The Sin Business

  In 1926, Tom Pendergast established an alliance in Kansas City that would have a profound impact on the city’s burgeoning population of musicians. Though this alliance did not directly involve the musicians, it did involve two spheres of influence that would ultimately shape their destinies: the machine and the underworld.

  It was perhaps inevitable that Pendergast would join forces with mafioso Johnny Lazia. A suave and sophisticated gangster with wire-rimmed spectacles and a tasteful assortment of suits tailored in Little Italy, Lazia seemed more like a bank president or legitimate captain of industry than a hoodlum. Officially, he was a paid organizer for the North End Democratic Club, which is how he and Pendergast became bosom buddies. As personalities, their temperaments were opposite, Pendergast the gregarious ruffian, Lazia the circumspect operator. But as businessmen, they were two peas in a pod.

  Lazia was born John Francis Lazio (the spelling was later changed for reasons unknown) on September 22, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York, to Sicilian immigrant parents.* The Lazia family moved to Kansas City when John was a child and settled in a cold-water flat at 406 Campbell Street. The city had become something of a mecca for Italian immigrants. Some had moved north from New Orleans in the years following the infamous Parish Prison lynching, a seminal event in the social trajectory of Italians in America. Blatant racism had contributed to an insular mentality among the sons and daughters of Italy. In Kansas City, Italians settled in the North End, an immigrant neighborhood where Italian was spoken in the street more often than English.

  The North End was Kansas City’s Little Italy. For Italian immigrants who sought to get ahead in life, the inherent insularity of the community was a double-edged sword. For young Johnny Lazia, it was initially advantageous. At the age of sixteen, through a family connection he landed a job as a law clerk with a downtown law firm. Lazia was a good student, and his family had every reason to believe that their son was on the road to a reputable life. Lazia may have been a lawyer of some type had he not fallen in with the darker influences of his neighborhood. Ironically, he would become a man of stature and influence in Kansas City, just not in the way his parents imagined.

  The Black Hand was prominent in Kansas City, just as it had been in New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When assessing the prevalence of this criminal society in U.S. cities, factoring in bias and racism is essential. Yes, La Mano Nera did exist. The organization was known to leave threatening notes and other evidence of its crimes, and its existence was an open secret in Little Italy. But the phenomenon was such an irresistible source of sensationalism for the local press that it was hard to assess its true threat to the average Italian American citizen.

  Mostly, it was a threat to the community’s business and power structure. In 1911, Joseph Raimo, a Kansas City policeman—originally born in Naples—received a note from the Black Hand that was published in a Kansas City newspaper. Officer Raimo, thirty-four years old, had played a role in the investigation of a woman shop owner in the North End who was brutally murdered. The killing was believed to have been an act of reprisal by the Black Hand.

  The note was delivered to Raimo at his home. In Italian, it read: “Mr. Raimo, Traitor, the others want money and you know it and this notice brings you death. Beware!! Last notice!” A dripping dagger and black cross, symbols of the Black Hand, were scrawled on the page.

  One week later, Raimo was gunned down while walking on a city street. His funeral at Holy Rosary Catholic Church on Missouri Avenue in the North End was one of the most widely attended services to ever take place in the neighborhood. Still, many naysayers, including the acting Italian consular general in the state of Missouri, contended that there was no such thing as a secret Italian criminal society. In the press, the consul general offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove the existence of the mafia.

  There is no evidence to suggest that Johnny Lazia, at the age of sixteen, was a member of the mafia. But there is little doubt that the existence of the Black Hand, a mysterious and violent cult, had a corrosive effect on young males in the neighborhood. Though he was gainfully employed with a decent job as a law clerk, Lazia succumbed to the temptations of his generation and fell in with a group of hoodlums. Armed robbery became their specialty. It is not known how many jobs pulled off by this teenage band of gangsters were successful, but it is known that on an afternoon in 1916, Lazia and a couple of his cohorts robbed a saloon and engaged in a shootout with local police. Lazia was the only person captured. He kept his mouth shut and took the fall, receiving a sentence of twelve years for armed robbery. In 1917, just nine months after having been sentenced, the lieutenant governor of Missouri paroled Lazia on the condition that he join the U.S. Army. Lazia took the deal and was released from prison. He ignored the conditions of his parole and never joined the army; instead, he returned to Kansas City and went to work for the political machine of Tom Pendergast.

  By the early 1920s, Lazia was known as an up-and-coming power in the city’s mafia, but you wouldn’t know it by his rap sheet. After his youthful stint in prison, he would never again be charged with a violent street crime. At a time when Kansas City would rise to be the city with the sixth most homicides in the United States, with many of the killings an extension of organized crime activities, Lazia was a master at insulating himself from prosecution. Undoubtedly, Lazia played a role in ordering a number of these murders. He was to become the most powerful bootlegger in the city—friend, confidant, and business partner of Al Capone in Chicago—but he was also a master at keeping his hands clean.

  Along with the illegal booze business, which made Lazia a millionaire many times over in a relatively short period of time, he became renowned for something else that would define Kansas City during the 1920s and 1930s.

  With all of the country’s major locomotive lines running through the city, and the burgeoning popularity of the motorcar, Kansas City was a central stop for businessmen traveling across the United States. Pendergast and the city’s overseers had envisioned as much and set about establishing the city as a sex and gambling mecca. As in New Orleans with Storyville, the idea was to create a vice district that would facilitate the city’s sin trade. Booze was the main attraction, but gambling, sex, and narcotics were not far behind.

  Wrote a visitor from New York, “If you want excitement with roulette, cards, dice, the races, or a dozen other forms of chance ask a patrolman on the Kansas City streets. He’ll guide you. It’s perfectly open. You just walk in.”

  As for sex, wrote Edward Morrow of the Omaha World Herald, “If you want to see some sin, forget Paris and go to Kansas City.”

  Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics declared that Tom’s Town was the “drug distribution center of the Midwest.” Anslinger’s agents staged raids in Kansas City, but they almost always came up empty because Lazia or Pendergast were tipped off ahead of time.

  Commercial sex was plentiful—not just prostitution, from cathouses to upscale bordellos, but also a variety of so-called “bawdy houses” where striptease and full-frontal nudity were on display. Most of these clubs were located in and around downtown. Among the most well known were the Blue Goose, the Winnie Winkle, the Oriental, and the Jubilesta. By far the most notorious was the Chesterfield Club, located downtown at 320 E. 9th Street, where the waitresses wore only see-through cellophane aprons that revealed their pubic hair to have been shaved into the pips of playing cards: diamonds, spades, hearts, and clubs. When patrons left a tip, they folded the bill and placed it at the edge of the table; the waitresses were trained to squat down oh-so-delicately and pick up the money with their vaginas.

  Occasionally, the kinkiness turned dark. In his biography of saxophone legend Charlie Parker, Kansas City Lightning, author Stanley Crouch described the goings-on at the Antlers Club, located in the neighborhood of West Bottoms, birthplace of Tom Pendergast. Saturday nights at the Antlers included private sex shows that some described as “freak shows.” Writes Crouch:

  The shows, also known to the musicians as “smokers,” generally involved sex acts presented in an almost vaudeville style, with the band performing musical backgrounds for different kinds of erotic exhibitions. Men in dresses were seen performing oral sex on other men or being mounted by men after being lubricated in a slow, sexual preamble. Women had sex with other women. Some puffed cigars with their vaginas; others had sex with animals.

  The bacchanalia both public and private fueled the drinking and gambling. It was all highly profitable for those in control. Pendergast’s take reportedly was $20 million annually from gambling, with another $12 million from prostitution and narcotics. And that doesn’t even include money from the booze rackets, which was possibly more than all of the above combined.

  Lazia may well have raked in even more, as he was the day-to-day overseer of these criminal operations and the first to calculate proceeds, which he divided up along with representatives from the Pendergast machine.

  Jazz was an essential element of it all. Most of the gambling parlors and strip clubs and private sex shows had live bands. Pendergast himself, known to be a family man and churchgoer, was not a patron of the clubs or the music, but many of the mobsters were jazz lovers who owned clubs, which they used to launder their criminal proceeds. Big Joe Lusco, a mafia rival of Lazia’s, owned Dante’s Inferno, an iconic nightclub on Independence Avenue. Not to be outdone, in the late 1920s Lazia opened the Cuban Gardens, a restaurant, nightclub, and casino located alongside a dog-racing track owned by Boss Tom.

  The Cuban Gardens was a dream come true for the mafiosi. In August 1927, like a lot of prominent gangsters of his generation, Lazia had made a trip to Havana, Cuba. He was smitten. There is a photo of the young gangster at Sloppy Joe’s, the preeminent tourist bar in Havana, along with his wife, Marie, and Charlie “Mad Dog” Gargotta, his second-in-command. At the time, the mob was using the island to smuggle molasses into the United States for the manufacture of bootleg rum, and it was rumored that leading lights of the underworld on the East Coast had established a cozy relationship with the Cuban government that would, decades later, lead to the mob establishing an offshore criminal paradise in Havana.

  Along with the business opportunities he explored, Lazia bore witness to some spectacular Afro-Cuban music at a nightclub located inside Havana’s Oriental Park Racetrack. Almost immediately upon his return home, the mobster started plans to re-create this scene in the heartland of the United States.

  Conceived as an upscale supper club—something that did not yet exist in Kansas City on this scale—Cuban Gardens was built from scratch. One of the investors was a longtime business associate with Pendergast’s Jackson County Democratic Club. During the construction of Lazia’s nightclub in Clay County, north of the city line, the mobster complained that “the fix over here in this county is too high.” Payments to the local sheriff, prosecutor, and other county officials was normally part of doing business.

  Along with the club’s large bandstand and dance floor, it had all the trappings of a 1920s Havana-style casino. Dice, roulette, and blackjack were the primary games of chance. As part of the club’s fine-dining mandate, Lazia brought in a chef who specialized in something that Kansas City, a meat-and-potatoes kind of town, had never experienced before: Cuban cuisine.

  When the club opened in late 1928, it came under scrutiny from the Ministerial Alliance of Liberty, a local anti-vice watchdog organization. The county sheriff made a series of raids and claimed, much to his disappointment, that he had found no evidence of gambling. Like many who entered the place, he admitted that seeing the fashionably attired men and women in evening wear dancing to “The Chant of the Jungle” and other Latin-inflected musical standards was a charming sight.

  The Cuban Gardens was Kansas City’s version of reaching for the stars, a staple of Prohibition-era nightlife at its most grandiose, when the flow of profits from illegal booze created a mentality that anything was possible.

  In reality, the club was the beginning of Lazia’s downfall. Cuban Gardens wound up costing the mobster in ways more than financial, as it created a paper trail that would ultimately be used to indict and convict him on tax-evasion charges.

  For the city’s jazz musicians, the club was a godsend. Cuban Gardens booked only large orchestras that played dance music and Latin jazz, and it paid top dollar.

  Given the club’s high-level financial and ownership roots in the underworld, there was an aura of menace to the place. Outside the club, armed guards sat in a small building at the entrance to the parking lot, sizing up arrivals and allowing admittance only to those who were authorized. Once inside the club, security personnel dressed in formal evening clothes did not hide the fact that they too were armed. This sinister mood sometimes enveloped the musicians who played the club.

  By now, Kansas City musicians were used to playing at clubs run by mobsters. They had learned how to navigate this reality without getting themselves killed, but the nuances could be treacherous. In October 1930, Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy—one of the city’s most prestigious big bands—was booked to play an ongoing residency. Mary Lou Williams, who played piano in Andy Kirk’s orchestra, remembered an occasion when the Clouds of Joy had an unfortunate run-in with one of Lazia’s henchmen who managed the club.

  Andy was playing tuba, and the band was conducted by our singer, Billy Massey. Billy was a man not easily scared, and one day [at the club] he ran off his mouth to the boss. The hood concluded he was crazy, which was not far wrong, and told the band to pack up and leave—but fast. The rest of the guys were too nice, he said, for him to think about killing Billy.

  In this instance, the musicians got off easy. They were fired but lived to see another day. Given the high demand at the time for bands of all varieties, Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy was immediately booked at the Pla-Mor Ballroom, another prestigious Kansas City venue controlled by the mob.

  Vice Music

  The 18th and Vine district, east of downtown in the city’s Black section, was sufficiently renowned that it had been immortalized by bluesman/bartender Joe Turner, who dreamed—and sang—about a street encounter with the ghost of Piney Brown. The district, no doubt, stoked the dreams of innumerable jazz hounds from coast to coast. Located between the streets of 18th and 12th, from Vine Street over to Paseo, dozens of nightclubs were packed into this tight radius of twelve blocks. The neighborhood included the Black musicians’ union building, the offices of two competing Black-owned newspapers, barber shops, clothing and shoe stores, diners, ice cream shops, and a level of streetlife, day and night, that rivaled Bronzeville in Chicago and Harlem in Manhattan. At night, the district gave way to drinking, gambling, prostitution, and music, mostly a mix of jazz, blues, and swing.

  William “Count” Basie, born in Red Bank, New Jersey, was twenty-one years old when he first came to Kansas City. At the time, he was playing piano for a touring burlesque revue, and when he got to Kansas City, he could hardly believe what he encountered:

  Oh my, marvelous town. Clubs, clubs, clubs, clubs, clubs, clubs, clubs. As a matter of fact, I thought that was all Kansas City was made up of was clubs . . . I mean, the cats just played. They played all day and tomorrow morning they went home and went to bed. The next day, the same thing. We’d go to one job we played on, then go jamming until seven, eight in the morning . . . At that time, it was blazing. I mean, everything was happening there, it was beautiful. Wonderful trumpet players, and clarinet players, and banjo players. You could hear the blues coming from any window or door. And it was the most remarkable thing I ever heard.

  A few years later, Count Basie returned to Kansas City to assume the role of piano player for the Bennie Moten orchestra, the most renowned band in town.

  “I found Kaycee to be a heavenly city,” said pianist Mary Lou Williams, who migrated to Kansas City from Pittsburgh after hearing stories about the great music being played there.

  Now, at that time, Kansas City was under Tom Pendergast’s control. Most of the night spots were run by politicians and hoodlums, and the town was wide open for drinking, gambling and pretty much every form of vice. Naturally, work was plentiful for musicians, though some of the employers were tough people . . . Of course, we didn’t have any closing hours in those spots. We could play all morning and half through the day if we wished to, and in fact we often did. The music was so good that I seldom got to bed before midday.

  Born May 8, 1910, Williams was an elegant piano player, but she could also get down and dirty. She remembered going on a club crawl one night with a handful of musicians, including Jack Teagarden, a brawny, white trombone player and vocalist from Texas who worshipped Louis Armstrong. (He also had a thing for Mary Lou and proposed to her twice.) They wound up at a club that was decorated to resemble the inside of a penitentiary, with bars on the windows and waiters in striped jumpsuits like convicts on a chain gang. “In these weird surroundings,” said Williams, “I got up and played for the boys, and Jack got up and sang some blues.”

  Just as the town was wide open in terms of vice, the district encouraged an attitude of liberation toward the music. Certainly, ragtime, the blues, and traditional New Orleans jazz were prominently on display, but these influences on the Kansas City sound were singular. “The bands in the Midwest had a more flexible style,” noted clarinetist Garvin Bushell. “They also had done more with saxophones in Kansas City.” Lester Young, Ben Webster, Budd Johnson, Eddie Barefield, and, later in the 1930s and 1940s, Charlie Parker emerged from the firmament as virtuoso musicians, bringing the saxophone to the forefront of the music. It all started at 18th and Vine.