Liquor, Lust and the Law Page 7

  Constable Vern Campbell in the late 1960s, shortly before he transferred to the vice squad.

  Another Crown witness was a prostitute who stated she started working at the Penthouse one week after her seventeenth birthday and that, with her husband acting as her pimp, she had used the Penthouse as a headquarters, making $20,000 between February and July 1975. She also made a startling claim that she’d been required to pass an unusual test before being allowed to operate in the nightclub; she had to give Ross Filippone oral sex. Filippone fully denied her claim and Chamberlain insisted that his client take a lie detector test to prove his honesty. Later, when Chamberlain entered a physician’s report to prove the woman was unfamiliar with his client’s anatomy, the Crown considered much of her testimony useless. “If she did perform an oral sex act,” Chamberlain told the court, “it was certainly not on Ross Filippone.”[29]

  The salacious testimony during the lengthy trial proved difficult for the Filippones’ family life. “My kids got ribbed at school. It was embarrassing,” Ross said. “It didn’t help my marriage, either.”[30] Ross’s wife Penny agreed. “We had a lot of support from friends and family, but it was a tough time for the kids. Every night it was on TV and in the newspapers. I went every day to the trial in the beginning, but it was too much after awhile. I couldn’t take it. Our marriage was rocky by this point, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t leave then. We really tried to rally around as family, but it certainly contributed to it getting worse.” Ross and Penny eventually divorced in the mid-1980s.

  The long shadow of John Eccles also appeared, albeit briefly, during the trial when Detective Elliot testified that the Penthouse upstairs lounge had become a meeting place for the heads of the “local mafia,” a comment that even Joe didn’t disagree with.

  Elliot identified Eccles as the leader of the group. Chamberlain objected that all references to Eccles and his cohorts who, despite their criminal activities, were no more than patrons at the Penthouse, were simply not admissible as relevant evidence. Judge Trainor agreed. Although a significant portion of Lake’s investigation focused on connecting Eccles to the Filippones, he had no evidence to prove it. While Eccles and his associates were well-known to the police, their names never circulated further in the trial and media coverage. The Filippone family consequently bore the brunt of the overall negative connotations in the minds of the general public, who believed that they alone were the “Vancouver mafia.” The Filippones’ Italian name seemed to support the rumours, at least in the minds of those who’d recently heard the titillating adventures of organized crime figures, from the real-life Joseph Valachi to the big- screen characters in the film The Godfather, released just four years earlier.[31]

  Of the some 700 photographs of men and women coming and going from the nightclub taken by Inspector Lake’s surveillance team in the unmarked police vehicle, only 200 were entered into evidence. The Vancouver Sun quoted an unnamed police detective as saying, “Let’s just say a blackmailer could make a fortune. There were lots of distinguished gentlemen.” Chamberlain heard all the rumours. “There were apparently photographs of people low and high in the community—politicians, judges, and businessmen from every walk of life. But the police never disclosed the other photographs during the trial.” Suspicious housewives reading the details of the trial in the newspapers were left to glance sideways at their husbands at the dinner table, imagining them on police negatives, remembering nights when they called home to say they were out “entertaining clients” and wouldn’t be back until late.

  Chamberlain defended the Filippones with considerable vigor and élan and captured his own share of media attention. Vancouver Sun columnist Alan Fotheringham regularly reported his courtroom antics, noting that “Chamberlain had the good looks of a second lead in a Hollywood western.” He was known to hurl his eyeglasses onto the courtroom’s oak table and spring to his feet with objections, as well as uttering “my learned friend” at Jacques in a tone that implied something less than respect.

  Chamberlain’s most dramatic move resulted when, in an effort to explain the complex layout of various rooms within the Penthouse building, he suggested to Justice Trainor that the court adjourn to the Penthouse itself. Trainor agreed with the motion. Thirty minutes later, escorted by two sheriff’s deputies, the judge arrived with a court clerk and a stenographer and was met at the door by Chamberlain, Jacques, and the six accused. Newspaper photographers captured the scene at the Penthouse’s front door, which ran in the next day’s papers with the inevitable caption, “Here Comes the Judge.”

  (Left to right): Juror, court sheriff, Judge Trainor, Roy Jacques, and Russ Chamberlain (with arm outstretched). Photo Brian Kent, Vancouver Sun

  This was the only time in British Columbia legal history that a portion of the proceedings took place in an exotic nightclub. Chamberlain acted as official tour guide, walking Justice Trainor and the entourage past the cashier ’s area and into the lower Gold Room lounge. With the court stenographer behind them furiously scribbling shorthand into the record, they passed a stairway sign in glittering letters that read “World of Girls” and were smiled down upon by large photos of near-nude exotic dancers like Gina Bon Bon and Suzanne Vegas.

  Vancouver Sun reporter Larry Still, who covered the entire trial for the newspaper and was among the press entourage inside the bar, described this scene: “Trainor joined Ross Filippone behind the bar, so he could see how the drink of a rum and coke would be entered into the register and how credit cards were processed. About one hour into the tour, Chamberlain asked the judge for permission to smoke. Trainor assented and the smokers lit up with Penthouse matchbooks thoughtfully provided by the management. At one point, Trainor was left behind the bar alone to examine the bar by himself. While it was well past the noon hour, no one in the party dared to request a double from His Honour.”[32]

  “Joe and Ross welcomed the vigor with which I defended the case,” Chamberlain says. “But I told them from the beginning, as soon as we drew Trainor as our judge, that we weren’t going to win. Based on my assessment, I knew from the start he was going to rule against us. All we could do was set up as many grounds for appeal as possible.”

  Chamberlain was correct. On April 22, 1977, over fifteen months after they’d first been charged, Justice Trainor found Joe and Ross Filippone, Jan Sedlak, Minerva Kelly, and Rose Filippone guilty. Mickey was acquitted because he only acted as host within the club. Trainor fined them and sentenced Joe and Ross to sixty days in jail. Crown Prosecutor Jacques heralded the court’s decision to close the “supermarket of hookers” that he had accused the Filippones of running.

  The Filippones immediately filed for an appeal and posted a bond for the convicted, and a new trial moved to the British Columbia Court of Appeal. It was there that Chamberlain, along with lawyer Thomas Braidwood, who lead the appeal, argued the Filippones case to the higher court. Braidwood suggested that in order to live off the avails of prostitution, one had to be seen as participating in their profits. The lawyers asked: If a prostitute is buying a dress at the Hudson’s Bay Company department store with the money she has made from her work, does that then make the store guilty? They further argued that the wording of the Crown’s original charge was not specifically applicable to the Filippones. Justice A.B. Robertson overturned the convictions in December 1977.

  From left: Ross Filippone, lawyers Russ Chamberlain, Tom Braidwood, and Rick Sugden, and Joe. Photo: Vancouver Sun, December 20, 1977.

  The Filippone family celebrated their vindication. Despite the thousands of dollars in legal expenses and years of stress on the family, Joe and Ross felt redeemed. Inspector Lake and Roy Jacques, on the other hand, were crestfallen. Vancouver Sun columnist Denny Boyd claimed that Angelo Branca had later “seared the buttons of Inspector Vic Lake’s uniform, charging the Vancouver Police Department officer with creating a Penthouse dossier that was a bundle of half-truths, quarter-truths, and untruths.”[33] Lake’s undercover operation and the subsequent le
gal proceedings were said to have cost taxpayers $2 million.

  Joe in 1978 holding up a copy of the Vancouver Sun (from the September 20, 1983 edition).

  “The trial finished Jacques,” says Chamberlain, who went on to have a successful criminal and labour law practice. Ross later named his dog “Jakes” as tribute to the prosecutor who’d so relentlessly prosecuted the case and cast aspersions against him. “I at least got to yell his name at the dog and run him around the block as revenge,” Ross laughed. “He was a great dog—a much better dog than who he was named after!”

  Detective Norm Elliot returned to police work dejected, and Barclay, who had already transferred to the drug squad, was equally disappointed with the verdict of the case. Today Barclay is circumspect. “We were just guys trying to do the job we’d been ordered to do, but in hindsight, I don’t know whether [it] was the right thing to do. When we closed the Penthouse, it really caused a lot of problems in the West End.

  The closure caused an increase in the number of prostitutes suddenly working on the street. What had been a situation kept indoors suddenly was a public nuisance.” Critics of the police investigation later suggested that the closure of the Penthouse indirectly resulted in a climate in which sexual predators—such as Robert William Pickton, the convicted murderer of dozens of Vancouver sex workers—could flourish.

  Al Abraham agrees. “It was civilized. The girls were safe there [in the Penthouse], and under cover. Big deal if the Filippones grabbed an end, but why shouldn’t they? They paid the taxes and kept the place safe. If some weirdo like Pickton would have come in, Ross or those guys would have remembered him and known what cab number he and the girl had left in. They kept an eye out for people.”

  For police officers like Grant MacDonald who, in the aftermath of the Penthouse trial was promoted to the homicide division, the closure of the Penthouse upset the informal information network that they relied on, the tips from prostitutes about major criminals with whom they came into contact. “As far as I was concerned, the Penthouse was never a problem,” says MacDonald. “I knew what was going on. But it was controlled there. After the trial, the hookers poured out into the streets all over the city, and it became like trying to capture quicksilver to manage it again.” Retired Constable Bill Harkema, who worked the West End beat during the same shifts as MacDonald, agrees. “There were guys in the vice squad trying to write up as many vagrancy charges on prostitutes as they could. If a girl got charged enough under the Vagrancy C-Class citations, she’d have to go to court, and if your name was on those charge reports you’d get called in to appear. Some guys were making a killing in overtime with their court appearances. While guys like Grant and I were out there trying to do some good police work, catching real criminals, I just felt there were some police targeting the prostitutes so they could rack up their overtime. It was really frustrating.”

  Meanwhile, John Eccles and Eddie Cheese continued their criminal activities for years. Eccles would serve nine months in jail for heroin possession in 1977. In the 1980s, police suspected Eccles and Cheese of being involved in a drug rip-off that consequently resulted in the unsolved murder of a Kitsilano couple whose bodies were found naked, bound, and gagged in the bathtub of their home, which was set on fire.

  “By the end of the ’70s, drugs had overtaken Eccles and those guys,” recalls Al Abraham. “The whole vibe was different, they went on to heavier things and I lost touch with that whole scene.” Eccles dropped off the police radar by the late ’80s, but on August 14, 2004, Royal Canadian Mounted Police were called to an accident scene in BC’s Okanagan region. They discovered a mostly submerged Jeep in Deep Creek that had first been spotted by a passing motorist. Emergency crews used the Jaws of Life to extract the driver and lone occupant, but Kelowna RCMP stated that fifty-nine-year-old John Kenneth Eccles had likely been dead for twenty-four hours. The BC Coroners Service ruled that Eccles had been intoxicated at the time of the accident.

  Despite Eccles’ notoriety in Vancouver as a figure in the criminal underworld of the 1970s, Kelowna RCMP, unaware of his past, said that he had not been a person of interest to them and they had no evidence to suspect his death was caused by foul play. In death, Eccles took the secrets and stories of his own nights at the Penthouse with him.

  There was one remaining mystery from the trial. What had happened to the 700 photographs taken by the vice-squad surveillance teams? Rumours persisted that the photographs showed members of Vancouver’s establishment coming and going from the Penthouse. It was said that these photographs would not be destroyed but kept permanently on file. In May 2012, over thirty-five years after hidden police camera shutters clicked away across Seymour Street, the author filed a Freedom of Information request to the VPD to access the photographs. While computerized records make accessing recent police records much easier, police archives prior to the late 1980s can only be referenced by antiquated paper index cards. The Vancouver Police Information and Privacy department found the index card regarding the case, but it didn’t list a case reference number, which would have made it possible to locate the photos.[34] While the VPD admits that poor filing techniques and the absence of digitized records sometimes result in dead-end searches for old documents, one still can’t help but wonder just who was captured in those photographs. And did someone, somewhere, discreetly urge a clerk to, if not shred them, then accidentally misfile them in the warehouse, making them difficult if not impossible to recover? For now, the photographs might as well be sitting at the bottom of Deep Creek with the ghost of John Eccles.

  VII. The Show Must Go On

  Joe and Ross, with Mickey in the background. Vancouver Sun, September 14, 1978.

  Despite the victory in the criminal case, Joe still had to fight another protracted legal battle with City Hall to renew the Penthouse liquor licence, which had been revoked during the criminal trial. He was forced to not only fight the province for the return of his liquor licence, but Vancouver city council as well for the return of his cabaret licence.[35]

  When the Penthouse finally re-opened in September 1978, the glamorous days of well-heeled patrons mixing with the “rounders” were gone. The trial had stolen three years of the club’s life, and the Penthouse found itself operating in a different world. The regulars had all gotten older or moved on, and although the Filippones had beaten the charges, rumours about the nightclub during the trial—both true and false—made what had once seemed mysterious and titillating now feel simply vulgar. “Maybe people thought they were going to be photographed or something,” Sandy King suggests. “But when [the Penthouse] re-opened after the trial, it wasn’t the same.”

  JoAnne Filippone agrees. “Something had been lost. Some of that special, higher appeal. When I first started working there, you would have never seen anybody come in wearing jeans and baseball caps. Society relaxed, and the dress code everybody had back then was gone. I don’t know if that was a good thing.”

  The Penthouse was a long way from the nights when the city’s smart set in their finery visited the nightclub. Now it was sparsely occupied by tourists and curiosity-seekers from the suburbs wearing T-shirts and running shoes who nursed one drink all night just to say they’d been there. But Joe soldiered on, hoping to show that the “hooker heaven” Penthouse days were gone. He even held “Family Days,” when the public and employees brought their kids to the club so that all might see that 1019 Seymour Street wasn’t the address for the local chapter of Sodom & Gomorrah.

  Joe helping dancers dress, 1979. Photo: Brian Sprout.

  “I used to have coffee with Joe once a week. I really liked him,” recalls Mike McCardell. “He reminded me of some of the old colourful guys in New York I knew as a kid—a big Italian guy.” McCardell, now a reporter for Global TV BC, was a crime beat reporter for the Vancouver Sun in the 1970s.

  The exotic dancers had been given the day off, and Joe invited me and my family down. My wife was a little cautious. But my two kids, who were about eight or nine, we
re pretty excited because the place had such a reputation, and this was a place where kids didn’t get to go!

  There was a long lineup outside to get in. Joe came out and recognized me, took my kid’s hands, and brought us in. As we walked past, people were holding their hands out to shake his hand or touch him. It was like people greeting the Godfather. Joe took us into the middle of the Penthouse main floor. He snapped two fat fingers and waiters brought a table out from nowhere, like something out of a movie. He put a towel over his arm and asked my kids what they wanted to eat.They ordered burgers and chocolate milkshakes.

  Joe walked over to the kitchen and told this guy in his gruff voice, “I want two hamburgers and two chocolate milkshakes.” The guy looks terrified. “We don’t have milkshakes—this is the Penthouse! Joe tells him again, “I want two chocolate milkshakes.” I didn’t see it, but I figure the guy must have been terrified to tell Joe they couldn’t do it, so he just ran around the neighbourhood looking to see where he could get two chocolate milkshakes in a hurry. A short time later, Joe returned—Joe Philliponi himself, the Godfather of the city—with a tray and two shakes and two hamburgers on it, with a towel over his arm, and served my kids. I’ll never forget it.