Dangerous Rhythms, page 28
Levy had another advantage with Basie, one that, as a former bookie and quasi-gangster, he knew how to manipulate. Basie was a notorious gambling addict. He tended to lose far more often than he won. Trumpeter Clark Terry was among those who recognized the problem: “Basie had lost his ass playing horses . . . He’d blown so much bread on those ponies that he was working his behind out of debt . . . He had problems like that all his life.”
Said jazz composer and arranger Quincy Jones, “Basie was the worst gambler that ever hit the planet, man. The worst.” Jones remembered a time when he was gambling with the bandleader in Las Vegas. “Basie would [bet on roulette] five hundred dollars on everything from one to thirty-six, double zero, zero, red, black, odd, even, first, second, third, twelfth. I said, ‘Basie, I don’t know how to do this, but mathematically that doesn’t work at thirty-five to one.’ He said, ‘I know what I’m doing, man. I’ve been doing this a long time. Just watch what I’m doing.’ And I followed his ass, and I lost $150,000 the first week.”
Much to the chagrin of members of Basie’s band, due to his gambling habit he was inclined to accept whatever deal came his way. He was sometimes late in paying the band as well as paying his own everyday expenses. On the bandstand and in the clubs, Count Basie was jazz royalty, but out on the street he was a scuffling, perennially in need gambling junkie.
Levy put Basie to work, but he also fronted the pianist money knowing full well he would gamble it away and thus be deeper in debt. It was a form of indentured servitude.
Sometimes, from a jazz perspective, the results were golden. In 1957, Roulette released Count Basie’s Atomic Café,considered to be among the greatest big band albums ever produced. Atomic Café not only revived Basie’s career as a bandleader, it also assured his legacy as one of the greatest stars in the entire jazz pantheon.
There were other less noble collaborations. Not long after the album’s release, Levy coerced Basie to take part in one of his sleazier efforts to grease the wheels of record promotions in his favor. At an annual convention of radio deejays in Miami, Roulette put up the money for a lavish all-night barbecue that the Miami Herald described as an orgy of “Booze, Bribes, and Broads.” Buying off deejays in a manner later described as “payola”—a criminal offense—was becoming a common practice in the music business, thanks in part to Mo Levy. Besides throwing the all-night barbecue, Roulette rented a hotel ballroom where deejays from around the country could gamble on a roulette wheel that seemed to always fall in their favor. “I was a little naïve,” said one participant from out of town. “I was betting blackjack and losing but they kept paying me. I said, ‘But I lost. Why are you giving me this stuff?’”
Levy also bussed in prostitutes from New York to talk up the latest Roulette releases while keeping the deejays company.
The entertainment that evening was Count Basie and his orchestra. Levy got the most out of his star client: After playing the gig in Miami, Basie had to rush back to New York to fulfill an engagement the following night at Birdland.
Basie was indebted to Levy, in more ways than one.
Despite Levy’s reputation for thuggery and questionable business practices, musicians knowingly signed with his record label, partly because it gave them access to extended engagements at Birdland. Even as other forms of popular music—country western, folk, rhythm and blues, and the earliest inklings of rock and roll—began to make headway in the commercial marketplace, Levy remained loyal to jazz. Bud Powell, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, and other musical luminaries signed exclusive contracts with Mo Levy and Roulette Records. Some would live to regret the day.
The Right to Live
There were a myriad of ways a jazz musician could get squeezed in the 1950s. The proliferation of record labels was a minefield. Recorded music and albums presented numerous opportunities for an artist to get screwed without even knowing it. For the average musician, whether bandleader or sideman, live performances remained the simplest way to make a living, but that also could be fraught with pitfalls.
Most cities required some form of licensing for musicians to work in nightclubs. The most onerous was in New York City, recognized by now as the jazz capital of the world. Since 1926, the city had imposed some form of cabaret licensing but it wasn’t until 1940 that the process expanded to institute the concept of a cabaret card, which was administered by the city’s police department. It was a vaguely humiliating process, as it was possibly intended to be. Every two years, a cabaret entertainer—primarily musicians but also dancers and comics—were required to report to the police department’s licensing division to be photographed and fingerprinted. Since most jazz performers were African American, it carried a stigma of criminality. If an artist was charged with a crime of any kind, or had legal matters outstanding, they were denied a cabaret card and thus denied the opportunity to make a living.
For some musicians, having their card revoked was a death sentence. New York was one of the few cities in the United States where a jazz musician could make a steady living, and it was highly dependent on the gig culture, playing the clubs four or five nights a week. Having your card taken away meant that it could not be reinstated until a musician was again up for licensing; this could be weeks, months, or even the full period of two years.
By design, the musicians who suffered the most were drug addicts, or at least those who were unlucky enough to get pinched on drug charges. Narcotics use was identified in society as the “scourge of the ghetto.” As a councilman from Brooklyn put it, “The people of this city would feel a little easier if they knew that performers had been O.K.’d as people of good character.”
The entire process was characterized by corruption and graft. A musician could possibly avoid losing their license by making an under-the-table payoff to the licensing division. In later years, when the cabaret card system came under investigation, it was noted that fees levied on entertainers went into the Police Pension Fund.
Some musicians lived in fear of this system, and others simply resented it. Trombonist J.J. Johnson, who was not a heroin user, once lost his cabaret card when he was arrested while carrying a needle for someone else. Musicians who were known to be addicts were targeted by the police. Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker all lost their cabaret cards when they were at the peak of their creative and earning potential. That these three artists were also known to be struggling with mental health issues did not matter to the cops. A cabaret performer who was an addict could be forced into a corner; they either paid off the licensing division or lost the ability to make a living for an extended period of time. It was all part of a larger system of servitude that made some African American jazz musicians feel as though they were still living on the plantation.
Monk and Holiday paid an extremely high price. Both had to deal with criminal narcotics charges and were not able to work in New York clubs for extended periods of time—in Holiday’s case more than a year while at the height of her popularity. Even after she served a prison sentence and “paid her debt to society,” the institutional intransigence of the system could not be swayed.
The artist who paid the highest price of all was Charlie Parker. In 1946, Bird had moved with Dizzy Gillespie and his band to Los Angeles, where they found steady work. On July 29, Parker was arrested after a drug-induced altercation with a hotel manager. He was committed to Camarillo State Hospital for six months, a stay that was commemorated in “Relaxin’ in Camarillo,” recorded in Los Angeles by Charlie Parker’s New Stars a month after his release. A move back east in April 1947 was followed four years later by his New York City cabaret card being revoked for two years, due to drug abuse. It was a devastating blow.
Parker did jail time, and he was prohibited from practicing his art. His life spiraled downward. When he couldn’t get his hands on dope, he drank prodigious amounts of alcohol. In a letter to the New York Liquor Control Board, Bird pleaded his case: “My right to pursue my chosen profession has been taken away, and my wife and three children who are innocent of any wrongdoing are suffering . . . I feel sure that when you examine my record and see that I have made a sincere effort to become a family man and a good citizen, you will reconsider. If by any chance you feel I haven’t paid my debt to society, by all means let me do so and give me and my family back the right to live.”
Bird did get his cabaret card reinstated, and then it was revoked again. Treatment during a 1954 voluntary commitment at Bellevue Hospital after two suicide attempts did not lead to any improvement of his health. He continued to produce some of the most dazzling sounds on his alto saxophone that jazz fans would ever hear. The joys were transcendent, but the stress and disruptions were ruinous.
On March 12, 1955, while watching the Tommy Dorsey show on television in the apartment of a friend, Parker died from a heart attack brought on by advanced cirrhosis of the liver and a perforated ulcer. He was thirty-four years old at the time of his death, though the coroner estimated that he had the body of a fifty-five-year-old man.
The cabaret card system lived on for another decade. It was done away with in 1967, thanks in part to Frank Sinatra, who wrote to the New York City Council:
For many years, I have denied myself the privilege and enjoyment of playing before New York audiences in nightclubs because I have refused to submit to the demeaning requirement that New York has imposed on entertainers. It has been difficult for me to understand why the city of New York, which aspires to be the entertainment capital of the world, has continued to treat people who work in cabarets as second-class citizens.
The cabaret card system existed as an institutional byway of the underworld, a racist con game disguised as civic leadership and law enforcement on behalf of the common good. The truth was something uglier. In this instance, the shackles of servitude were eventually broken, but the plantation remained in effect.
Half Past the Unlucky
Mo Levy wasn’t seen nearly as often around Birdland as he used to be; Roulette Records took up most of his time. He advanced from being a mere club owner to being a mogul, and in so doing he spread the mentality of the underworld into every aspect of the music business. He was not alone. His was a mentality that originated in Black Storyville, at Matranga’s; it thrived in clubs all around the United States during Prohibition and beyond, and it sought to capitalize on each and every technological advancement in music recording and distribution. Levy was driven. He genuinely believed he was being fair when he said, “The music business is like a big pie. There are slices for everyone. You don’t fuck with my piece; I don’t fuck with yours.” And there was no doubt whose slice was the biggest.
The day-to-day management of Birdland was left to Irving, his brother. Irving had some of the same personality characteristics as Mo. A former member of the U.S. Navy, he ran the club with an iron hand. The bassist Charles Mingus related to an author how he saw Irving push musicians down the stairs when they were late for a set, yelling, “Get down the stairs, nigger.” Mingus also claimed to have witnessed a fight between a cop and Max Roach in late 1952 or 1953, saying that Birdland’s bouncer held Roach while the cop hit him. Inside the club, Irving was in charge. If anything, his attention to detail was superior to his brother’s. One of his duties was to oversee the parameters of vice allowable at the club.
According to accounts of the era, there were heroin sales and prostitution going on at Birdland. For management, the idea was to monitor and control these undertakings so that they did not exceed what was allowable and agreeable to management and to the police. Once a month, officers from the NYPD’s 54th Precinct came to the club’s office to pick up an envelope stuffed with cash. In part, these payments were to guarantee that the club would not be hassled, but this arrangement involved a set of rules. Regarding vice, the club could designate a set number of dope and vice operators. Anything beyond that, it was understood that the police would come down hard on violators. This meant that Irving Levy and other club managers needed to maintain a strict eye on the potential for violations.
On the early morning of January 26, 1959, the Urbie Green Big Band was playing a late set. Around two thirty, Irving approached a woman he believed was a prostitute and asked her to leave the club. The man who was with her began arguing with him. There was a momentary scuffle, then the man pulled out a knife and viciously stabbed Levy in the gut. The man and the woman quickly left the club. Levy staggered from the bar to the service area/kitchenette, where he collapsed, bled out, and died in a matter of minutes.
The band and most club patrons had no idea what had happened. Hal McKusick, a sax player with the band, described the scene:
I had just started my alto sax solo when we heard a fight start near the bar. We could hear shouting and scuffling but the bandstand lights were in our eyes and we couldn’t see what was happening . . . As the scuffle continued, we went into our finale—“Cherokee”—a real wild arrangement. A woman yelled. Some glasses crashed. We finished the number, left the stand, and learned Irving was dead.
It took a while for the press and police to piece together what had happened. Initial reports suggested that it was perhaps a case of mistaken identity—the real target had been Mo Levy. The younger Levy had made many enemies and was known to have many disreputable partners. Maybe Mo had finally stepped on the wrong toes. The Long Island–based newspaper Newsday reported that “Morris Levy had been [previously] involved in scuffles with patrons. In one instance, he threw out a man who had cut his ear with a knife. In the other, he was flung through a glass doorway by a customer. Police refused to disclose the reasons for the fights.”
A later report stated that Mo’s ear had been cut only a few weeks before Irving’s death, in an incident with a customer over the paying of a bill. The FBI, in a later investigation, was told by an informant of a stabbing of an unidentified man that occurred at Birdland “some months before Irving Levy was killed.” Said the informant, “After his recovery, [the man] was summoned to a ‘meeting downtown.’ At the meeting, he was told that this stabbing was to be forgotten and nothing further was to be done.” The informant noted that Dominic Ciaffone (aka Swats Mulligan) was present at that meeting, as were other members of the Genovese crime family.
Eventually, Irving’s killer was identified as Lee Schlesinger, a pimp and low-level hood, who on the night of the stabbing was out on bail for having previously shot a tavern owner in Yonkers. Schlesinger claimed he had stabbed Levy in self-defense.
Many still wanted to believe that the killing involved a mob hitman and a case of mistaken identity. Even Mo was not so certain. The death of his brother inside the establishment both had founded was a shocker. The brothers had been close. With the early death of their father and a mother who was nearly incapacitated, they had practically grown up together as orphans. They looked out for one another. Mo was distraught, but also circumspect. There were rumors he had fled the United States for Israel, though there was no evidence to support that. He did hide out in Miami for a while.
The killing of Irving Levy received major coverage in the press. In many ways, it conjured up aspects of jazz and the underworld that were easy to sensationalize. United Press International described Levy’s assailant as “a hopped-up jazz enthusiast.” The Associated Press, in an article that was picked up by many newspapers, opted for an almost cosmic note of guilt by association, with the headline: “Jazz Provides Background for Death.”
A Newsday reporter found it coldhearted that the club reopened only a few nights after Levy’s death. Echoing the hard-boiled ethos of The Sweet Smell of Success, an irresistibly cynical film noir about Manhattan nightlife released one year earlier (with a jazzy musical score by the Chico Hamilton Quintet), the reporter concluded his article this way: “In this sanctuary, a murder turns no heads. It is slick and hard, it is the city, it is Birdland.”
11
The Ghost of Chano Pozo
The American mob of the postwar era was not your grandfather’s mob. Localized mafia organizations in cities like New Orleans, Kansas City, St. Louis, and others did still exist, but they were now part of a much larger tapestry. Luciano, Lansky, Costello, and Siegel all envisioned a world in which the Mustache Petes of yesteryear represented il vecchio modo, “the old way,” an outdated Italian ballad played by Luigi the organ grinder with his monkey at his side. In this day and age, the mob was to be a corporation connected not only by geography but by criminal ambition. Nightclubs and the music business played a role, as did labor racketeering, loan sharking, political corruption, and gambling, all of which were now connected by a series of underworld alliances that infected every region of the country.
The gambling activity was what caught the attention of Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Partly because he himself was a gambler. Meyer Lansky called the senator on it when they first met in a private backroom session. “What’s so bad about gambling? You like it yourself. I know you’ve gambled a lot.”
“That’s quite right,” answered the senator, “but I don’t want you people to control it.”
You people.
Kefauver was a proud WASP who once campaigned for office in a coonskin cap. Lansky took the “you people” comment as an anti-Semitic jab and launched into a defense of his Jewishness. But Kefauver meant it as a more generalized form of slander aimed at the Italian, Irish, and Jewish gangsters who formed the bulk of witnesses who were to be served with subpoenas to appear before his senatorial committee.
The Kefauver hearings, conducted by what was officially known as the Senate Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, were designed to be a barnstorming tour, with subpoenas served and public and private sessions held in many major cities throughout the United States. In seeking to expose the existence of an underworld commission governed by mobsters in various jurisdictions, it was unprecedented in scope. There were public hearings in Los Angeles; San Francisco; Chicago; St. Louis; Covington and Newport, Kentucky; New Orleans; and other cities. In South Florida, hearings in Miami exposed Lansky’s carpet joints in Broward County and the police and judicial corruption that made them possible. The casinos were abruptly shut down.
