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    Wicked Newport: Kentucky's Sin City
    Wicked Newport: Kentucky's Sin City
    Wicked Newport: Kentucky's Sin City
    Ebook182 pages2 hours

    Wicked Newport: Kentucky's Sin City

    By Dr. Thomas Barker, Dr. Gary W. Potter and Jenna Meglen

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    About this ebook

    Controlled by the heavy hand of the mob and fueled by government corruption, Newport evolved through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a notoriously robust center of criminal activity.


    With top political and law enforcement officials often on the take, the seedy status quo became so excessive that a May 1961 issue of Time magazine declared, "Newport has developed such a gaudy brand of gambling and prostitution that it stands today as one of the nation's most blatant sin centers." Eastern Kentucky University Professors Gary Potter and Thomas Barker, both experts on organized crime, along with Jenna Meglen, offer up a captivating chronicle of Newport's criminal development, complete with thought-provoking assessments of the possible advantages that organized crime brought to the city commonly considered to be Las Vegas's predecessor.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateOct 10, 2008
    ISBN9781625841179
    Wicked Newport: Kentucky's Sin City
    Author

    Dr. Thomas Barker

    Dr. Gary Potter is a professor at Eastern Kentucky University in the College of Criminal Justice & Police Studies. He is at the forefront of research in organized crime, and he has published numerous books, articles and essays on the subject. Dr. Thomas Barker is also a professor in EKU's Criminal Justice Department, and focuses much of his research on crime, police administration and police misconduct. He has published hundreds of articles in various publications relating to sensational crimes and corrupt police.

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      Book preview

      Wicked Newport - Dr. Thomas Barker

      References

      INTRODUCTION

      Newport, Kentucky, lies to the south of Cincinnati, across the Ohio River, and to the east of Covington, Kentucky, across the Licking River. It was incorporated in 1795 by James Taylor, the brother of Hubbard Taylor, who actually platted out the site, named it and took up residence on it in 1775. The city was named for the British explorer Admiral Christopher Newport, who captained the first ship from England to Jamestown, Virginia. Newport was a small river town, whose potential for importance as a major river port had been eclipsed by Cincinnati. By 1830, Newport still had only 715 inhabitants. Newport was a town thoroughly isolated from its neighbors. There was no bridge across the Licking River to Covington until 1854 and no bridge across the Ohio River to Cincinnati until the Civil War. Newport’s economic identity would not become established until the late 1800s, when a large brewery and a large steel mill began operations in the town.

      Newport would, no doubt, have been just another of the quaint, quiet, sleepy towns on the south shore of the Ohio River to the east of Louisville if it had not been for organized crime. Individuals and groups operating in the hidden economy of the United States would give Newport a distinctive identity for the entire twentieth century. Newport would become a legendary city in the history of American organized crime. In fact, Newport would share a designation as an open-city with only a handful of other towns, such as Hot Springs, Arkansas; Saratoga Springs, New York; Galveston, Texas; Hallendale, Florida; Phenix City, Alabama; and Biloxi, Mississippi. Open cities were communities in which politics, economics and crime became so enmeshed that separating one from the other was impossible. They were cities where organized crime became the dominant influence, an influence that persisted for decades. Of all the nation’s open cities, Newport had the longest run of unfettered criminal capitalism. In fact, Newport would become the earliest prototype of wide-open gambling later emulated in Las Vegas. Newport’s importance as an organized crime entrepôt is what put the city on the map.

      But why Newport, Kentucky? What was it about this town and this configuration of politics and economics that made it so attractive to criminal syndicates? Reporter Hank Messick attributes Newport’s uniqueness to two factors. First, he claims that Newport was geographically isolated from the rest of Kentucky by bad roads and hilly terrain, requiring that it be both economically and politically autonomous. Second, he attributes Newport’s uniqueness to cultural conflicts between German and Irish Catholic immigrants and anti-immigrant, Protestant, Know-Nothing elements in Kentucky. Messick argues that this rift in the local population doomed any common political purpose or initiative for most of the twentieth century.

      There is much truth to Messick’s observations. Certainly, Newport was isolated, even from its closest neighbors. The absence of bridges to Cincinnati and Covington for the first sixty years of Newport’s existence clearly stunted its economic growth and allowed Cincinnati to develop as the primary river port in the area. Newport’s distance from Lexington, Louisville and Frankfort, and the difficulty of travel, certainly separated it from the major centers of social, political and economic life in Kentucky, as well as making it difficult, and politically unrewarding, for governors to interfere in Newport’s life, both legal and illegal.

      Anti-immigrant bias was also well developed in Kentucky and in Cincinnati. In the 1840s, Newport’s population swelled to six thousand people as a result of an influx of Irish and German immigrants. In the 1880s, a second wave of German immigration occurred. There is no denying that anti-immigrant feelings ran high in Kentucky in the mid-1800s. There was a large and active, although short-lived, Know-Nothing party preaching anti-immigrant politics, and there were acts of considerable violence, such as Bloody Monday in Louisville in which twenty-two people were killed on August 6, 1855, in anti-Catholic riots. Certainly, there were traditional divisions and deep-seated animosities between Catholics and Protestants in Newport. How debilitating these were over time to political reform is a matter of conjecture. Messick believes that these divisions prevented a united front against organized crime until George Ratterman’s campaign for sheriff of Campbell County in the 1960s. Anti-German and anti-Irish prejudice did not enhance political cohesion.

      But there were other influences on the development of Newport, as well. Every river town on the Ohio and Mississippi had its share of vice and river piracy during the nineteenth century. While river piracy in Kentucky was most common west of Louisville on the Ohio, some occurred in the Northern Kentucky area. Similarly, while Natchez, Vicksburg and New Orleans would become the primary vice districts for nineteenth-century river commerce, Newport also had its small share of vice in the form of faro games and hog pens (floating river brothels).

      But the primary influences on Newport’s development as an open city can probably be identified in the economy and politics of the area. Despite the tendency to treat organized crime as an evil aberration in American history, the truth is far more complex. Organized crime, as demonstrated by every historical study on the subject ever conducted in the United States, is an organic, vital part of the communities in which it exists. Organized crime provides jobs, capital for reinvestment and a substantial injection of money into the local economy. It provides political contributions, under-the-table kickbacks, lucrative investment opportunities and election workers for political campaigns. It also provides an important social structure in communities that creates a buffer against the coarsest, most brazen criminal elements, who now are subject to social controls initiated by syndicates, and provides opportunities to make a living for a large number of very marginal people who might otherwise turn to more dangerous forms of predatory crime. Finally, and most importantly, organized crime exists only where there is demand for it. Organized crime does not create gamblers, drinkers, johns for the prostitution trade or illegal drugs and drug users. Organized crime simply establishes structures to meet that demand and profit from it. The relationship between organized crime and the communities in which it operates is highly symbiotic. The lesson of both historical and contemporary research on organized crime demonstrates universally that organized crime cannot exist where it is not wanted or tolerated. And in Newport, it was a welcomed guest.

      Part One

      SLOT MACHINES, HANDBOOKS AND LIQUOR

      PRE-PROHIBITION ORGANIZED CRIME

      In the early twentieth century, prior to alcohol prohibition, Newport was the perfect place for outlaws, desperadoes, bank robbers and kidnappers to hide out from the law; so much so that it came to be known as Little Mexico. The geographic and political isolation of Newport made it a good place to rest and relax in relative anonymity during those periods when the heat was on. It was also a place of opportunity for enterprising young criminal minds. In 1917, two such enterprising young men, Howard the Hillbilly Vice and Charles Kroger, introduced the first slot machine to Newport. Howard Vice came out of Clay County, Kentucky, and worked for a while as a bodyguard for Toledo, Ohio bootlegger Jackie Kennedy. When Kennedy was murdered by Pete Licavoli, who later became a major force in Ohio organized crime, Vice went to Newport to seek his fortune. There he linked up with Kroger, a Cincinnati native.

      In 1917, the two men ordered a slot machine they had seen advertised in a magazine from the Herbert Mill’s Company in Chicago. The slot machine was one of Mill’s brand-new fruit-symbol gambling devices, a vast improvement over slow and unreliable earlier gambling machines. They placed the machine in a candy store, where it made about sixty dollars a week in profit, not an inconsiderable amount of money for one machine in 1917. Later, they moved the machine to a beer garden, where it made even more money. But there was a problem. The machine kept breaking down, and parts had to be ordered from Chicago. It often took weeks for the spare parts to arrive, thereby cutting off the machines’ income. Vice and Kroger grew tired of these interruptions and sold the machine to Lawrence McDonough and Boots Ortlieb. A few years later, Kroger was killed in an argument over bootlegging profits. Howard Vice went on to become something of a legend in early Newport organized crime lore.

      McDonough and Ortlieb invested more capital in additional machines. They also solved the breakdown and repair problem by hiring a man to serve as a combination repairman/collector who would maintain a regular route to fix the machines and collect the coins. It was a highly successful endeavor. By March 24, 1917, the Campbell County grand jury was reporting:

      The citizens of our county do not realize the magnitude of slot machine gambling. The daily income averages $8 per machine. It is estimated that about 150 machines are in operation. This means about half a million per year. The tremendous possibilities of corruption are plainly seen.

      The grand jury may have seen the tremendous possibilities of corruption, but it clearly did not understand them. The judge overseeing the grand jury inquiry ordered Dayton Police Chief Frank Ortlieb (Boots Ortlieb’s father) and Newport Police Chief Frank Bregal, whose son headed up a competing slot machine syndicate, to take charge of the cleanup. The slot machine syndicates seemed quite safe for the time being.

      There were other forms of gambling in Newport at the time. Pool halls offered betting on either billiards or cards. With the advent of the telephone, bookmaking on horse racing became a fixture of many Newport taverns. However, prior to the 1920s, these gambling activities operated on the fringe of society and underground with little organization. That was to change with Howard Vice and Prohibition.

      After selling his slot machine, Vice went back to hiring himself out as a bodyguard to bootleggers during Prohibition. But one evening, while playing in a craps game at the Gun Club, a local speakeasy, Vice went on one of those legendary runs of the dice and won $6,000 from the club’s owner. The owner decided it was simply easier to give Vice the Gun Club than to pay the debt. So, Howard Vice, the hired muscle from Clay County, was now a speakeasy owner. Vice operated the Gun Club for several years, surviving several extortion attempts by early local crime syndicates. In fact, Vice was shot and wounded in one shakedown attempt. But it wasn’t the threat of extortion that drove Howard Vice out of the illegal liquor business; it was actually the quality of the liquor itself.

      In the early days of Prohibition, sufficient quantities of bonded liquor had been diverted to the illegal market to supply demand. Vice relied on several local independent bootleggers who were running high-quality bonded booze into Newport. But as Prohibition continued, the supply of bonded liquor was depleted. Large organized crime syndicates in New York and Chicago had not, at this time, established the smuggling enterprises that would bring Canadian, European and Cuban liquor to the

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