The Time Grandad Helped Out a Speakeasy Proprietor

Recently I shared a story my Grandad often told about the time he got drunk with F Scott Fitzgerald. I’ve received a lot of positive response to the story and have been asked if my grandfather had told me any other stories that might be of interest. Well he sure did. Grandad led an interesting life and was a good storyteller. Come to think of it, I wished I’d recorded his stories while he was still alive. I suppose I should be thankful that I heard a lot of his stories so many times that I’ve practically got them memorized. Anyway, I’ll share another one now and perhaps more later. But first a little background.

Grandpa was born Emery Joseph Scanlon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on March 3, 1902. He grew up in Pittsburgh the middle child of Asa and Gertrude Scanlon. His parents owned a grocery store and Grandad used to work there after school, weekends and in the Summer, except when he was playing baseball, a sport at which he excelled. He also excelled in the classroom and earned admission to Columbia University in New York.

Grandad graduated from Columbia in the Spring of 1924 with a degree in Comparative Literature. However he had achieved notoriety on campus and the attention of others with his writing for the school newspaper and the school annual. “I had newspaper ink flowing through my veins so right after graduating I applied for jobs at every newspaper in New York. The Herald Tribune hired me. There was an editor — Lester Martin — whose son, Ned was a buddy of mine. Ned had shown his pop some of my writing and he was impressed enough to not only hire me but put me to work straightaway on the crime beat.”

Within a few years Grandad — who everyone called Em — was an editor on the city desk, a job he held for 12 years. The rest of his life I’ll recap another time as this particular story involves his early years at the Herald-Tribune.

It was 1928 and Prohibition was still the law of the land and would be for another five years. Like many Americans, Grandad flouted the law and was a regular at several speakeasies. One was a particularly popular joint in Greenwich Village called Lucky Louie’s. The front was a little Italian restaurant. To get to Lucky Louie’s you’d go through the restaurant into its kitchen and down some stairs. The place was huge, with several dozen tables, a long bar against the far wall and a stage on another wall. Most nights there was a band playing, sometimes with a crooner.

Grandad got to know the owner, a Sicilian by the name of Giuseppe Antonelli. His wife and sister ran the restaurant and Giuseppe and a partner handled the bar. Here’s what Grandad said about it:  “As to that partner, he was good news and bad news. Was a guy by the name of Rocco Maccioni and through his mob connections he was able to guarantee Giuseppe a steady supply of booze and complete protection from cops, judges and rivals. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had no written contract with Giuseppe and tended to take his share when and how he saw fit and a little extra to boot. If Giuseppe said anything to Rocco, the hood would claim he had to pay additional tributes to his bosses. Giuseppe knew this was horseshit. Because of Rocco, Giuseppe was barely getting by — despite the fact that his was among the biggest, most popular speakeasies in New York.

“Sometimes Giuseppe would come sit with me and commiserate. ‘What can I do, Em? I need this guy but he’s skimming half my profits, or more. There’s no way I can complain to his bosses, I don’t even know who they are.’ I’d ask Giuseppe if he ever thought of ‘arranging an accident’ for Rocco. ‘He’s connected big time. My life wouldn’t be worth a wooden nickel if anything happened to him and even if they didn’t suspect me, the mob would just send another guy to be my goddamned partner and maybe he’d be worse. Face it, Em, I’m stuck.’”

Grandad felt real bad for Giuseppe and wanted to help. But what could he do? “I knew a lot of cops. Some were great policemen, some were brutal sadists, some were lazy bums, some were scam artists, some were drunks, some were conscientious. All kinds. But I knew one particularly well, a Sergeant by the name of Mickelson. Different from the rest. Tough as nails but a real intellectual. Totally honest and by the book but when it came to prohibition he looked the other way as often as he could. Mickelson was a real renaissance man, loved literature and the arts, but he was six feet three inches of pure muscle and not afraid to use it. I met Mickelson at a coffee shop one afternoon and told him Giuseppe’s story. Mickelson said, ’That’s what happens when you get mixed up with the mob. Ya take the good with the bad and hope the bad ain’t awful. Least your friend’s making some money. Should count his blessings.’”

Grandad asked the cop if there was anything — anything at all — he could suggest Giuseppe do. “Em, you’ve been solid with me and seen that cops gets a fair shake in your paper and I appreciate it. Let me roust this Rocco character, have some of the boys rough him up some, tell him to keep his nose clean and play fair with his partner,” Mickelson said. But Grandad was immediately concerned that Rocco would figure that Giuseppe had squealed to the cops and give him what for.

“Em, you underestimate me. He won’t suspect that your pal said a thing. Hoods like Rocco are used to being hauled in now and again, he’ll suspect that a — let us say — business acquaintance fingered him for one thing or another. We’ll just tell the punk — as an aside, mind you — that we’ll let him stay in business but that there’ll be periodic checks with his partner to assure he’s being square.”

Mickelson assured Grandad that far from having anything to worry about, Giuseppe would soon be taking in the money he deserved, perhaps even with interest.

I asked Grandad why, as an officer of the law, the sergeant didn’t haul in the whole lot of them for violating the Volstead Act. “A place like Lucky Louie’s was paying off cops and cops were some of their best customers. Hell, I saw the mayor there more than once,” Grandad told me.

Sergeant Mickelson was good to his word and “him and the boys” as Grandad put it, put such a fear into Rocco that he turned over his share of the business to another hood by the name of Luigi Finestra, who treated Giuseppe square.

Finestra not only didn’t skim any money, he was an excellent host who, according to Grandad, “lent extra charm and grace to the dump.” Unfortunately Finestra charmed the wrong person one night ultimately seducing the girlfriend of a mob boss. A few nights later Finestra was found in the alley behind the speakeasy with his throat slit and in Grandad’s words, “a significant part of the male anatomy removed.”

The experience so shook Giuseppe, who had the terrible misfortune of being the one who discovered the body, that he sold out his share of Lucky Louie’s and opened a restaurant in Brooklyn, one that prospered at the same spot for decades.

Once Giuseppe sold Lucky Louie’s it went downhill. Grandad stopped going as the new bosses watered down the drinks and jacked up the prices. It was bad enough that it ended up being one of speakeasies that the cops busted up. “Every so often the police would raid a speakeasy and make a bunch of arrests, just to give the general appearance to the public that they were enforcing the law. Once they raided Lucky Louie’s it was done for as a going concern.”

I asked Grandad about the protection money the mob paid to keep the place open. “This was the prohibition era, everybody double crossed one another. Sometimes it was the mob that got double crossed.

“I’ll tell ya, Prohibition was the bunk, it turned everyday citizens into criminals, made the real criminals rich and made even more cops than usual corrupt. I’ll tell you what it was, it was a tragedy. I think more people were drunkards when prohibition ended than when it began.

“Funny thing is that I kinda miss it. There was always something going on and so many characters and stories…”

I’ll share another one of those stories soon.