Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times And Corruption of Atlantic City (33 page)

Turn Out the Lights

The windows hadn’t been washed in months. The seats were grimy and the entire place had a damp stench about it. The marquee was dark and blank, save for the words “Coming Soon.” Only Skinny D’Amato, owner of the 500 Club, could recall the last name act to appear in his nightclub.

Paul “Skinny” D’Amato was a local hero. A grade school dropout, running numbers at age 11, he had his own gambling room by the time he was 16. A successful racketeer since the Nucky Johnson era, D’Amato was held in esteem by the entire community. Skinny seemed to know everyone, from the guy slicing lunchmeat at the corner grocery to entertainers in Hollywood. Handsome, dapper, and charming in a way expected of a nightclub owner, D’Amato was a nocturnal creature. A coffee-drinking chain smoker, Skinny hardly ever awoke before noon and routinely had breakfast in bed. The 500 Club was his life’s work, offering all kinds of entertainment, from singers and comedians to women and boys. In its prime, the acts at the 500 Club rivaled the best in Vegas and the Big Apple. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis got their start there, and Frank Sinatra was a frequent performer. But the 500 Club was no longer a nightclub; it was a seedy bar, attracting a handful of old regulars and a trickle of first-timers lured by its reputation. D’Amato was having trouble meeting payroll and taxes, remaining open for lack of anything better to do. The same was true of most of his customers, especially the female patrons.

Rita was the only woman sitting at the bar. Platinum blonde hair and rings on every finger but her thumbs, she wasn’t easy to mistake. Her new jeans were so tight they looked as if she had been poured into them. Her sweater was a gaudy green and despite the money she’d spent on her bra, her breasts sagged unmercifully. The years hadn’t been kind and no amount of Maybelline helped. It was a young crowd, most of whom came to the 500 Club out of curiosity, hoping to find the hot times they’d heard about from their fathers. A few of them looked her over, but Rita wasn’t their idea of action. Within a couple of hours the bar was empty, but for the regulars, leaving Rita with no choice but Pacific Avenue in search of a score.

By 1974 Atlantic City was one with Rita—a broken-down old whore scratching for customers. What once was a prosperous and bustling seaside resort was now a sleazy saltwater ghetto struggling to get by on a hollow reputation. No one who knew better, or who could afford to go elsewhere, would choose Atlantic City as a place to vacation.

Jonathan Pitney’s dream had become a nightmare, and his town was collapsing. The core area, once the bustling center of the hotel industry, was a squalid, decaying embarrassment. In the off-season, the town was dead. There were days between September and June when a bowling ball could have rolled from one end of Atlantic Avenue to the other without hitting anything. The profile of the streets leading to the beach resembled a garbage pile. Beginning with the battered, towering hotels along the Boardwalk, and sloping to the grungy motels of the beach block, the streets continued across Pacific Avenue lined with abandoned churches, rundown boarding-houses, discount liquor stores, and greasy-thumb eateries that closed by dark. Across Atlantic Avenue and onto Baltic and Mediterranean, the buildings blurred into a huge pile of rubble making up a vast ghetto. Most of the residential neighborhoods looked like Dresden after World War II. But there had been no bombs, just decay. Street after street, there were thousands of row houses needing painting and repairs, some occupied—the occasional home to vagrants—most vacant, punctuated by burned out ones.

The spirit of the community was burned out, too. As the middle class made its exodus, the town’s social fabric unraveled. Schools and churches closed or were forced to consolidate. Service clubs disbanded as their members relocated to the mainland, sapping the city of civic leaders. Little League baseball, teenage basketball, and youth clubs saw their numbers dwindle until many dissolved. The city was rife with street crime. Corner grocers and family-owned clothing, jewelry, and hardware stores packed it in as robberies gobbled up their profits. Barbers and beauticians retired and no one took over their shops, leaving “Sale or Lease” signs all over town. Movie theatres closed for lack of customers and vandalism, and every office building in town had space for rent. With no prospect of a turnaround, despair was the dominant mood.

For nearly a generation Atlantic City’s leaders were helpless in dealing with the deterioration. Between 1950 and ‘74, tourist income shrank from more than $70 million annually to less than $40 million; thousands of hotel rooms were torn down or boarded up, reducing the rooms for visitors from nearly 200,000 to less than 100,000, hardly any of which could be considered modern. “How could you get anyone to stay in a hotel where the mattresses were 40 years old and guests had to share a bathroom?”

As the grand hotels were pulled down, they left gaps along the Boardwalk as startling as missing teeth in a smile. Instead of a grand promenade and showcase for popular culture and industry, the Boardwalk was home to schlock houses, gyp joints, and panhandlers. The unemployment rate was about 25 percent for nine months of the year, with a full one-third of the population on welfare. More than 90 percent of the housing stock had been built prior to 1939, with the majority substandard. Of the nine New Jersey cities included in the Federal Model Cities Program, Atlantic City had the highest percentage of families (33.5 percent) earning less than $3,000 per year. A report prepared by a local antipoverty group disclosed that the resort had the highest divorce, venereal disease, tuberculosis, and infant mortality rates of any city in the state. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, among 528 American cities in the 25,000 to 50,000 population group, Atlantic City had the highest total number of crimes in the seven standard categories. The criminals were poor people stealing from the less poor. No new money of any kind was coming to town. There had been no major construction for nearly a generation. The only activity on the rise was arson.

In an attempt to revive the resort’s sagging economy, advertising agencies for some of the hotels tried promoting Atlantic City as a “family resort.” The wide-open days were gone, and Atlantic City was now supposed to be a place where mom and pop could bring the kids. What a joke. People like Skinny D’Amato who could still remember Atlantic City in its glory days knew better. They understood their town could never compete as a family resort.

As early as 1958, the resort’s Women’s Chamber of Commerce, at the urging of local hotel owner Mildred Fox, had gone on record in support of legalized gambling. A feisty little redhead with an Italian temperament—she was Fox née Logiovino—Mildred was forever banging heads with the local power establishment. Politically active, she was a dyed-in-the-wool FDR-JFK Democrat, not a Farleycrat. Atlantic City was her home and she wasn’t leaving. Plucky but savvy, Mildred pushed the idea of legalizing gambling to anyone who would listen. “It was our only hope for saving the city. We were on our way to becoming a ghost town.” Fox, the mother of four, was the owner and operator of the Fox Manor, a small Pacific Avenue hotel specializing in honeymoon packages. At the time, there was still a small network of backroom gambling operations and for her efforts, Fox and her children received death threats. The FBI took the threats seriously and, with her permission, tapped her phone but were unable to trace any of the calls. For half the year special agents escorted the Fox children to and from school.

By the early 1960s, the gambling rooms were gone, and gradually there developed a mentality that argued that if Atlantic City was ever to regain stature as a national resort, it needed an edge, the only logical one being casino-style gambling. Las Vegas had casinos and look what they were able to do in the desert. Think of what could be done with gambling in a town with the ocean and the Boardwalk, or so the logic went.

Toward the end of his career when the idea was first suggested, Hap Farley refused to sponsor casino gambling. It may have been the only instance in which Farley put his political interests ahead of his city’s, or maybe he was weary with the battles to hold onto power and pessimistic there was any one cure. People intimate with Hap believe he was concerned over the scrutiny that would be brought to bear on his regime. Were the resort to become the Las Vegas of the East, state and federal law enforcement agencies would pay even closer attention to Atlantic City’s corruption, and Farley wanted none of that.

With Farley gone, Fox’s idea was able to surface. She and like-minded business people kept the hope alive. But bringing gambling to the resort was a major undertaking. The legalization of casino-style gambling could only come about by means of an amendment to the New Jersey Constitution, which required approval at a statewide referendum. And there could be no referendum without an act of the legislature and support from the governor’s office. That took serious clout, something Atlantic City was short on with Farley gone from the scene. To make matters worse, the governor’s chair was occupied by a priggish former Superior Court Judge who, as a criminal prosecutor, had established a reputation as a “Mr. Clean.” Brendan Byrne was hardly what Atlantic City needed in the way of a governor to help bring in legalized casino gambling.

Brendan Byrne’s first run for political office was his election to governor in 1973. Plucked from the Superior Court bench, he was the handpicked candidate of a group of wealthy North Jersey Irish Democrats, the same clique responsible for the election of two other governors. Byrne was the ideal candidate: trim, handsome, well-spoken, and well-connected; Princeton University undergraduate; and Harvard Law School. He was the antithesis of the Farley-style politician. Upon graduation from law school he served as a clerk to a Superior Court Judge. From there he became assistant prosecutor in the Essex County Prosecutor’s office and eventually prosecutor and judgeship. During his days as prosecutor, Byrne gained a reputation as a crime fighter and was referred to by the mob as someone who “couldn’t be bought.” He savored his reputation and effused self-righteousness.

With the traditional problem of corruption in New Jersey, Byrne would have been welcomed by either political party in much the same way Woodrow Wilson was 60 years earlier. The leading Democrats supported him and he won the primary easily. His campaign was short on substance and consisted essentially of a pledge to “restore integrity” to New Jersey government—a tall order for anyone. Byrne’s opponent was Congressman Charles Sandman of Cape May. Charlie Sandman was a perennial candidate and wannabe governor most of his career. In June 1973, he upset incumbent Governor William Cahill in a bitter primary dividing the Republican Party. Sandman would later be Richard Nixon’s most loyal supporter during the Watergate hearings, and his uncompromising conservative message had limited appeal. He was no match for Byrne and the election was a landslide. As Brendan Byrne began his first year in office, legalizing gambling wasn’t one of his priorities. It wasn’t even on his agenda.

But gambling was a priority for the resort’s legislative team. 1974 was the year Atlantic City was to begin its comeback. State Senator Joe McGahn took his cue from the local media as well as business and civic leaders. They had one item on their legislative agenda. This was the year casino gambling was to become a reality. For the first time in Atlantic County’s history, its legislative delegation was entirely Democratic and there was a Democrat in the governor’s chair. As the year began, hopes were high. The
Atlantic City Press
took the lead in expressing confidence: “Governor Brendan Byrne has said he is receptive to a referendum aimed at removing the present constitutional ban on gambling, and a newly elected legislature presumably is willing to vote it onto the ballot. Public approval is regarded as certain.” But Joe McGahn knew better.

Joe McGahn had spent most of his life watching his hometown crumble. Now as senator, he had a chance to reverse the downward spiral. While having none of Farley’s gifts as a horse-trader, he could think on his feet and had the personal maturity needed to stay focused on a single issue. McGahn’s partner, in truth the leader in pursuing a constitutional referendum, was Democratic Assemblyman Steven Perskie. On his first election to the assembly in 1971, at age 26, Perskie was the youngest state legislator ever elected from Atlantic County, having been swept into office on McGahn’s coattails in his win over Farley. Upon arriving in Trenton, the young assemblyman needed no one’s coattails and learned his way around quickly. Nephew of Farley nemesis Marvin Perskie, Steve Perskie was a third generation attorney from a family of respected lawyers, the son and grandson of judges. Of medium height and build with shaggy black hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses, he was the picture of intensity. Perskie exuded confidence—almost cocksure—and had an innate ability for the legislative process. Brilliant, fast-talking but articulate, and with an engaging personality, he was a tireless advocate of casino gaming and the resort’s best spokesperson for the cause. More importantly, Steve Perskie had ingratiated himself with Brendan Byrne. He was one of Byrne’s earliest supporters in the Democratic primary and raised the gambling issue with Byrne early on. After the election he visited the governor’s office frequently, building important ties with Byrne’s staff. Between McGahn and Perskie, the resort had as effective a legislative team as it could hope for.

As the city launched its drive for a constitutional referendum, the watchword was “don’t oversell our case.” The prevailing mentality produced a caution and restraint in presenting the case for gambling, which could come only from overconfidence. Atlantic City and its leaders felt all they had to do was keep a low profile and things would just fall into place as they planned.

At that time, New Jersey was struggling with statewide tax reform. A State Supreme Court decision on the funding of local public schools had made an income tax inevitable. Some proponents of gambling spread the word that legalizing gambling might eliminate the need for an income tax. To preclude such talk, the
Atlantic City Press
in almost lecturing tones told its readers, especially the politicians, “The state can expect to profit very little, if at all, directly, and gambling opponents and proponents alike know it … it should not even be mentioned in the same breath with an income tax. It must be sold on the very sound argument that it is a much needed stimulant for the capital investment that can bring Atlantic City back to its days of glory.”