Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar — attributed to Sigmund Freud
Sometimes a cigar store isn’t a cigar store — #Mobsburgh

In our last #Mobsburgh outing we visited with the Mattes family and got to know Israel Mattes,

a former Pittsburgh police officer who became a bootlegger and gambler. Here, we are going to get to know his older brother, Nathan.

In this visit, we also are going to look at an important institution found in organized crime: the front business. Nathan Mattes’s story is an ideal window into how racketeers used “legitimate” businesses to hide or facilitate their illegal enterprises. You see, for a few years, he ran his numbers racket out of a downtown Pittsburgh cigar store. Law enforcement’s efforts in the 1940s to end his operation spanned several years and generated sensational headlines in the city’s newspapers.

Nate Mattes

Nathan Mattes (1898-1962) was a colorful Pittsburgh racketeer. From the 1920s through the 1950s, he made his living in bootleg liquor and gambling. In a 1980s interview, former racketeer Sam Solomon told University of Pittsburgh historian Rob Ruck that Mattes was one of the earliest Jewish numbers bankers who competed with Hill District African Americans: “They had some outlaw Jewish bookmakers, guys like Kid Angel, Nate Mattes, and Froy Nathan.”

Like many of the people featured in #MobsBurgh, history has all but forgotten Nathan Mattes (and his brothers) and the period in the 1940s when he ran his numbers operation out of an infamous cigar store in an iconic downtown office building.

Mattes arrived in Pittsburgh in 1906 at age 11, along with his mother, Esther, and his four brothers. Nathan’s father, Abraham, had emigrated three years earlier, according to U.S. Census records.

Once they were reunited in 1906, the Mattes family rented several Hill District homes on Bedford and Webster avenues before moving to Highland Park.

Between 1906 and the 1920s, the family lived in at least two rented Bedford Avenue homes. In 1918, when Nathan registered for the draft, the family lived at 1713 Bedford Avenue. He was working as a florist for Harris Brothers at 511 Market Street in downtown Pittsburgh.

A Racketeer’s Resume

Nathan Mattes continued working as a florist until the mid-1920s when he went into bootlegging. His first known brush with the law came in 1924 when the Bedford Gazette reported that Mattes had been arrested on a charge related to “intoxicating liquor.”

The following year, in 1925, Nathan and Israel Mattes and Harry “Kid” Angel testified for the defense in a West Virginia bootlegging trial. Hyman Darling, also known as Pittsburgh’s “Bar King,” was tried and convicted of leading a regional bootleg liquor ring. Witnesses called in his defense were a veritable Who’s Who of regional organized crime history. In addition to Angel and the Mattes brothers, Wheeling bootlegger and gambler William “Big Bill” Lias also testified for Darling.

Over the next two decades, Mattes racked up arrests and headlines for bootlegging and gambling. In September 1929, local law enforcement officers and federal prohibition agents raided the Mattes home at 5415 Guarino Road in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. The fashionable two-story brick home was newly built in a street that didn’t exist two years earlier.

Local newspapers reported on the quantity and quality of liquor seized in the nighttime raid. “Big Stock of Fancy Booze Is Seized in Squirrel Hill,” read the Post-Gazette headline. In the Mattes basement, agents found, according to the Sun-Telegraph, “68 quarts of whisky, 103 quarts of apricot and blackberry brandy, three gallons of alcohol, and 30 gallons of rock candy syrup and large quantities of wrappers, labels and stamps.”

The raiding officers seized the liquor and paraphernalia; curiously, newspapers reported, other items found were not confiscated. The Sun-Telegraph reported,

Besides the liquor, the agents and constables reported finding a list containing a large number of names of persons believed to be customers. The prominence of some of the patrons astonished the raiders, they said. An account book showing that business accounts were kept also was found. The customers’ list and the account book were not confiscated.

The next year, Allegheny County detectives arrested Mattes in a building at 1600 Centre Avenue in the Hill District. Officers confiscated four adding machines and other numbers racket paraphernalia.

Later reports described the Center Avenue property as Mattes’s “joint.” The Post-Gazette, in July 1930, wrote that Mattes was “one of the biggest operators of the numbers racket on the Hill.” The building out of which Mattes operated had a restaurant on the first floor; the racketeer used a second floor space for his numbers operation.

1600 Centre Ave., January 31, 1933. Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection, University of Pittsburgh Library, image no. 715.3317952.CP.

One year later, Mattes and his Guarino Road home again made headlines when the Post-Gazette reported that robbers had entered the home and stolen jewelry worth $3,715. The family had been traveling and numbers bankers were an attractive target for robbers looking to make what could be an easy score.

The family moved across Squirrel Hill to a Forbes Terrace duplex in the early 1930s. Like his earlier home, the new house was located in a comfortable middle-class development marketed as “beautiful houses, located on very desirable flower and shrub-covered grounds.” Mattes had done well for himself and his new digs were far-removed from the Hill District’s tenements.

In June 1935, newspapers reported that a car had caught fire downtown. Firefighters responding to the flaming vehicle found that it was registered to Mattes. Inside, they found 10,000 numbers slips, a wire cage used to draw night numbers, and a roulette wheel. Mattes had loaned the car to his stepson, who then illegally parked it downtown. Officials said that a lit cigarette butt tossed into the car caused the fire. Police arrested Mattes at his home that night.

Over the next decade, Mattes continued to run his numbers operation downtown and in the Hill District. In 1936, police arrested Mattes and another man for operating a lottery. The arrest came after a woman numbers writer named Mattes as “the ‘big shot’ of the East End racket.”

In the early 1940s, the Mattes family moved again, this time a few hundred feet away to a townhome on Forbes Avenue. The 5735 Forbes Avenue address appeared in the many arrests and other legal actions that followed after Mattes appears to have relocated his entire gambling operation to a downtown storefront.

Leonard’s Cigar Store

Pittsburgh’s bookies and numbers writers used drug stores, candy stores, cigar stores, and barber shops as spaces to take bets and pay out winnings. These businesses were widespread throughout the entire city, from downtown to each of Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods.

They were easy to spot: stores with no stock in their racks and patrons who left empty-handed. They had salespeople behind counters who didn’t sell. “Lady, whatever you do, don’t try to buy any of that china,” wrote Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigative reporter Ray Sprigle in a 1950 article on the numbers racket. “If you do, the lad behind the counter probably won’t sell it to you … Because lady, that’s no china store. That’s a numbers joint.”

University of Pittsburgh history graduate student Benjamin Hayllar described these fronts in a 1972 magazine article documenting the history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh:

A typical numbers operation will be housed in a little storefront that says “News” outside; in the window, there will be maybe one copy of Mad Magazine and one copy of True Romance. Inside, there may or may not be a stack of newspapers. In any case, it is obvious even to the least perceptive that the establishment doesn’t make its money from its “news” operation.

These businesses were “fronts”: establishments that appeared to be legitimate to hide unlawful activities. “Every major numbers entrepreneur also owned at least one legitimate business outright, had a legal or semi-legal interest in a legitimate firm, or owned and operated what appeared to be a legal firm as a front for illegal business operations,” wrote Don Liddick in his 1999 book, The Mob’s Daily Number.

The front was distinct from other community businesses that offered space to numbers entrepreneurs to ply their trade. Again, Liddick offers some insights into these operations. They were “otherwise legitimate community businesses … used as drop spots, meeting places, and collection spots.” Sometimes the legitimate business owners got a cut from the gambling revenues generated inside their drugstores, barbershops, etc. If they didn’t get a direct payment, then they profited from the increased traffic in their establishments and purchases made by racketeers and gamblers while in them.

During the 1940s, Mattes used cigar stores as fronts for his numbers joints. Pittsburgh newspapers began reporting that he was operating out of a smoke shop at 932 Liberty Avenue. The ground-floor store had entrances on Smithfield Street and Liberty Avenue; it occupied rented storefronts in the Triangle Building (then called the McCance Building). Completed in 1884, the six-story building is an iconic downtown landmark that is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Pittsburgh Central Historic District. But, you won’t find this story in the National Register nomination or in local historic preservation files (more on that later).

Pittsburgh newspapers in early 1943 began reporting on law enforcement raids at a cigar store there. Three men were arrested in an April 1943 raid at the “Victory Cigar Store” (later known as “Leonard’s Cigar Store”) located at 932 Liberty Avenue. According to Allegheny County police, the site was “operating as a numbers pickup station” and two of the men taken into custody were found “writing numbers in a second floor room.”

Later that year, police arrested Mattes in the store. That arrest was the first of several for Mattes over the next four years. In April 1944, Mattes was again arrested there. Located in the narrowest part of the building with a triangular footprint. Its two entrances, one on Liberty Avenue and a second on Smithfield street, provided a strategic location that also gave Mattes an easy excuse for the gambling slips found there. The Pittsburgh Press reported,

Nathan Mattes… was discharged when he testified an undated numbers slip found in the rear of his store may have been dropped there by one of the “hundreds” of persons who use his store as a shortcut to Liberty Ave.

The 1943 raid signaled an acceleration by local law enforcement against Mattes. In early 1947, law enforcement officials and the courts devised a new strategy to shut down Mattes’s operation. They targeted the woman who owned the property and who leased it to Mattes.

Lillian Mervis Pivar (1875-1958) was a Pittsburgh native. After marrying in 1933, she moved to Los Angeles, California. Pivar left a slim records trail that is available digitally (COVID research limitations, you know). By the mid-1940s, she was widowed and back living in Pittsburgh. Pivar owned the cigar store at 932 Liberty Avenue that Nathan Mattes rented.

Unable to reach Mattes, raids at the store repeatedly netted a Mattes associate, Joseph Rosen (1908-1967). Rosen was a small-time numbers man with arrests dating back to the mid-1930s. His parents were immigrants: Rosen’s father Morris was from Romania and his mother, Ethel, was Russian. He was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in the Hill District.

Surviving records show that Rosen identified himself as a huckster, drugstore employee (1930 census), as self-employed (World War II draft registration), and bartender (death certificate). His absence from the 1940 census may be due to a three-year stay in a federal penitentiary after being convicted of “passing counterfeit money.”

In 1945, law enforcement officers raided the cigar store at 932 Liberty Avenue and Rosen pleaded guilty to to writing numbers. He was arrested again the next year in another raid on the store. In that raid, police officers seized “six cigar boxes with small sums of money and a large box of numbers slips,” according to the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. One month later, Rosen was again arrested across the street in front of the Chamber of Commerce building.

The final push to close down Mattes’s operation came in the spring of 1947. Several raids in March and April of that year again resulted in Rosen’s arrest and numbers paraphernalia being confiscated.

On April 3, 1947 police officers conducted a final raid at the 932 Liberty Avenue store. Citing eight raids since July 1944, Allegheny County District Attorney Artemus Leslie asked an Allegheny County judge to issue an injunction declaring the business a nuisance. The judge agreed and a padlock order was granted. Legally liable for her tenant’s actions, Pivar began eviction proceedings against Mattes.

“Rosen Seems Fall Guy,” wrote the Post-Gazette. The article on the raid and legal maneuvering to put Mattes out of business continued:

The first thing the raiders did was to place the gentle arm of the law one one Joseph Rosen, who had been arrested four times before in the same place and who apparently is the permanent fall guy for the operator, one Nathan Mattes.

 

The spring raids finally sent Mattes packing from downtown. In 1949 and again in 1955, federal agents pursued Mattes on tax charges. He spent his final years working as a bartender and living with his daughter, Donna and her first husband, near Churchill. He died in 1962 and was buried in Beth Abraham Cemetery.

After Leonard’s Cigar Store

District Attorney Leslie got lots of headlines when he shut down Leonard’s Cigar Store. The 932 Liberty Avenue case became a precedent and he pursued other padlocking other gambling joints. The Pittsburgh Press reported on his campaign in July 1947. The article mentioned the Liberty Avenue location: “Most notable case was Leonard’s Cigar Store at 932 Liberty Ave., reputed one of the biggest Downtown numbers headquarters. The cigar store disappeared and a poultry business moved in.”

A photographer captured part of the facade in 1961 and the poultry store that replaced the cigar store.

Nathan Mattes and his brother Israel were key players in Pittsburgh’s Jewish organized crime syndicate. Just how significant they were remains to be seen; additional research should shed light on their careers. What hints at their greater importance in Pittsburgh’s organized crime history is the fact that their pictures don’t appear to have been published in any local newspapers. This offered major figures like “Kid Angel” and others relative anonymity in their daily lives.

The Mattes brothers’ trajectory from bootlegging to numbers gambling followed a path many of their contemporaries took. The cigar store episode offers us a chance to see the complicated relationships racketeers had with the spaces they occupied. Front businesses were an essential part of many illicit enterprises. The storefront at 932 Liberty Avenue was one of Pittsburgh’s more colorful numbers twentieth century numbers joints.

In a follow-up post outside of #Mobsburgh I will explore the implications of this brief but significant chapter of a landmark building with a historic preservation narrative that fully omits this chapter in Pittsburgh’s organized crime history.

Meanwhile, if you have any information on Nathan and Israel Mattes — or know of any surviving photos of them — please let me know in the comments. Thanks for visiting.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

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