Liquor, Lust and the Law Read online

  Burrows also remembers the patrons that he drove to or took home from the club. “My customers were gangsters, prostitutes, judges, or lawyers. Joe was always curious who I drove or if they’d said anything to me or I overheard anything. There was a hooker there who I drove home almost every night, until her pimp beat her up and near crippled her. I never saw her after that. One Christmas Eve, it was snowing like hell, and I took home this drunken businessman. He wanted to stop off at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Burnaby and scream and swear at his father’s grave before I took him home. It was absolutely crazy. One after another like that.”

  Burrows, who was later active in the Vancouver nightclub business for forty years and became particularly well-known in the 1980s and ’90s for booking clubs including the Town Pump, Richard’s on Richards, and Venue, got his start in the business while still a Diamond Cabs driver.

  Around the time I was working [as a cab driver], I took over this place in the back of the Shanghai Junk nightclub in Chinatown that we called the Pink Parlour. It was a real hippie palace—bead curtains and big pillows—that we ran as an after-hours booze can with music. Joe heard about it and wanted to see what I was doing. He was curious if he was missing out on anything. One night, he came in with a few friends—these tough Italian bruisers in their suits who stuck out like crazy. The place was full of body painted hippies drinking and doing LSD. Everybody was fucked up in there, but it looked lively! We had no liquor or business licence. Joe just thought it was great. “Hey, hey, you’re doing a good job, Bob! It’s nice to see a young kid being enterprising and getting a leg up in the world.”

  VI. Set ’Em Up[21]

  Mickey, unknown, Joe, Jimmy, Dee Dee Special, legendary Montreal Canadian Bernie "Boom Boom" Geoffrion, and Ross at the club, mid-1970s.

  In July 1974, Don Winterton was named new chief constable of the Vancouver Police Department.[22] Described as a “squeaky clean guy with a new broom,” he’d been involved with prostitution crackdown strategies for years.[23] While a number of city nightclubs and hotel lounges were used as working areas by prostitutes, the Penthouse, after years of indifference, was suddenly targeted. The reasons for this have remained a cause for speculation. But Winterton wished to demonstrate his administration’s dedication to ridding Vancouver of prostitutes once and for all, and to this end, he appointed Inspector John Samuel Victor “Vic” Lake as the new head of the vice squad.

  Chief Constable Don Winterton. Photo courtesy of the Vancouver Police Museum.

  Lake joined the city police in 1946. His first contact with the Penthouse wasn’t until 1966, when he’d been posted to the liquor squad and took part in some of the “bottle raids” before the Penthouse got its licence. He knew all the tricks; he knew, for example, that some of his supervisors, after the drama of a raid was over, would go up to Joe’s office for a drink before they left. Joe later stated that Lake had a personal vendetta against him, telling Jack Wasserman on the CBC television show Hourglass that Lake would sit in the bar out of uniform, wait until a patron at a nearby table produced a bottle, and catch them in the act. While Lake publicly denied any personal animosity toward the Filippones, he did undertake his new task with unexpected zeal.

  Like Winterton, Lake had strong attitudes about prostitutes. “Vic was a real straight arrow—maybe one of the straightest guys on the force then,” recalls retired constable Vern Campbell. “He was really into physical fitness, which wasn’t that common to inspectors at the time. He was young when he was made an inspector, and I think in some cases, he rubbed a few guys in the department the wrong way.”

  With Lake at the helm, the vice squad launched an unprecedented investigation into the Penthouse that was kept secret from the beat cops in the area. The squad parked a camper van across the street from the club, and with a hidden camera, photographed prostitutes and patrons as they entered and exited the club. They also wiretapped the Penthouse telephones.

  Of key interest to Lake’s task force on the Penthouse were the cover charges that the customers paid for admittance. Prostitutes who frequented the nightclub were required to pay the cover again each time they returned to the building, and they tipped the staff to get prime seating. Lake’s investigation also focused on the cash advances the Penthouse made available to those wishing to use their credit cards, and the fact that the Filippones added a surcharge to each advance. That the Penthouse management was essentially allowing customers to put the costs of hiring a prostitute on their credit cards is not as peculiar as it may now seem. Before instant teller bank machines offered twenty-four-hour access, if you didn’t have any cash, you had to wait until the bank opened the next day. Joe, during Lake’s surveillance, was recorded colourfully commenting on these cash advances to an undercover policeman. “[You] can go into a bank and say ‘Look, I’ve got two prostitutes outside in cab and I need $200,’ and the bank clerk wouldn’t care.” Nevertheless, Inspector Lake and his team considered the repeat cover charges, tips, and cash advance surcharges as tantamount to profiting from prostitution.

  In addition to the surveillance and wiretaps, Lake put someone on the inside. “There were taxis coming and going with girls. It was a zoo,” recalls retired Constable Leslie McKellar who, at the age of twenty- one, was plucked from the police academy for her first assignment as an undercover prostitute at the Penthouse. McKellar spent four to five nights a week at the club from May to August 1975.[24] She would leave with undercover officers posing as customers looking for sex, report her findings to them, and then return to the club as if she’d left to turn a trick.

  In the upstairs lounge, McKellar observed the Filippones’ interactions with Eccles, Cheese, Oda, and their other associates. “The Filippones acted the best of friends with them,” she says exasperatedly. That the management might have been especially attentive to them because they were regularly dropping hundreds of dollars at the club was of no relevance to McKellar, who still holds strong opinions about the Penthouse and the Filippones. “The Filippones [made me] automatically think of old Mafia movies—always with their cigars. I never liked Mickey. Ross was a classy guy, but I was scared of him because he was so observant and never missed a thing. I didn’t like how they all catered to Eccles and those guys.”

  On July 10, 1975, police began monitoring the business telephone of the Penthouse and the home phone of the Filippones. On July 18, Sergeant Mike Beattie filed a report to his supervisor (the details of which are made public here for the first time), updating him on the details of the wiretap surveillance.[25] Beattie noted that several calls made on the pay telephone were regarding prostitution. In one call, a man wanted to hire two women to travel to Victoria to perform at a stag party. When the woman on the line wanted to know if there was “anything on the side” she could do, intrigued police were convinced that the Penthouse was not just a hangout but a dispatch network for prostitutes. Beattie also reported a conversation intercepted between Joe and another man detailing a business deal in excess of $1 million.[26] During the call, Joe declined the deal, but Beattie nevertheless concluded that it was part of a loan-sharking operation he was involved in.

  Police suspected that Mickey was running a bookmaking operation out of the Penthouse after overhearing various people contact him to take sports bets, usually of wagers between twenty and fifty dollars. On July 14, a man named Phil Benson called to place a bet on a horse named “Proud Bird” in the eighth race that day at Exhibition Park racetrack.[27] Whether Benson figured he had a hot tip or a good hunch is unknown, but Mickey accepted the twenty- dollar-to-win bet. Unfortunately for Benson, Proud Bird ran last in the race.[28]

  “We used to bet through Mickey on Super Bowl games,” Al Abraham recalls. “He’d take any bet. At his house, he’d have three or four small televisions, each showing a different sport, so he could figure out his bets. You see that all the time now in sports bars, but this was in the 1970s, and he was doing it right in his living room!”

  But Lake was primarily looking for evidence th
at directly connected the Penthouse to the prostitutes, evidence that proved that the Filippones weren’t just businessmen who ran a bar frequented by them, but were also acting as their pimps. Although the police never heard or found any evidence to support this allegation, Lake believed the Filippones were profiting financially from their presence. Beattie’s report suggests another reason why the police department focused so much effort against the Penthouse—they were trying to connect the Filippones to John Eccles and his gang. In his report, Beattie noted that after wiretaps were installed on the Penthouse payphone, police intercepted a conversation between Eccles and a man named Wayne, who spoke about a delivery of drugs that Eccles was expecting. Beattie states that during the call, “Eccles told Wayne that he had people waiting on the street corners for them,” and Wayne explained that he was too busy “capping up; it’s still loose,” and was not ready for delivery.

  Lake’s vice-squad investigation remained secret from other police working the area, such as Grant MacDonald. “Occasionally I’d see other guys from the department there in plainclothes, and we’d pretend not to know each other,” MacDonald says. “I always thought it was weird until it came out much later that they had this investigation running.”

  Starting in early 1975, dancer Sandy King did two shows nightly at the Penthouse six nights a week, from Monday to Saturday. King had come from Isy’s Supper Club to the Penthouse when she was just seventeen years old. She’d already been an experienced dancer after a run in Las Vegas, where she learned more than just the usual bump-and-grind routine. “I did a pretty good whip show,” she laughs.

  I could really smack myself and scream, but it was pretty classy! Thursday to Saturday was always packed and sometimes Monday was really busy too. The town was really jumping then; there were obviously less places to go. I usually got there around eight, as the shows would start at nine. When you got there that early, there would be just rows and rows of working girls, because the guys hadn’t arrived yet. It was a pretty funny scene to walk in on.

  We dancers weren’t supposed to sit with the working girls. The guys [the Filippones] didn’t want the customers to confuse us with them. But on some nights, Jack Diamond [the businessman, thoroughbred owner, and operator of Exhibition Park] would come in from the racetrack and bring a bunch of the dancers and working girls out for the day. The booze and the broads went hand-in-hand. You had a bunch of guys getting horny from the strippers, and there were working girls there to take care of them. In a way, both businesses fed off each other.

  Sandy King rides as Lady Godiva, mid-1970s.

  But King has nothing but fond memories of the club which elicit her quick laugh and vivid recollections of the nights she worked there. “One night I went upstairs to the steak restaurant and saw Mickey sort of having a food fight with Vincent Price [the actor]. They were trying to be sly about it, but were giggling while trying to eat, throwing a bun or some noodles here and there. It was kind of surreal seeing Vincent Price, of all people, and Mickey in a little food fight.”

  While she danced in the Penthouse’s main Gold Room lounge, she also remembers John Eccles and Eddie Cheese and their crowd holding court upstairs; they often dated some of the dancers that worked downstairs. “They were tough guys you didn’t want to mess with. But I also thought they protected that place. If somebody got out of hand there, those guys might take care of it and bring the guy out back for a pistol whipping!”

  Joe confers with exotic dancers in his office (behind Joe is Danielle Dean).

  While Lake looked down on the Filippones, Sandy King has positive memories of how Joe, Ross, and Mickey treated both the working girls and the dancers. “They were great guys. With their cigars, you could smell them coming. You could tell what mood Joe was in by the puffing of his cigar. If he was puffing fast, he didn’t want to be bothered. But if he was just standing there, puffing slowly, he’d usually want to be talked to. Some other club owners would look down on you. They thought that, just because you were a stripper, you had to be a slut. The Filippones were always fair. They treated you with respect. They had rules, too. They didn’t want the hookers table-hopping or pestering customers. If they found out a prostitute had stolen something off a trick, they’d be banned.”

  King suggests that that very “rule” is what caused the hammer to drop in the winter of 1975. “That Christmas, there was a working girl who called herself Valerie Rose. She’d met a Japanese businessman, a well-connected guy, taken him back to his hotel, and got him into the shower. While he was in there, she stole his suitcase and took a cab right to her pimp’s place. They went through it and then drove to Stanley Park to dump the suitcase. They’d taken his wallet, but they’d also taken his passport, and that was serious. He went to the police. We all heard about it. The next thing you know, the cops hit the place.”

  After months of investigation that included twelve officers, photograph and wiretap surveillance, male officers posing as clients, and female officers posing as prostitutes, police entered the Penthouse on December 22 and arrested Joe, Ross, and Mickey on charges of “conspiracy to live off the avails of prostitution, corrupting public morals, and keeping a common bawdy house.” In addition, doorman Jan Sedlak, cashier Minerva Kelly, and Mickey’s daughter Rose were also charged because Lake believed they had profited from the tips they were given and cash they handled.

  The family was stunned. Joe, Ross, Mickey, and the co-accused were termed “the Penthouse Six” in the newspapers, the club was padlocked by court sheriffs, its licence revoked, and the Filippone family banded together for its biggest fight yet.

  Russ Chamberlain was a thirty-four-year-old Vancouver lawyer who’d only been practicing law for a few years when Joe and Ross Filippone came to his office to hire a lawyer in early 1976. “I’d never met them before. I’d certainly heard, when I was at UBC [the University of British Columbia] in the 1960s, that the Penthouse was the place to go if you wanted to find a prostitute and not get harassed for hiring them off the street. But I’d never even been in there before.”

  Chamberlain still remembers his first meeting with the Filippone brothers. “Joe was an amazing character. He was about five-foot-six and perhaps the same width! He had a good sense of humour, and was really a very astute businessman. Nothing fazed him; no problem was too big to solve. But I found Ross taciturn and quiet. He really struck me as the iron hand that ran the day-to-day operation of the Penthouse.”

  Chamberlain didn’t know it, but he’d come highly recommended to the Filippones. “Much later, I found out that Les Peterson, the former attorney general of BC, and Angelo Branca, who by that time was on the Supreme Court of British Columbia, had recommended me to the Filippones. I’d appeared before Branca in court, but he and Peterson really only knew me by reputation. I gather they’d told the Filippones that if they needed somebody who would overturn tables to fight the case, I was their man.”

  The last notable trial of its kind in the old Provincial Courthouse before the Vancouver Art Gallery took over the building in the early 1980s, the case of Her Majesty The Queen against Celebrity Enterprises Ltd., began in September 1976. Prosecuting the case for the Crown was Roy Jacques, pronounced “Jakes.” Chamberlain was familiar with Jacques as a city prosecutor before the trial. Born in England, Jacques had the air of a man too prim to be exposed to the term “prostitute” or any of its more colloquial terms during the court proceedings, yet he prosecuted the case with relish. “His accent suggested he would have fit in well at the cricket grounds of Eton,” Chamberlain recalls. “Jacques was a prickly, sanctimonious guy with the moral righteousness of an English parson. He found the Penthouse and everything it stood for abhorrent. He was indignant all the time, with no sense of humour at all, so I constantly tried to make him the butt of every joke I could during the trial to get a rise out of him.”

  Presiding over the trial was Justice William Trainor. A balding, bespectacled man with sandy hair, Trainor’s quizzical eyebrows framed his disapproving sta
re down from the bench to Chamberlain’s courtroom antics. “Trainor and I were at constant war during the trial. He would sneer at me, and I had barely concealed dislike for him. There would be exchanges where he would address me, and I would say, ‘I know your lordship is not speaking disparaging words of me but I would note for the record your lordship is sneering contemptuously at me.’ This went on all the time!”

  The events in Courtroom 214 of the Provincial Courthouse played out with the kind of lurid testimonies that packed the gallery and made for the kind of sensational headlines that the BC courts have rarely seen before or since. Witnesses for the prosecution ranged from a prostitute disguised in a wig and sunglasses who refused to identify her pimp (sitting in the same courtroom) for fear she would be beaten. On another day, a pair of fourteen-year-old schoolgirls told the court how they visited the Penthouse, hoping to turn a trick. Chamberlain aggressively cross-examined the prosecution witnesses, suggesting that they had been coached by the police or offered leniency on other charges if they testified against the Penthouse. He also argued that some Crown witnesses were prostitutes from the East End who had never even been to the Penthouse.

  From the police department, Leslie McKellar took the stand, telling the court how the visiting Japanese navy “invaded” the Penthouse on shore leave in the summer of 1975. “There were so many Japanese customers coming in that some of the girls learned quite fluent Japanese,” she said. In addition to McKellar, the prosecution offered testimony from two members of Inspector Lake’s vice-squad team, Detectives George Barclay and Norm Elliot. Barclay was often on one of the pick-up teams, and Elliot had played the part of a crooked plainclothes cop trying to ingratiate himself into the Filippones’ trust. Barclay and Elliot’s testimony was meant to support the prosecution’s assertion that the cover charges paid by the hookers and the cash advances on credit cards were part of the Filippones’ conspiracy to profit from the prostitutes that frequented the nightclub. Chamberlain assiduously questioned Elliot on the stand about how many drinks he normally consumed in one night’s surveillance at the Penthouse (Elliot admitted up to twelve), and suggested in court that he had even begun a relationship with one of the club’s dancers, Miss Lovie. Elliot denied any relationship but admitted taking Miss Lovie to dinner.