One or two Oasis girls strip completely, without G-strings, plaster or anything on. The m.c. mouths continuous patter of dirty talk in which he encourages the customers to tickle the girls—anywhere. The girls talk back to the patrons, jump on their laps, stick their bare backsides in their faces, in the spirit of good clean fun.
Max Cohen sold the Oasis to Sam Levin. He agreed to get out of the strip business. But he immediately opened another room, around the corner, called the Miami. Levin sued for breach of contract and collected $50,000. The competition between these two sewers opened the town up wider than it had been in decades. Each tried to outdo the other in nudity. But a girl can’t take off more than all. Meanwhile, other strip dives found themselves outstripped and had to meet the new mode.
The Miami is around the corner from city hall and police headquarters. The mayor can turn at his desk and look into the Miami, and many other dives. This is one of the most vicious and lawless areas in the world. The mayor of Baltimore, whose present term expires in May, 1951, is Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a Democrat. He was chosen Permanent President of the U.S. Attorney-General’s Continuing Conference on Crime and Corruption last winter.
Mayor D’Alesandro was, before his election as the city’s chief executive, the “Mayor of Little Italy.” His rise to the seats of the mighty, did not turn his head. He refused to move from the slums where he had always lived, at 245 Fawn St. Instead he rebuilt his home into a modernistic mansion, a show place surrounded by hovels.
Next door, and connected, is a new commercial building in which the Mayor operates his insurance business and his wife her home-beauty treatment supply company.
If the Mayor returns late from a banquet, political meeting or night session of the City Council, he will not be forced to travel through dark and deserted streets. For the immediate vicinity of his home is the bright light section of Little Italy, where neon-lighted restaurants run all night, and serve liquor in tea-cups, and some openly in orthodox set-ups.
Kid Julian runs one such place nearby, a mob hangout.
It is interesting how Baltimore’s Mayor was chosen to head the Conference on Crime over mob-fighting Mayors Bowron, of Los Angeles, and Morrison, of New Orleans. We know the inside. We covered the inaugural meeting in Washington at which all problems were solved in two hours, after President Truman opened it with a pep talk in which he said there’d be no crime if everyone read the Bible and stopped for traffic lights.
“Look at me,” he said. “I am the most important man in the world. Yet I instruct my chauffeur to stop at all red lights.”
That night the President’s car went through 17 en route to a banquet at the Statler.