Washington Confidential 35 – Mortimer · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 35Part 3 · BALTIMORE, CONFIDENTIAL
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 35
Part 3 · BALTIMORE, CONFIDENTIAL
MortimerEnglish
(Authors’ note: This is a chapter, not the going-over that a Lait-Mortimer excavating job on our sixth biggest city, our second port in tonnage, truly rates. It is a by-product of this work, because aristocratic, historic Baltimore is the slumming-ground for thousands of escaping Washingtonians, only 36 miles away over fast rails and modern autobahns.)
Stir up your memory and try to think when and where you have read an “exposé” or any other study of Baltimore. You can recall pieces, kindly or vicious, about San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, and discussions of the peculiarities of Boston. But Baltimore, a main-line metropolis, with atmosphere and tradition and volume and character, is by-passed.
We were almost complete strangers there on field-work, though our tortuous delvings into the continental Mafia-managed Syndicate long ago fixed for us its place in the national network.
Baltimore is perhaps the perfect example of a Mafia-controlled city in action. For practical purposes it is a contraction of Chicago and an expansion of Galveston, extreme gangster-throttled cities with the same core of Sicilian manipulators who push the buttons and pull the levers.
Italians constitute one of the largest foreign elements in Baltimore and can always be depended on to vote in a bloc. Little Italy is centered around Albemarle and Fawn Sts., where much of the deviltry is hatched over “dago red” wine. Add to this the huge colored vote, which also is pretty solidly Democratic, and you have the makings of a perfect boss-run burg.
Our investigations into other American municipalities have shown where the Mafia dominates there is a disintegration of public morality and private conscience.
To this major seaport huge numbers of Italian and Sicilian immigrants have always been drawn. They formed the base for its underworld colony, made it a star on the Mafia map. It is a concentration point for illegally-entered Sicilians, stowed away on the freight steamers that ply between the Mediterranean and Chesapeake Bay, by a smuggling-ring. As these aliens become Americanized, grow rich and powerful in the rackets, they import new waves of Sicilians for the underworld’s menial tasks.
Baltimore is a favorite hide-out for Mafistas on the lam from other towns, especially New York, and is used interchangeably with Providence, R.I., for that. When one of your authors was assaulted by Sicilian hoodlums in the pay of Mafia tycoons last spring at Bill Miller’s Riviera in New Jersey, New York police investigating the crime were tipped off that the sluggers were being sheltered in Baltimore’s Little Italy, where they were feted as honored guests at a two-week wedding blowout for the daughter of one of the richest and most powerful Sicilians there. More recently, Tony Rotondo, a Brooklyn ex-convict wanted on suspicion of being the torpedo who slew Bill Drury, was found in Baltimore.
In recent years Baltimore has had an infiltration of Puerto Ricans. It is in handy sea communication with the Caribbean. It has also considerable air traffic with that area and at a cheaper rate than New York’s. The affinity between the Mafia underworld and the new Puerto Rican migrants quickly developed, as it did in East Harlem. Young Puerto Ricans are employed as dope-peddlers, pimps, and torpedoes. Their colony is not large as yet. What it lacks in size is made up for with Latin enthusiasm.
Baltimore’s Negro population is around 300,000. On the whole, the colored folk there are more orderly than their neighbors in the District of Columbia. Maryland is still a Southern state and its whites will stand for just so much. But Maryland’s Negroes have the right to vote and they have been taken in hand by the professional do-gooders, the New Dealers and other such ilk, who often work hand in hand with the underworld. The result is that the Negro, the Italian and the Puerto Rican votes are often enough to tip the balance in local elections and perpetuate the criminal rule.
This is expressed on all levels with “fixes” necessary and available for everything from a special license number which will exempt you from arrest to the go-ahead for a bagnio. (When you see a Maryland license ending in three zeros, you know the car is an untouchable.)
The town’s gambling czars are some Comi brothers, some Corbi brothers, all Italians, and George Goldberg, big in numbers.
Tom Shaw, original owner of the swank Club Charles, also was important in the gambling firmament until the Sicilians muscled in, taking a part of his night club as well. Nick Campofreda, a local radio sports announcer, was put in as permanent M.C.--not good either.
The Century Athletic Club on Baltimore St., was in the fight promoting business, as well as the central clearing house for bets. The Mafia had tried long and hard to declare itself in, always without success.
The deal was consummated three years ago, after a couple of swarthy boys from Brooklyn “stuck” it up. Every newspaper printed the story, but the cops denied it happened.
The Club has surrendered its fight charter, and is now simply a gambling place. Five leaders of the Sicilian colony are James Caranna, Frank Gattuso, Tom Lafata, John Maurice, and Joe Palozzolo. They control the potent minority votes--through threats and payoffs--and dictate to Baltimore’s political leaders.
The town’s top Democratic politicians are Bill “Boss” Curran, a lawyer, and Jack Pollack, former bootlegger, now in insurance. He runs the 4th District. Pollack was once arrested for murder but never indicted.
They split recently over patronage. Curran nominated his man for Governor, but Pollack threw his weight to the G.O.P. candidate, thus putting a Republican in the State House for the third time since 1864. He is expected to remember his political debt to Pollack.
The new Governor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, was the last Republican mayor of Baltimore. He had Pollack’s nod then, too.
The Governor can be a nuisance in Baltimore if he wants to, but never does. City police heads are appointed by him, not by the mayor. Beverly Ober, the incumbent commissioner, is “social,” and acceptable. Anyway Maryland law provides a set term for the top cop. McKeldin is expected to keep his snoot out of Baltimore--he needs it for re-election; and its Democratic legislators--who control the legislature--to pass his measures.
A powerful Democrat is Senator Herbert R. O’Conor. The R is for Romulus. O’Conor is a member of the Kefauver committee. Locally he works with whatever faction is in power.
George Muller, 4th ward boss and State Racing Commission Inspector is a local czar.
Juke-boxes, vending-devices, slot-machines and other Frank Costello monopolies are handled locally by Joseph Corbi, of the brothers, out on bail at this writing after being arrested by the F.B.I. as one of the chief operators of an international lottery ring.
Senator O’Conor is the sponsor of a new plan to bring in 36,000 Italian immigrants forthwith, mostly from Sicily. The Baltimore underworld hopes to route most of these to Maryland. But New York’s Republican Senator Ives has boosted the ante to 130,000. There are more Italian voters to appease in the Empire State.
The importation of Sicilians, legally and illegally, under the padrone system, is again growing. Huge numbers of aliens have been brought into the country and settled in certain key spots dominated by the Mafia, where they work off their fare and keep, usually by acting as dope-peddlers, numbers-runners or sluggers, or selling their daughters into white slavery.
Now let’s catch up with our mythical refugee from Washington, who comes to Baltimore for only one purpose--and that’s no good. You can be sure he finds what he wants in Baltimore. It’s got everything that’s no good.
The visitor’s first impression is of a dirty old town, with ancient, smoke-grimed structures and narrow, rambling streets, one-third of which are still illuminated by gas-lights--with Welsbach globes!
Baltimore is overrun by rubes. And the dress, manners and customs of most residents appear provincial. Washington is a city of hicks, too, but it is a yokel cosmopolis, with farmers drawn from all sections of the country, leavened with some civilized folk and foreigners.
Baltimore is the market for more chicken-farmers than any other of our cities. It is the place, therefore, where they come to raise the kind of hell a chicken-farmer would.
Washington women on the average seem smart and well-dressed compared to those in Baltimore. Yet Baltimore has some famous high-fashioned women’s shops which bring customers up from Washington. But the street types don’t patronize them, for they walk around in cheap house-dresses and shapeless coats of cloth, plush and phony fur.
This is the more surprising because Baltimoreans are the most finicky shoppers in the world. As we write this, the local department stores insert a pleading full-page ad in the papers:
“Gentle Reader.... Over 11,000 purchases daily are sent back to Baltimore stores. NO OTHER CITY EVEN COMES CLOSE to our percentage of returns.... Think how thousands of sales people lose productive time making over 3,000,000 sales a year that come back.”
Baltimore has a Skid Row that turns your stomach even in Baltimore, where so much of the burg looks like one Skid Row. Next door to and around the corner from some of the best hotels, cafes and department stores, you will find nude strippers, B-girls, hostesses and whores. Guttered drunks and street-walkers may be the badge of the Bowery elsewhere; here they are a common sight on every street.
The visitor heads for one of a half-dozen hotels, all but one of which are almost as ancient as the city itself. The newest, the Lord Baltimore, is almost a quarter-of-a-century old.
The hotels are cozy, but musty. The elderly Belvedere, once the class joint, is now part of the nation-wide Sheraton chain. Its cocktail lounge is the only social hangout left. The Emerson and the Southern are doddering old ladies. There is an air of laissez faire in Baltimore which extends to the inns. If you are quiet and gentlemanly about it, they probably won’t throw that broad out of your room. For it is a friendly town, as you will have many occasions to find out. Everyone talks to you, half the girls you meet want to go to bed with you. The name of its new airport is Friendship International.
When Judy Coplon worked for the Department of Justice she was considered the most amenable gal there, which made her the most popular. Harold Shapiro, a good-looking assistant attorney general, dated her frequently. It was testified at her first trial that they went together to Baltimore, where they spent a night in a room in the Southern Hotel.
Judy admitted that, but claimed she did not undress. Shapiro was an unhappy witness against her, because many thought he had acted for the government to lure her--kissed and told.
He moaned to friends in Baltimore, “It happens to lots of guys. But not everyone has a G-Man under the bed.”
The first item on the tourist’s agenda after he gets out of the hay is East Baltimore Street, part of the main commercial thoroughfare. From Gilford Avenue to Fallsway it is Hobo Heaven. You know when you are getting to what you want to find when you see a Salvation Army meeting on a street-corner, in front of a barker for a burlesque house. Other towns have honky-tonk lanes, too, but this is the only one where it is the main attraction.
Skid Row starts as soon as you walk past the Emerson and Southern hotels. You are right in the middle of it--a good half mile of avenue lined on both sides with burlesque theatres, cheap bars, low-class night clubs, novelty stores, shooting galleries, penny arcades, flop-houses and second-hand clothing stores. All burlesques and some saloons have hawkers who will pull you in by main force if you hesitate or stop to look at the pictures.
The most famous dump in town is a basement dive called the Oasis Club. Years ago, when we first visited it, it specialized in a rowdy floor-show, with a chorus of elderly relics, their drooping bosoms unencumbered by brassieres. It is now a strip-joint selling a parade of nudes, some “refined” with bubbles or fans, pretending to “tease.” Many peelers make $1,000 a week. But not these in Baltimore. The Oasis is non-union. The maximum salary is $35. They earn the rest of their living sitting out with male customers. We had seen crummy shows before, but nothing quite like the Oasis. Yet, when we stepped around, we found it tame for the course.
In Chicago, where nudes run wild, they never work at floor level. They are lewd on raised stages or on platforms behind bars. At the Oasis and a good many others in Baltimore, they work on the floor. If you are sitting at the ringside, you can reach out your hand and tap the babe on her bare behind. And she’ll love it.
One or two Oasis girls strip completely, without G-strings, plaster or anything on. The m.c. mouths continuous patter of dirty talk in which he encourages the customers to tickle the girls--anywhere. The girls talk back to the patrons, jump on their laps, stick their bare backsides in their faces, in the spirit of good clean fun.
Max Cohen sold the Oasis to Sam Levin. He agreed to get out of the strip business. But he immediately opened another room, around the corner, called the Miami. Levin sued for breach of contract and collected $50,000. The competition between these two sewers opened the town up wider than it had been in decades. Each tried to outdo the other in nudity. But a girl can’t take off more than all. Meanwhile, other strip dives found themselves outstripped and had to meet the new mode.
The Miami is around the corner from city hall and police headquarters. The mayor can turn at his desk and look into the Miami, and many other dives. This is one of the most vicious and lawless areas in the world. The mayor of Baltimore, whose present term expires in May, 1951, is Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a Democrat. He was chosen Permanent President of the U.S. Attorney-General’s Continuing Conference on Crime and Corruption last winter.
Mayor D’Alesandro was, before his election as the city’s chief executive, the “Mayor of Little Italy.” His rise to the seats of the mighty, did not turn his head. He refused to move from the slums where he had always lived, at 245 Fawn St. Instead he rebuilt his home into a modernistic mansion, a show place surrounded by hovels.
Next door, and connected, is a new commercial building in which the Mayor operates his insurance business and his wife her home-beauty treatment supply company.
If the Mayor returns late from a banquet, political meeting or night session of the City Council, he will not be forced to travel through dark and deserted streets. For the immediate vicinity of his home is the bright light section of Little Italy, where neon-lighted restaurants run all night, and serve liquor in tea-cups, and some openly in orthodox set-ups.
Kid Julian runs one such place nearby, a mob hangout.
It is interesting how Baltimore’s Mayor was chosen to head the Conference on Crime over mob-fighting Mayors Bowron, of Los Angeles, and Morrison, of New Orleans. We know the inside. We covered the inaugural meeting in Washington at which all problems were solved in two hours, after President Truman opened it with a pep talk in which he said there’d be no crime if everyone read the Bible and stopped for traffic lights.
“Look at me,” he said. “I am the most important man in the world. Yet I instruct my chauffeur to stop at all red lights.”
That night the President’s car went through 17 en route to a banquet at the Statler.
Mayor D’Alesandro’s honor came after he read an intelligent paper to the delegates. It came as a surprise that D’Alesandro had such a fine grasp on the subject. It came to him that way, too.
You see, when he read it, it was the first time he had seen it. It was written for him by a Baltimore newspaperman.
The location of the deadfalls in Baltimore reminds us of Galveston, where the gambling and red-light districts, controlled by Syndicate-allied bosses Sam and Rosario Maceo, are also contiguous to the offices of the law enforcement authorities.
The Miami Club is on the main floor of a building which advertises “Rooms Upstairs.” It has some of the most disgusting acts we have ever seen. Girls in the show will sit out with you on request. Every time you pay for your round of drinks--they require you to pay after each round--the sitter asks you for a dollar tip. The girls who work in the show get no commission on these drinks. But if they don’t have a drink in front of them all the time they risk being fired. Their base pay, as “entertainers” runs from $20 to $35 a week. The rest they make from the tips and from deals arranged for after work. Some of the girls in the show aren’t bad lookers. We spoke to one young Puerto Rican, named Aida, who could have gone places in New York if she had any spunk or talent. Here all she did was walk around the floor without a stitch on. Off her it looked good.
The m.c. at the Miami, when we got nauseated there, was a fairy. Some of the older dames in the show are lesbians. Many fags frequent the place. The girls told us all that freely, though not free.
The rest of the customers are servicemen, riffraff, sight-seers and drunks. One seldom brings his wife or girl friend to this place. One of the nights we were there we saw two policemen and a lieutenant in uniform, sitting at a table drinking, surrounded by girls. At the next table was a wizened little old fellow tossing dough away on the broads. We figured him for a chump. But he turned out to be a retired Baltimore police captain who quit so rich that he can afford to spend $500 a night, that way.
Many of the lower-paid employes of the British and French embassies in Washington hang out at the Miami. Occasionally some of these girls are brought to Washington when low down high-jinks are wanted. The Miami advertises regularly in the Washington dailies.
The waitresses at the Miami seem to be independent contractors. Tables are not assigned. Customers are continuously solicited for orders by dozens of different ones. Each carries a purse and you settle with her after every round. She pays cash at the bar for it. It seems any girl who wants to can come in and hustle drinks this way without being hired. Some wear slacks, others street clothes, and a few sport cheap evening gowns. They will sit with you with no coaxing. One of our waitresses sat down and said, “My tables always buy me a drink.”
At the Miami Club we often saw men seated with girls from the show or waitresses and making obscene passes--not in booths, right out on the open floor.
But the ultimate in lowdown shows goes to Kay’s, on Frederick and Baltimore Sts., across from the Oasis. There is nothing like Kay’s anywhere, and we’ve seen them all. The dance-floor is about 15 feet square, all tables on the floor. Practically every girl in the show works naked and does raw routines within reaching distance of those at ringside. The women, with words and motions that wouldn’t be allowed in Fultah Fisher’s boarding-house, solicit men from the floor. One of the most startling dirty acts we’ve ever seen was done by a woman billed as Moana. She introduced it as her “Whore Dance.”
Here are some of the sights of East Baltimore Street:
At Number 116, a couple of doors from the Emerson Hotel, is an amusement arcade where the kid pick-ups come. Those who like them so can walk off with 13-year-olds.
The first thing you notice is the profusion of stores and shops and stands selling “sanitary rubber goods” and other immediate accessories. In the lobby of the Globe Burlesque Theatre is a sign reading, “SALAMI--RUBBER GOODS.”
A sign in the window of 424 East Baltimore reads “TRY OUR HAMBURGER--SANITARY RUBBER GOODS--SHOOTING GALLERY IN REAR.”
Most of these novelty stores and newsstands also sell dirty pictures, including series of snaps showing strips. In one we recognized a New York chorine we know. On sale are playing-cards with naked females on the faces.
In the window of the Maryland Gift Shop, in addition to a lavish display of “rubber goods” and salacious pictures, are switchblade knives. The newsstand at Gay and Baltimore Streets has “rubber goods” on display beside newspapers and the usual pictures. Gordon’s Novelty Shop, at 428 East Baltimore Street, hands out a business card with a drawing on the reverse side showing a short-skirted cutie standing next to a young soldier in a rainstorm, with the caption: “Don’t forget your rubbers.”
Though we saw “rubber goods” displayed in at least 40 store windows, not only on Baltimore Street, but in other parts of town, we can’t remember seeing so many pregnant women anywhere else. In New York one seldom sees such displays, even on the streets.
Many Baltimore Street joints are pointedly pick-up bars. One is the 408. Another is the Midway Bar, where the local hoodlum hot-shots hang out. Harry’s Bar has strippers and pick-ups. Katherine’s Bar goes in for a couple of cheap teasers and a lot of cheap whores working the tables. Next door to Katherine’s Bar is a sign, “Rooms one dollar a night.”
Down a couple of blocks in the Victoria Hotel, a tawdry assignation joint, is a dive called Bettye Mills Night Club. It was once known as the Stork Club, but Sherman Billingsley brought suit. It has a couple of long bars where soiled strippers work on platforms, above the bartenders. While you sit on the stools, dames come over and ask you to buy them drinks. This doesn’t surprise anyone, because they do it in every low joint in town. Such places have female bartenders, and many lean over and kiss customers. If not too busy, they come out and sit with the trade.
One bartender at Bettye Mills is a character known as Mitzie, a plump little broad, a retired stripper. She has a running line of patter. If you give her a dollar tip she will pull up her skirt, pull down her panties and stash the bill in full sight of the customer.
In the men’s room is an ad which reads: “Sanitubes for defense, protect our Army and Navy.”
Bettye is the town’s chief call girl madame, operating through the hotel switchboard.
The Village Bar, 12 Harrison Street, around the corner from Baltimore, is a pick-up dump with B girls, hustlers and barmaids who go through the customers, and we mean just that. Three of us saw a guy get rolled. He was a good-looking, well-dressed young fellow, obviously plastered. A whore in an evening gown sat next to him and pawed him with both her hands. Then she got up, went to the women’s room for a minute, then took a seat by herself at the far end of the bar. When the cluck woke up, he frisked his pockets for his poke. It was gone. Still in a daze, he wandered around the room looking for the dame. She didn’t give him a glance. He wandered off, befuddled.
Even the better places have circular bars. We figured that out--they are better for pick-ups. You can look at the girls from front, then motion them. But in most places you don’t have to motion. They practically attack you. Not even in Chicago are they so voracious. They don’t ask you to buy a drink. They move right in and order.
Few Baltimore B girls work on commission. Most of them live on their tips, which they solicit after they’ve bilked you for drinks. The procedure is for a girl to move in next to you, order without asking, then get ready to blow if not propositioned and demand a dollar tip for her “company.”
Some saloons which specialize in better-looking ones give them $5 a night and they keep their tips and anything they can make after hours. Entertainers must cadge drinks to keep their jobs. No commissions.
Baltimore has a 2 A.M. closing, which except in Little Italy is generally observed--one of the few laws that is. These easy hours give the girls plenty of time to pick up money after work. A strange sight is East Baltimore Street a few minutes before 2 A.M. It is lined with walls of men waiting for the frails to come out of the bars, strip dives and burlesque houses. These are not pimps or dates, but men on the hunt who saved drink-money and put a ceiling on the commodity. Hundreds of pick-ups are made this way every night, openly in front of the few cops there on patrol.
Streetwalkers pace in front of the filling-station at Baltimore and Fallsway. They are very low-grade stuff. Asking prices start at five bucks and waver to what they can get.
Parlor-houses have about disappeared from Baltimore, as from most cities, but there is a line of them in the 600 block, on West North Avenue. There’s one in the 1000 block of N. Charles, also one next door to the Blue Mirror.
Most of the dives are on Baltimore St. and in the vicinity, but there is no monopoly there. A store next to May’s department store, in the retail shopping district, has a window display of “sanitary rubber goods” and switch-blade knives. Ditto is a shop known as Blizzards, on Eutaw Street, which advertises a bargain, “Three dozen latex, one dollar.”
There’s a strip-dive, the Picadilly, around the corner from the Lord Baltimore Hotel, in the midst of the financial and retail district. It has pretty lowdown floor-shows and swarms with hustlers who work the bars. We saw one cute bartender there, calling herself Val, about 18, from some mountain town in Tennessee. For a dollar tip she’d let you play around and never slap your hands.
The joints on East Baltimore are bad--but on the outskirts of town, on the Pulaski Highway at Fayette Street, you find places not patronized by tourists, bums or sailors, but by local kids. You see nude floor-shows at the Ambassador, on Fayette, and at De Carlos, on the Highway, that would make Baltimore Street bums blush.
The Big Mob operates or protects the dives. It owns many of the good places, too. Every dump and purveyor of filthy pictures now has a sign in the window: “Re-elect D’Alesandro.”
The better region is along Charles Street, where the more expensive specialty and antique shops and the few better-class night clubs and lounges are. Among them is the Club Charles, part of the circuit which includes the Copacabana in New York, the Chez Paree in Chicago, and clubs in Saratoga, Miami, Las Vegas and New Orleans, which play such acts as Sophie Tucker and Joe E. Lewis. When the heat isn’t on, a game runs in the back room of the Charles.
Less elaborate is the Chanticleer, but far above deadfalls in the other part of town. It boasts good floor shows and “name strippers.” Among the good cocktail lounges in this district are the Coronet and the Blue Mirror. These are places where men take their own girls or their business associates. They provide no entertainment, but usually have a musical trio behind the bar.
As the 2 o’clock closing ordinance is generally obeyed, a problem in Baltimore after hours is to find a place to drink on the premises. But liquor package stores sell until 2 A.M., and most licensees are permitted to sell for off-premise consumption, too--a procedure practically unknown in other parts of the country. So, if you still want a drink at 2, you buy a bottle and take it with you.
Ask a cab-driver where you can get a drink after hours and he will know only of two spots--outside of Little Italy--Sue’s and Hector’s. Sue’s is a lowdown dump. Unless you are known, all you can buy there after the deadline is beer, which is also illegal. If they know you, they will sell you rotgut liquor.
Hector’s is not quite so bad, but it closes Saturdays.
The night after we were given a courtesy card to the Press Club, 100 West Fayette Street, it was raided for selling liquor at 3:30 A.M. to non-members.
There are many cheating private flats and remodeled homes, especially on Charles St., where chumps are steered from the Club Charles and the Chanticleer, for girls, booze and stud poker.
Bell-boys and hackies can steer you to anything. Baltimore cab-drivers have to scrabble for a living. The legal rates are about the lowest in the country. You can go almost anywhere in town for a quarter and tips are meagre.
Gambling is plentiful and easy of access. There are horserooms on Eutaw Street, across from the Public Market. Most of the rooms, however, are in the outlying sections of South Baltimore and Northeast Baltimore. We found three running in the 1900 block of Greenmount Avenue and others in the 2400 block, the 2500, 2700, 2800, and 3300 blocks of Greenmount Ave. There was wide open gambling in the 1800 block, the 2000, 4300, and 5500 blocks of Hartford Road, as well as the 5200 block of Bel Air Road.
Casinos and horserooms run openly across the County line in Anne Arundel, and a regular scheduled limousine service is maintained to transport suckers.
The cars leave at frequent intervals from Redwood and South Sts., and the Biltmore Hotel, Fayette and Paca.
Some of these suburban gaming hells are guarded by armed men stationed in pill boxes commanding the gates.
There are thousands of one-armed bandits and gambling devices in the city, where they are illegal even by local option. At this writing, the city itself was in the gambling business with a game room in the new Friendship International Airport, eight miles south of the city, in Anne Arundel County, where slot-machines are tolerated by illegal local option. But the airport is owned by the City of Baltimore, which is officially on record against slot-machines.
Into the game-room of the airport came something new in the way of trying your luck. It is a combination cigaret-vender and slot-machine. You can buy cigarets at the usual price, 20 cents. But if you want “action” you put in a nickel instead of the 20 cents, and hope to get up to 20 packages of your favorite brand--or nothing. The Frank Costello enterprises are giving the machine its first tryout under this blessing of legality.
The gambling payoff in Baltimore is made through the police. North Side cops get $10 a week for their services, those on the South Side only $7.50.
Sergeants rate $25 and lieutenants $50, with higher officers greased accordingly.
The cops collect the take from the numbers men and bookmakers and deliver it to their higher-ups, who then transmit the “documents” to the gang collector.
One reason for this complicated business is a shrewd point of law to get around the income tax laws. The government will not allow a deduction for graft to public officials but if the payoff is taken off the top before the mobsters get theirs, then all they need to pay on is what they receive, the net.
Baltimore is a way-station on the international underground railroad that transports narcotics. Considerable foreign stuff comes in through the port. It is also brought down from New York in quantity and stored in the Italian and Negro sections, awaiting transportation in smaller packages to the District of Columbia.
Local street sales of narcotics are concentrated on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Negro district, where individual caps of heroin, morphine and reefers are available cheap. Puerto Rican and Italian peddlers work the white dives in East Baltimore Street, where they sell to whores, strippers and B girls, many of whom use it and others sell it.
Baltimore’s Little Harlem--Pennsylvania Avenue--is more peaceful than the Negro section of any other large town we ever gandered.
The cops don’t let the colored places get away with anywhere near what they act blind to in the white spots on East Baltimore. Some of the cleanest and best night clubs in town are the black-and-tan resorts in the Pennsylvania Avenue district. Though whites are welcome, they seldom visit them.
Gamby’s is an orderly colored night club with fine Negro entertainment and a small but excellent line of tan chorines. There was no stripping here, though one pretty wench, billed as an exotic dancer, shook swiveled hips but took off nothing. It occurred to us that we had never seen a Negro stripper anywhere. The girls of that race refuse to vulgarize themselves in public to the extent that many white girls do. Not only was Gamby’s show clean and entertaining, but the customers, all colored, behaved well and were better dressed than the social sewage we saw in most of the white dives.
We saw no soliciting here. But there was a one-armed bandit in the bar. Willie Adams is the numbers boss of Darktown.
The Negro joints close on the dot, and then the streets fill up with thousands of laughing, shouting, usually sober merrymakers. White policemen patrol the streets in pairs, but at ease. We saw one buck pull a razor on his sugar in front of Gamby’s. Two white cops in a squad car drove off.
Baltimore has a large homosexual population, which is swelled by visiting fairies from Washington. On mild nights you can find them in Mt. Vernon Place, under the Washington monument, where they pick each other up and make liaisons. A favorite gathering place is the Plaza Bar, formerly Longfellows, at Madison and Charles. They also patronize Ball’s and the Harem, the latter a corny night club with two entrances, one leading to a stag bar with a sign on the door, “For Men Only,” and a place on Mulberry near Howard. The lesbians hang out at the Earl Club.
Baltimore follows the trend of most large cities, other than New York, in that its best people never go to cafes in town. When they feel the need of night life they come to New York. When they want to drink and dance in Baltimore, they do it at house parties or at country clubs. So most of the patrons of Baltimore liquor dispensaries are the lowest classes. The few better rooms, like the Club Charles, cater to the sporty set, big spenders, gamblers, buyers and salesmen and trippers up for the night from Washington.
When the Charles has a first-rate attraction it advertises in the Washington papers. For a couple of years the ancient Ford’s Theatre in Baltimore was the only house within 150 miles of the District offering legitimate shows. Ford’s gets top road companies and attracts show-lovers from Washington, who drive up for a sea-food dinner, for which Baltimore is famous, an evening at the theatre, then take in the cabaret at the Club Charles.
Baltimore’s big night life season begins when the races at Maryland’s famed tracks bring in loose money from all over the country. Then the town is brilliant, gambling is rampant and the whores cash in on bonanza.
The city is the center of the so-called “Minor League” racing circuit. There are five half-mile tracks in Maryland, which run almost all year, with unknown plugs and has-beens, raced by “Gypsy” horsemen. These are a unique breed. They own one or maybe two nags, which they may have picked up for dog-meat money. They train them themselves and often are their own jockeys. It is not uncommon for them to live in the stables with their horses and even travel from track to track on the horses’ backs. The entry fees at these tracks are as low as $10 and a $100 purse is something to shoot at. The shenanigans at these tracks, controlled by the gamblers in Baltimore, are atrocious.
This smudgy picture of the Baltimore that embraces the visitor brings up the question: How Come?
This city of H. L. Mencken has long prided itself upon rebellion against what most of its citizens believe to be an invasion of their private rights. Prudery was never profitable in Baltimore. The Prohibition Amendment was deported as an undesirable alien.
One old-timer said, “You think this is something? You should have been here 50 years ago!”
Baltimore, the mid-Continent seaport, is one of the most provincial of Eastern cities. In some of its set ways it is a backwash to the colonial days and the cavaliers.
Yet Baltimore is the “big city” to thousands of hillbillies from the nearby mountains of Western Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, and the poor white trash of Maryland’s Eastern shore counties on the seaboard, and Delaware. They are the folk who trade and settle in Baltimore.
It took us some time to figure out why there were so many pretty young girls whoring in Baltimore. If they left home to sell it, why didn’t they go on to New York? Research showed they came from the nearby hills and farms; even those with roots deeper in the South or in the reaches of West Virginia came to Baltimore because that was as far as their small savings or imagination could get them. Some planned to make the major league when they saved up a roll, but they were the exceptions.
One girl put it up to us frankly. All she had to offer was all she had. New York, the word has spread, is closed to hustling hucksters. New York’s market trades through switchboards for smartly turned-out call gals, models, chorines, pent-house patooties. A rosy-cheeked milkmaid in gingham dress, with no capital, would be pinched and jugged if she winked to a Sand Street sailor.
The hungry harlots on Baltimore’s streets and in its stinking saloons come there because the whisper back home is that it’s the place to go to. Often procurers have brought them and started them, or they are beckoned by bims who are there. “Bread of infamy” has more raisins than home-baked loaves.
After soliciting at the bars a while, some get ambition. They see strippers don’t even know how to walk across a stage, a requisite in even repellent Chicago. They need only take off clothes, and all gals know how to do that.
Few, if any strippers, except at a couple of places that import semi-names, were ever in show business before. Pretty soon they’re local celebrities, with a special following. These nude numbers are heart-breaking to Broadway-wise guys who’ve known the best. Few have looks, none have wit, and at $35 a week most of these stag-show strumpets are overpaid.
Like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco have flavor, Baltimore exceeds both as a ship port, yet it has little appeal for travelers.
Seafaring folk whose vessels bring them into Baltimore’s fine harbor are an unromantic lot. No important passenger ships call. Those that do carry steerage. Its freighters are cattle-ships and oil-tankers.
In the thousands of uniform flat-front red brick homes with the balustradeless white stoops, unique to Baltimore, live good, solid people, white and Negro.
The department of political skulduggery, though, in the Free State metropolis, is a streamlined model, oiled up and with all the gadgets.
Baltimore is exceeded in population only by New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Detroit. It has passed Boston, St. Louis and Cleveland, and is growing. It is a combination of an anachronism and a boom town. Labor is flocking in to work its mushrooming airplane factories, huge wholesale trading houses, needle-trade shops and ship works. These are mostly people without roots.
But Baltimore is getting the gravy that overflows from crowded Washington, the hot money out for the kind of fun not tolerated in the District. Baltimore is somewhat in the state of development Chicago knew four decades ago. That city’s political morality is still primitive. The same trend is manifest in Baltimore. Yet crimes of violence and serious felonies are not as pronounced as in either Washington or Chicago.
Most citizens are openly on the side of the law-breakers, too; the concepts of liberty and non-interference play into the hands of the hoodlums and the harpies.
At this writing, any and all forms of vice are tolerated and protected. There is a price for everything, and it’s not much. In fact, it costs only $500 to jump to the top of the police promotion list.
