This installment of #Mobsburgh returned to Squirrel Hill with a visit to a pair of gambling clubs.

Squirrel Hill is a fashionable Pittsburgh neighborhood long associated with the city’s Jewish residents. In the 1920s, first- and second-generation European immigrants accumulated sufficient capital to move away from crowded Hill District tenements and other parts of the city where they had settled. They brought with them European cultural and religious traditions adapted to American urban life. And, they carried new additions to their economic and social repertoires: Organized crime rackets, including bootlegging and gambling.

Two organized crime institutions associated with sports gambling, games of chance, and numbers gambling emerged in Squirrel Hill. The Beacon Club and the Squirrel Hill Veterans Club provided cozy spaces where the city’s racketeers could drink, gamble, eat, and share information. Racketeers from across the region patronized these clubs and the establishments became frequent targets of Pittsburgh law enforcement raids.

The Beacon Club

In January 1927, the Pittsburgh Post reported that more than 300 Pittsburgh Jews met in the Morrowfield Hotel ballroom to discuss creating a new organization to promote unity among the city’s Jewish residents. They settled on a name for the new organization, The Beacon Club, and proceeded to draw up bylaws. The new organization’s leaders included a former assistant district attorney, an ex-magistrate, an assistant city solicitor, a former Pittsburgh police detective, and a University of Pittsburgh professor.

Over the next few months, The Beacon Club found a meeting space and it filed incorporation papers to formalize the entity. According to the corporate charter, the club was formed “for the purposes of maintaining a club for social enjoyment, the study of political economy and the discussion of public questions.” The charter authorized the founders to select a board of directors and to “acquire real estate for the purpose of maintaining a club house.”

In March 1927, the Pittsburgh Post reported that the Beacon Club planned to open its “permanent headquarters and club rooms” on Forbes Avenue in Squirrel Hill. The club rented space over commercial space that housed a series of stores during its early years.

After its founding, Pittsburgh’s newspapers reported on various celebratory dinners and political events held by the club in its space. For the next decade, except for a 1933 robbery in which five gunmen robbed about 40 members at the clubhouse, the club got lots of laudatory press.

The first sign that something other than political discussions and banquets might be happening at the club occurred in February 1937 when several Pittsburgh newspapers

reported that city police had raided the club and arrested several people on gambling charges. The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph wrote that six men had been arrested after police entered the club and observed a poker game in progress.

Over the next 20 years, the club was raided several times. It had become such a well-known spot that its members and guests not only had to dodge frequent police raids but they also had to worry about criminals looking to rob the high-stakes games conducted there. In 1947, during an investigation of the gangland slaying of Frank Evans and Fred Garrow, who had been gunned down the previous May, witnesses detailed how the Beacon Club’s skin games (a rapid paced, high-stakes card game) had been targeted by the machine-gun-toting mob.

During the late 1940s and into the 1950s, police raids on the club accelerated during various racketeering crackdowns by the Pittsburgh Police and the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office. The high-level racketeers who gambled at the club included numbers bankers and bookies. They frequently became the targets of violence. In 1953, a pair of brothers who reportedly headed a large numbers racket were robbed at gunpoint after leaving the club.

By 1959, the club had relocated to Murray Avenue. The new location, also a rented second-story space above a store, became more infamous for the raids that occurred there and the sophisticated security measures taken to prevent police raids and robberies. These included reinforced steel doors and stairway mirrors.

In addition to the security measures, former patrons recalled gambling while enjoying corned beef sandwiches brought in from Weinstein’s deli one door over.

The club became a popular hangout for the region’s most infamous racketeers, including New Kensington’s Gabriel “Kelly” and Sam Mannarino. When the club closed in 1975, the Pittsburgh Press reported that the Beacon Club stood out among its peers throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania. “None was more notorious than the Beacon Club,” the paper wrote.

Despite the announced closing, it appears that the Beacon Club continued to operate for several years at 1928½ Murray Avenue. Pittsburgh Police Department records continued to show gambling activity at the location into the 1980s. In 2016, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published an obituary of racketeer Charles “Chucky” Porter, a reputed local crime family underboss. The obituary included a photo of Porter and another reputed racketeer exiting from the rear of the Beacon Club in 1981.

Squirrel Hill Veterans Club

The Squirrel Hill Veteran’s Club is less well-known than its famous neighbor, the Beacon Club. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in October 1945 that Jewish World War II veterans established the club for educational and recreational activities. Some of those recreational activities included high-stakes card games. Less than a year after it opened, Pittsburgh police raided the club, which was located at 1926 Murray Avenue — next door to where the Beacon Club moved in the late 1950s. The Post-Gazette wrote in July 1946 that 50 people were arrested, some of them playing “skin.”

Over the next decade, police raided the club several times, sometimes as part of larger anti-gambling sweeps that included the Beacon Club. In 1948, during a sweeping grand jury investigation into Pittsburgh rackets, law enforcement officials described the club as a “high-powered gambling establishment.”

In 1956, a woman filed a complaint with the Pittsburgh police that her husband had been losing all of his money in the club. A subsequent raid exposed an elaborate cheating scheme involving radio transmitters and receivers. Gamblers would use the devices to send information to other gamblers in the club. Signals were sent and the receivers, concealed beneath clothing, vibrated, allowing cheaters to know when to bet and when to pass during card games.

The cheating scheme probably spelled the end of the Squirrel Hill Veterans Club. There don’t appear to have been any additional newspaper reports about the club or gambling there.

The Bigger Picture

The Beacon Club and the Squirrel Hill Veterans Club were two of the region’s many gambling clubs run and frequented by Pittsburgh racketeers. These two clubs, and others, were used strictly for conducting business and for friendly gambling; others were more “respectable” establishments where the top echelon — the numbers bankers, high-stakes bookies, and slot machine owners — took their families for good food, drinks, music, and dancing. Lennie Litman’s Copa and Charlie Jamal’s Ankara were the polite places where the took their families for good food, drinks, the latest musical acts, and dancing.

Do you have memories of the Beacon Club or its neighbor? Have you heard family stories about them? Let me know in the comments.

Stay tuned for more dispatches from #Mobsburgh. Catch up with the first installment in this series: Philly gangster Morris Kaufmann’s last ride, which ended near these two establishments.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

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