The King of Content Read online

  To most people reading about the gambling ring in the press—many of whom played the numbers themselves—none of the gang’s crimes would have sounded particularly dastardly. So, with World War II raging in the background, the politically astute Bushnell emphasized not so much the gambling as the ration violations that enabled it. The American government had been rationing tires since 1941, when the Japanese took control of major rubber-producing regions in Southeast Asia, and by late 1942 it sought to further reduce wear and tear on tires by rationing gasoline.9 When Bushnell’s investigators caught Sagansky’s men on film pulling five-gallon gas cans out of the trunks of their cars and surreptitiously filling up, the attorney general knew he had the tinder for some political outrage. The same was true of Sagansky’s men’s ability to procure new cars, even though the government had shut down new car production the year before to free up factory space for the production of military vehicles. Even Sagansky’s formidable phone bill of $5,160.75 for the first eleven months of 1943 was held up as evidence of a lack of public spiritedness, after the War Production Board banned phone companies in 1942 from expanding their lines so that the materials could go to the war effort.10

  But ultimately, it was the Cocoanut Grove fire—often described in newspapers of the day as a “holocaust”—that gave Bushnell the political capital he needed to throw the book at Sagansky and the Boston police. By February, he had convened a grand jury. When a reporter buttonholed him to ask what it had been called for—Sagansky, the Cocoanut Grove, or some new case—he replied, “Obviously, these things converge. It is on the whole situation.”11

  By “the whole situation,” Bushnell meant the way that, ever since Prohibition, Boston’s entire city government, from the top of its police department to its mayoralty to its municipal courts, had been bought off by the mob, who used their interest in the nightclubs of the Conga Belt as their personal living rooms to entertain politicians and get a bit of money laundered in the process. As he painted it, beyond depriving the government of tax revenue and making a mockery of wartime rationing, their activities finally combusted in late November into a situation that killed nearly five hundred people.

  As Bushnell built the two cases simultaneously, he emphasized their interlocking components. In the Cocoanut Grove investigation, he declared that everyone knew the club was “the product of the underworld.”12 And as he unveiled his probe against Sagansky, he argued that it spanned not just the gambling element, but also “night life and entertainment promoters and certain public officials,” as the Globe put it.13 The strength of “the whole situation” gave Bushnell license to do two unprecedented things. First, he decided to make an example of Sagansky and a few of his accomplices by charging them with operating a “fictitious lottery,” a seldom-used felony charge dating back to Colonial times that meant Sagansky was facing hard time. Second, in a stunning and ultimately politically overreaching bit of corruption busting, Bushnell’s grand jury indicted Timilty and a handful of his lieutenants for conspiring to permit the operation of gambling.14

  * * *

  This was all very bad for Mickey Redstone.

  The nightclub business had been so good to him that, by 1943, he and his family had moved into the sumptuous Copley Plaza Hotel, parlor of Boston’s elite, just around the corner from the Conga Belt. But on the morning of February 4, 1943, all this was suddenly at risk, as he was forced to put on his best suit and make his way across Boston Common to the Suffolk County Courthouse to appear before Bushnell’s grand jury.15 The proceedings laid out publicly for the first time that Mickey and Sagansky were partners in both the Mayfair and Latin Quarter, as well as in a lending company called Standish Finance alongside Charles “King” Solomon’s former bootlegging lieutenant Louis Fox.16

  Louis Fox was a key member of Boston’s Jewish mob and a shining example of how to turn bootlegging profits into legitimate business and social respectability. After he and associates like Hyman Abrams and Joe Linsey took over Solomon’s bootlegging syndicate, they broadened it to gambling.17 Fox held a stake in the Wonderland Greyhound Park dog track, which Linsey would go on to take control of decades later, and in which Mickey remained invested until the 1980s. Once known as the “King of the North Shore” for his vast waterfront real estate holdings stretching from Boston to New Hampshire, Fox died in 1963 a millionaire, with most of his obituary taken up by his philanthropy to Boston College and Jewish charities. Only one small line was reserved for his being hauled in before the Massachusetts Crime Commission in 1957 and interviewed for five hours—during which he declined to answer any question except his birthday and would only repeat a single statement: “I am not now or have I ever been involved in anything to do with illegal gambling.”1819 During that testimony, he refused to answer questions about his role in Standish, though a few years later, his obituary listed him as having been the firm’s president. During the same testimony, he also refused to answer a pointed question about whether he had ever visited Sagansky in prison. During the grand jury testimony in 1943, jurors learned that Sagansky held a stake in Standish and that its treasurer was Mickey Redstone.20 Details on Standish are scant, but one associate of Mickey’s described it as a loan-sharking operation.

  The optics of Bushnell’s grand jury were not great for Mickey or his businesses, but his real headache would come from the probe into Sagansky’s alleged attempts to “buy up” the city government of Malden in his quest for a beano license. Among Mickey’s problems was that Club Mayfair was the scene of the alleged crime.

  During the trial, two Malden aldermen testified that Sagansky had met with them at the Mayfair and offered them $1,000 up front and $100 a week if they voted for a chairman of the town’s board of aldermen who would issue Sagansky a beano permit. Sagansky testified that those figures were mentioned but that he was describing how much money would go to the city, not the aldermen—and besides, it was his associate, not himself, who was seeking the beano permit.21 He added that Club Mayfair was “almost like home” to him, prompting the DA to crack, “No dental work there, except in the nature of extractions?” eliciting laughter from the courtroom.

  Sagansky and his associate were found guilty of conspiracy to bribe the aldermen, and by February 20, they were being outfitted with gray trousers and coats to begin their two-year sentence in the Middlesex House of Correction. A month later, Sagansky was brought into court in handcuffs and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the fictitious lottery law. He was sentenced to two and a half to three years in state prison and fined $5,000.22

  * * *

  The episode didn’t break up Mickey and Sagansky, but it imperiled their businesses enough that neither would ever again talk publicly about their partnership. Within a week of Sagansky’s conviction, the authorities came for the nightclubs. Based on Sagansky’s testimony that he was the assistant manager of and a stockholder in Club Mayfair, the Boston police recommended that the club’s liquor license be suspended. Mickey was only able to get out of it by publicly breaking with Sagansky, writing him a $10,000 check to pay him back for the loan Sagansky had given him two years before and having Sagansky sign a witnessed affidavit severing all connection with the club.23 If Sagansky had some crazy idea in his head that their partnership went further than that, Mickey’s lawyer testified, well, that was all a big misunderstanding. After the lawyer came up with evidence a few days later that Mickey had also gotten bank loans for the Mayfair, and thus was not completely dependent on Sagansky for funds, the liquor license was restored.24

  No sooner was the Mayfair out of trouble with the licensing board, however, than the Latin Quarter was in it. Barely a week after Sagansky was convicted the second time, one of the small fry rounded up in the raid on his gambling ring was shot, along with his friend, in an argument over a showgirl at the Latin Quarter, sending hundreds of terror-stricken patrons out onto the brick sidewalks of Bay Village in the wee morning hours of Friday, March 26, 1943.25 The police, mindful that they were vulnerable to appe
aring too cozy with the city’s nightclub owners, recommended that the Latin Quarter be shut down, calling it a “menace to the patrons who frequent it.”26

  This time, it was Bushnell who inadvertently saved Mickey’s hide. The next day, Timilty and other police top brass were indicted and suspended from their jobs, and their replacements did not share their late-found zeal for shutting down the Latin Quarter.

  * * *

  While Mickey was being hauled in front of the licensing board to answer questions about his business partnership with a convicted criminal and ration violator, his son Sumner may as well have been on a different planet. He was in Arlington, Virginia, breaking Japanese codes for the war effort. It was a stroke of amazing good fortune that Mickey’s darkest hour coincided with Sumner’s first real stretch of total independence from his family.

  When Sumner entered Harvard in 1940, he initially lived at home with his parents and brother in a rented apartment in Brighton.27 During the summers, he worked for his father, he said in his autobiography, though he is short on details on in what capacity. “I worked one summer selling hot dogs at the little shack of a refreshment stand at the Sunrise Drive-In,” he wrote. “This was my introduction to the high-powered world of media and entertainment.” During college, he only visited his father’s nightclubs “on rare occasions.” Despite finding Harvard disappointingly easy after the rigors of Boston Latin, he still studied all the time.28

  His maniacal study habits and facility with languages after having taken the required Latin and Greek at Boston Latin caught the attention of the college’s administrators, who recommended that he take an intensive Japanese class from an elegant, charismatic professor named Edwin Reischauer, who had been raised in Japan by missionary parents. Sumner found the fast pace of the course and Reischauer’s high standards exhilarating. In January 1943, with the war intensifying, Reischauer left Harvard to set up a school in a former girls’ school of Arlington Hall to train Japanese translators and cryptanalysts for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Sumner was one of about fifty to sixty (not two to three, as Sumner recalled it) of Reischauer’s Harvard students he recruited to join him.29 These included some of the brightest minds of his generation, like future Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens and Stanford Law School dean and the first president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Bayless Manning.

  Sumner left Harvard without a degree and joined the army. Day in and day out, he scoured intercepted Japanese diplomatic cables. By the end of the war, codes he had helped break were being read to generals and colonels and helped play a role in battles like the one in the Gulf of Leyte where a Japanese fleet was nearly demolished. In 1944, he and his fellow code breakers were made second lieutenants, and he was later promoted to first lieutenant. Breaking the Japanese codes had been one of the crucial ways that the Allies won the war.30

  It all seemed a long way from the Conga Belt. Except that it wasn’t.

  After the war ended in September 1945, but before Sumner could muster out of the army, he was transferred to Special Services and charged with bringing entertainment to army hospitals. “Because my father was in the nightclub business I had met a few performers on the rare occasions during college when I had visited the clubs, so it seemed a natural assignment,” he wrote. “I made some contacts and suddenly I was an expert on booking bands.” He even got Benny Goodman to play for free. He was such a good impresario—and had access to such a powerful Rolodex—he received a commendation for his service from the army.31

  But there was no sign he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. He had amassed enough credits before leaving for Arlington that Harvard allowed him to graduate at the end of the war, technically a member of the class of 1944. His Harvard yearbook of 1943–1944 shows him at twenty, slight and younger-looking than his classmates, filled with righteousness and idealism.32 With his concentration in classics and government, he intended to pursue a career in civil service.

  If his father lived in the shadows, he would live in the light.

  There was just one hint that this might not come to pass: he listed his home address as the Copley Plaza Hotel.

  * * *

  With Sagansky in prison, Mickey carried on with the show. He installed a new manager at the Mayfair and expertly spun his newfound inability to afford “name” talent at the Latin Quarter as a fresh approach to entertainment. Instead of stars, he offered novelty acts, like a circus-themed spectacle in August 1943 featuring a fake snake charmer, “Squatting Squaw, the daughter of Sitting Bull,” and a man in a horse costume. “It was Mickey Redstone’s idea, and it must have taken some courage to try it out, but the experiment proves that names do not necessarily make good entertainment,” wrote Joseph Dinneen of the Globe. Boston was rooting for Mickey to get back on his feet.3334

  Bushnell’s crusade to eradicate corruption in Boston fell somewhat short of its goals. Timilty managed to get his indictment quashed and went back to work until the governor removed him later that year for another scandal entirely.35 He became what he called a “houseguest” of Joe Kennedy’s, traveling with him, delivering threats to his political opponents, and acting as a beard for him when calling upon his girlfriends. The once-mighty police commissioner was reduced to tasks like delivering a bag of $12,000 in cash from Kennedy to Curley in 1946 in exchange for his decision not to run for a congressional seat that Kennedy thought his son Jack would be perfect for.36

  Bushnell never made it to the governor’s mansion. He returned to private practice and died of a heart attack in 1949 in his hotel suite in New York, a workaholic till the end, his body surrounded by open law books.37

  In the end, Sagansky would have the last laugh. His two and a half years in state prison would turn out to be a mere blip in one of the longest and most successful illegal gambling careers in American history. He continued to have a role in the rackets and occasional run-ins with the law until he died of natural causes at the age of ninety-nine.38

  Even after power in the underworld shifted away from the Jewish and Irish mobs toward the Italian mafia, Sagansky remained part of the action. In the 1950s, the Senate committee investigating organized crime named him one of the top 150 bookmakers in the country.39 He would occasionally get busted—the Brookline police department caught him trying to stuff betting slips into a trapdoor in the floor of his office in 1954—but the charges almost never stuck. He kept his word, kept his friends, and didn’t squeal. On his ninetieth birthday, he became the oldest federal inmate in the country for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating organized crime.40

  By the end of his life, he had earned millions and given much of it away to Beth Israel Hospital, Tufts Dental School, Brandeis University, and Temple Ohabei Shalom. At his funeral, hundreds showed up to hail him as a “folk hero.”41 And he still had enough left over to leave $9.5 million to his four children, according to probate documents obtained by the Boston Herald.42 His son told the Herald he was able to leave his children so much because “he sold all his interest in Redstone theaters years ago” and converted them into Treasury notes, mutual funds, and other investment vehicles.

  But Mickey and Sagansky’s partnership went beyond drive-ins, nightclubs, or even loan agencies. In the 1950s, as the mob was leveraging its gambling expertise to build a sparkling paradise of legal gaming on the Las Vegas Strip, Sagansky brought Mickey in with him as an investor in the Dunes Hotel, an Arabian-themed casino and hotel marked by a thirty-five-foot fiberglass sultan with a glinting car headlight playing the role of the jewel in his giant turban. The Dunes opened in 1955, quickly went out of business due to gambling losses, and changed hands.43 (Despite help from friends like Frank Sinatra, who performed at the opening wearing a turban and surrounded by a harem of scantily clad dancers, and interest from prospective buyers including Donald Trump, the resort struggled financially and was blown up in the 1990s to make way for properties like the Bellagio.44)

  Years later, as the FBI was investigating the assassination o
f President John F. Kennedy, its informants reported that some of Mickey and Sagansky’s fellow investors had been front men for Raymond Patriarca, the Providence, Rhode Island–based boss of the Patriarca crime family, who controlled the New England rackets. According to the FBI files, some of Patriarca’s associates were having trouble getting back even a portion of their original investment, but Mickey made $6,000.45

  * * *

  After Sagansky got out of prison in 1945, his name would never again publicly appear alongside Mickey’s, though there were signs that he was more than just a passive investor in their entertainment holdings. After the war, the focus of those holdings would shift back from nightclubs to the drive-ins. The nightclub business suffered from the lack of servicemen moving through Boston, as well as the growing fees that the “name” talents were demanding, and by 1949 Mickey handed over the keys to the Latin Quarter to new management.46 Meanwhile, the end of tire and gas rationing meant the drive-in boom that Mickey and Sagansky had once foreseen was now at hand.

  By 1948, they had bought land bordering a marsh at the intersection of Routes 1 and 60 in Revere, in Boston’s northern suburbs, and opened the Revere Drive-In with a swashbuckling adventure film The Swordsman starring Larry Parks.47 The same year, they opened a drive-in at the same location in Dedham that the community had so forcefully rejected in 1937.48

  But when they tried to take this expansion inside Boston city limits in 1949, with new theaters proposed in West Roxbury and Dorchester, they ran into problems. Drive-ins were no more popular with urban neighbors than they had been a decade earlier. Clergy in West Roxbury and Dorchester had appealed to Mayor Curley, then serving what would turn out to be his final term as mayor of Boston, not to approve the licenses for the theaters’ construction, and they believed they had assurances from Curley that he would not.