Texas Confidential
A 1950s compendium lays bare the seamy underbelly of urban Texas in its oil-flush heyday. San Antonio and Galveston come out well; Houston, and especially Dallas, not so much.
Back in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th, there was a trade in guidebooks to the underworld in various cities, mostly focused on bordellos though not neglecting other aspects of what was then known as “the sporting life.”
In New Orleans, they were known as “Blue Books” and focused on descriptions of the various establishments in Storyville, the city’s most famous red light district. (One established shortly after a very rare Puritanical drive failed in that city; in conceding defeat to the forces of the world’s oldest and most ineradicable profession, one New Orleans mayor shrugged and said “I can make prostitution illegal but I can’t make it unpopular.”)
It seems World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War II put the kibosh on publication of such volumes but they briefly burst back into spectacular flame in the late 1940s at the hands of two hard-bitten newsmen: Jack Lait of Chicago and Lee Mortimer of New York.
From 1948 to 1952, Lait and Mortimer published four salacious and controversial volumes, each of whose title ended with “Confidential.” Chicago, New York and Washington got their own dedicated volumes, and the rest of the country was rounded up in USA Confidential, the last in the series. Ranging far beyond just prostitution, the books purported to expose ties between organized crime and official power structures in each of the cities and coast-to-coast — (Lait and Mortimer had front-row seats to the rise of the Mafia in Chicago and New York — the books also described each city’s homosexual scene in terms so vicious one wonders if they doth protest too much, as we shall see.
In a way, they seemed like forerunners to alt-weeklies like the Houston Press and Village Voice — this was where the (unpaid) sex ads were, to some extent, and also in the muckraking style of their insinuations about how vice had infiltrated city halls from coast to coast and how everyone everywhere was ever on the take.
Six decades after its publication, Washington City Paper, a descendant of these books, described the DC version as an "infamous guide to the D.C. demimonde" written by "a pair of right-wing hacks determined to peel back the city's white-frosted veneer to expose a fetid underbelly of Communist sympathizers, Chinese bookies, call girls, Mafiosi, and homosexuals." The modern day writer added that while the book dripped with disdain, it remained "an underhanded ethnography rich in fascinating period detail.”
That they are, these (allegedly) "nonfactual accounts of alleged crime-politics links, vice and scandal." A world-weary nihilism pervades; in its review of USA Confidential, a New York Times scribe opined that the book was"a rather hard-breathing lecture on coast-to-coast depravity that represents about as discouraging a picture of America as you can find at the moment."
Or as their publishers touted USA Confidential:
As you might expect, these mask-rendings, moralistic diatribes, wild allegations, and muckraking crusades spawned lawsuits, lots of lawsuits, perhaps the most infamous of which came from Dallas. Here is what they had to say about Neiman-Marcus. (Strap in; modern ears will find this prose discordant.)
So — Neiman-Marcus, that grand temple of high-living Texas consumer opulence, was little more than a cathouse / den of catamites that not only fostered prostitution but also introduced homosexuality to Dallas and made it flourish.
Stanley Marcus’s suit against the writers failed when he couldn’t furnish plaintiffs willing to say they were injured by these allegations.
But you see what I mean about protesting too much? And this whole, “Well, we hate queers, but in case you are just as disgusting as they are, here is where you might find some.” The homophobic language is so shrill and strident it comes across as an inside joke.
The writers mocked the tendency of Dallasites to toot their snouts at Houston — the practice is ancient, apparently — and accurately pointed out that Benny Binion, the murderous East Texas Irish gangster / gambling kingpin — had a bright future ahead of him — Binion moved on the Vegas and founded the Golden Nugget, which is still in the “family,” if you mean by that blood relatives of Texas mobsters. That would be Tilman Fertitta, the maternal relative of Sam and Rose Maceo, who take up a lot of space in the book’s Galveston and Houston sections. (Fertitta owns Binion’s Vegas Golden Nugget and his own creation — Golden Nugget II in Lake Charles.)
So let’s head down old 75 Highway to the Bayou City.
First, here is their general view of Houston:
And on we go through a few pages of McCarthy and Howard Hughes Big Rich tales I’ll spare you with here; most are well known to locals. They see a rising star in LBJ and tie him to Brown & Root.
On to vice:
For “Zallone,” read Vallone, who had been whacked, likely at the behest of the Maceos, in the interim of this book’s reporting and its publication. Unless they were referring to a son of his, one of whom was the father of Tony Vallone of Texas restaurant legend.
Five bordellos were deemed worthy of mention: those belonging to madames Addie Sasser (208 Bastrop), described as “a Negro who specializes in white girls,” and Thelma Denton (3333 Scott), “the ritziest assignation madame in town” “who supplies girls for big boys like industrialists, bankers, and rich gangsters.” Two more madams operated out of hotels — the Ayres in the 400 block of San Jacinto, which “gets raided often but is never closed,” and another in a hotel called the Wyndham, whose coincidental name does not lend itself to easy Googling today when seeking its location.
There was also the Capitol Avenue establishment of Lucile LaPorte, which still stands at number 2719. Some years back I got a tour of the place as well as some touching stories and some good old-fashioned dirt. Jim Ohmart, who bought the place from the White LaPorte’s Black surrogate daughter Vicie, came into possession of the establishment’s scrapbook, in which newspaper clippings of the bordello’s customers were lovingly tended in a scrapbook kept by Vicie. LaPorte’s house was said to have inside the biggest, brightest, merriest Christmas tree in town, one decorated by her girls under her studious eye.
From there the authors proceeded to offend the honor of all Houstoian womanhood by writing that madames were hardly necessary in a city where so many women were “amiable” enough to give it up for free.
The authors did not find Houston’s gay demimonde as horrifyingly prevalent as that of Big D, saying only:
The Pink Elephant was at 1218 Leeland; the Gingham at 1301 Main. La Tonga seems to be forgotten.
Apparently there was something like A Clockwork Orange milieu amongst the city’s youth at the time. The authors claim each neighborhood had a youth gang, the largest of which was the South End Gang. These prosperous White hooligans — attendees of San Jacinto HS for the most part — were said to roll 200 deep, and along with a smaller River Oaks horde, the South Enders were known to cross the bayou into the “Bloody Fifth Ward” to rumble with the Black gangs there. According to the authors, the White kids were supported by off-duty cops who would only step in when the violence approached homicidal levels or, one assumes, the White kids were getting a thorough thrashing.
Though they name Houston Post city columnist George Fuermann as a source for some of their dope, Sig Byrd, then in his heyday, is not cited or even mentioned. Perhaps he wanted his role to be kept….confidential.
Acknowledgment: Many thanks to reader Anthony Dorsa for putting me on this story, and if any of you have things like this you’d like me to write about and explore further on your behalf, don’t hesitate to send them my way.
I loved this particular blog especially the part about Neiman-Marcus. Houston did have Sakowitz but it just goes to show you the "culture wars" have been going on longer than many of us imagined but , in this case, law enforcement had it right by understanding popularity is key. I recently heard some gazillionaire from Dallas is buying the Galvez Hotel (where the Maceos' had their barbershop). Apparently, this man wants to renovate the Galvez back to it's glory days. George Mitchell, I think, bought and renovated it back in the 80s and then sold it. It appears to have lost some of it's luster since then. It's a great historic building to save as long as they don't Dallas-ify it too much.
Thank you! I loved every word of this! There are more stories about the Galveston Beaumont Houston Mafia that need this kind of examination!!!