Ah! Prohibition. Fortunes were made on both sides of the law. It gave rise to Elliot Ness and J. Edgar Hoover. Every large American city had pockets of Mafia and Mafia-adjacent activity. And it put one Cincinnati suburb on the map. Across the river lies Newport, Kentucky, reachable today by a freeway, the Taylor-Southgate Bridge, and the Purple People Bridge, which formerly carried US 27 and the Louisville &Nashville Railroad. It's now a pedestrian and bike bridge and frequently hosts events.
[Photos sourced from The Northerner to the best of my knowledge.]
But during prohibition, a man named George Remus, called the King of the Bootleggers, ran his criminal empire in Cincinnati from Newport. But a funny thing happened to George. Just as Prohibition came to an end, he got arrested for… Well… Bootlegging.
At the same time, Cincinnati was as mobbed up as any city in Ohio. The city fought back by creating Charter government, run by a city manager. What's a poor mobster to do? They packed up their casinos and dens of ill repute and moved over to Newport, now open territory. Soon, two types of joints opened: knock-out joints, your typical hole in the wall with some rooms upstairs where "hostesses" would entertain gentleman clients, and carpet joints, illegal casinos and, sometimes, brothels that operated in the open and would not be out of place in Las Vegas of the 1950s through the 1970s. One such carpet joint, located between York and Monmouth Streets near what is now the Newport Aquarium, later became a Jeff Ruby restaurant and now a mob-themed event center called The Syndicate. Since Ruby's days as owner, the Syndicate has kept its carpet joint motif. Many celebrities from Frank Sinatra to Marilyn Monroe frequented the more glamorous establishments. On the other hand, a young blackjack dealer and singer from Steubenville, Ohio, named Dean Martin, dealt at a knockout joint later occupied by a bar owned by Reds legend Tom Browning.
There was no Cincinnati mob to speak of. Newport wiseguys answered to the Cleveland mob, who in turn answered to what's now the Genovese crime family in New York. But others had a hand in the boom times, specifically Bugsey Siegel and Meyer Lansky had money in Newport. It became a proof-of-concept for what they would build in Las Vegas.
But the good times ended in the 1960s. A man named George Ratterman ran for Campbell County sheriff as a reform candidate. At the same time, Robert Kennedy received a mandate from his brother Jack to crack down on organized crime. So RFK (Sr.) set his sites on Newport. The mob, afraid Ratterman would mean the end of the mob in Newport, drugged him and tried to frame him by having a stripper named April Flowers (not her real name) pose with the unconscious candidate in an effort to derail his candidacy. Everyone saw the picture as a fake. By 1970, the operation was in tatters.
A few remnants lingered on after that. Larry Flynt bought a famous strip joint on Monmouth known as the Brass Ass. Flynt later sold it. The Brass Ass became a local tourist trap and only closed last month. The Syndicate, of course, exists as a mob-themed event center after hosting the Rat Pack and the like back in Newport's sin-and-vice heyday. But it's a, like, a respectable joint.
But if you want to know what drove the final nail in the coffin, look no further than the Bevery Hills Supper Club in neighboring Southgate. The Club was the areas most famous carpet joint, still open long after gambling operations had been run out of Northern Kentucky. If the police raided, the gambling gear would be shoved into another room until the police did their business. And again, celebrities frequented the place as both performers and guests. But one night in 1977, a fire swept through the club, killing 165 people and injuring 200 more. The club was never rebuilt, and a memorial now stands on the site.
And I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of the most infamous post-mob vice incidents in Newport. A Cincinnati City Council member drove over the late, lamented Central Avenue Bridge to Newport for a massage. As in one with a "happy ending." He wrote a check. It bounced. It became a running joke in Cincinnati for years. But...The councilman returned to Council next term, got elected mayor, and later became a well-respected anchorman on WLWT. Then he had his own talkshow.
The Jerry Springer Show.
But his most infamous episode came about because the vice of Newport outlived the mob.
I hadn’t known about Newport, but I was cognizant of that type of second city enterprise, namely Terre Haute, at one time referred to as Chicago mobs’ playground, a reputation that stuck around into the 1950s.
ReplyDeleteOne of the tales involved a brothel resort that catered to both women and men that straddled the Indiana-Illinois border, possibly owned by a woman. It proved particularly difficult to shut down because Illinois investigators were told the actual venue was on the Indiana side and Indiana authorities were told it was on the Illinois side. Presumably the feds stepped in and resolved the situation.
I fixed my brother up with a stunning Terre Haute girl. He took her to his prom but eventually moved on. Only later did I learn she was the daughter of a well known madam, a woman who had treated me kindly and generously. I had no clue, but what college sophomore does?
BTW, when I visited Cincinnati as a kid, I thought it a beautiful city with lovely hills and greenery. Apparently city fathers went mad, overbuilding, covering every living bit of photosynthesis with concrete, and choking downtown with skyscrapers walling the valley with inescapable petrol fumes. I’ll never forgive them.
DeleteI visited Cincinnati in 1990 or so with my then-boyfriend & was unimpressed. It was kind of a concrete jungle. It seemed that any time a Cincinnati resident did something noteworthy, a commemorative beer appeared on the market. That time, catcher Johnny Bench was inducted into the Hall of Fame ... I looked for daycare centers & computer stores, of which there were hardly any, in Cincinnati to see if I would like to live there. No thank you.
DeleteThe mob was also involved in multiple things in the rest of Kentucky. Back in very late 90s, my husband and I visited my father in Frankfort, KY, and we drove up to where Mother was buried, etc. Then we stopped in Cynthiana, where there's a great Italian restaurant - perhaps a little too great for a town of that size, if you know what I mean. My father reacted to Mother's death by picking fights with the universe, via waiters and clerks and everyone else. Anyway, the food was VERY good, but he bitched and moaned to the waiter, who gave him the side eye. The manager came over and my father ripped into him. Manager took it without a blink. When my father was all done, the manager said, "I got too much to do to sit around and listen to your bullshit. You either eat or get out." And we got out. In the car, my angry father asked me, "Why did we just get up and leave?" I looked at him and said, "Because they were Mafia." And he shut up about it, never brought it up again.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot that goes on in small towns. Lot that goes on in Kentucky. Don't forget the horse races and the gambling that goes with it.