And whatever raids were made for the sake of appearances occurred early enough in the evening that business could resume in full a few hours later.
But at the Stonewall, Genovese capo Matty “The Horse” Ianniello was always tipped off in advance. Police raids persisted, mostly at the insistence of neighbors offended by the presence of the gay bars. All for a monthly payoff to the 6th Precinct of $1,200. Any thoughts of income-tax payments or liquor licenses were a joke. The cigarette vending machines were filled with bootlegged smokes. Regardless of weak drinks, with a near-monopoly on a growing clientele, gay bars became a Mafia cash cow. We would go in the back at the beginning of our shift and take Dewar’s bottles and pour whatever swill we could get into it. McDarrah/Getty ImagesĬhuck Shaheen, the legit face of the Stonewall, admitted, “None of the liquor was brand-name. Handwritten chalk text on a boarded-up window of the Stonewall Inn in 1969. Mafia house beer? I mean, does anyone know what that is.” One patron recalled: “I never bought a drink at the Stonewall. “Wiseguys stole shipments of liquor and watered it down heavily.” “Some of the funniest stories are about the awful liquor supplied by the Mafia,” Hortis tells The Post. 1 gripe by customers was that the drinks were atrocious. And so the Stonewall became an institution.īut there’s always a price when you’re doing business with the Mafia. But it was the only gay bar in the city where dancing was tolerated by bought-off policemen. It had no fire exits, no running water to wash glasses, and the toilets routinely overflowed. The largest gay bar in America, it opened in 1967 with the backing of the Genovese crime family. In particular, the Stonewall Inn holds a peculiar place in the confluence of gays coming out and goombahs staying out of sight. all I had to do was give them the name of my employer and they let me go, because we were both working for the same people. “If anybody ever threatened me or intimidated me, I had recourse.
“I was the safest on the streets of New York that I had ever been,” said one gay-club bartender. In La Cosa Nostra-speak, the finocchio - “fairies” - were good business. It was Mafia bosses who founded hot spots, from the famed Stonewall Inn to the lesbian haunt the Howdy Club to the 181 Club, known as “the homosexual Copacabana.” And it was Mafia muscle running the clubs behind the scenes. Alexander Hortis in his new history, “The Mob and the City,” adding that the State Liquor Authority and NYPD used this excuse to close hundreds of bars in the 1930s and ’40s that catered to “homosexuals soliciting partners.”Įnter the wiseguys. “New York State’s liquor laws barred ‘disorderly’ premises,” writes C. Same as with gambling, prostitution or bootlegging, all it took was the customary payoffs for cops to look the other way. Yet where most New Yorkers saw deviance, the Mafia saw profit. In short, a gay bar was an illegal business - or at a minimum, a business subject to relentless harassment.
Two: The Mafia, principally Vito Genovese, controlled Manhattan’s West Side, including the Village. One: It was illegal to be gay, with police routinely hauling in homosexuals on charges of lewdness or indecency. Two conditions brought these seemingly oppositional groups together. The Hidden History of How the Mafia Captured New York” Who’d have guessed that, as far back as the 1930s, it was the mob who would give homosexuals a place to mingle, hook up and eventually coalesce as a movement - by running the city’s underground gay bars.