Lost Lloyds: A Pittsburgh Gambling Site Is Erased

Posted on May 27, 2022 by David Rotenstein

If only Pittsburgh had a functioning historic preservation law and a more sophisticated historic preservation advocacy community. A few weeks ago I was in the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood to plan for my upcoming Squirrel Hill by the Numbers walking tour dates and I noticed that the facade of 1926 Murray Avenue was missing. It had been there last winter.

Former Beacon Club (1928 1/2 Murray Ave., left) above “H&R Block” and former Squirrel Hill Veteran’s Club (right, 1926 Murray Ave.) in 2019.

I had first encountered the block where the building is located in 2019. I had begun doing interviews for my research into the social history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh. The Beacon Club, one of Pittsburgh’s most iconic and infamous twentieth century gambling clubs, had been located next door at 1928 1/2 Murray Avenue. Many of the people I interviewed early on and later described the club’s significant roles in Pittsburgh’s underworld history, Jewish history, and Black history.

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The “Big Six”: Pittsburgh racketeer Israel Mattes

Posted on May 27, 2020 by David Rotenstein

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 →

Where the racketeers played: Squirrel Hill’s gambling joints

Posted on January 20, 2020 by David Rotenstein

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

Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, December 12, 1952. Source: newspapers.com.

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. Continue reading →

Welcome to “Mobsburgh”: Morris Kauffman’s last ride

Posted on January 2, 2020 by David Rotenstein

Last summer I inadvertently stumbled upon a story about organized crime in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since August, I have been poring through archival records, historical newspapers, and interviewing the descendants and extended kin of people involved in Pittsburgh’s gambling and bootlegging rackets between 1920 and 1980. As I work my way through this research I will be posting stories in this space: #Mobsburgh.

The first #Mobsburgh story begins far away from Pittsburgh in the U.S. 301 and U.S. 1 highway corridors between Richmond, Virginia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1933 and 1934, a loosely organized crew committed a string of robberies and murders. They were called the “Tri-State Gang” for the territory (Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia) where they operated.

Pittsburgh was a bit far afield for the gang, best known for hijacking cigarette trucks out of North Carolina and for robbing postal facilities in Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Yet, their crime spree extended to Pittsburgh in 1934 when the body of one of the gang members was found behind an apartment building in the city’s emerging Jewish neighborhood, Squirrel Hill.