Demolition has begun on familiar building in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. The seven-story windowless concrete block, built in 1928, sports a huge fish formed from lights to advertise one of its prior owners, Wholey’s Wholesale Fish.
Historically known as the Federal Cold Storage Building, many Pittsburghers simply call it the “Wholey Building.” Once demolition is done, a developer will build a 21-story tower at the site.
Continue readingNorth Meadowcroft Avenue in Mt. Lebanon, south of Pittsburgh’s city limits, is a quiet tree-lined suburban street. In 1965, the street became ground zero for testimony before a U.S. Senate committee investigating federal agency surveillance practices. Joseph “Frank” Grosso was racketeering kingpin Tony Grosso’s older brother and he was living in a home near the southern end of the street and around the corner from a home where his younger brother had lived in the 1950s. Cresson O. Davis was the Internal Revenue Service’s chief investigator in Pittsburgh and he lived five blocks north of the Grossos.
Frank Grosso had owned the stone-faced home since the 1930s. Davis was renting a ranch home that has had only two owners since it was built about 1952. There’s nothing remarkable about either home in a subdivision filled with period-revival and ranch houses. Neither house blares “the mob lives here” nor “fed in residence.” Perhaps that’s what made the street an attractive place that brought both men — on opposite sides of the law —together.
Former Grosso home.
Former Davis home.
Silver Spring, Maryland, is one of several suburbs just across the District of Columbia state line where racketeers operating in the nation’s capital lived and had satellite operations. It is an unincorporated area that abuts Northwest Washington in a sprawling county that until the 1950s was mostly agricultural. Suburbanization attracted throngs of government workers moving to the District of Columbia as well as Washingtonians moving away from Blacks buying homes in previously segregated all-white neighborhoods. Sam Morgan was one of several District racketeers who ended up in the suburbs. This is his story. Continue reading
In the early 1960s, law enforcement officers from the FBI and the IRS descended on Pittsburgh to investigate organized crime figures and corrupt public officials on mob payrolls. Federal agents used confidential informants, private company records, and electronic surveillance to make cases against such mob leaders including numbers bosses Tony Grosso, Kelly Mannarino, and Meyer Sigal. They also pursued Pittsburgh police beat officers who collected payoffs for their supervisors, including Assistant Police Superintendent Lawrence J. Maloney.
Lawrence J. Maloney, pictured in 1948 when he led a special racketeering investigations unit. Source: historicpittsburgh.org.
Congress in 1965 authorized an investigation into the administrative procedures in federal agencies related to how they collect information on citizens. A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee had a $150,000 budget to investigate federal agency procedures that might imperil citizens’ constitutional rights to privacy. Continue reading
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.
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
Welcome back to #Mobsburgh.
Israel Mattes was born in Russia and he arrived in Pittsburgh in 1906, along with his mother and four brothers. Abraham Mattes, Esther’s husband and Israel’s father, had come to the city three years earlier. Within 20 years, Israel and his younger brother Nathan became two of the city’s best known Jewish racketeers. Two other brothers, Ben and Sam, also had brushes with the law. This post explores Israel Mattes’s short life and tragic death in a dark Squirrel Hill parking garage. Continue reading
Stories circulated for years in Pittsburgh about the exploits of a Jewish gangster known as “Kid” Angel. During the 1920s and 1930s, Angel and his gambling exploits were legendary. “Over town there’s a lad who has been active around the bookie shops where the race track fans pick the horses,” wrote Post-Gazette investigative reporter Ray Sprigle in 1936. ” [Harry] Angel is his name, but everyone knows him as Kid Angel.”
The corner of Centre Avenue and Arthur Street in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, April 2020. In the 1920s, Harry “Kid” Angel had a billiards hall and gambling den at this location.
This visit to #MobsBurgh re-introduces Kid Angel to Pittsburgh readers. Continue reading