By
Michael Kane
Who’d
have guessed that, as far back as the 1930s, it was the mob who would give
homosexuals a place to mingle, hook up and eventually coalesce as a movement —
by running the city’s underground gay bars.
Two
conditions brought these seemingly oppositional groups together. One: It was
illegal to be gay, with police routinely hauling in homosexuals on charges of
lewdness or indecency. Two: The Mafia, principally Vito Genovese, controlled
Manhattan’s West Side, including the Village.
In
short, a gay bar was an illegal business — or at a minimum a business subject
to relentless harassment. Yet where most New Yorkers saw deviance, the Mafia
saw profit. Same as gambling, prostitution or bootlegging, all it took was the
customary payoffs for cops to look the other way.
“New
York State’s liquor laws barred ‘disorderly’ premises,” writes C. Alexander
Hortis in his new history “The Mob and the City,” adding that the State Liquor
Authority and NYPD used this excuse to close hundreds of bars in the 1930s and
’40s that catered to “homosexuals soliciting partners.”
Enter
the wiseguys. It was Mafia bosses who founded hot spots, from the famed
Stonewall Inn to the lesbian haunt the Howdy Club to the 181 Club, known as
“the homosexual Copacabana.” And it was Mafia muscle running the clubs behind
the scenes. In La Cosa Nostra speak, the finocchio — “fairies” — were good
business.
“I
was the safest on the streets of New York that I had ever been,” said one
gay-club bartender. “If anybody ever threatened me or intimidated me, I had
recourse. I had been stopped by the police and . . . all I had to do was give
them the name of my employer and they let me go, because we were both working
for the same people.
“The
law made the gay bars illegal. The Family made it operable.”
In
particular, the Stonewall Inn holds a peculiar place in the confluence of gays
coming out and goombahs staying out of sight. The largest gay bar in America,
it opened in 1967 with the backing of the Genovese crime family. It had no fire
exits, no running water to wash glasses, and the toilets routinely overflowed.
But it was the only gay bar in the city where dancing was tolerated by
bought-off policemen. And so the Stonewall became an institution.
But
there’s always a price when you’re doing business with the Mafia. In this case,
the No. 1 gripe by customers was that the drinks were atrocious.
“Some
of the funniest stories are about the awful liquor supplied by the Mafia,”
Hortis tells The Post. “Wiseguys stole shipments of liquor and watered it down
heavily.”
One
patron recalled: “I never bought a drink at the Stonewall. Never, never, never.
Mafia house beer? I mean, does anyone know what that is.”
Handwritten
chalk text on a boarded-up window of the Stonewall Inn in 1969.Photo: Getty
Images
Chuck
Shaheen, the legit face of the Stonewall, admitted, “None of the liquor was
brand-name. We would go in the back at the beginning of our shift and take
Dewar’s bottles and pour whatever swill we could get into it. The same with
vodka. I mean, it wouldn’t be Smirnoff. Nothing would be what it said.”
Regardless
of weak drinks, with a near-monopoly on a growing clientele, gay bars became a
Mafia cash cow. The cigarette vending machines were filled with bootlegged smokes.
Any thoughts of income-tax payments or liquor licenses were a joke. All for a
monthly payoff to the Sixth Precinct of $1,200.
Police
raids persisted, mostly at the insistence of neighbors offended by the presence
of the gay bars. But at the Stonewall, Genovese capo Matty “The Horse”
Ianniello was always tipped off in advance. Liquor was stashed away. And
whatever raids were made for the sake of appearances occurred early enough in
the evening that business could resume in full a few hours later.
The
ugly breakup of gays and goombahs began, not coincidentally, in the late ’60s,
along with the upswell in gay activism.
Calls
for honest-run businesses began, led by the Mattachine Society, the city’s
first gay-rights organization.
But
of more significance was the infamous police raid on the Stonewall Inn in June
1969. The raid sparked a historic riot that’s credited with truly igniting the
gay uprising — yet Hortis posits it was really a crackdown on the Mafia and
that the gay patrons bloodied that night by billy clubs were mostly just in the
wrong place.
The
cop who turned his back on the mob’s payoffs and led the raid, Deputy Inspector
Seymour Pine, said later, “We weren’t concerned about the gays. We were
concerned about the Mafia.”
Whether
that was police spin or not, the Stonewall riots famously fueled a rights
movement — but also ended the mutually beneficial relationship with the mob.
Somebody
even wrote in chalk on the Stonewall’s boarded-up windows: “Gay Prohibition
Corupt$ Cop$ and Feed$ Mafia.”