Dangerous Rhythms, page 33
Clearly, something was in the air. In 1955, a young civil rights activist named Martin Luther King Jr. had led the Montgomery bus boycott. More recently, in 1961, the Freedom Rides riveted the nation, as a new generation of activists seemed determined to alter the course of racism in America. These were early though significant steps in what was now being referred to as the civil rights movement, which seemed to be gathering steam all across the country. Celebrity artists—actors, musicians, and writers—both Black and white, felt compelled to march and protest in solidarity with King and other leaders of the movement. No one knew yet how this might affect relationships in the music business or other commercial ventures, but it was already beginning to reshape the larger context of American society.
Levy made his living primarily, but not solely, from the labors of African American entertainers. He was believed to have an uncanny nose for talent that, in the late 1950s, led him to extend Roulette Records beyond jazz into rockabilly, pop, and early rock and roll. He created a subsidiary label, Tico, to record exclusively Latin jazz artists. When it came to making a buck, Levy was racially magnanimous. He signed and promoted Black and Latin artists as vigorously as he did white artists, and he got rich doing it. Artists often signed with Roulette Records to great fanfare and optimism, only to find that the stories about Levy cheating artists out of royalties and other revenue streams were mostly true.
The great Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan signed with Mo Levy’s label in 1960. She was one of a number of prominent female vocalists to sign with Roulette, others being Dinah Washington, Nancy Wilson, and Betty Carter. Vaughan was believed to be the logical successor, in terms of sheer vocal talent, to Billie Holiday, who had died tragically—and in near poverty—in a New York City hospital in 1959 at the age of forty-four. Like many African American singers of her generation, Vaughan was determined to not fall into the same traps that Lady Day had. In the 1950s, she recorded a handful of albums with Mercury Records. Known for its unconventional promotional methods, Mercury eschewed the usual route of using radio airplay to establish an artist in favor of jukeboxes. The problem, as everyone knew, was that the jukeboxes were controlled by organized crime. Sarah Vaughan may have figured that if she was going to have a career that was dependent on organized crime, why not sign with the godfather of the music business, Mo Levy.
At Roulette, Vaughan was assigned to producer Teddy Reig. A renowned ruffian who had done time on marijuana smuggling charges, Reig was corpulent, with a pencil-thin mustache and a jivey street patter that was part Lester Young, part Thelonious Monk. He was also a brilliant producer who had recorded many bebop stars. He knew that Vaughan sounded better live in a club than she did in a recording studio. So he re-created a nightclub atmosphere in the studio, recording at night with as few takes as possible. The finished product, an album called After Hours, released in 1961, was exquisite.
Vaughan did some of her best work at Roulette, but she soon became frustrated. Either the label was not properly promoting her records, or she was being cheated out of royalties. Whenever her representatives sought to get a full accounting from Levy’s company, they were met with stall tactics and prevarications. In 1964, only four years after signing with Roulette, Vaughan left and returned to Mercury Records.
Levy’s reputation for chicanery was renowned. In 1963, when Dinah Washington, age thirty-nine, was found dead in her home in Chicago of an overdose of sleeping pills, her husband came to New York to collect royalties. Dick “Night Train” Lane, a veteran football player with the Detroit Lions, was not a man to be trifled with. In addition to his years as a defensive back in the National Football League, he had served four years in the U.S. Army. He was muscular, fast on his feet, and not likely to take guff from anyone, much less a doughy, slightly balding record executive. When Lane showed up at the offices of Roulette Records, Levy at first tried to duck out a secret doorway he had in the back of his office. When one of his house lawyers noted that Lane was not likely to give up in his efforts to collect on his deceased wife’s royalties, Levy acquiesced. Night Train Lane was seen leaving the offices of Roulette Records with a check in his hand, a rare sight indeed.
Levy’s shady business tactics went far beyond individual artists or their angry spouses. In 1962, his tactics finally caught the attention of the FBI.
Starting in 1960, Levy had been on the radar of law enforcement authorities due to his partnership with the notorious disc jockey Alan Freed. Levy had used Freed, a popular deejay at WINS (1010 AM), to promote his product, to great effect. Later, it was shown that Freed engaged in “payola,” an illegal practice of accepting payments from record companies to play specific records. Eventually, Freed was fired from his radio job and lost his popular television show. In 1962, he pleaded guilty to two counts of commercial bribery, for which he received a fine and a suspended sentence.
Many—including agents of the FBI—wondered how Levy had avoided criminal prosecution. In 1962, the same year Freed was convicted, the Bureau opened a file on the owner of Birdland and Roulette Records, noting that “Morris Levy is under investigation by the New York and Miami offices as a top hoodlum. His activity principally involves his operations as ‘front’ for hoodlum principals in the entertainment field, including nightclubs and music recording.”
Almost immediately, the FBI received an interesting tidbit from one of its numerous informants inside Roulette Records: “NY T-2 stated that on March 19, 1962, SWATS MULLIGAN [aka Dominic Ciaffone] physically beat up MORRIS LEVY in the Roulette offices. The reason for the beating was unknown to the informant.”
Levy was under pressure. His restaurant/lounge, the Roundtable, located on East 53rd Street in Manhattan, was running in the red. The Roundtable was co-owned by Ciaffone and other mafiosi affiliated with the Genovese crime family. Auditors from the Internal Revenue Service descended on Levy’s operations, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office was investigating whether or not Roulette Records was making illegal under-the-table payments to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. The theory was that Levy was paying off certain officers of the musicians’ union to keep them off his back regarding tardy or nonexistent royalty payments to the union’s rank-and-file membership.
Levy bragged so often about his mafia associations that the FBI began to believe it was a tactic used by the mogul to inoculate himself. In interviews with talent agents, managers, producers, and artists, many noted that Levy was, in the words of one agent, “a braggart who seemed to be enjoying the reputation that he was a ‘friend of racketeers . . .’ Levy himself probably encourages these rumors.”
Sarah Vaughan was interviewed by the FBI in 1963; she told the agents that she believed she was being ripped off by Levy but knew nothing of his mobster associations.
Whereas some believed that Levy’s mafia affiliations were more braggadocio than anything else, the FBI knew the truth.
After the beating in his office at the hands of Ciaffone, Levy realized he needed to protect himself. In an FBI report dated February 1966, an informant noted that “Levy is scared of Ciaffone and would like to break away from him but is afraid to do so.” Rather than do what some people might—seek out the aid of law enforcement—Levy did it the Mo Levy way.
Throughout the mid- and late 1960s, Levy began cultivating a relationship with Tommy Eboli, a powerful underboss in the Genovese family. It was the classic Machiavellian gangster strategy: to mitigate disputes you might be having with a fellow member of the organization, cultivate relationships with others higher up in the food chain. It was textbook “check and checkmate”: In fostering a relationship with Eboli, Levy was endearing himself with the man who many felt was the logical successor to Vito Genovese, who was currently in prison on a narcotics conviction.
On February 14, 1969, Genovese died in prison of natural causes. Eboli became acting boss of the family.
Born in Scisciano, Italy, in 1911 and raised in the Bronx, Eboli, in his rise to power, was believed to have taken part in twenty-two murders. Early in his career, he operated under the alias of Tommy Ryan.
Levy first met Eboli when he was working as a hat-check boy at the Greenwich Village Inn. At the time, Eboli was serving primarily as a boxing promoter. In 1952, the future boss became the owner of a jukebox delivery company and another business, Tryan Cigarette Services, which leased vending machines to nightclubs, including Birdland.
Eboli was a killer, but he was no galoot. Like Sam Giancana in Chicago, he was physically unimpressive, prematurely bald, and soft spoken. Also like Giancana, he was ruthless and, in his business dealings, prone to employ the use of violence—though now that he was boss, he had others do the dirty work.
Following the death of Genovese, Levy’s cultivation of the new boss kicked into overdrive. He and Eboli partnered on a company called Promo Records, with offices in Paterson, New Jersey. The purpose of Promo Records was to purchase remaindered records, also known as “cut-outs,” overstock from corporate record labels of product that had long ago stopped charting. There was money to be made selling these records as remainders in the used record section of a store. Also, a remainder dealer could buy, say, five hundred copies of an album and illegally press several thousand copies more by simply copying the record jacket and making a new master of the record. Either way, in selling as a cut-out or as a pirated copy of the original master, the artist did not receive a dime.
These methods were particularly lucrative with jazz records. Although jazz had downsized considerably as a percentage of the overall music market, jazz fans were unusually persistent and loyal. Unlike pop music or rock and roll sales, which were based on Top Forty charts, trends, and the whims of an ever-changing youth market, jazz fans still bought vintage records from the likes of Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Ellington, Benny Goodman, and other masters. The numbers were nowhere near those of the latest pop or rock releases, but if the cut-outs purchased by the likes of Levy and his partners were purchased at a low price and then pirated, the profits could be substantial.
Like royalty theft, payola, and bootlegging of records, cut-outs—as a subsidiary criminal racket buried deep within the nuts and bolts of the music business—were yet another scam pioneered by Mo Levy. Even though nightclubs were no longer a sure thing, and the economics of jazz were making it less attractive to the average gangster, Levy continued to find ways to profit from the business. He was the ultimate jazz vampire.
“Get Off My Stage, Nigger”
The Copacabana had become the granddaddy of New York nightclubs. Though it was not a jazz club, per se, it often featured jazz, especially vocalists. It had become the city’s premier cabaret and supper club almost by default. Long gone were the famous Harlem venues from the Golden Age: the Cotton Club, Savoy Ballroom, Connie’s Inn, and the Ubangi Club. In Greenwich Village, the Village Vanguard was still functioning, but Café Society, Club Bohemia, and the Famous Door were history. Nearly all of the 52nd Street clubs were gone. And then, finally, to no one’s surprise, in June 1964 Birdland filed for Chapter Eleven and ceased operations the following year.
The Copa was an anachronism. Anthony Polameni, maître d’ at the club for nearly twenty years, remembered the day the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. The club’s manager and some of the staff watched the lads from Liverpool on a black-and-white TV in the club’s kitchen. “Some of us thought it was a fad. Some thought it was kids’ music. There may have been somebody who felt it was a threat to us, but if they did, they kept their mouths shut. We were the Copa. We’d been around since 1940. We weren’t going anywhere.”
One reason the club may have survived after most of the others closed was its stature as Manhattan’s premier mafia lounge. It was part of the legend of the Copacabana. There were the many famous incidents—the night four New York Yankees, including Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin, got into a brawl with some patrons in the club, or the night Frank Sinatra severely strained a vocal cord and lost his voice—but mostly the place was famous as a veritable man-cave for made members of cosa nostra.
By the mid-1960s, the club was one of a dwindling number of venues that served as a nexus between jazz and the underworld. When Meyer Lansky opened the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Havana in 1957, the hotel’s nightclub was called the Copa Room, as was the main showroom at the Sands in Las Vegas. In name and, most important of all, symbolically, the Copacabana brand was the engine that powered mobster-affiliated jazz from New York to Vegas.
The mobster pedigree of the club had been established from the beginning. When the club opened, the name on the lease as owner was Monte Proser, a well-established nightclub and cabaret owner originally from England. Pointedly, Poser had no criminal record. The true owner was Frank Costello, who had invested in the club using money from his upstate gambling operations in Saratoga. The man who actually ran the club for the mob was Jules Podell, who had formerly managed the Kit Kat Club, a burlesque house and strip club on Broadway also owned by gangsters.
The Copacabana was named after the famous neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, and the Brazilian-themed décor was influenced by cabaret star Carmen Miranda, who was one of the first major acts to perform at the club. The Copa had glamour and excellent Chinese cuisine, but by far the primary attraction was the live entertainment, most notably the Copa Girls, a chorus line of voluptuous women in skintight, sequined costumes whose dance revue opened every show.
In 1944, a few years after the club opened, racket-busting mayor Fiorello La Guardia went after the Copa and other nightclubs in the city. It was an ambitious effort by La Guardia to once and for all sever ties between nightclubs and the mob. The city sought to establish that “there were known racketeers or gangsters frequenting the Copacabana” along with “persons interested or part owners who are disreputable persons engaged in unlawful enterprise.” Costello, in particular, was cited as being the mob’s man in control of city nightlife. He was subpoenaed to testify in front of a city commission investigating the club.
Costello and his lawyers contested the subpoena. One person who did appear in front of the commission was Podell, who reluctantly testified that, when applying for city licenses for the Copa, he neglected to mention that he had been arrested at least four times on Volstead Act violations and once for burglary. Podell was what was known in the business as a tough Jew. He had once been shot in the leg but refused to tell the cops who did it. La Guardia’s commission threatened to remove Podell from management of the Copa. Instead, lawyers for both the city and the club got together and reached a deal. Though Costello never admitted that he actually had a financial stake in the club, he agreed to render “terminated and severed” any connection he “may now have or have had with the Copa.” Monte Proser was out, but Podell was allowed to stay.
If anything, the city’s efforts only enhanced the reputation of the club. The place was now referred to in advertisements as “Jules Podell’s Copacabana,” and mobsters, including Frank Costello, were still a major part of the club’s clientele.
By the late 1940s, the Copacabana’s reputation was such that it could make or break an entertainer. Sammy Davis Jr., in Yes I Can, his bestselling autobiography (published in 1965), described a night when he and his father stood across the street from the club. Davis was a twenty-year-old song-and-dance man who, along with his father, appeared onstage as part of the Will Mastin Trio. Struggling to attain notoriety, they dreamed of one day appearing at the Copa.
It was a freezing night, but we stood in the doorway of a building at 15 East 60th Street, directly across from the Copa, watching the people going inside, the doorman helping them out of their limousines and cabs, tipping his hat, holding the door open for them until they disappeared inside, laughing. Why wouldn’t they laugh? They had everything, importance, clothes and jewelry like I’d never seen anywhere but in movies . . . I clenched my fists. “Someday I’ll play that place, so help me God.”
Davis and his father had a problem, and it wasn’t just that their small-time act was nowhere near famous enough to secure a booking at the Copa. The problem was that they were Black.
Even by the late 1950s, many of the city’s nightclubs were still strictly Jim Crow. The mob-controlled clubs especially seemed to take pride in their segregationist door policy. It was part of a venue’s historical identity: Black entertainers, white audience—that is how the mob conducted business. If you didn’t like it, what were you going to do, take it up with the mob?
Davis learned firsthand about the Copa’s implacable racial policies. Even though he was invited to the club by Frank Sinatra—on a night that Sinatra was performing—Sammy was denied entry. This was a fate also met by Harry Belafonte, who in 1944, as a member of the navy, tried to attend the club with a white girlfriend. Interracial couples were especially frowned upon; Belafonte was turned away at the door.
Ironically, both of these men—Davis and Belafonte—would eventually appear as headline acts at the Copacabana after they became world-famous singers.
The racism at the club was pervasive. It started with management and the staff and spread to patrons in the audience, which, on any given night, included many mafiosi. Even after becoming a star and an honored guest at the club, Sammy Davis Jr. suffered racial indignities.
On a night in January 1957, he was at the club as a patron with a large group of friends. They were seated at a table near the stage. Sinatra had been scheduled to perform that night, but earlier in the day it was announced that actor Humphrey Bogart had died from lung cancer. Sinatra idolized Bogart; they were good friends. At the last minute, Frank announced that he was unable to do the show that night. Jules Podell, the owner, scrambled to find someone to fill in. Comedian Jerry Lewis agreed to do the show, but he could do only one set. Podell needed someone to fill in for the late set, which usually started around two in the morning.
