The diplomatic set, visiting nobility and royal guests of the State Department, and the older Washington dignitaries visit John Perona’s El Morocco, the swankiest in New York. One may meet ambassadors, princes, a dispossessed king and some South American presidents in Morocco at one time. On these occasions there is more law scattered around the room than there are customers in most other clubs. A visiting potentate like a sultan or maharajah, in addition to rating a couple of Secret Service men, gets four New York detectives.
When the boys come up from Washington with nothing good on their minds they head for the Sun Up Club, in a private house in West 68th Street, right off Central Park West. This place is run by a couple of sisters who used to operate the Hour Glass Club. One, Helen O’Brien, is close to Joe Nunan, former Commissioner of Internal Revenue and intimate friend of Boss Ed Flynn. This place gets away with anything and has for years. It freely sells liquor at any hour without a license and without regard to closing ordinances.
Helen O’Brien knows a lot of amiable dishes who hang around there. If there should happen to be none when a visiting padrone comes in, they soon get there. This spot is practically unknown to New Yorkers, few of whom, including newspapermen, ever heard of it. It is patronized almost solely by august Democrats from Washington.
Visiting New Dealers pour also into Toots Shor’s restaurant, where they are almost as welcome as baseball players and prize fighters. The late Bob Hannegan, postmaster and Democratic Committee Chairman, was a regular. Sometimes he brought an unknown Senator from his home state with him, Harry Truman, who liked the conviviality of the place and bent an elbow with the boys. When the Senator was Vice President, he stopped in and played the piano in the private room. Toots, a genial giant, fat and wide and tall, had lunch at the White House with the late President Roosevelt and made him laugh. Sometimes at dinner there’s more Washington brass at Toots’ than there is in Washington. Toots also runs all non-union. But he can call a cabineteer a crumb-bum, and is then set down as a character and a wit.
35. BALTIMORE, CONFIDENTIAL
(Authors’ note: This is a chapter, not the going-over that a Lait-Mortimer excavating job on our sixth biggest city, our second port in tonnage, truly rates. It is a by-product of this work, because aristocratic, historic Baltimore is the slumming-ground for thousands of escaping Washingtonians, only 36 miles away over fast rails and modern autobahns.)
Stir up your memory and try to think when and where you have read an “exposé” or any other study of Baltimore. You can recall pieces, kindly or vicious, about San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, and discussions of the peculiarities of Boston. But Baltimore, a main-line metropolis, with atmosphere and tradition and volume and character, is by-passed.
We were almost complete strangers there on field-work, though our tortuous delvings into the continental Mafia-managed Syndicate long ago fixed for us its place in the national network.
Baltimore is perhaps the perfect example of a Mafia-controlled city in action. For practical purposes it is a contraction of Chicago and an expansion of Galveston, extreme gangster-throttled cities with the same core of Sicilian manipulators who push the buttons and pull the levers.