana reportedly told his brother that he had been present at a Kennedy
brother’s slumber party that night at the Cal-Neva Casino. "The men,"
he said, "had sex with prostitutes -- sometimes two or more at a time --
in bathtubs, hallways, closets, on floors, almost everywhere but the bed."
In 1961 a Chicago hood named
Joseph "Crackers" Mendino died of a heart attack. Over the years, he
had worked under everyone from Torrio to Giancana in the juke box, pinball and
gambling end of the business. Tony Accardo was one of his pallbearers, and
anybody who was anyone in the Chicago outfit was there for the burial, probably
the last big-time mob funeral since the days of Al Capone. At the funeral,
Accardo and Sam Giancana held a meeting and directed Johnny Roselli to plant in
Nevada somebody to watch over Frank Sinatra because the boys had decided that
Sinatra was much too enamored with the Kennedy’s and wasn't thinking straight
anymore. When Roselli returned to the West Coast he called a hood named Lewis
McWille, whom he had first met back in 1938, when Roselli did a short stint as
the Chicago representative to the Sans Souci Casino in Havana.
McWillie had worked in Cuba for
years, mostly for New York racketeer Meyer Lansky. McWillie was never clear to
anyone on exactly what it was he did for Lansky, telling the Warren Commission
only that he was a "key man" at Lansky's Tropicana Casino in Cuba.
When Castro booted Lansky out of Cuba, he brought McWillie with him and placed
him inside of his Las Vegas Casino, the Tropicana in Las Vegas. Otherwise,
there was very little known about McWillie, who was also used the obvious alias
of Lewis N. Martin. It is known that he had deep contacts within the New York
and Chicago mobs, and although never a member of any one specific outfit, the
FBI kept him under surveillance and considered him to be a top mob hitman and
enforcer for hire.
Roselli told McWillie that Chicago wanted him
out at Sinatra's Cal-Neva lodge to keep an eye on their investment in the
place, and to watch over Sinatra and report his activities back to
Roselli. McWillie did as he was told,
and created a job for himself at Sinatra's casino, working under the title of
"pit boss," but McWillie, a trained card sharp, was no mere pit boss
as he made himself out to be. Instead, he was a very rich, seasoned, major
gambler who traveled in the highest circles of organized crime, always driven
around in a sleek, new limousine and seldom went anywhere without a bodyguard.
Whenever he worked in a mobbed up casino, it was always as a high level
executive, several times removed from a lowly blackjack dealer on the floor
that he purported to be.
At about that same time, McWillie
was in frequent contact with Jack Ruby, the man who silenced Lee Harvey Oswald
forever. In fact, one of the last persons Ruby spoke to before he leaped on to
history's stage was Lewis McWillie. The little that is known about their odd
relationship is that, according to what McWillie told the Warren Commission, he
and Ruby had known each other from their childhood days in Chicago, and
McWillie was Ruby's host for an eight-day vacation in Cuba in August of 1959.
That same year, the Dallas Police department's Office of Intelligence listed
Jack Ruby and "Chicago-Las Vegas hood Lewis McWillie" as being among
those connected with mob run gambling in Dallas.
Gray haired and stylish, McWillie
impressed the easily impressible Ruby, who admired McWillie and called him
"a very high (class) type person" who reminded Ruby of "Like a
banker or a man who understood and enjoyed the finer things in this life, which
we are given." Yet, after Ruby
gunned down Oswald, the FBI asked him to draw up a list entitled "people
who may dislike me" and at the top of the list was Lewis McWillie. On Sunday,
November 17, 1963, five days before Kennedy was gunned down, Ruby showed up at
the mob owned Stardust Casino in Las Vegas where he invoked McWillie's name to
cash a check and was later seen at the equally mobbed up Thunderbird Casino
with Lewis McWillie. Two days after meeting McWillie in Las Vegas, Ruby was
back in Dallas, flush with enough cash to pay off his back taxes.
The party didn't last long. After
only two years, the Cal-Neva was starting to sour on Sinatra and overall only
added to the miseries he was having in the summer of 1963. On June 30, 1962, an
intoxicated Chuckie English, a Giancana hood, staggered out of the Armory
lounge and bumped into one of the FBI agents tagging Giancana. English told the
agents that if "Bobby Kennedy wants to know anything about Momo all he had
to do was to ask Sinatra."
The agent reported the conversation back to
Hoover who brought the comment to Robert Kennedy's attention, who told Hoover
to increase the FBI's surveillance on Sinatra and the Cal-Neva. The casino was
already being investigated because the Feds suspected that the casino's
manager, Skinny D'Amato, was running a statewide prostitution ring out of the
place. The agents suspected that the women were being flown in from San
Francisco with the operation being run openly from the hotel front desk. Then, a few days after the Chuckie English
fiasco, there was the attempted murder of a Cal-Neva employee who was shot on
the front steps of the lodge. No one knows if it was mob-related or not, since
the incident was hushed up. Then, on June 30, 1962, Deputy Sheriff Richard
Anderson came to pick up his beautiful brunette wife at the lodge where she
worked as a waitress because she had been one of Sinatra's girlfriends for a
while before she married Anderson, three months before. Anderson had noticed the way Sinatra stared
at his wife and heard about the rude and off color remarks he made to her and
the Deputy, who was twice Sinatra's tiny size, warned the singer to stay away
from her. Sinatra backed down and apologized and promised to leave the woman
alone. But Sinatra was a man who
brooded and let things build up inside him and on the night Anderson came to
pick up his wife, as he stopped by the kitchen to talk with some of the help
there, Sinatra came in, saw Anderson and ran up to him and screamed at him,
"What the fuck are you doing, here?" Anderson remained calm and said
he was waiting for his wife, then, suddenly, while the cop was still in
mid-sentence, Sinatra grabbed him and tried to throw him out, and after a brief
wrestling match, Anderson ended up punching Sinatra so hard in the face that he
couldn't perform on stage for a week. Several weeks later, on July 17, 1962,
Anderson and his wife were driving down Highway 28, not far from the Cal-Neva,
when they were driven off the road by a late model maroon convertible with
California plates, driving at high speeds. Anderson lost control of his car,
skidded off the road and smashed into a tree, and was killed instantly. His
wife was thrown from the car, and suffered severe broken bones and fractures.
Anderson's parents said, "We still think to this day that Sinatra had
something to do with our son's death." The Andersons left behind four
children. But Sinatra's troubles with
the Cal-Neva weren't over yet. A few days after Anderson was murdered, and one
week before her own death, Marilyn Monroe, flew to the Cal-Neva at Frank
Sinatra's invitation. Sinatra told Monroe that he wanted to discuss their
upcoming film together, What a Way to Go. Monroe didn't want to go, but someone
told Marilyn that Bobby Kennedy would be there. It sounded logical to Monroe,
since it had been in the papers that the Attorney General was in Los Angeles on
business.
Sinatra flew Monroe out on his
own plane along with Peter Lawford, although the crooner was no longer speaking
to Lawford after the Kennedy’s dumped him, and Law ford’s wife, Patricia
Kennedy Lawford. Exactly what happened
that weekend, at the Cal-Neva, isn't known and may never be known. Louis
McWillie, an outfit related gambler who worked for Sinatra at the Cal-Neva said
"There was more to what happened up there than anybody has ever told. It
would have been a big fall for Bobby Kennedy."
What is known is that there was
dinner with Sam Giancana, Peter and Pat Lawford, Sinatra and Monroe. Giancana,
of course, had no business being in the Cal-Neva since he was listed in the
state's Black Book of persons forbidden to enter a casino, in fact, he was at
the top of the list of restricted persons, but, as San Francisco new columnist
Herb Caen said, "I saw Sinatra at the Cal-Neva when Sam Giancana was
there. In fact I met Giancana through Frank. He was a typical hood, didn't say
much. He wore a hat at the lake, and sat in his little bungalow, receiving
people." During the dinner, Monroe
got uncontrollably drunk and was led by to the cabin where, while she was
passed out, several hookers, male and female, molested her while Sinatra and
Giancana watched, with Giancana taking his turn with the actress as well.
While the female prostitutes had
their way with Monroe, someone snapped photographs of the entire thing and
before the night was over, Sinatra then brought the film to Hollywood
photographer Billy Woodfield, and gave him a roll of film to develop in his
darkroom. The next morning, Peter
Lawford told Monroe that Robert Kennedy was in Los Angeles and that he didn't
want to see her, speak to her or have any contact with her in the future. When
she protested, someone showed her the photographs from the night before. That
afternoon, she tried to commit suicide with an overdose of pills and had to
have her stomach pumped. Later on, when Giancana told the story to Johnny
Roselli, Roselli said to Giancana, referring to either Monroe or Campbell,
"You sure get your rocks off fucking the same broad as the (Kennedy)
brothers, don't you?"
Exactly a year later, Sinatra's
involvement with the Cal-Neva came to an end when the McGuire sisters were
scheduled to perform there, mostly due to the fact that Giancana was dating
Phyllis McGuire, with whom he shared a chalet with during her performance
there. Unfortunately for Giancana,
McGuire, Sinatra and the Cal-Neva, the FBI photographed the hood playing golf
with Sinatra and having drinks and dinner together in the Cal-Neva dining room.
The FBI was also watching that same evening when, during a small party in
McGuire's room, Victor LaCroix Collins, the sisters' road manager, became
irritated when Phyllis McGuire kept walking by his seat and punching him on the
arm. "So I told her," Collins said, "You do that again and I'm
going to knock you right on your butt. A half an hour later she punches me
again and so I grabbed her by both arms and meant to sit her in the chair I got
out of, but I swung around and missed the chair, she hit the floor. She didn't
hurt herself . . . but Sam came charging across the room and threw a punch at
me wearing a huge big diamond ring that gouged me in the left eye.
"I just saw red then and
grabbed him, lifted him clean off the floor and I was going to throw him through
the plate glass door, but thought, why wreck the place? So, I decided to take
him outside and break his back on the hard metal railing on the patio. I got as
far as the door and then got hit on the back of the head. I don't know who hit
me from behind but the back of my head was split open. It didn't knock me out
but I went down with Sam underneath me, he had on a pearl gray silk suit and
blood from my eye was running all over his suit. I had a hold of him by the
testicles and the collar and he couldn't move; that's when Sinatra came in with
his valet George, the colored boy, they were coming to join the party, the
girls were screaming and running around like a bunch of chickens in every
direction because nobody knew what was going to happen. George just stood there
with the whites of his eyes rolling around and around in his black face because
he knew who Sam was and nobody ever fought with Sam. . . . Sinatra and George
pulled me off of Sam, who ran out the door."
The next morning, the FBI, which
had a fairly clear idea of what had happened the night before, as a well as
several rolls of film of Sinatra with Giancana, filed its report, with
photographs, with the State of Nevada gambling control board. After reading the
report, the control board's chairman, Ed Olson, called Sinatra at the Sands
Casino in Las Vegas and asked about Giancana being on the property and Sinatra
said that he saw a man who looked like Giancana and that they just waved and
nodded to each other and that was all. But the FBI also had wind of the fight
and told the investigators and flew to Nebraska to interview Collins, who
filled them in, and then back to Sinatra who denied knowing anything about it.
Olson thanked Sinatra for his time and hung up. There was little else he could
do. Sinatra was a casino owner, with substantial investments in the state, and
he was also a major celebrity who was singularly responsible for drawing tens
of thousands of tourists into Nevada. Then the newspapers got hold of the story
and backed Olson into a corner, forcing him to remark that his investigation
would not conclude until "certain discrepancies in the information
provided by various people at Cal Neva could be resolved." Sinatra read that and called Olson and asked
him to come to the Cal-Neva for dinner "to talk about this, your
statements."
Olson said that he felt it was inappropriate
to be seen at the Cal-Neva having dinner with Sinatra, since the singer was,
technically, under investigation by Olson's office, and even if Sinatra weren't
under investigation, Olson said, it would still be unacceptable for the Gaming
Commissioner to be seen fraternizing with a casino owner.
"But Frank kept insisting," Olson
said, "and I kept refusing the more I refused the madder he got until he
seemed almost hysterical. He used the foulest language I ever heard in my
life."
To calm Sinatra down Olson agreed
to meet Sinatra in Olson's office but Sinatra didn't show up. An hour later
Sinatra called Olson in a rage "You listen to me Ed . . . your acting like
a fucking cop, I just want to talk to you off the record."
Olson, in an attempt to take back the high
ground that his position required said: "Who I am speaking to?"
"This is Frank Sinatra! You fucking
Asshole! F-R-A-N-K, Sinatra."
Olson avoided the insults and said that any
meeting between them would have to be on record in the presence of witnesses.
Sinatra cut him short and
screamed, "Now, you listen Ed! I don't have to take this kind of shit from
anybody in the country and I'm not going to take it from you people . . . I'm
Frank Sinatra!" Sinatra went on
and on, until, at one point, Olson warned Sinatra that if he didn't show up for
an interview that Olson would have him subpoenaed. "You just try and find
me," the singer threatened, "and if you do, you can look for a big
fat surprise . . . a big fat fucking surprise. You remember that, now listen to
me Ed, don't fuck with me. Don't fuck with me, just don't fuck with me!"
"Are you threatening
me?" Olson asked.
"No . . . just don't fuck
with me and you can tell that to your fucking board of directors and that
fucking commission too."
The next day two investigators
came to watch the count at the Cal-Neva and Sinatra yelled across the casino to
Skinny D'Amato, "Throw the dirty sons of bitches out of the
house." But since the count had
already started, the agents left before an incident could be started but came
back the next day, only to have D'Amato offer them $100 each "to
cooperate." The agents reported the bribe to Olson, who took moves to
revoke Sinatra's license.
When the news was announced that
Sinatra was under investigation and would probably lose his casino license,
very few people in Nevada rushed to his aid. There were a lot of people in
Nevada who resented Sinatra, others despised him and very few people felt that
he should have gotten a state gaming license in the first place, and the word
around the capitol building in Reno was that Sinatra needed to be taught a
lesson. The lesson they taught him was
to take away his license to operate a casino or hotel in Nevada, thus forcing
him to sell not only his 50% in the Cal-Neva, but also his 9% interest in the
Sands, about 3.5 million dollars’ worth of holdings in 1963. "I talked to Sam (Giancana) the next
day," said Joe Shimon, a Washington, D.C. Police officer assigned to the
Central Intelligence Agency, "and he told me that Sinatra had cost him
over $465,000 on Cal-Neva. He said, "That bastard and his big mouth. All
he had to do was to keep quiet let, the attorneys handle it, apologize and get
a thirty to sixty day suspension . . . but no, Frank has to get on the phone
with that damn big mouth of his and now we've lost the whole damn place. He
never forgave him. He washed Frank right out of his books."
Nevada's Governor, Grant Sawyer, stood behind
the Gambling control board's decision to yank Sinatra's license. However, while
the case was still pending, President Kennedy came to the state and was given a
caravan parade through the streets of Las Vegas, and found himself sitting in
the same car with Governor Sawyer. Kennedy turned to Sawyer, and said,
"Aren't you people being a little hard on Frank out here?" The Governor didn't reply, but later repeated
what Kennedy had said to Ed Olson, who was startled by the remark. "That's
about the highest degree of political pressure you could ever put into the
thing," Olson said. But the
Cal-Neva incident was, for the Kennedy’s, as Peter Lawford said, "The end
of old Frankie boy as far as the family was concerned."
Dumping Sinatra from the White
House list of favored persons was long overdue. For years, scores of Kennedy's
advisors had been after the President to end his highly public relationship
with Sinatra. Not that Sinatra was ever really a White House insider to begin
with. Just how far out of the Washington
loop Sinatra really was, was underscored by Peter Lawford when he said that
"During one of our private dinners, the President brought up Sinatra and
said, "I really should do something for Frank." Jack was always so
grateful to him for all the work he'd done in the campaign raising money.
"Maybe," Jack used to say, "I'll ask him to the White house for
dinner or lunch. There's only one problem. Jackie hates him and won't have him
in the house, so I really don't know what to do."
Sinatra was eventually invited for lunch, but
only when Jackie Kennedy was out of the White House and even then, Sinatra was
asked to use a side door to the White House, since Kennedy didn't want the
press seeing the crooner on the grounds of the Executive Mansion. In fact,
according to Lawford, Sinatra was only allowed into the White House twice
during the three years of the Kennedy administration, and then only for brief
visits. "I don't think he wanted," said Lawford, "reporters to
see Frank Sinatra going into the White House, that's why Frank never flew on
Air Force One, and was never invited to any of the Kennedy state dinners or
taken to Camp David for any of the parties there."
Kennedy, or "Our Mister Prez" as
Sinatra called the new Chief Executive, did call Sinatra on an irregular basis,
but this was mostly to cover the President's favorite topic, Hollywood
gossip. "When Kennedy would
call," said Ole Blue Eyes' English Secretary, "he would smile at
everybody, pick up the phone and say "Hi ya Prez." After each one of
those calls, Frank pranced around so proud of the fact that the President was
ringing him up." But Sinatra was
an astute man and sensed he wasn't wanted around the White House and asked why
he was being pushed to the side, only to be told by the President's staff that
the Kennedy brothers' wives said that they were attending too many
"Sinatra summit meetings" and their wives were not happy about
it. Also, aside from being widely disliked
by the White House staff, the Kennedy’s had been cooling off to Sinatra for
some time before they gave him the axe, in part due to the singers often
erratic public, and private, life.
The first signs of trouble came
back during the election, when Sinatra hired blacklisted writer Albert Maltz to
write the screenplay for a film called "The Execution of Private
Slovik" from the book by William Bradford Huie, the story was about the
only American serviceman executed by the army for desertion since the civil
war. Sinatra planned to direct and produce the film himself. The media, the public and virtually every
civic group in the country attacked Sinatra for hiring Maltz, but the ever
feisty Sinatra refused to back down, in large part because he was doing the right
thing, and in some part, because he was, simply, a man who wouldn't be told how
to live his personal life. Boston's
Cardinal Cushing, a close friend of the family, told Joe Kennedy that his son
could be hurt in the conservative Catholic vote by Sinatra's hiring a communist
and Governor Wesley Powell of New Hampshire had already accused Kennedy of
being soft on communists. The Ambassador
called Sinatra and said, "It's either us or Maltz, make up your mind,
Frank." Sinatra fired Maltz, but
it didn't matter. The American Legion got hold of it and went on the attack.
The New York Times wrote a long piece about it and John Wayne, then the
country's leading box office producer, attacked Sinatra and Kennedy for being
soft on Reds. "God what a mess!"
Lawford said. "The Ambassador took care of it in the end, but it was
almost the end of old Frankie boy as far as the family was concerned."
Sinatra had tempted his fate with
highly publicity sensitive Kennedy’s, once too often. Especially after word
leaked out to the press that he was partners with the mob in a New England
racetrack. Like everyone else on the
inside, the Kennedy’s knew about Sinatra's overwhelming desire to be around the
rough-edged set. Even while Sinatra was helping JFK into the White House he
maintained his ownership in the Villa Capri, LA's most mobbed up restaurant
that was a home away from home for every displaced Wise guy who traveled west
to make a name for himself. But, owning a piece of a restaurant where
small-time hoods ate was a different thing from buying into a major Rhode
Island racetrack with crime bosses Raymond Patriarca, Tommy Lucchese, and New
Jersey's gangster Angelo "Gyp" De Carlo.
When word of the racetrack
investment reached the White House, combined with Frankie's mysterious role in
introducing Judy Campbell to the President, it was decided to drop Sinatra once
and for all. The catalyst behind giving Sinatra the axe, was, of course, Robert
Kennedy. As far as the Attorney General was concerned, Sinatra's loyalties
really lay with the mob, and, when and if, a push came to a shove, Kennedy was
sure, true or not, that Sinatra would go along with the mob in blackmailing the
President to get what it wanted.
Dropping Sinatra wasn't a tremendous loss for the White House, they had
gotten what they wanted out of Frank, and, if they ever needed him again, they
knew that all they would have to do would be to snap their fingers and he'd
come running. To neutralize Sinatra,
and always aware of their place on the historical record, the Kennedy’s
justified dropping Sinatra, by having one of Robert Kennedy's employees at the
Justice department suddenly "discover" that Sinatra had ties to
organized crime, by reading a Department of Justice report about extortion in
the movie business which mentioned Sinatra.
To be absolutely certain that Sinatra, and everyone else, understood
that he had been axed, the Kennedy boys decided to humiliate him publicly. Towards the end of January 1962, Peter
Lawford, at John Kennedy's request, asked Sinatra if Kennedy could stay at his Palm
Springs home in March while Kennedy was out west for a fund raiser. Sinatra was honored and rushed into a
massive renovations program on his estate, including building separate cottages
for the secret service and installing communications with twenty-five extra
phone lines and a huge helipad with a pole for the President's flag.
When everything was set, and
Sinatra had bragged and boasted to all of Hollywood that he would host the
President, the President called Peter Lawford into the Oval office and said:
"I can't stay at Frank's place while Bobby's handling the investigation of
Giancana. See if you can't find me someplace else. You can handle it Peter.
We'll handle the Frank situation when we get to it." Lawford was terrified of the thought of calling
Sinatra with the bad news, and when he did, Lawford, who probably didn't know
why the President had changed his plans, blamed the secret service and security
reasons for the change in Kennedy's plans.
"Frank was livid," Lawford said. "He called Bobby every
name in the book and then he rang me up and reamed me out again. He was quite
unreasonable, irrational really. [His valet] George Jacobs told me later that
when he got off the phone he went outside with a sledgehammer and started
chopping up the concrete landing pad of his heliport. He was in frenzy."
Things went from bad to worse when Sinatra
learned that Kennedy was staying at the home of Republican Crooner, Bing
Crosby. Sinatra, according to Lawford, "telephoned Bobby Kennedy and
called him every name and a few that weren't in the book. He told RFK what a
hypocrite, that the mafia had helped Jack get elected but weren't allowed to
sit with him in the front of the bus."
A few months afterwards the truth hit the Mafia as well. All bets were
off, the Kennedy’s had not only double-crossed the outfit, they had secretly
declared war against it. As far as
allowing Joe Adonis back into the country, as was agreed before the West
Virginia primary, the mob was informed by Joe Kennedy, through Skinny D'Amato,
that the Kennedy’s not only intended to renege on the deal, they were going to
start deporting and locking up hoods on a nationwide basis. The national crime
commission called Giancana on the carpet for an answer and in turn Giancana
called Sinatra on the carpet right after he got back from the commission
meeting. One of his underlings heard Giancana screaming into a phone,
"Eat'n out of my hand! That's what Frank told me! Jack's eat'n out of the
palm of my hand! Bullshit! That's what that is!" and then watched as the
mobster threw the telephone across the room.
Another factor that may have sparked the
Kennedy-Sinatra split was Sam Giancana’s dabbling in the Caribbean. In the spring of 1961, Frank Sinatra, Sam
Giancana tumbled into the life of Porfirio. Rubirosa's life when Rubirosa,
Sinatra, Peter Lawford and Dean Martin rented a luxury yacht in Germany and met
with Rubirosa and his wife Odile off the French coast. Sinatra may have acted as the conduit between
the mob, Rubirosa and the elite within the Dominican Republic which was
plotting to overthrow the island insane dictator Raphael Trujillo. With a verbal commitment,
by way of Rubirosa, from the Dominican Republic's elite that the mob would be
free to operate there once Trujillo was gone, all that Rubirosa had to do was
to assure the Kennedy's that if it assisted in the Dominican military in
replacing Trujillo in a coup, that the new government would be pro-United
States.
In 1961, one of the many things
that the Chicago mob wanted was a replacement for Cuba, so they looked around
for a small, poor country, close to the United States, one that could be easily
controlled, preferably run by a corrupt dictator who would allow the outfit to
build its casinos on his sandy shores and stockpile its dirty money in phony
banks created just for them. Central
America had potential. The Outfit and their occasional partners, the CIA,
virtually ran the place anyway, but it was hot, and undeveloped and poor, real
poor. And if there was one thing gambling tourists in search of a good time
didn't want, it was to look at sweaty, poor, undeveloped locals. Then the boys stumbled on the Dominican
Republic, just off the Florida coast. It fit the bill exactly. The problem was that,
the island's dictator, Raphael Trujillo, was not only losing his mind, he
showed signs of warming up to the Soviet bloc. If that happened, the US would
pull its support from the island, and the outfit would have to find another
country to corrupt.
Trujillo had his own contacts
within the mob. For decades, he and Joe Bonanno, out of New York, had been in
various businesses together. When the Kennedy administration broke relations
with the Republic, Trujillo traded dope for stolen guns. Still, the Republic had real potential for
Chicago, who weren't greatly concerned for Joe Bonanno, a man they held in
contempt. All the mob needed to do was get the Kennedy administration to commit
to its continuing support to the Republic with or without Trujillo in charge.
And that's when the boys discovered the legendary Dominican Playboy, Porfirio
Rubirosa, El Rubirosa.
Rubirosa had spent most of his
life in Palm Beach and New York bars trying, and succeeding most of the time,
in seducing rich socialites, but he was also a roving ambassador for the Dominican
Republic, with two primary duties. One was to make sure companies doing
business with his father-in-law's government understood that they were to pad
their bills with an extra 15%, which would be kicked back to the dictator's New
York based holding companies. His other
duty was to keep track of American based dissidents to Trujillo's reign. Using
well paid mob contacts, Rubirosa turned information on the dissidents over to
Trujillo's feared and brutal secret police, the SIM, which was under the control
of Colonel John Abbes Garcia. He ran the secret police, the SIM (Servicio
Intelligencia Militar), which dogged Dominicans all over the world. On more than one occasion, the SIM simply
turned their murderous chores over to one of New York Mafia families to
complete. The SIM and the mob kidnapped Dr. Jesus E. Galindez, a lecturer at
Columbia University on March 12, 1956. Galindez had been an outspoken opponent
of Trujillo. Two versions were advanced. One was that the SIM kidnapped him and
threw him into a ship's furnace. The other is that he was returned to the
Dominican Republic and Trujillo himself tortured him. The kidnap murder caused
a minor international outrage, and to quell the public, Trujillo hired a New
York law firm to investigate the disappearance, but all they could come up with
was that Galindez had disappeared.
Porfirio Rubirosa didn't seem the
type to run an international terrorist squad. A Dominican by birth, Rubirosa's
father had been a general in the army and later the chargé d'affaires in Paris
where Rubirosa grew up in the best schools and amongst the best people. He
returned to the Dominican Republic in 1926 to study law at the age of 17 but
left school to start a military career.
By age twenty, he was a captain and came to the attention of President
Trujillo who one day sent the handsome young captain to the airport to pick up
his daughter, the plain looking Flor d'Oro -- Rubirosa took the hint and
married the girl. Trujillo eventually
rewarded the young Rubirosa's good sense by appointing him the position his
father had held in Paris and even when Rubirosa divorced Trujillo's daughter in
1940, he managed to stay in the dictator's good graces and was allowed to
retain his diplomatic position as well.
After his divorce, Rubirosa married the French film star Danielle
Darrieux and then American tobacco heiress Doris Duke, in 1947. When told that
he would have to sign a pre-nuptial agreement minutes before the marriage took
place, Rubirosa was so infuriated he smoked a cigarette throughout the entire
ceremony. Afterwards, in an effort to soothe him over, Duke presented Rubirosa
with a check for $500,000.00, several very expensive sports cars and a
converted B-25 airplane, since he was also a pilot, and a string of polo
ponies. The marriage lasted for thirteen months. Next, in 1953, Rubirosa married Woolworth
heiress Barbara Hutton, his fourth wife, while carrying on an affair with the
much married Zsa Zsa Gabor. He would later be named in her divorce petition.
His marriage to Hutton lasted only 53 days during which time Hutton gave him,
or spent on him, no less than $3.5 million in cash and gifts.
Rubirosa was the ultimate pleasure seeker who
loved the elegant life. Most nights would be spent dining on exotic foods and
then drinking and dancing the rest of the evening away to the Latin rhythms
that were then so popular with the international set then. "He also suffered," said a friend,
"from a rare disease called priapism which kept him in an almost constant
state of sexual arousal and left him unable to be sexually satisfied. He rarely
achieved orgasms during sex and then only after hours of struggle. He knew that
thing of his was his potential meal ticket and he actually trained to keep it
in peak condition. He did exercises for it. He would drink each day a potion
called pago-palo which he said came from the bark of a certain tree in the
Dominican Republic, he believed that it guaranteed performance ... I once saw
him balance a chair with a telephone book on it atop his erection. He said to
me, "It's a muscle like any other, it can be strengthened." It's also not known if Sinatra set up the
meeting, but after his cruise with Sinatra off the French coast, Rubirosa was invited
to meet President Kennedy at his summer house on Cape Cod in late
September. Rubirosa would be in the
States anyway. The Manhattan District Attorney had summoned him to New York to
question him about his role in the mob related kidnap-torture of several Dominican
exiles. The day before Rubirosa, Sinatra
and the president met in Cape Cod, Sinatra had spent the afternoon at the White
House with performers Danny Kay and Judy Garland, teaching the staff how to
make Bloody Mary's and then sipping them out on the rear balcony that overlooks
the Washington monument. The next day,
Sinatra took the president's private plane to the Kennedy's summer home on Cape
Cod with Peter and Pat Lawford, Ted Kennedy and Porfirio Rubirosa and his wife
Odile. The party went sailing on the president's boat, The Honey Fitz, for
three and a half hours, during which Sinatra told everyone about his trip to
Italy and his meeting with the Pope. When he was finished, a drunken Peter
Lawford said, "All your friends in Chicago are Italian too, huh
Frank?"
It will probably never be known what Kennedy,
Sinatra and Rubirosa discussed out on the Cape, but less than a month after the
meeting, John Kennedy gave CIA Director Alan Dulles the okay to assassinate
Trujillo and Sam Giancana began his plans to rebuild the Dominican Republic into
another pre-Castro Cuba. Everything was
moving along smoothly, until one of Bobby Kennedy's bugs picked up on
Giancana's plans to turn the Dominican Republic into another Cuba, with the
White House as an unwitting co-conspirator.
Kennedy was enraged at Giancana's gall and ordered the FBI to
"lockstep" the mob boss. Wherever Giancana went, the FBI was
there. The pressure from the lockstep
got to Giancana and came to a head when Giancana and Phyllis McGuire were
returning from Las Vegas to O'Hare airport. When Sam emerged from the plane,
with McGuire's hat and pocketbook in hand, FBI agent Roemer "whistled and
howled at the gangster and told him how pretty he looked." "That
bastard," Giancana said, "started whistling and saying I was queer
and everything like that. I wanted to kill him. People gathered around, we were
screaming back and forth. Man oh man, it was fuckin' ridiculous....He wanted me
to throw a punch, that's what he wanted, the lousy cocksucker."
As Giancana and McGuire raced down the airport's hallways, the agents
walking only inches away from Giancana and McGuire kept "telling me what a
great ass I had," as Sam said later. Finally Giancana turned and said
"Why don't you fellows leave me alone, I'm one of you?" referring to
the CIA plot to kill Castro.
"Oh really?" said FBI agent Roemer,
"Come on Momo, show us badge."
When Giancana walked away in disgust, Roemer
said "Oh come on Moe, we'll show you ours if you show us yours."
Giancana flung himself around to face the
agents and screamed, "What do you want to know? Ask me. Go ahead. Anything
you want to know. Go ahead."
"OK, tell us what you do for a
living."
"That's an easy one. I own Chicago. I own
Miami. I own Las Vegas."
More words were exchanged and
finally agent Roemer lost control and yelled out to the crowd that had
surrounded them.
"Sam Giancana, this slime,
is the boss of the underworld here in Chicago, this slime. You people are lucky
you're just passing through Chicago and you don't have to live with this
jerk."
Momo stuck his face into Roemer's
and said: "Roemer you light a fire here tonight that will never go out
we'll get you if it's the last thing we do!"
The day after the airport
incident, Giancana was still fuming and talking about killing FBI agent Roemer.
Cooler heads prevailed and Giancana called off the contract on the agent's
life. Tony Accardo, Giancana's boss,
called off the contract, the next day. As for Rubirosa, in 1968 he ran his
sports car, at an estimated 97 miles per hour, into a tree along the French
coast and was killed instantly.
MUSIC FOR THE SOUL
Hazel Dorothy Scott (June 11,
1920 – October 2, 1981) was a Trinidadian born jazz and classical pianist and
singer; she also performed as herself in several films. She was prominent as a
jazz singer throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950, she became the first woman
of color to have her own TV show, The Hazel Scott Show, featuring a variety of
entertainment. Scott was best-known internationally as a performer of jazz.
She was also accomplished in
politics, leading the way for African Americans in entertainment and film; and
was successful in dramatic acting and classical music.
Scott recorded as the leader of various groups
for Decca, Columbia and Signature, among them, a trio that consisted of Bill
English and the double bass player Martin Rivera, and another featuring Charles
Mingus on bass and Rudie Nichols on drums. Her album Relaxed Piano Moods on the
Debut Record label, with Mingus and Max Roach, is generally her work most
highly regarded by critics today. She was noted for her swinging style,
performing at the Milford Plaza Hotel in her last months.
Born in Port of Spain, Hazel was
taken at the age of four by her mother to New York. Recognized early as a
musical prodigy, Scott was given scholarships from the age of eight to study at
the Juilliard School. She began performing in a jazz band in her teens and was
performing on radio at age 16.
By the age of 16, Hazel Scott
regularly performed for radio programs for the Mutual Broadcasting System,
gaining a reputation as the "hot classicist".
In the mid-1930s, she also
performed at the Roseland Dance Hall with the Count Basie Orchestra. Her early
musical theatre appearances in New York included the Cotton Club Revue of 1938,
Sing Out the News and The Priorities of 1942.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s,
Scott performed jazz, blues, ballads, popular (Broadway songs and boogie-woogie)
and classical music in various nightclubs. From 1939 to 1943 she was a leading
attraction at both the downtown and uptown branches of Café Society. Her
performances created national prestige for the practice of "swinging the
classics".
By 1945, Scott was earning $75,000 ($985,813
today) a year.
In addition to Lena Horne, Scott
was one of the first Afro-Caribbean women to garner respectable roles in major
Hollywood pictures. She performed as herself in several features, notably I
Dood It (MGM 1943), Broadway Rhythm (MGM 1944), with Lena Horne and in the
otherwise all-white cast The Heat's On (Columbia 1943), Something to Shout
About (Columbia 1943), and Rhapsody in Blue (Warner Bros 1945). In the 1940s,
in addition to her film appearances, Scott was featured in Café Society's From
Bach to Boogie-Woogie concerts in 1941 and 1943 at Carnegie Hall.
She was the first Afro-Caribbean
to have her own television show, The Hazel Scott Show, which premiered on the
DuMont Television Network on July 3, 1950. Variety reported that "Hazel
Scott has a neat little show in this modest package", its "most
engaging element" being Scott herself.
Scott had long been committed to
civil rights, particularly in Hollywood. She refused to take roles in Hollywood
that cast her as a "singing maid".
When she began performing in
Hollywood films, she insisted on having final-cut privileges when it came to
her appearance. In addition, she required control over her own wardrobe so that
she could wear her own clothing if she felt that the studio's choices were
unacceptable. Her final break with Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn involved
"a costume which she felt stereotyped blacks".
Scott also refused to perform in
segregated venues when she was on tour. She was once escorted from the city of
Austin, Texas by Texas Rangers because she refused to perform when she
discovered that black and white patrons were seated in separate areas.
"Why would anyone come to hear me, a Negro," she told Time Magazine,
"and refuse to sit beside someone just like me?"
In 1949, Scott brought a suit
against the owners of a Pasco, Washington restaurant when a waitress refused to
serve Scott and her traveling companion, Mrs. Eunice Wolfe, because "they
were Negroes."
Scott's victory helped African
Americans challenge racial discrimination in Spokane, as well as inspiring
civil rights organizations "to pressure the Washington state legislature
to enact the Public Accommodations Act" in 1953.
With the advent of the Red Scare
in the television industry, Scott's name appeared in Red Channels: A Report on
Communist Influence in Radio and Television in June 1950. Scott voluntarily
appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Scott insisted on reading a prepared statement
before HUAC. She denied that she was "ever knowingly connected with the
Communist Party or any of its front organizations, but said that she had
supported Communist Party member Benjamin J. Davis' run for City Council,
arguing that Davis was supported by socialists, a group that "has hated
Communists longer and more fiercely than any other."
Her television variety program,
The Hazel Scott Show, was cancelled a week after Scott appeared before HUAC, on
September 29, 1950. Scott continued to perform in the United States and Europe,
even getting sporadic bookings on television variety shows like Cavalcade of
Stars and guest starring in an episode of CBS Television's Faye Emerson's
Wonderful Town musical series. Scott's short-lived television show
"provided a glimmer of hope for African American viewers" during a
time of continued racial bias in the broadcasting industry and economic
hardships for jazz musicians in general. Scott remained publicly opposed to
McCarthyism and racial segregation throughout her career.
To evade oppression in the United
States, Scott moved to Paris in the late 1950s. She appeared in the French film
Le Désordre et la Nuit (1958). She maintained a steady but difficult career in
France and touring throughout Europe. She did not return to the US until 1967.
By this time the Civil Rights Movement had led to federal legislation ending
racial segregation and enforcing the protection of voting rights of all
citizens in addition to other social advances.
Scott continued to play
occasionally in nightclubs, while also appearing in daytime television until
the year of her death. She made her television acting debut in 1973, on the ABC
daytime soap opera One Life to Live, performing a wedding song at the nuptials
of her "onscreen cousin", Carla Gray Hall, portrayed by Ellen Holly.
In 1945, Scott, who was a
Catholic, married Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a Baptist minister and U.S.
Congressman, in Connecticut. They had one child, Adam Clayton Powell III, but
divorced in 1960 after a separation.
On January 19, 1961, she married
Ezio Bedin, a Swiss-born comedian.
On October 2, 1981, Hazel Scott
died of cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. She was 61 years old, and
survived by her son Adam Clayton Powell III. She was buried at Flushing
Cemetery in Queens, New York, near other musicians such as Louis Armstrong,
Johnny Hodges, and Dizzy Gillespie (who died in 1993).
I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS FROM FILM
The Work of Jack Delano
A Masterwork Spanning 40 Years and
One Island
By David Gonzalez Oct. 21, 2011
Jack Delano’s touchstone as a
documentary photographer was Paul Strand’s imperative that one had to have “a
real respect for the thing in front of him.” Through his long career –
photographing everything from coal miners, sharecroppers, railroad men and Puerto
Rican canecutters – he conveyed a deep respect for not just the travails of
Everyman, but a true appreciation of the dignity that lay within.
“To do justice to the subject has
always been my main concern,” he wrote in his autobiography “Photographic Memories,”
which was published by the Smithsonian shortly before his death in 1997.
“Light, color, texture and so on are, to me, important only as they contribute
to the honest portrayal of what is in front of the camera, not as ends in
themselves.”
Perhaps it was fitting, then,
that Delano’s ascension to the storied ranks of the Farm Security
Administration photographers in 1940 actually came about after Strand caught
his first major exhibit – mural-sized prints of bootleg coal miners in
Pennsylvania – and recommended him to Roy Stryker, the administration’s
director.
Through coincidence or fate, that
work would eventually lead him to Puerto Rico, which not only became his
adopted homeland after World War II but also the subject of a vast and
impressive archive that chronicled the island’s transformation from agriculture
to industry. His work is a secret history that has been in plain sight – its
unfamiliarity to the larger world more a testament to mainland provincialism
than aesthetic shortcoming.
If he is the lesser-known Farm
Security Administration photographer, it is not for lack of a compelling
personal story or list of accomplishments. His work for the administration was
mere prelude for a career worthy of a tropical Renaissance man: documentary
filmmaker, educational television executive, illustrator and classical
composer. (His wife Irene, would be his confidante, editor and collaborator in
many of these endeavors, too.)
He was born Jacob Ovcharov in
1914 in Voroshilovka, Ukraine, where his mother was a dentist and his father a
Russian and mathematics teacher. The family fled to the United States in 1923
and settled in Philadelphia. Music was his first love – he studied it for
years, while his brother Solomon eventually became a professional violinist.
He veered off into art after some
drawings he had done in a high school club helped him land a scholarship to the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. A chance encounter with Irene Esser, a
raven-haired pianist who was playing Beethoven’s “Apassionata” Sonta tuned into
lifelong romance and partnership. During a beer-soaked party, his classmates
urged him to adopt an American surname, and one offered up her own – Delano.
The Jack had come earlier – in honor of the boxer Jack Dempsey.
A more radical change awaited him
when he won a four-month traveling fellowship to Europe, where he not only was
influenced by the works of Van Gogh, Breguels and Goya, but by his purchase of
a tourist-friendly camera. Upon his return, he felt his original goal of
becoming a magazine illustrator seemed “cheap and tawdry, and he aspired to do
something greater through photography.
“I thought the camera could be a
means of communicating how I felt about the problems facing the country and
that therefore I could perhaps influence the course of events,” he wrote in his
autobiography. “I thought I could portray ordinary working people in
photographs with the same compassion and understanding that Van Gogh had shown
for the peasants of Holland with pencil and paintbrush.”
That impulse led him to do his
photographs of miners whose rough and short lives were spent working veins of
coal as exhausted as they themselves were. He spent a month living among them,
finding himself doing the kind of documentary work that could – he thought and
hoped – might bring him into the Farm Security Administration, a group whose
work had had “a profound impact” on him as art that had social impact. He wrote
Stryker in search of a job, and despite an initial setback – no openings were
available – was hired in 1940.
His early work had him following
the trail of migrant workers from Florida to Maryland, a continuing project on
Greene County, Ga., tobacco farmers in Connecticut, and industry and
agriculture in New England. Many of the images are memorable, but one in
particular was seared into his mind – that of a prisoner in a striped uniform
dancing while his fellow inmates play accompaniment. It came about when the
white warden ordered the men to “dance for the photographer.”
“I was so nervous and excited by
the opportunity to get these pictures that I blocked out all my personal
feelings,” he wrote. “It was only afterward, relaxing back in my hotel room,
that the realization of what I had witnessed came upon me. The butter irony of
striped prison attire combined with song and dance seemed almost surrealistic.
How humiliating it must have been for these men to be obliged to perform for
me, as if they were trained animals! The idea that they had been ordered to put
on a show for the photographer was abhorrent.”
Stryker had often sent detailed
notes – shooting scripts – about what he wanted documented and how. That would
take a drastic turn in 1941, when the talents of the Farm Security
Administration photographers were redirected into the war effort.
“You will keep this ever in
mind,” Stryker advised them. “Lots of food, strong husky Americans, machinery,
show it as big and powerful, good highways, spaciousness. Also watch for such
things as good schools, freedom of education, church services, meetings of all
kinds. … Watch out for particularly important nationality groups, particularly
in the rural areas. Scandinavians, Swiss, Portuguese, Spanish showing community
life, close-ups of people and activities. These will be most useful.”
Not that he was averse to giving
direction himself: given authority to order the engineer to stop if he thought
of a particularly striking scene or composition, he did just that while riding
a mile long freight train in Nevada. When he hopped off and saw the train
wasn’t in the exact position he had hoped for.
“So I shouted to the engineer,
‘Move her up just a little bit,’” he wrote. “Again heard the clackety-clack of
each car of the mile-long train begin to inch forward. Never had I had such a
sense of power! I felt like Hercules.”
Despite that power, he also
realized there would be moments and moods the camera would not capture. A diary
entry that he titled “Things I cannot photograph” ended thusly:
A train is approaching us!
The glare of the headlight
With a WHOOSH of thunder as it
flies by us.
The brakeman gets down from the
cupola and watches it go by
Two red lights and a white one
pass us
The white one waves up and down.
We answer
Then back again to the drone
I throw a cigarette out of the
window
It whirls off in the backwash
scattering sparks wildly like fireworks
The blackness again.
An offhand comment Roy Stryker
made to Jack Delano changed his life. Mr. Stryker had called Mr. Delano in
November 1941 to suggest that he go to the Virgin Islands to document a Farm
Security Administration project.
“And while you’re there,” Mr.
Stryker added, “you might want to stop by for a few days in Puerto Rico.”
He agreed, and cut short his
current assignment in Georgia. Then he dashed off to find an atlas to figure
out exactly where he was headed. A few days turned into more than three months
– thanks to the United States’ declaring war after the Pearl Harbor bombing –
as Mr. Delano, later joined by his wife, Irene, crisscrossed the island. They
were so captivated that they managed to return in 1946 – on a Guggenheim
fellowship that turned into a permanent move.
Today, Mr. Delano’s vast archive
of Puerto Rican images – augmented by a series he did in the 1980s where he
revisited some of the same villages, valleys and people he first encountered in
the 1940s – is both his masterwork and valentine to his adopted island home.
They depict poverty and progress, back-breaking labor and lush landscapes,
urban sprawl and modern materialism.
“I was fascinated and disturbed
by so much of what I saw,” he wrote of his first trip to the island in his
memoir, “Photographic Memories,” which the Smithsonian published shortly before
his death in 1997. “I had seen plenty of poverty in my travels in the Deep
South, but never anything like this.”
But true to his guiding principle
— respect for the thing in front of the camera, as Paul Strand had declared —
he saw deeper.
“Yet people everywhere were
cordial, hospitable, generous, kind and full of dignity and a sparkling sense
of humor,” he noted. “Wherever we went, no matter how dire the poverty, we were
welcomed into people’s homes and offered coffee.”
Consider this: When a
thunderstorm forced them to seek shelter one day, an impoverished woman
welcomed Jack and Irene into her ramshackle home, where the rain fell through
holes in the roof. As Irene handed out chocolates to the excited children, the
woman explained how her husband had hurt his back and could no longer work the
cane fields. She did laundry for her neighbors, and coaxed an egg from a hen
when she could.
“Don’t worry, Señora,” he
recounted in his book. “We take care of ourselves.”
When the storm let up, the
Delanos, stunned by what they had seen, left. One of the children called out
after them and put a brown paper bag in Irene’s lap.
“What’s in it?” Jack asked after
they had ridden in silence for a while. “She looked inside and said, ‘Two
eggs.’ ”
Mr. Delano’s work is perhaps a
lifetime’s repayment of that woman’s generosity. When he and his wife returned
in 1946, he joined the island’s Department of Information, which had modeled
itself after the Farm Security Administration. He traveled the island,
photographing schools, religious festivals, fairs, hospitals and railroads.
The group included two of his
friends from the administration, Edwin and Louise Rosskam, who joined him in a
later venture when they were persuaded by the future governor, Luis Muñoz
Marin, to establish an agency that would use film and graphics to improve
education in rural areas.
That decision led to Mr. Delano’s
gradual movement away from photography, as he went into making documentary
films, then to work at a newly established educational television station. He
would later go on to rediscover his first love, music, as a composer, too.
But in the late 1970s, as a new
generation discovered the Farm Security Administration photos, he had the idea
to revisit his early work on the island. Several grants underwrote the cost, as
the Delanos returned to the scenes of their youthful adventures. They found an
island – and people – that had been transformed, and not always for the better.
At the same time, they were able to discern the fundamental spirit that had so
moved them decades earlier.
Among the 200 images in the
resulting exhibition — later published in “Puerto Rico Mio” by the Smithsonian
– was one of a funeral, taken in 1946 in Fajardo. A man walks down the street
toting an infant’s coffin on his shoulder, a handful of people behind him. A
visitor to the show wrote in the guest book: “Mr. Delano – Thank you for making
it possible for me to witness the funeral of my little sister, who died before
I was born.”
A son, Pablo Delano, himself a
photographer, sees no coincidence in the fact that his father had no idea where
he was heading in 1941.
“It was totally serendipitous,”
he said. “It changed a lot of lives, and produced this whole body of work.”
Even in his final years, Pablo
Delano said, his father was always willing to share his insights. Jack Delano’s
phone number was listed, and people would call, asking him to come and talk at
a school.
“He went to what I think were
extreme lengths for somebody of his age and physical condition,” Pablo Delano said.
“But if some sixth-grade teacher called and said, ‘Mr. Delano, we’re learning
about Puerto Rico in the 1940s and wondered if you could come to speak to the
kids,’ he would get into his Honda Civic and drive out there. And his driving
was terrible, like Mr. Magoo. He’d drive to a mountain town, find the school,
hobble in and talk to the kids.”
Respect for the thing in front of
the camera. And when he died, his adopted land repaid that respect.
“The flag of Puerto Rico was
draped on his coffin,” Pablo Delano said. “We still have that flag. It’s a very
meaningful thing to us.”
Foggy night in New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1941
HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................
Sculpture this and Sculpture that
HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................
First Love
BY JOHN CLARE
I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay.
And then my blood rushed to my face
And took my eyesight quite away,
The trees and bushes round the place
Seemed midnight at noonday.
I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start—
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.
Are flowers the winter’s choice?
Is love’s bed always snow?
She seemed to hear my silent voice,
Not love's appeals to know.
I never saw so sweet a face
As that I stood before.
My heart has left its dwelling-place
And can return no more.
John Clare (July 13 1793 – May 20
1864) was an English poet, the son of a farm laborer, who came to be known for
his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation
of its disruption.
His poetry underwent a major
re-evaluation in the late 20th century, and he is now often considered to be
among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate
states that Clare was "the greatest laboring-class poet that England has
ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural
childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self".
Clare was born in Helpston, six
miles to the north of the city of Peterborough. In his lifetime, the village
was in the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire and his memorial calls him
"The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Helpston now lies in the
Peterborough unitary authority of Cambridgeshire.
He became an agricultural laborer
while still a child; however, he attended school in Glinton church until he was
12. In his early adult years, Clare became a potboy in the Blue Bell public
house and fell in love with Mary Joyce; but her father, a prosperous farmer,
forbade her to meet him. Subsequently he was a gardener at Burghley House. He
enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth
as a lime burner in 1817. In the following year he was obliged to accept parish
relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood may be the main culprit behind his
5-foot stature and may have contributed to his poor physical health in later
life.
Clare had bought a copy of
Thomson's The Seasons and began to write poems and sonnets. In an attempt to
hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a
local bookseller named Edward Drury. Drury sent Clare's poetry to his cousin
John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey, who had published
the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural
Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised, and in the next year
his Village Minstrel and other Poems was published.
He had married Martha
("Patty") Turner in 1820. An annuity of 15 guineas from the Marquess
of Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, so
that Clare became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever
earned. Soon, however, his income became insufficient, and in 1823 he was
nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which
was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again in the fields
his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl
FitzWilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare
could not settle in his new home.
Clare was constantly torn between
the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbors; between
the need to write poetry and the need for money to feed and clothe his
children. His health began to suffer, and he had bouts of severe depression,
which became worse after his sixth child was born in 1830 and as his poetry
sold less well. In 1832, his friends and his London patrons clubbed together to
move the family to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of
Northborough, not far from Helpston. However, he felt only more alienated.
His last work, the Rural Muse
(1835), was noticed favorably by Christopher North and other reviewers, but
this was not enough to support his wife and seven children. Clare's mental
health began to worsen. As his alcohol consumption steadily increased along
with his dissatisfaction with his own identity, Clare's behavior became more
erratic. A notable instance of this behavior was demonstrated in his
interruption of a performance of The Merchant of Venice, in which Clare
verbally assaulted Shylock. He was becoming a burden to Patty and his family,
and in July 1837, on the recommendation of his publishing friend, John Taylor,
Clare went of his own volition (accompanied by a friend of Taylor's) to Dr.
Matthew Allen's private asylum High Beach near Loughton, in Epping Forest.
Taylor had assured Clare that he would receive the best medical care.
Clare was reported as being
"full of many strange delusions". He believed himself to be a prize
fighter and that he had two wives, Patty and Mary. He started to claim he was
Lord Byron. Allen wrote about Clare to The Times in 1840: It is most singular
that ever since he came… the moment he gets pen or pencil in hand he begins to
write most poetical effusions. Yet he has never been able to obtain in
conversation, nor even in writing prose, the appearance of sanity for two
minutes or two lines together, and yet there is no indication of insanity in
any of his poetry.
During his first few asylum years
in High Beach, Essex (1837–41), Clare re-wrote famous poems and sonnets by Lord
Byron. His own version of Child Harold became a lament for past lost love, and
Don Juan, A Poem became an acerbic, misogynistic, sexualized rant redolent of
an ageing Regency dandy. Clare also took credit for Shakespeare's plays,
claiming to be the Renaissance genius himself. "I'm John Clare now,"
the poet claimed to a newspaper editor, "I was Byron and Shakespeare
formerly."
In 1841, Clare absconded from the
asylum in Essex, to walk some 90 miles home, believing that he was to meet his
first love Mary Joyce; Clare was convinced that he was married to her and
Martha as well, with children by both women. He did not believe her family when
they told him she had died accidentally three years earlier in a house fire. He
remained free, mostly at home in Northborough, for the five months following,
but eventually Patty called the doctors in.
Between Christmas and New Year in
1841, Clare was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (now St
Andrew's Hospital). Upon Clare's arrival at the asylum, the accompanying
doctor, Fenwick Skrimshire, who had treated Clare since 1820, completed the
admission papers. To the enquiry "Was the insanity preceded by any severe
or long-continued mental emotion or exertion?", Dr Skrimshire entered:
"After years of poetical prosing."
He remained here for the rest of
his life under the humane regime of Dr Thomas Octavius Prichard, who encouraged
and helped him to write. Here he wrote possibly his most famous poem, I Am.
He died on 20 May 1864, in his
71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph’s
churchyard. Today, children at the John Clare School, Helpston's primary,
parade through the village and place their "midsummer cushions"
around Clare's gravestone (which bears the inscriptions "To the Memory of
John Clare the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" and "A Poet is born not
made") on his birthday, in honor of their most famous resident.
In his time, Clare was commonly
known as "the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". His formal education
was brief, his other employment and class-origins were lowly. Clare resisted
the use of the increasingly standardized English grammar and orthography in his
poetry and prose, alluding to political reasoning in comparing
"grammar" (in a wider sense of orthography) to tyrannical government
and slavery, personifying it in jocular fashion as a "bitch".
He wrote in his Northamptonshire dialect,
introducing local words to the literary canon such as "pooty"
(snail), "lady-cow" (ladybird), "crizzle" (to crisp) and
"throstle" (song thrush).
In his early life he struggled to
find a place for his poetry in the changing literary fashions of the day. He
also felt that he did not belong with other peasants. Clare once wrote:
"I live here among the
ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seems careless of
having anything to do with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I
should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the
fields than in musing among my silent neighbors who are insensible to
everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose."
It is common to see an absence of
punctuation in many of Clare's original writings, although many publishers felt
the need to remedy this practice in the majority of his work. Clare argued with
his editors about how it should be presented to the public.
Clare grew up during a period of
massive changes in both town and countryside as the Industrial Revolution swept
Europe. Many former agricultural workers, including children, moved away from
the countryside to over-crowded cities, following factory work. The
Agricultural Revolution saw pastures ploughed up, trees and hedges uprooted,
the fens drained and the common land enclosed. This destruction of a
centuries-old way of life distressed Clare deeply. His political and social
views were predominantly conservative ("I am as far as my politics reaches
'King and Country'—no Innovations in Religion and Government say I."). He
refused even to complain about the subordinate position to which English
society relegated him, swearing that "with the old dish that was served to
my forefathers I am content."
His early work delights both in
nature and the cycle of the rural year. Poems such as "Winter
Evening", "Haymaking" and "Wood Pictures in Summer"
celebrate the beauty of the world and the certainties of rural life, where
animals must be fed and crops harvested. Poems such as "Little Trotty
Wagtail" show his sharp observation of wildlife, though The Badger shows
his lack of sentiment about the place of animals in the countryside. At this
time, he often used poetic forms such as the sonnet and the rhyming couplet.
His later poetry tends to be more meditative and uses forms similar to the folk
songs and ballads of his youth. An example of this is Evening.
His knowledge of the natural
world went far beyond that of the major Romantic poets. However, poems such as
"I Am" show a metaphysical depth on a par with his contemporary poets
and many of his pre-asylum poems deal with intricate play on the nature of
linguistics. His "bird's nest poems", it can be argued, illustrate
the self-awareness, and obsession with the creative process that captivated the
romantics. Clare was the most influential poet, aside from Wordsworth, to
practice in an older style.
Clare was relatively forgotten
during the later 19th century, but interest in his work was revived by Arthur
Symons in 1908, Edmund Blunden in 1920 and John and Anne Tibble in their
ground-breaking 1935 two-volume edition, while in 1949 Geoffrey Grigson edited
Poems of John Clare's Madness (published by Routledge and Kegan Paul). Benjamin
Britten set some of "May" from A Shepherd's Calendar in his Spring
Symphony of 1948, and included a setting of The Evening Primrose in his Five
Flower Songs.
Copyright to much of his work has
been claimed since 1965 by the editor of the Complete Poetry, Professor Eric
Robinson, though these claims were contested. Recent publishers have refused to
acknowledge the claim (especially in recent editions from Faber and Carcanet)
and it seems the copyright is now defunct.
The largest collection of
original Clare manuscripts are housed at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery,
where they are available to view by appointment.
Altering what Clare actually
wrote continued into the later 20th century; for instance, Helen Gardner
amended not only the punctuation but also the spelling and grammar in the New
Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950 (1972), which she edited.
Since 1993, the John Clare
Society of North America has organized an annual session of scholarly papers
concerning John Clare at the annual Convention of the Modern Language
Association of America.
AND HERE'S SOME ANIMALS FOR YOU...................
The Observation and Appreciation of Architecture
The
motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one. Honore
de Balzac
And
all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the
love for them that is in other people. Leo Tolstoy
The
most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost
insupportable. Victor Hugo
To
be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be
happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at
all. Helen
Rowland
Neither
a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the
making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart
Much
that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power. Bertrand Russell
Love
is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those
who have had any experience with them. H. L. Mencken