The Stardust Hotel and Casino opened in 1958. Its owners included Cleveland racketeers Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Ben Rothkopf, and Samuel Tucker — leaders of Cleveland’s so-called “Silent Syndicate” of Prohibition-era bootleggers turned gambling entrepreneurs. Pittsburgh resident Milt Jaffe also had a stake in the Stardust. Jaffe was the MobsBurgh connection to the Cleveland and Chicago mobs.
Stardust hotel and casino postcard, c. 1960s.
The Ankara was a popular Pittsburgh nightclub and restaurant. Located just outside the city limits on Route 51 in Pleasant Hills, it opened in 1946. For more than 20 years, the Ankara fed and entertained Pittsburgh residents. Its floor shows, dancing, and ice revues were part of the city’s nightlife golden era. The Ankara, though, was mob owned and operated.
Ankara nightclub souvenir photo cover.
Charles Jamal was a Turkish immigrant who bounced around North America in the years before World War II. He named his new Pittsburgh nightclub for the city in his homeland. Jamal’s organized crime ties beyond the club remain opaque. In 1952, muckraking journalists Jack Lait and Mortimer Lee described Jamal, “a Turk who runs the swank Ankara nightclub” as one of Pittsburgh’s “big boys” in the county outside the city limits, in their survey of American organized crime, U.S.A. Confidential.
You can read more about the Ankara and Jamal in this August 2020 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article. This post digs into the crime family that was closely associated with Jamal and the Ankara from the time the club opened until the early 1960s: Nathan Mattes, et al. MobsBurgh previously featured Nate Mattes and his brother, Irwin, a..k.a., Pittsburgh’s “Big Six” of Gambling. This time around we’re going to highlight the nightclub’s Miami Beach, Florida, namesake, the Ankara Motel.
The American Jewish Outlook, September 1, 1950.
“805 was a burner. Where the hell is Jakie Lerner?” That’s how aging racketeer Sam Solomon responded to University of Pittsburgh history graduate student Rob Ruck in 1981 when the latter asked him about a big numbers gambling hit from 1930. Ruck interviewed Solomon for a dissertation (and later book) on Black sport in Pittsburgh, Sandlot Seasons.
In the dissertation and book Ruck didn’t flesh out Lerner’s identity. Also left unsaid was why Lerner might be important in any discussion of Pittsburgh’s organized crime history. Not a fan of unanswered questions, I went looking for Lerner and I found him buried in a suburban Jewish cemetery. Along with his grave, I also found a criminal career spanning more than 60 years and several states. Lerner, it seems, was one of Pittsburgh’s most notable racketeers. He also was misogynist and, as one relative told me, an asshole for whom “describing him as a scoundrel would be a compliment.”
Jakie Lerner’s gravesite, Shaler Township, Pennsylvania.
As the rest of the nation focuses on election returns, I’m going to spend a few minutes on some different numbers. These numbers were published in newspapers throughout the United States and racketeers co-opted them to calculate a daily lottery number. The “numbers racket” sprung from the hope that a penny, nickel, dime, or quarter bet would yield wins that equaled or exceeded a week’s pay.
Yet, factory workers, government clerks, housewives, and even schoolchildren picked three-digit numbers six days a week losing much more over the years than they ever won. Starting in the years after the Civil War, the game was called “policy.” In the 1920s, a new nationwide numbers racket spread through cities and small towns that relied on daily reports from the New York Clearing House published in newspapers.
Cumberland Evening Times, March 21, 1930.
Folks picked their numbers using birthdates, things they heard on the radio and read in comic strips, and suggestions they got from psychics or in the many “dream books” and “hot numbers” pamphlets that circulated. Lottery dates, however, remained among the most popular ways to pick a lucky three-digit number.
Typical newspaper numbers tips published in newspapers.
For example, take Monday July 14, 1930. In Pittsburgh, that seemed like a good bet and many bettors put their change on a winning combination drawn from the actual date, 714. Panic ensued as the city’s numbers bankers failed to pay the winners.
The Pittsburgh Press July 17, 1930.
Can you spot the three-digit combination used as the winning number that hot summer day in Pittsburgh?
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 15, 1930.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
Banner, Internet Court of Lies.
Robert Thibadeau wants to jail all of the lies floating around on the Internet. To accomplish this lofty goal, the retired Carnegie Mellon University professor is using an old Moose lodge in a Pittsburgh suburb as a virtual courtroom where he runs the Internet Court of Lies.
Thibadeau’s idiosyncratic approach to Internet truth dismisses decades of scholarship on lies and lying. Instead, he has concocted a dubious definition of “lies” and an even more questionable approach to identifying and mitigating digital dishonesty. I first noticed his “courtroom” while driving through Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, about six miles north of downtown Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River. The banners and other items affixed to the former Moose lodge piqued my curiosity. I bought a copy of Thibadeau’s self-published book, How to Recover Your Lies (Privust LLC, 2019), and then I asked him for an interview.
After a two-hour Zoom conversation, multiple follow-up emails, and communications with a linguist who literally wrote the book on lies and lying, I cobbled together a two-part blog post for the New Directions in Folklore blog. Read about the Internet Court of Lies here:
The Internet Court of Lies: A Digital People’s Court? (Part 1)
and
The Internet Court of Lies – Part 2
The Internet Court of Lies is the first thing people see as they enter Sharpsburg, Pa., from the south.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
While researching African American communities in Montgomery County, Maryland, I visited several historic Black cemeteries and photographed the cultural landscapes and grave markers. This slideshow is a sample from that research.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
This summer I am teaching a graduate seminar on ethnography and community engagement for historic preservation. For the the final day of the virtual residency, I will be re-creating the Decatur, Georgia, walking tour that I did for the 2020 National Council on Public History (virtual) conference.
This version will be a little different because our world has changed dramatically since March. The tour focuses on the intersection of racism, municipal planning, and historic preservation. For this iteration I will be using interviews with Decatur residents that I did between 2011 and 2018.
The clips I am using drill down into how the city’s schools have reinforced structural racism, from Jim Crow segregation to efforts to resist integration to racial curriculum tracking. City leaders have weaponized the school system to create an environment that is hostile to Black children and their caretakers.
In the interviews that I did, I collected accounts of real estate speculators threatening grandparents with children in the schools. The city makes it possible for people to file anonymous tips to report children attending the schools who are not living with their parents inside the city limits. People told me about real estate speculators who approached elderly African American homeowners with unsolicited offers to sell their homes. When the homeowners declined the offers, the real estate speculators threatened to report them to the City Schools of Decatur because grandchildren or nephews and nieces were living with them.
Such reports result in removal of the children from the school system and possible fines and criminal charges for the adults.
This brief clip (which isn’t part of the tour) has one woman telling me about the city’s successful effort to purge her granddaughter from the city’s schools.
© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein
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,
The Morning Herald, Monessen, Pa. march 6, 1948.
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. Continue reading
I recently participated in a Society for Industrial Archeology online program featuring projects with a social justice element. The SIA program titled, “Infrastructure and Social Justice” included a presentation on a Tennessee bridge used during the Trail of Tears and a viaduct in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Infrastructure and racial segregation have a long and fraught history. Railroads and highways frequently created firm boundaries separating racialized spaces. Many cities throughout North America have their “other side of the tracks” or interstate highways that were built to separate Black neighborhoods from white ones. In some places, like Detroit, Michigan; Decatur, Georgia; and, North Brentwood, Maryland, walls and other barricades divided Black space from white space.
Railroad tracks, Decatur, Georgia.
Crivella’s Wayside Inn. Tucked away in the 1000-block of East West Highway near downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, this former restaurant was the scene of non-violent civil rights protests between 1962 and 1965. Montgomery County in 2006 bought the former Crivella’s Wayside Inn. After holding listening sessions with members of Silver Spring’s historic Black community, county leaders worked with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History to collect stories, artifacts, and design exhibits to tell the story of Silver Spring’s Black communities, from colonial plantations and enslavement through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement.
That’s what a journalist writing about a new Silver Spring Civil Rights Museum might have written had there been a museum developed in the former Crivella’s space. Instead, Montgomery County officials demolished the former restaurant and erased its history. This post explores a lost opportunity for Montgomery County to confront its segregationist history and seek reconciliation with its African American residents, past and present. Continue reading