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well good evening everybody thank you for coming I'm really gratified that so many people took the time to come out I guess you're interested in sin huh I guess I should say right off the bat that I am NOT a historian okay I am a writer I like fiction I like stories and and so my novel is really the confluence of two different mythological or myths that sort of converged into one thing I was always fascinated by the all the stories I heard about ol Newport and then I was also interested in all the stories that you know because of I guess my age you know I grew up with the the Kennedy assassination and so that was always in the back of my head and and one day I got an idea about putting the two together and that's really where the novel came from the the front of the book is from the the marquee of the old Glenn run David Hotel which was down on mama Street and originally instead of my novel it was the ink spots because the ink spots were playing there when this picture was taken so I mean Newport was really a happening place so I have a few of my other books back there and maybe if I'm invited back we can maybe I can do a poetry reading but my latest book of poetry is waiting for insanity Clause so you can see it I have a bit of a sense of humor about my writing and so I mean I take this stuff sort of seriously but not too seriously I certainly don't take myself too seriously when it comes on this stuff so if you're interested in that sort of thing you know you can go back and look at some of my books and if you are of a mind you're more than welcome to purchase one so rapport Kentucky so this is from 1957 Esquire article about Newport Kentucky where it got its moniker of Sin City well actually he named it's in town but later on in another article by Look magazine I believe it was they called it Sin City and also there was a placard advertising that the magazine at that time and they called it Sin City and the thing to remember about Newport is that before Vegas was Vegas there was Newport okay and and Newport really it's it's Sin City really goes back to the Civil War because the general hooker who was a general who was in charge of the northern section of the army was based here in Cincinnati and of course so across the river they had a camp that where they where the men could sort of have fun right and hooker used to allow wives to come into camp and also what were called hooker girls okay and so these camp followers eventually just were called hookers right and so Newport was famous for all sorts of nefarious entertainment let us say okay and so this is as I say this is from cross-section USA since sin town so Newport is in Campbell County in the whole area is generally for referred to as Northern Kentucky and Northern Kentucky serves as the playground not only for the bustling Cincinnati with its more than half a million population but for a vast area within a hundred mile radius an estimated 1 million Americans come to Northern Kentucky with money in their pockets for gambling and our pretty girls now this is 1957 right a million people come tourists visitors spent an estimated 30 million a year in gambling and women payoffs in Northern Kentucky may function with little interruption are said to be a million dollars annually and that's probably an underestimate so here's another article this is a famous article from Esquire caustic oh this is the same thing only this is from magazine itself and you could probably get this online when I first started all this and since I'm a geezer you know I started before there was an Internet and I used to hit to find out this information I had to go to libraries like this one and I would look things up in the card catalog card catalog right remember those and then I would go to the stacks remember those and you know I was looking for pictures and things like that and when many times I'd go and somebody had stolen the picture which is the very Newport thing to do I think you know so it didn't surprise me I guess is what I'm saying so these so here we have some more epigraphs this is from Time magazine from 1961 there has rarely been any problem about betting a buck or buying a babe in Newport Kentucky a red brick town just a nine-minute dollar thirty-five cab ride across the Ohio River from Cincinnati the town's traditions traced back to the female followers who camped around the u.s. army barracks like which I just told you that since the Newport has developed such a gaudy brand of gambling and prostitution that it stands today is one of the nation's most blatant sin center centers and what you know if you go to Newport today of course it's squeaky clean I mean it's almost boring now all right so all of this has sort of gone into the the dark mists of mythology thoughtful Newport grocers used to keep stools handy so the local tots could climb up to play the slot machines in fact when I'll tell you about slot machines here in a second Cincinnati high school kids came roistering across the river to take advantage of the whorehouse specials a dollar for the prostitute and a dollar for the madam when one statistics' minded citizen clocked the trade at Newports biggest bravo he discovered that the 11 girls averaged a new customer every 7 minutes from noon Saturday to 6 a.m. the following Monday those are some busy girls the town had its spattering of killings but they were generally shrugged off as self-defense one Easterner was shot in self-defense while sound asleep in fact I was just reading I published an article by about old Newport in the journal of Kentucky studies and I I think I might have another copy back there and you're welcome to peruse this one by Richard chalice who was the youngest member of the committee of 500 which I'll talk about was a reform committee and he got his master's degree at Northern and he wrote an oral history about old Newport and one of the facts that he dug up was that when it came to prostitution you had one-way streets in Newport and so the monastry goes north and so the daytime brothels were on mama street and then York Street was south and then when people came home they could stop off on their way home on York Street so it's very handy they they keep the customer in mind right so this is the Saturday Evening Post from 1960 and this is another big expose they did now one of the big one of the journalists one of the few journalists that have the courage to write about Newport during its mobster days was hank mezack he was a reporter for the Louisville courier-journal all the local papers were a lot more circumspect when it came to activities in Newport mainly because it was dangerous to talk about it the mob didn't like to be talked about and so most of the local papers just didn't say anything you know just like everybody knew what was going on in town but nobody said anything and the thing you've got to keep in mind is that gambling especially in the middle part of the the 20th century was the biggest industry in Northern Kentucky in Newport sure you had the the trout dairy right and there were a couple of smaller businesses and then in Southgate you had the steel mill but by and large everybody was touched one way or another with the money from gambling and the other activities right so I mean it didn't mean that you were necessarily involved with the mob specifically but you may have delivered meat or you know beverages or whatever many people were were involved in the gambling some people were croupier some car dealers you had half Czech girls you had you had cigarette girls in those days and also think about the you know after the war even before the war where you had you know you didn't have the kind of radio and everything we had now people went out for dinner and they went to floor shows and so people would go to these clubs in Newport for entertainment and that didn't necessarily mean that you gambled right and this was true really up until it really until the 70s you know but hank mezack um he published a lot of articles about old newport and he was really a crusader and he really opened it up and his the first book I ever read about old Newport was syndicate wife it was a it was from the wife of trigger Mike Coppola right and it was from her point of view and what her life was like being a mob wife right razzle dazzle this is when I met Hank he just come out with razzle dazzle which was another book about the mob in Northern Kentucky and specifically Newport and it looks like we're old buddies there but he was I but I was just leaning over he was nice enough to take a picture with me um and then he also has this big expose and I've got a couple of his books in the back if you want to look at him about mob and the Mafia in the United States in general so this was a placard from his from the book signing of razzle-dazzle I'm going to talk about screw handers here in a minute and you could see him trying to punch out a local reporter in razzle-dazzle he has this map and it's a fascinating map because it has all of the different clubs newport okay so you see Columbia Street down at the bottom and the New York Street when you came off the central bridge it kind of would kind of ask you over there and then then up and he has all the clubs listed and then he has a list of them and I have if you have this handout that I I prepared I if not you can share with each other but I have a list of the clubs and their addresses on the back here and well anyway I'm having trouble with the Machine here but the clubs in Newport especially after World War two were divided into basically two types there were the carpet clubs and these are more Vegas type clubs the kind of that you if you go out to Vegas today you'll even see right and they call them carpet clubs because they had the thick carpets on the floor and all of that and you could you could go and see a floor show they had national acts that come through I can remember back in the 70s the Beverly Hills used to have the Rat Pack was there it would come in Phyllis Diller you name it you know these national acts would be there and but then you also have these other more neighborhood type clubs and these are sometimes called bust out joints and people tend to lose their money in the bust out joints right but I want to back up just a second because but even going back before prohibition the first slot machine and Charlie my brother-in-law brought in an example if you want to look at it when we when we end here brought the first slot machine in after World War one he had bought it in Chicago and he has bought it on a fluke he was from down in Kentucky Clay County and he brought it up to Newport and he installed it in a bar and before he knew it people are just playing the heck out of it right he goes well this is a great idea so when I bought a bunch more and before long there were slot machines all over Newport and back in the day everybody had slot machines right the drugstore the barber everybody right you know you'd walk into the barber and you know the chairs would be in the front and then there'd be some curtains and then right behind the curtains you'd have maybe two or three slot machines right now if the grand jury was in session because all this is illegal they had these velvet coverlets that they used to slip over the slot machines right surprise they don't exist anymore right nobody sees them anymore because they got a velvet coverlet on it and then when the grand jury was out of session they just take him off and go back to business as usual but they had chuck-a-luck you know they had they had little cards where he could punch out the cards and see if you won back rooms I had you know blow stakes and high-stakes poker games in fact when the gambling museum was open and you know Larry was taking tours we went on a tour of the well the gambling Museum was in the the original bar there was was that this frontier bar well and he also had chalk marks of where the bodies of people who were shot over disagreements or on the floor but if you went downstairs you know they had oak paneling all the way down the steps and you go down to this room downstairs and that's where they had the poker game right and then they had a they they had a place for the phones because everybody was betting doing off-track betting and that sort of thing and then they had a window that if you wanted to go into the back room you know sort of like a doctor's office right but if you were a special person they'd give you the okay and you could go into the back room and then they had steps going up the back way to the rooms over top and of course that's where some of the girls plied their trades and so you can you know sit out a hand there to go upstairs it spent a little time come back down and finish your game see Newport now of course because of the Volstead Act and prohibition alcohol sales became illegal well of course that didn't stop people in Newport and of course Kentucky we had a reputation for illegal moonshine anyway right and so so there was there really wasn't any cessation in being able to get illegal alcohol even during Prohibition the Weiman brewery which was one of the big employers in Newport made over a million gallons of alcohol a year even during Prohibition now this fellow here George Remus he was a guy who was who was born in Germany and he came to the United States and he was raised in Chicago and his father was a pharmacist okay so he grew up in the pharmacist trade well he studied at night and got his law degree so he was both the pharmacist and he was a lawyer okay and during Prohibition he I mean and he knew that if you were a pharmacist you could legally sell alcohol for medicinal and industrial uses but you had to have one of these certificates okay well I mean those are easy enough to forge and so he had plenty of certificates and he looked at a map to see where all the alcohol had been made in the United States and he realized that Cincinnati within two to three hundred miles of Cincinnati eighty percent of all the alcohol in the United States was distilled okay in fact in Cincinnati at one time Cincinnati itself had over three hundred breweries and of course now with all the micro breweries were getting back up there again right but so he moves to Cincinnati and he sets up shop here and he becomes what some people call the king of the bootleggers okay um he he starts paying off everybody because it's illegal okay um and he starts buying let you know alcohol from wherever he can get it he buys the the Fleischmann's distillery in in downtown Cincinnati but he also makes deals with all kinds of distilleries you know to do it sort of under the table all over the area okay but he also starts buying moonshine that they cut that they run up from southern Kentucky Tennessee in Georgia did you know that stock car racing came from running illegal booze right because they needed hot cars to outrun the feds and it's the truth in fact I was just watching a Jay Leno's Auto Show and he they had one of the old rumrunner cars on display and sometimes you know they would just put the jugs in the in the trunk but sometimes they actually had tanks on them but anyway they would come up to Newport they would unload sometimes they would load them on train cars and Remus would send all kinds of booze up to Al Capone in Chicago okay became he became fabulously wealthy this is his house a picture of his house in Price Hill and this is he married a local girl by the name imaging imaging she was the daughter of a lawyer that he had used in business and so anyway he throws lavish parties and she loved jazz you know this was the age of the flappers this was the age of Jazz Age right and they threw parties and everybody who was anybody came to these parties right he had so much but he had artwork from all over the world he had one of the first heated pools in the area okay he had pianos grand pianos all over the place um he would give as megive gold watches to the women as or he'd give cars to the women as party favors you know before Oprah right and he'd give men gold watches right and so I mean we're talking about governor's we're talking about senators I mean all kinds of people and of course he's paying off so many of them right and they're so they' e on best of turns and this goes along fine except that he forgot to pay off the feds so he paid off the local people but he forgot to pay off the feds and so eventually they bust one of his operations right and he gets convicted and has to go away for five years alright so in the meantime he made a bit of a mistake he put all of his money into his wife's name okay while he's gone she starts dating the Fed who busted him so she starts dating him and um when when George gets out of prison she divorces him okay well one day George Remus is driving in his car over in Eden Park and he sees her car and out one story I had it was actually his old limousine and she and her daughter was in the back well he steps on the gas forces the car over to the curb he chops out of the car runs to the back opens up the back door grabs his wife throws her out of the car and shoots her in the head okay so then he gets back in back in his car and he drives down to the local police station and turns himself in well um this starts one of the greatest murder trials in the 20th century history okay and if you you can see here on this the handout I gave you trial of the century it the prosecutor was Charlie Taft the former set of the president's son yeah and he since Remus was a lawyer he he defended himself right and so uses as his defense the first time that the insanity defense was ever used right and so it's like I say it's it's a trial that goes on and on and on and on and on it's on all the papers and everybody's you know it would be on one of the tabloids today right and the jury comes back and they acquitting right he isn't quite totally acquitted because he was he says he was insane so he has to spend some time in the mental institution so he spends you know a couple of months in the mental institution and when they let him out um he's free as a bird but of course all his money's gone his reputation is shot and it really took a toll on him he eventually just moves to into an apartment in covington and he just lets dirt the rest of his life as a quiet man now what makes him so fascinating if you he's his character shows up in several movies and in books in fact there's two new books coming out about George Remus or just came out in August about both his biography and also the murder case if you're interested in the murder case though I have the the holdings book and I think I've got it listed here for you you have the jazz bird by Craig Holden it's a fascinating a book that he sort of he writes it as a as a fiction but it's it's all based on fact and it's really a fascinating read and it's really worth your time if you're interested in that sort of thing he's oh the other thing I was going to mention and I haven't been able to verify this but I've heard it in several places that f scott Fitzgerald used Remus as the model for the Great Gatsby because the character is very much the same you know and he was widely known in the 20s all over the country he's probably the third or fourth biggest gangster in the country at that time um there's this grave there in Falmouth I haven't made my pilgrimage down there yet but if you go down that way you might be able to look him up you probably appreciate a visit so Wiedemann brewery had its problems during that period too because you know I mean it was an open secret that they were creating illegal alcohol and so they're you know they were in and out of court this is from 1927 if you go unfortunately if you go to Newport today where Wiedemann brewery was has been all torn down it's all gone it's a shame because it was a it was a you know foundation of the city for so many years so many people work there I know a lot of my relatives worked in some of them anyway and you can I think the mansion the Weidman mansion is still there up over to uh from 10th Street and they used to have tours I don't know if they still have tours there or not well okay so Remus goes to prison he had you know he had about a dozen associates that he needed what during his operation and one of them was this fellow by the name of Peter Schmidt okay well when Remus goes into prison Schmidt comes to Newport and decides that he wants to try his hand at being the boss and he builds the original Glen rendezvous Hotel on mama Street but he ends but he also buys a Roadhouse called the Caine tongue castle okay in Southgate okay and he remodels it and when he reopens it he calls it the Beverly Hills so this is a this is an earlier version of the Beverly Hills they it was constant they were constantly revamping it of course it burned down a couple of times to that didn't hurt but you can see the portico share there in the front and this became one of the premiere carpet clubs in the area and this is the club where as I say but even up through the 60s and early 70s really the they had national acts come in you know about once a year Dean Martin would play Frank Sinatra right when the thing to remember too is that in the in Newport proper in the grunt Glen rendezvous and some of the other clubs you had a lot of national acts play here even in the 40s 30s and 40s you know Duke Ellington played here for example you know so I mean it was a it was an important entertainment stop so this was the original entrance in Southgate to the Beverly Hills and he would go through this and he'd go up to the top of the hill right did anybody here go to Beverly Hills when it was you have good memories of the place did you gamble what would you would you admit it but you didn't have to right I mean you just go that you could go to a show you could you know people had their problems there they you know they had with the wedding receptions it was just a it was a nice venue right and they they did a pretty good job of keeping all the other stuff away if he weren't interested in it so this is a this was a photograph an advertisement for Beverly Hills look how swanky it is it makes you want to go there doesn't it you know I wouldn't mind going in there and have dinner have a drink you see this mix doll she's wearing so you dress up to go there you wouldn't go there in jeans and flip-flops this is the bar entrance I mean this is gorgeous isn't it you know you getting thirsty you know yeah so it's a nice place a swanky place alright so this is what the interior looked like and you can see the big dance you got the stage there and it was a supper club so you went there to eat and usually they had a big dance floor so you could dance and so this is just one of the bars they had in there and these are some postcards you know that advertised the place it must be a fancy place if they going to advertise the ladies lounge but you know you can have your wedding there other private parties now the Beverly Hills wasn't the only game in town in Kenton County he had the lookout house okay and the lookout house it was run by another one of george remus a--'s lieutenants who went out on his own and it was on Dixie Highway and it was there I think it burned down - in the early seventies I think that's when it burned but see in Newport that's the way every time they wanted to remodel or every time they changed locations oh wait you know there's a fire well goodness so there's some here's the exterior of the lookout house but it too was one of the big carpet clubs right this is the Glen rendezvous and this is this is a famous place for a couple of reasons um this is one of the first places that I said that a peach schmidt he made it into a happening club he named it the Glen rendezvous after his son the Tropicana Club was on the first floor and the gamble you could gamble in there if you wanted to but this is also the site of the George Ratterman scandal which I'll talk about here in a little bit but and it burned down in the late 50s unfortunately but in my novel one of my one of the couple of the scenes are in this club as well as the inside the Beverly Hills as well as in sleepout Louie's place on on York Street unfortunately I don't even know if that building is there anymore so here's the original picture of the cover of my book see the ink spots so I mean it was a swanky place right so this is this here's a picture there's the Tropicana there on the left so if you go to down the fourth Street you with the peace Bell is if you if you look north all right I think there's a good year there now but this is where the merchants Club was okay and so if you were to walk outside the merchants club you would see it now you would see the peace Bell and of course would would be the across the parking lot there would be the syndicate restaurant well this is where red Masterson red Masterson ran this place that's red right there now red wasn't enforcers for the mob now he he's a fascinating character in and of himself if he lived in Fort Thomas if you know where the if you know anything about Fort Thomas where the fort thomas library is the Campbell County Library and Fort Thomas we're almost right across the street is a house and that sort of a mediterranean-style house well that's where he used to live and in fact I was talking to a I was giving one these presentations several years ago and a young man came up to me and said that he had grown up right around the corner and he said they loved red because it on Halloween he give out dull silver dollars you know so hey you can't can't hate a guy like that right but he was enforcer and so he is credited with certain let us say murders okay he himself was the victim of an assassination attempt at one point also one of the stories about him that I find funny is that when peach Smith finally got the Beverly Hills going and it was really going well well what are the big mob organizations the Cleveland for who basically ended up running most of Newport they decided they wanted a piece in the acting well they didn't want a piece of the action they wanted the whole thing and he didn't want to sell so um you know they were so they wanted to convince him so what they did is they got red to go up you know this is a carpet Club a real swanky place right and he and some of his buddies would come in and do what they called dingdong and he gets any guess what that might be well here they have this real fancy place you know with the chandeliers and all the nice curtains and stuff and they started would start urinating all over everything and they called that dingdong II and they kept it up and kept it up and kept it up and among other harassment eventually Pete decided okay I give up you know I'll sell out but but if you anybody take the gangster tour did they talk about red down there yeah so let's show you were red shot some people and is that right I'd like to have that my own self is that right you were okay all right in fact I just had dinner with his son Billy the other day yeah Frank on so other carpet clubs in Newport proper this was the 633 club or the Flamingo club and this is sleepout Louie's place okay now sleep out some people calling part of the Jewish mafia some people just say he was part of the New York mob there was a sort of an uneasy balance between the Cleveland folks and the New York mob most of the Cleveland mob though they can't the the people who were Newport came out of Steubenville Ohio oh by the way going back to the merchants club I meant to tell you that it was an Italian restaurant hey there's a surprise and they had singing waiters and they had this kid from Steubenville Ohio and it was Dean Martin right and so he got his start here in Newport Kentucky it's one of the reasons he would come back um one of the other carpet clubs in its day was that what was called the Primrose Club and Brady was another one of those lieutenants of of George Remus later on was it was sold and in two different hands and it became the Latin Quarter some of you remember the Latin Quarter well of course today it's Bobby Mackey's right it's haunted you know there's probably good reasons for that too so there's some of the dancers at the Latin Quarter and there you have a season's greeting advertisement for the Latin Quarter so there's the interior for the Primrose when it was the Primrose and then they made it into much more of a fancy Club later and that stirred that that's the Latin Quarter you can see the bandstand and the and usually the the dance floor was in front of it again people would come there to eat and see a show and you could gamble if you wanted to but you didn't have to and sir this is my Bobby Mackey's but it's the same location and if you watch those ghostie hunt shows it's been on several times now originally I think the building it probably was a tannery or something like that because there was a pit in the basement and nobody knows exactly what it was used for but it was probably used in those early days for for tanning purposes although you know if you want to get rid of somebody you know you know and also the Licking River is right there so if you want to go looking you can to take a quick story about that one of the rumors you know how the levee is built down there on when you go into the garage underneath the bridge they've got all of those that stonework well that was a favorite place to go down and you know make people see your your point of view you know and sometimes they'd find people just hanging there you know they couldn't be convinced apparently now this the Yorkshire was another one of those carpet clubs that building is still there last I heard it was a bakery it's a what is that is that fifth in York fifth in New York it's a sort of an Art Deco outside and so that part is still there now when I came back to this area I guess I was a road musician in those days in the 70s they were using it for show bands and you could go in and when you walked in in the front door you would go down this long bolts an incline you go down and down stairs that's where they used to have all the crap tables and all that right well I was down there one night and I was listening to show band and I looked up and the the ceiling was like twice as high as this so basically two stories of a extended ceiling and about three quarters of the way up you'd see these brick rectangular holes in the wall well that's where the guys sat with the shotguns case there was trouble so this is what it looked like probably what would you say that is that's probably mid 60's early sixties looks like an old Pontiac or something there but that would that would have been the entrance and there's all kinds of bust out joints in Newport and these are places that were usually run by locals who paid a you know a certain amount of their money back to the mob and you had to highlight club and I think that was on York Street and then I don't know exactly well the alexander club was 21:24 elexander one of the most infamous places with a heidi coke club in wilder because it was both a brothel as well as a gambling joint and the state police raided one time and they found a lot of the prostitutes hiding up in the ceiling but the owner all the politics of it gets kind of complicated but since it was outside of Newports proper the state police could raid it because the state police couldn't go into municipalities without being invited and so they just surprised them one night and and I think it was owned by the sheriff in those days so here's that placard I was telling you about Newport Kentucky Sin City of the South Saturday Evening Post from 1960 so Frank's crew Andrews from Andrews originally a PI understand was a moonshiner but he owned a lot of these clubs on the west side of Newport he owned a sportsman club were you around for the sportsman club do you know do you remember well originally it was on the west side and I think had they moved it down underneath the bridge just the central bridge 314 you know that - well I think we should that's right yeah yeah well that's when everything was segregated and so a lot of the clubs on the west side were black clubs that's right yeah you know and here he is beating up a photographer who was trying to take a picture of him during one of the one of his indictments there on I guess that that looks like the Flamingo club because that you can see the church in the background and this is just some of the kind of paraphernalia the police put on display look at all the slot machines right there was the roulette wheel by the way speaking of the Yorkshire Club which was on mama Street right across the street was Auto printing and my understanding was there was a tunnel underneath the street and so whenever a raid was coming the mob would take the all this kind of paraphernalia and take it down into the tunnel so that when the police showed up we don't have anything like that you know or they take it over into the printing office so screw met a sort of a mysterious death he was in the hospital and they say that he committed suicide but one report had there was a couple of gentlemen with Hamburg's on who came to visit him right before he was decided to try to fly so so whether it was a suicide or a murder you know you know it's Newport you take your you make your own decision and these are just some ones the dice from the 633 club there's a stir from I think the Glen rendezvous and we've got some other kind of we've got some dice back there's other dice for sale so if you want some Newport dice and you can put in your own load right some of them are pre-drilled so all you have to do is load them up yourself and this is an ad for the Glenn rendezvous happen in place right and these are just some other odds and ends this is these are some paraphernalia from the Beverly Hills when we think of Newport you know I was talking about shows but they also had a burlesque shows back in the 40s and 50s burlesque was a little more genteel than we think of strip bars today Newport became famous in the 80s late 70s and 80s for all nude dancing you know you had the xxx theater and all of that down there and became kind of a blight and I think people really objected to that but the burlesque shows had you know comedians as well as exotic dancers you know and they had all kinds it was more like vaudeville you know and so you could see this kind of stuff - there's Ted Lewis Ted apparently played Cincinnati a lot because he was a terrible gambler and he would he would every every week he gamble away his salary so he had to work the next week for free and so you ended up staying here here's another ad for for Beverly Hills and well by the time we get to the late 50s and early 60s see Newport the populace of Newport tolerated all this because they didn't see it unless of this stuff happened at night when you know if you know if you're a working person you go to bed you got to get up you got to go to work you know you never saw any of this stuff besides that the mob did not tolerate any kind of petty theft muggings anything like that my father grew up in Newport he said that when he was a young guy that nobody locked their doors you didn't have to you know if somebody was stupid enough to start mugging somebody they just find him floating down the river you know because the mob wouldn't tolerate that they had you know bigger fish to fry but um by the time you get to the to the late 50s and certainly by the early 60s um because of the you know the chief keef offer commissioned in the 50s then you had the organized crime investigations in the mid to late 50s there was just too much heat on on Newport and besides that by this time Bugsy Siegel had gone to Vegas this little desert town and he'd built a hotel called the Desert Inn and it was going gangbusters and the big difference was in Las Vegas gambling was legal so you didn't have to pay all these people off you didn't have to worry you didn't have all those headaches and so by the early 60s a lot of the heavy hitters had left Newport and gone have gone to Vegas and so you had a lot of the lower echelon guys running things and they just weren't as how do I want to put this they didn't have the style that the other guys had you know so there was more violence and there's more trouble and you know they would get caught doing things they shouldn't be doing stupid stuff you know and it just brought more and more heat and and then the community started getting tired of it and so you you had you had people who wanted to reform and of course you had this reform group probably going on for about 20 years but there was a lot of inertia you know I mean the churches didn't want a lot of laws that said they couldn't gamble they couldn't have their church fairs and things like that and most of the clergy just felt man what's the harm if people want to go in bed a little bit but you know what do we care but things were starting to get out of hand and so a committee of 500 was formed of 500 people who wanted to reform Newport and get rid of these guys right and so they started looking around to see if they could find a candidate who would be a good challenger to one of the ones backed up by the mob and they found George Ratterman and radarman was famous in the area he had he had played for some local teams he'd gone to Xavier he'd gone to Notre Dame and he was a football star at Notre Dame and I think he'd even played for some pro ball a little bit of pro ball the Browns yeah and so he was pretty well known smart guy right he was a lawyer he was a smart guy and and so they asked him if he would run and he said yeah okay I'll do it okay I mean so but the mob doing the things the way they do things now there's different versions of this story and the common version is that he was friends with Tito currency who was the manager of the the Tropicana Club at the inn out there on mama Street and the story is that Tito called him up and said look you know he wanted some help to get out of the mob you know he wanted to see if George would help him out so George agreed to meet him at a at a bar or a club over in Cincinnati and so they're having a couple of drinks and talking things over and that Tito or somebody had slipped George a Mickey Finn right some chloral hydrate well the next thing he knows um he's waking up in one of the upstairs bedrooms above the Glen Ronda the Tropicana Club in the Glen rendezvous building and his trousers are off or down around his knees and he's in bed with one of the local slippers Dustin slippers strippers okay now there was supposed to be a photographer who was supposed to come in and take his picture but the photographer chickened out so they called the police and police detective Suffredini shows up and arrests him okay and takes him down to jail so the whole time though George claims that he was he was drugged and framed all right and so the a trial ensues in police court and it becomes a kind of a circus and I I'm gonna hold off saying and too much more about this because I have a bit of a documentary that W ket made and I think you'd get a kick out of it yeah oh is that right oh yeah I believe yeah just just happen to be downstairs yeah okay you were talking about Frank Benton um it he was the the attorney for the committee right of 500 right and he and he's just reading this the other day they offered him I think was ten thousand dollars a week if he would just go away he was on he didn't but I mean he was offered the money yeah oh I'm sure you know here's a here's some surviving members of the committee of five hundred with hank mezack now this was probably probably ten years ago 12 years ago unfortunately hank has passed i wanted to say this quickly about you know I need to say it very quickly because I want to show this film the connection between the Kennedys and Newport is an interesting story you wouldn't think that you know these these people from Hyannisport wouldn't even know anything about Northern Kentucky but you have to remember one one thing that the Kennedys father was an old rum runner himself I mean he's during Prohibition he used to run Scotch whisky into Canada and then bring it down by truck into the United States but and it's also none of the parts of the fuzzy history or if you want to think of it as a conspiracy theory that Jack won the election of 1960 just barely right and it is said in part because of the help of Sam Giancana in Chicago who helped to secure not only Chicago votes but also West Virginia votes which they needed to push him over the top but Bobby also went to school with some local people okay so they they knew each other and one of the interesting things about it is well there's two interesting things about it there is a there's a news clip where Bobby is talking right before the election talking to Al Fogarty or one one of the local reporters saying that if his brother wins the election that he's going to get rid of this stuff that's going on here in Newport right the other thing is that during the election on Election Day they kept close tabs on the vote counts in Campbell County because Campbell County always went Republican and if they couldn't win Campbell County they didn't think they were going to win and so um and so you you know and before the election you know John came and visited some people here in in in Newport so there was there was a lot of interest there's another picture of him well you can see here from Hank Messick's book but I was just saying about Robert Kennedy and in Cincinnati and the election the first heart election news came in at 625 it came from Campbell County Kentucky his county seat was Newport and his principal industry was illegal gambling a few months earlier a weary Robert Kennedy had stood in a Cincinnati hotel room and looking out the window and viewing the viewing Newport promised the war on crime if his brother was elected so this is now in terms of my novel in terms of my novel this is really I had heard a story about Bobby Kennedy in Newport at the Beverly Hills and I'd heard different versions of it but it really intrigued me and so I wrote a short story that was eventually published in a happy magazine in New York and it became the core of what became my novel all right and I don't know if we're going to have time but if we do I'll read that read some of that chapter for you but if if you know anything about the Kennedy assassination and the you know all the rumors about the mob hating the Kennedys a lot of it could very well be because of the relationship with the mob and especially at this flashpoint here in Newport you know yeah go ahead right absolutely yeah and he really had an animus about especially about Newport I mean it's it's strange you know did you okay yeah oh yeah some things never change right yeah where's Google well you know the the original george google testified before the Kefauver commission and in a famous answer he gave they they asked him they said we've heard all about all this gambling and everything that's going on in Newport and we want to know you know you're the police chief what do you what do you have to say about it he goes I don't know anything about any gambling and they said well the cab drivers will take take people right to these places and he says I don't ride in cabs and then then he says well he they said we've we know the names of all these different clubs he says I don't go in those places and so they said well listen if you had to arrest somebody how would you arrest them if you don't go in he said I just go to the door and tell them who I wanted and they bring them out of course the place just burst in laughter because it's it's so absurd you know okay so comments yeah you know I'm not exactly sure in fact we could probably find out in one of those books I know I've read it I just can't remember I know that he had Bobby had gone to school with one of the local lawyers at Harvard but I don't know what her connection was she may have been head of the Democratic Party in the area well his Pete had named the you know where the syndicate is now you've you've been to the syndicate restaurant well that was the old plate Torian and Pete had after he sold off the Beverly Hills went and built that place it was a it was a bowling alley and it had meeting rooms and stuff and but you could also gamble there too and next door was the snacks bar and they had more off-track betting going through that that particular place than a place in the country in fact one of the reasons Newport made so much money it really wasn't for the mob it wasn't from gambling it was from off-track betting they were the mob bank and so bookies all over the world if they wanted to lay off some bets they laid off the bets through Newport and in fact that building that's cat right across the street from the peace Bell if you're looking west I guess yeah that's B West that building is a lawyer's building now well that's where there was a bank there and that's where supposedly the mob bank was in that building yeah that ran from the porte de cincinnati is a and when they cut the phone line that ended the book well in those days in those days too you have to remember that every phone had to have its own line and there so there were different offices in in town where there were so many phone lines going in you couldn't see the sky yeah in fact the story about old Newport back in the day - during Prohibition there were so many illegal stills and you know they had a month at people had him on the roofs that there was so much smoke they said they and they they were taking take feed up you know to make for the stills but they said they were up there feeding their chickens but there was so much smoke coming from the stills that again it blotted out the sat the Sun that's the story that's the myth anyway that's the story one of the last big killings of Newport was of Sammy Eisner I don't know if you remember him but there there's a still a big mystery about who who killed Sammy Eisner and I was doing a a book signing over at the Duke Energy senator they have a big thing there for new books and a former state policeman came up and he said he'd they had evidence of who did it you know so but probably not enough I guess to go and get him presenting you know yes ma'am Johnny Johnny TV Peluso well he was you know he ran for sheriff against vitamin and lost and but his family you know they're a big been a big part of Newport for ever I mean and he had a family had a grocery store down there in Newport and they he had a TV repair shop that's why they call him you know TV TV Peluso really a character he there for a while he ran the Grandview Gardens which was up what they called a spaghetti knob 19th Street at the top up there take a couple quick stories about Johnny when I was a was a musician for years before I became a academic and we went up there one time I had a show band and we went up there to take some pictures because he won in Cincinnati in the background and it was in the morning and we were out there you know we're all dressed up and stuff and we're taking our pictures and all of a sudden we hear this guy screaming running across the lawn in his night clothes you know and it was Johnny Peluso and he goes what are you doing up here you know well I think was one of those times he was an under indictment you know I guess he was afraid we were I don't taking pictures of him or something and he explained what we were doing he was so thrilled that we thought the thought of using his place that he said well here I'll I'll take your pictures and so he got behind the camera and he started taking the picture another quick story about Johnny he was a known character I mean you know I mean he was kind of a bad boy sometimes I mean he did do I think was three years or five years for tax evasion or fraud or something but I came back to this area and I was down on Newport there used to be a garage called nel Tanner's there on llama Street or you know where I'm talking about and I was coming out of the the the shopping center there and I couldn't get out because there was a pink Cadillac convertible sitting right in the middle of the street with its engine running and the door was open you know and I thought to myself you know there's only one person that would have the gall to do that and drive a pink Cadillac and leave it idling right in the middle of the street it was it was Johnny Peluso and just at that moment he comes out of knelt neurs hitting the pack of cigarettes he needed a smoke and so he just ran in and got smoke left this car running he hopped in it put in gear and took off yeah oh yeah I mean he was around for a while for what's that yeah the poor souls are well there you go that's it it's family business yeah you know so let's see that's art school politics I mean that's yeah yeah absolutely sure and people remember that absolutely come election day you bet well we're out of time thank you very much for coming I sure do appreciate you