Liquor, Lust and the Law Read online

  In a Vancouver Sun article published in December 1977, columnist Allan Fotheringham remarked, “The hooker shop known as the Penthouse has been existing for decades. It has been known as one of the landmarks of the town, a minor league equivalent of the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State building.”[19] Certainly by the early 1970s, the club was often home to more than a hundred prostitutes who used it as their workplace. Saxophonist Dave Davies, who performed at the Penthouse in the early ’70s, observed that, “there were resident hookers. Some of [them] were just goddesses. They were just stunning women. Beautiful women. Real style, class, dressed to the nines, cultured women.”[20]

  Exotic dancers on stage.

  Prostitution wasn’t a public nuisance when it was kept indoors and off the streets, but it was still a crime. Retired Constable Vern Campbell spent eight months on Vancouver ’s vice squad in 1973. An affable, well- spoken Vancouver East Ender, Campbell still recalls the nights when he had to pose undercover as a john. “I joined the VPD when I was pretty young. I’d never been to the Penthouse before. The first time I ever went in there, I was undercover. Typically, your routine was, you’d go in, sit down, have a drink, and really just wait for the solicitation to take place. The older vice-squad guys were a lot better at tricking the hookers than I was. Those girls spotted me as a cop a mile away,” Campbell laughs.

  Detective George Barclay and Constable Vern Campbell escorting a suspect under arrest, 1970s.

  After meeting a prostitute and arranging a price, Campbell would suggest that they leave go to his car or a nearby hotel. A pick-up team from the squad would be in position outside, watching and waiting for the undercover constable to come out. “They’d usually let you walk a block away to distance yourself from the club before they stepped out to make an arrest. Sometimes, if you were working with some asshole pranksters they’d make you sweat, they would wait awhile until it looked like the girl was about to get too friendly before they’d come out and make the arrest. The pick-up team guys would never acknowledge that they knew you, so you just pretended to be an embarrassed john on a night out from the wife. The girls never actually knew who you were until they saw you in court.”

  For vice-squad police, too many nights at the Penthouse tended to jeopardize their undercover abilities. For Detective George Barclay, who worked undercover in 1975, it once produced a humorous result. “I remember walking down Granville street with my wife one night. We were headed to the Orpheum. A woman tapped my wife on the shoulder as she passed and whispered to her, ‘He’s a policeman!’ My wife told me this, and I turned around and recognized one of the regular Penthouse hookers I’d arrested. I had to explain that the girl thought my wife was a hooker and was trying to warn her. We had a good laugh about that.”

  Police also found the prostitutes great sources of information about the men they did business with, and they often told police about what they’d overheard or had been bragged to about, including who’d been behind a robbery, stock tips, and as-yet-unannounced cabinet-ministry shuffles in Victoria. For police officers like Grant MacDonald, who were able to establish a friendly rapport with some of them, these women became informants.

  One night, we answered a dispatch call at about three a.m. from a woman who’d been attacked on her front steps going into her West End apartment. While getting her name, address, occupation, etc., she tells us she’s a working girl. I think she figured that we wouldn’t take a statement from a hooker seriously, but we ended up catching the guy. We became social with her, seeing her around the Penthouse, and she’d tell us if pimps were trying to move in or trying to hustle any of the girls. It was interesting because she was a nice looking young lady that just had a dollar figure in her mind that once she hit it she was out. She wasn’t abused or anything typical. Her job was never an issue to her, it’s just what she did for a living.

  With the liquor raids over, MacDonald and his partner were shifted to a special plainclothes squad in the early 1970s. They continued their former rounds but now dropped in every night at the Penthouse as part of an intelligence detail to observe the comings and goings of figures in the Vancouver underworld.

  “My liver still shudders to think about those days,” MacDonald laughs. “You couldn’t just stand with your thumb up your ass and hope to see or overhear something. They knew us as police, but you still needed to ingratiate yourself by buying a drink and hanging out. Joe would always stop me when I came in. ‘Hey Grant, Grant! How are ya? You alone or by yourself tonight?’ He thought that was the funniest line ever. The Filippones were all nice guys—I liked them all. But they were a little nervous when we came in and would stand near us to keep an eye on us,” says MacDonald. It wasn’t as though the Filippones didn’t like the police, they just felt better when they weren’t around. “One night, when we were in plainclothes there, Joe was busy talking to my partner when this gorgeous young lady starts chatting me up. One thing leads to another, and she asks me what I do for a living. I told her I worked for the city,” MacDonald chuckles. “She eventually asks me if I’d like to go out. I said, ‘I’d love to go out with a girl as pretty as you, but I can’t.’ She said ‘Why not?’ and I told her, ‘Because I’m a policeman.’ She was shocked I’d told her up front, and thanked me profusely for not running her in. That got around the room pretty quick that I wasn’t there to bust them. The main reason we were there was to go in and check around the upstairs lounge.”

  While the main floor Gold Room functioned as the lounge and main stage for shows, the upstairs contained the Steak Loft restaurant and a front-room lounge. Where Edna Randle had seen Oscar Peterson and Jack Teagarden years before was now a seedy rogue’s gallery of criminals who held court under increasing police scrutiny.

  John Kenneth Eccles had already been arrested for drug trafficking, heroin and marijuana possession, assault, and theft, and he was known to police as one of the city’s main heroin and cocaine dealers. He had a pilot’s licence, and with his criminal connections in the United States, police had investigated him for flying cross-border drug shipments. A tall, thin man with long hair, Eccles sped through the city streets in his 1958 Corvette, often with his beautiful nineteen- year-old wife Sunshine, a flowers-in-her-hair hippie girl, who police also believed prostituted for him. “The question in every police officer ’s mind that met her was, ‘What is she doing with him?’” MacDonald says. “We all concluded that he had lots of money and a good supply of drugs.”

  Then there was Eccles’ notorious friend Eddie Cheese. In August 1971, police raided his apartment. Cheese had outstanding warrants in Montreal, but because the plainclothes policemen had failed to properly identify themselves when they entered the apartment, the charges were dismissed. Eccles was awarded damages, as the police were found to have technically trespassed. The case was precedent-setting and was appealed by the Crown up to the Supreme Court of Canada. Cheese was delighted that he’d won the case, and had been so bothersome to the police without ever leaving home.

  “Eccles wasn’t a likeable guy,” says MacDonald. “In my thirty years in the force, I could count on one hand the number of guys it became personal to catch. With Eccles, you could get a rise out of him to talk to you, but Eddie Cheese didn’t show any emotion.”

  Along with Eccles and Cheese in the upstairs Penthouse lounge, “There was Paul Gray, who was involved importing drugs, and Dennis Walton who had a patch over one eye,” MacDonald recalls.

  “The Levinson brothers—Peter and Paul—were international jewel thieves, some of the best in the world, who’d gone through Europe like a dose of salts and pulled jobs here in Vancouver, too. There was Al Oda, a Japanese guy who looked like Oddjob from the James Bond movie. We were in there to see who was sitting with who. Later on down the line, you’d compare notes if something went down. ‘Okay, on that night I saw the two of them together, so that makes sense’—that sort of thing.”

  If a customer came to the Penthouse to spend money, who were the Filippones to ask if he had a
n arrest record? Even if he was a little shady, he might open his wallet and buy rounds all night for a whole table. As for the prostitutes, the Filippone brothers tended to look the other way. “We weren’t denying there were hookers in the club. We didn’t show any dislike or encouragement to them. We didn’t treat them any differently than regular customers,” Ross Filippone later recalled. “We didn’t want them to table hop. But if a guy wanted to buy a girl a drink, that was his business.”

  Exotic dancer on stage, c. 1970s.

  Penthouse dancer on stage, 1973.

  And it was clear they were good for business. In addition to bringing in customers to see the shows, the prostitutes paid the three-dollar cover charge just as regular customers did, and paid again when they returned from turning a trick.

  So the Penthouse patrons, honest and dishonest, blended together on any given evening. Club owners and musicians mingled with cabinet ministers and newspaper editors. Off-duty policemen chatted with safe-crackers, and corporation presidents drank with short-order cooks. For “girl watchers,” there was no reason to go to the beach. With the club full of hookers, eggheads met redheads as all kinds of cheating husbands, stockbrokers, school principals, celebrities, PTA presidents, and gamblers shared tables—and the Vancouver police undercover teams surveyed it all.

  New family members were now employed at the Penthouse as well. Mickey’s twenty-year-old daughter Rose began to work in the ticket cashier ’s office in 1974, and Jimmy’s daughter JoAnne, when still a teenager, began work as a cigarette girl on weekends. “It was like how you used to see it in the movies, with a girl holding out a little tray. I sold cigarettes, cigars, gum, and lifesavers,” says JoAnne. “It was great money for a kid my age!” Being involved in the family business made her privy to an adult realm that was the envy of many of her friends.

  JoAnne remembers watching emcee Tony Pisani— billed as the Mario Lanza of Vancouver—open the evening’s entertainment with a few songs (including his rendition of Al Martino’s “Spanish Eyes,” featuring a ribald lyrical amendment to “Spanish Flies”), then introduce Danielle Dean, who danced inside a larger- than-life-size champagne glass filled with warm, bubbling, tinted water. “It was like another world. There was glamour and glitz and high rollers and celebrities. If there were hoodlums there, I couldn’t tell [who they were], everybody was so well dressed! And while I knew there was an element of call girls there, I never felt threatened or unsafe; they and the dancers were beautiful. As a young adolescent girl, it was an amazing world to watch. Backstage, I got to meet these incredible burlesque stars with their costumes, feathers, and sequins—just beautifully adorned. They were great shows.”

  Toni Pisani with Dee Dee Special in the early 1970s.

  Exotic dancer Danielle Dean, the "Queen of the Champagne Glass," in the Green Room.

  The Penthouse continued to be “home” to an array of visiting actors and entertainers, from Lee Marvin to Ed Asner. Vegas comedians such as Jack E. Leonard and Frank Gorshin performed or came to the Steak Loft. “Bombshell” actresses Jayne Mansfield and Jane Russell dropped in, and musicians ranging from jazz stars Louis Prima and Woody Herman to 1970s rock bands like Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin came in after their own shows when in town.

  Frank Gorshin (second from left) with Ross (left) and Mickey (far right) and an unidentified friend.

  The Ladybirds, billed as the world's first all-girl topless band, performed at the Penthouse in the early 1970s.

  “My partner and I stopped into the Penthouse in uniform one night when the Boston Bruins were in town,” says Grant MacDonald. “Don Cherry and two or three other players were seated right down at the front watching the dancers—they were pretty drunk. We were standing at the back of the bar just having a look around. Cherry sees us, and starts going into his act. ‘Hey, check out the monkeys at the back.’ The place went dead still. I saw Joe was worried. Cherry kept acting like a big shot. You can put up with a bit of it if it’s funny, but eventually it can get to the point where it’s abusive. I walked down to him and very quietly told him, ‘You know you can go to jail in this town?’ That was the end of it. He never said another word. He had a lot more to lose than I did!”

  “The parties were unbelievable,” says Al Abraham. The amicable East Ender became a Penthouse regular when in his twenties and fell in socially with Eccles and his crew, drinking and hanging out with some of the very same people that MacDonald was keeping an eye on. “The years 1969 to 1975 was the greatest time ever—the money was really flowing. To spend a grand on a Friday night, which was a lot of money back then, was nothing to these guys, and the Penthouse was the spot. Everybody went there. We always hung out upstairs. They had great food up at the Steak Loft— and the place was full of rounders.” It’s a term that Abraham says with relish and uses frequently when talking about the old days.

  A rounder was someone who was street-wise. They’d literally ‘been around.’ They learned everything from the curb. Maybe they’d done a little time for something—real characters. You don’t see guys like that now. You see Hells Angels around today; those guys are nothing compared to back then. A lot of guys now are fringe—they try to act tough, but those were the real deal, those guys were connected. Back then, when you wanted to know something, you went to certain guys. One year some thieves broke into Hunter’s Sporting Goods up on Kingsway, and they got all their guns stolen—it was a big deal.The police had something on Eccles and they went to him. He had nothing to do with it, but he made some inquiries on the street and got all the guns back. They even anonymously got delivered right to the police station— and whatever they had on Eccles got forgotten!

  Eccles and Cheese were nice guys, actually.They just didn’t care about living straight. They had a few rackets going on and suitcases of money to show for it. I remember they had a guy named Baxter who would dope horses to fix races out at the track. That’s one thing I learned from those days. Any time there’s money involved, it’s rigged. Everything’s rigged! I don’t know one thing that ain’t.

  Abraham’s eyes light up and he smiles as he remembers the coterie of characters around the bar in the early ’70s.

  There was a black guy named Shoe Polish, and another guy named Perfume Jack, who was a fence. Shoulders Levy was another—he had watches in his coat, and he

  went around to clubs and sold them. There was a guy called Cowboy John, who was always in Western clothing, and another guy, the head of a big construction firm, who’d drink at the bar wearing just a kimono while he kept a cab running, ready to take him home. I’m not kidding!

  After a night at the Penthouse, we’d pile in my car, a ’72 Cadillac Eldorado. I’d put on Al Green or “The Love I Lost” by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and we’d roar up at three a.m. to my friend Brown Bear’s ‘booze can’ [private after-hours club] he ran out of a house on 14th and Oak. The bar was in the kitchen. They had eighteen couches in the living room, a pool table in the basement, and a card game going upstairs. Eccles would get on the phone, ten or fifteen hookers would show up, and we’d keep the party going. It was unbelievable! I’d leave around seven in the morning and get a couple of hours sleep before I went back to my day job. I don’t know how I did it!

  As much as Abraham enjoyed the parties and was a welcome regular, he tried to keep his distance from Eccles and his cohorts. “I gambled with them and did some driving, but I stayed out of the serious stuff. I didn’t need to go to jail for twenty years just because I liked driving a new car every year,” he says. Abraham remembers the regular prostitutes at the Penthouse well, noting that a lot of them lived at the Century Plaza Hotel on Burrard Street just blocks away from the Penthouse.

  Late at night we’d hear the stories. One girl, Joan, would meet a logger who came into town every few months. He’d want to go down to Industrial Avenue at night when nobody was around, and Joan would smack him on the ass with a tire iron. Right there, naked, in the middle of the street! There was another guy, some lawyer or sto
ckbroker or something, and she used to put a towel over his knob and jump all over him in her high heels. Unbelievable! They were just such crazy stories, and everybody at the party would be laughing, hearing this shop talk.

  A lot of broads are attracted to that lifestyle, too—guys spend a lot of money on them. Truth be told from what I saw, a lot of men would want the same woman over and over again. I still know some of the women. They have families now, but they still take their regular customers from the old days. It’s hard to say no to that cash.

  Abraham isn’t naming names—but it does give one pause to think of some Vancouver housewives’ hidden pasts.

  Meanwhile, Diamond Cabs was still going strong, and although not one of the biggest cab companies in the city, it was certainly one of the most memorable to work for. “They had a midget dispatcher in the office, along with Jimmy Filippone who ran the cab company,” recalls Bob Burrows. In the early 1970s, Burrows was “just another longhair” in his twenties bumming around Vancouver’s counterculture, when he arrived at Diamond Cabs looking for a job.

  “I got fired by Yellow Cab because I wouldn’t cut my hair,” he says. “So I went to Joe and asked him for a job. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world that I’d been fired for not cutting my hair, and on that basis alone seemed to hire me. Joe was always really good to me. But he’d always try to buy you a drink after he paid you, then hope you’d stay and drink your wages down. With a few of the older drivers, that seemed to work.

  “Ross was all business, and I never really talked with him. But I really liked Mickey,” Burrows continues. “When that Goodfellas movie came out I kept thinking, when I saw Joe Pesci’s character, that was Mickey! He wasn’t violent like that, it was just the quick-talking, the sense of humour. He was a great guy, with his cigars and a big diamond ring and his suits.”