Liquor, Lust and the Law Read online

  Joe not only tried to re-invent the Penthouse, he also re-invented himself. He’d always been involved in charities, but in the 1970s became active with the Variety Show of Hearts telethon. “You could always count on Joe to show up every year with a $10,000 cheque,” recalled booking agent Hugh Pickett, who had also been involved in the fundraiser.

  Joe, with Dee Dee Special, raises funds at the Variety Show of Hearts telethon, 1981.

  Joe became active as a backroom figure and campaign donor in provincial politics. While the old allegations (and the nature of the business he ran) made it difficult for him to be directly acknowledged, on election nights, as winning candidates took the podium to make their acceptance speeches, the smiling face of Joe Philliponi with his white hair could often be seen applauding in the wings.

  The family continued to have prestige in Vancouver’s Italian community, where many considered them enterprising business owners who’d fought the city and won. “Joe was a leader and very enterprising,” Ross recalled. “One time, Joe brought 200 Italians to a political rally. If Joe told ’em to stand up, they’d stand up. If he told ’em to sit down, they’d sit down. If he told them to clap, they’d clap. I always thought, God forbid if he went to the toilet!”

  On an August evening in 1979, Mickey Filippone went to the Penthouse to start his evening shift. The club was just getting ready to open for the evening when Mickey asked his daughter Rose, who was working as a waitress, to order him a steak for dinner. He then excused himself to the bathroom. After some time passed, Rose became concerned and went to look for him, only to find that he had collapsed. His last works to her were, “I’m gonna be okay.”

  Mickey had been in two diabetic comas before, and despite warnings from doctors, hadn’t changed his lifestyle. He fell into a third coma and would not live out the weekend. Domenic “Mickey” Filippone, the youngest of the four brothers, died on August 10, 1979.

  The Filippone family was devastated, particularly Maria Rosa. Her vision had been failing for some time, but the distress of her youngest son’s death was said to have driven her completely blind in mourning. It was the first death in the family since that of her husband Giuseppe, over twenty years earlier. With the bittersweet victory of the trial over and the business up and running again, it felt like one more terrible thing had befell them. Without Mickey, the family knew the future would be more difficult.

  Mickey bowling in teh 1953 A.B.C. Tournament in Chicago.

  “He was a great guy, a great personality,” recalls Al Abraham. “I don’t think the Penthouse would have made it without him. He looked the part.”

  “Anybody who came down there, be it a lawyer or a dock worker, he made them all feel important. He was so good with people,” recalls his daughter Rose. “He’d say to the staff that worked there, ‘Take care of this guy. Give him the best seat in the house.’ I think everybody thought he gave them the best seat!” Rose remembers Mickey as a loving father whose sense of humour had helped keep the family’s spirits up through the worst years.

  One day I was heading out to the PNE [Pacific National Exhibition, an annual summer fair and amusement park in Vancouver] with my boyfriend at the time, and my dad asked me to go to the racetrack for him and place a bet on a horse. He loved the racetrack. He told me to bet on a single particular horse to win, place, and show, and he gave me—I’m not kidding—$500 for each bet. I really didn’t know much about the races, but there I am, twenty-three years old with my candy floss and $1,500 in my purse to make these wagers for my dad. The horse came in first to win, So I threw away the tickets to place and show in the garbage, thinking they were no good.

  I came home and Dad said, “Hey, we did good!” and I said, “Yeah, too bad you didn’t get the other two.” He looks at me confused and worried and says, “What do mean? Where are the other tickets?” I said, “The horse came in to win, not to place or show, so I threw those tickets into the trash.”

  Well, he almost had a heart attack! “Rose—you have to go back and find those tickets!” I didn’t even know which garbage can I put them in, but I had to go back. They were just closing up and I pleaded with them to let me in. My boyfriend and I went through about four garbage cans while these guys were waiting to close up the racetrack. I was sweating and feeling terrible. Then—I couldn’t believe it—I found the tickets. My dad never let me forget that one!

  Mickey at the racetrack.

  VIII. Buona Notte

  Joe reclining in his office. Vancouver Sun, December 22, 1977.

  Sunday, September 18, 1983 began as a typically relaxed day for the Filippone family. With the club closed on Sundays, Joe did his usual routine of taking his mother to the farmers’ markets in the semi-rural suburb of Richmond to get fresh vegetables and eggs for the week. Together they later visited Jimmy at his family home that evening, staying for dinner. “Joe was in a happy-go-lucky mood,” Jimmy later recalled.

  Joe returned home, sending a housekeeper away early, and had just said goodnight to his mother when Tony Pisani called. “Every Sunday, Joe used to come by to see me,” says Pisani, who was then running an Italian gelato shop on Cambie Street. “He used to come and bring some of the dancers from the club or friends and get a cone for everybody. It was in the early evening and he hadn’t come in. So I gave him a call at home to see if he was still coming in. He says, ‘Yes, yes, Tony, I’m coming up soon, soon.’ I happened to look at the clock in the store and it was 8:20 p.m., and we were closing at ten p.m., but he never showed up.”

  Joe was still at home, waiting for Sid Morrisroe. Joe had known Morrisroe since the 1940s. Morrisroe had fought at the Eagle Time Athletic Club in his youth. Now working in the plumbing business, separated from his wife and family, keeping company with an array of low-life gamblers at the race track, he remained an occasional Penthouse patron. Morrisroe had called Joe earlier that day about some plumbing work at the club that he wanted to reschedule for the evening. Joe had mentioned this to Ross and Jimmy.

  Sid Morrisroe. File photo, Vancouver Sun, September 22, 1983.

  Joe was relaxing in his armchair, watching television, when the doorbell rang. He got up and opened the door to find Scott Forsyth, a burly twenty-five-year-old journeyman painter from Smiths Falls, Ontario, who Morrisroe had met at the track. Joe knew Forsyth; he’d seen him drinking with Morrisroe at the Penthouse. Forsyth, with a bag of plumbing tools in hand, said that Morrisroe would be along shortly to do the plumbing work, and Joe invited him in. While they waited for Morrisroe, Forsyth then excused himself to the washroom, taking his bag of tools with him. The details of what happened next are taken from Forsyth’s own testimony, as reported in newspapers at the time.

  In the bathroom, Forsyth nervously removed a .22 calibre pistol from the bag, loaded it with one of the bullets he had in his pocket, and walked back into the living room.

  “Okay, Joe, let’s have the money,” he said.

  “There’s no money here,” Philliponi replied from his chair. “What the hell is this, some kind of joke?”

  Forsyth moved closer and Joe realized he was looking down the barrel of a real gun. “Okay, okay, no problem,” Joe said. He walked over to the safe in the living room, sank to one knee, and turned the dial on the combination lock while Forsyth stood watching him.

  Open safe in the Penthouse office, Vancouver Sun, September 20, 1983.

  Forsyth glanced from the safe for a moment to Joe, and their eyes locked. Joe—neither nervous nor scared—looked directly up at Forsyth and said, “Don’t kill me. Just go ahead,” and motioned at the contents of the safe. “I won’t even identify you in a line-up.”[36]

  Some people said that Joe Philliponi had felt lonely in the last few years; business was down, and the nightclub scene wasn’t what it once was. His clientele was getting younger, but he wasn’t. The dancers, bartenders, and waitresses that worked at the club had all been born after the Penthouse opened. When he talked with them, he didn’t recognize their cultural references, and t
hey didn’t get his. Even the new hookers were a step down in class. In the old days they had been mature, well dressed, charming, and never violent. Now they were young, raggedy, and addicted to drugs. When he retold his favourite stories around the bar, he had to stop to explain to the younger staff who those once famous names were. None of them even knew who Les Brown and his Band of Renown were. After the trial, he’d once unwillingly booked some local rock bands; they were nice kids, but too loud for him. Joe was starting to feel his age. He joked about being an old man—but he was starting to feel a little more tired all the time. The nightclub life hadn’t done wonders for his health, and he hadn’t really taken care of himself. He’d had a prostate operation just a few years earlier, and was overweight.

  Joe was the last of his kind. He’d lost many friends and business rivals over the years—Isy Walters from Isy’s Supper Club, Ken Stauffer from the Cave, Bob Mitten from the Arctic Club—they were all gone. Even his friend Bill Kenny from the Ink Spots, who’d settled down in Vancouver, had died in 1978. And Joe felt the loss of his brother Mickey.

  But he also had hopes for the future. There was no way he could stop now—there were too many family members who worked at the Penthouse and depended on him. What else was he going to do? They were sitting on too good a piece of property to pack it in now. Expo 86 was just a couple short years away, and Joe told friends he believed the Penthouse would be a hit with the tourists. He had a feeling that real burlesque was due for a comeback. He and Ross had been working on a show they hoped would bring back the old crowds, called “Casino de Paris,” a full-blown costume revue they’d seen at the Dunes in Las Vegas.

  Or maybe he thought of none of that—and what he did think didn’t matter. Because when Joe Philliponi told Scott Forsyth that he wouldn’t identify him in a line-up, Forsyth tensed, stared at him, and replied, “Oh, yeah? Fuck you,” raised the gun, and shot Joe in the head.[37]

  The murder of Joe Philliponi was just one of twenty-three homicides in the city in 1983, an average annual total for Vancouver at the time.[38] But it would be average in no other way; it was the most high-profile murder in the city that year and became one of the most notorious in Vancouver’s history.

  Jimmy found Joe’s body the morning after the murder, when he began his maintenance duties for the day. When he opened the door, the TV was still blaring. Joe lay on the floor, next to the open safe. His pockets had been turned out, papers from the safe were strewn all over the floor, and cabinets and desk drawers were also opened. Jimmy immediately called emergency. Patrol Sergeant Brian McGuiness—later to become deputy Chief of Police in Vancouver—was first on the scene, followed by two ambulance paramedics. Jimmy also made a second call.

  “Ross and I were in bed when the phone rang, and I picked it up,” Penny recalled. “Somebody made some shocked noise on the phone, but it wasn’t clear. I thought it was some crank call. About a minute later the phone rang again. It was Jimmy, who just said, ‘Let me talk to Ross.’”

  “I woke up to hear the strangest sound. I’d never heard it before,” Danny Filippone recalls. “Like a wounded animal. It was my dad crying. I didn’t understand what had happened. I got up and saw my dad getting dressed, and he told me that Uncle Joe had been shot.” Danny got dressed himself, and drove his father down to the Penthouse. “It was a very sombre drive. We were just shocked and had no idea what had happened. I don’t think we said anything the whole drive down.”

  They arrived to find a crowd of police, who had closed off Seymour Street. Ross and Jimmy discovered that their mother, who had been upstairs at the time of the murder, had slept through the incident. Jimmy had awoken her after finding Joe to see if she was all right, but did not tell her what had happened. She was too blind and hard of hearing to notice the scene outside where six police cars had already assembled.

  Ross told police that when he’d last spoken to Joe, he’d said that he had to meet Sid Morrisroe that evening. Ross too had seen Morrisroe with Forsyth in the Penthouse. “I didn’t like his looks. I didn’t like his style,” Ross said of Forsyth.

  With no signs of forced entry into the second-floor suite, police suspected that Joe knew his killer and had let in whoever his assailant was. Police asked Ross if he knew how much money and valuables the safe had contained. Rumours were that it regularly held a million dollars, and such rumours were part of the myth of the Penthouse. But the safe in the house wasn’t the one that contained the lucrative weekend deposits from the bar, and never contained that much cash. Using the scattering of paperwork left behind, Ross did the math, which made the crime seem all the more grim. Whoever had killed his brother had done so in order to rob him of just $1,144.[39]

  Coroner leading Joe's body out of the Penthouse. Vancouver Province, September 19, 1983.

  Friends and curiosity seekers descended onto Seymour Street, alerted by the morning media, as the city woke up to learn that Joe Philliponi had been shot and killed. “We were both dazed,” Danny recalls. “I think [my dad] needed to get away from the madness for a bit, and we just slowly walked up Granville Street. We walked up a block or two and sat on a bench outside while the city was beginning its day and traffic drove by like it was any other morning.”

  Meanwhile, Sergeant Dennis Lannol told a press conference that Philliponi had been shot and killed. He did not say that police were already following up on Ross’s lead and were looking for Morrisroe.

  Once again the Penthouse was the lead story in the newspapers and on radio and television in the weeks that followed. On Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, where Philliponi had been a familiar face on the street that’s traditionally been home to the city’s Italian community, there was an outpouring of shock over his death. Antonio Luliano, owner of Café Italia (now Caffe Roma), recalled how Philliponi helped him start his business. “Everybody in the Italian community loved Joe. He always wanted business to progress and succeed. If somebody needed something—money, help, whatever—he’d give it to them,” Luliano said.[40]

  The news also stunned old entertainment industry friends like singer Frankie Laine. “I’m just shocked to hear about this,” said Laine in a telephone interview from his home in San Diego at the time. “I remember Joe always as being a warm and generous person.” In an interview from the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Sammy Davis Jr told reporters that “Vancouver has lost a part of its entertainment history.” Davis said that he’d been a friend of Joe’s for years, since he first performed at the Palomar. “Whenever I had a chance to go back to Vancouver, I used to hang out with Joe. To lose a friend like that is a real shock. A lot of people owe him a debt of gratitude, like the Mills Brothers, Billy Eckstine, and me.”[41]

  Vancouver Sun columnist Denny Boyd said that Joe “was never half as big as his wicked legend,” and noted that, at his death, “he leaves more friends than enemies, which cannot be said of all men when they pass.”[42]

  “Joe was an amazing man. Nothing fazed him. No problem was too big for him. All he cared about was running that business. It was such a shock,” Philliponi’s former lawyer Russ Chamberlain recalled.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” says dancer Sandy King. She’d seen Joe on her Saturday night shift at the Penthouse the day before the murder. “I was shocked—but in a way I wasn’t. Everybody knew there were people that owed him money, and some of the people weren’t good people. I first thought that, whoever had done it, they put a gun in his face and Joe probably told him, ‘Screw you.’ Joe didn’t scare easily—all those guys [Joe, Ross, and Mickey] weren’t afraid of anybody.”

  Joe’s violent death added to his mystique as the “Godfather of Seymour Street.” There was speculation about his connections with organized crime figures and some thought his murder was part of a mafia hit. Legendary bombastic alderman Harry Rankin was the most vocal, telling the Westender newspaper just four days after the killing, “I am sorry when any man dies before his time or has his life ended in such a brutal way. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the
Penthouse was a hangout for whores, rounders, scroungers, crooks, and pimps. I don’t think that Joe Philliponi was doing a service by keeping the prostitutes off the streets. I marvel that women’s lib has nothing to say about the degrading, ugly performances staged at the Penthouse in the name of entertainment. I despise and I really object to glowing testimonials of that kind of person.”[43] Rankin, however, was in the minority.

  On the morning of September 22, more than 800 people attended the funeral for Joe at Vancouver’s Holy Rosary Cathedral. In the same church where Filippone family weddings, christenings, and previous funerals had taken place, Joe’s bronze coffin was carried up the steps by family members, including his nephews Danny and Joey. Vancouver has rarely seen a funeral attended by such a cross-section of the city. Stockbroker Basil Pantages, Whitecaps soccer team chairman Herb Capozzi, and retired Supreme Court Judge Angelo Branca sat beside musicians, club personalities, hookers, and dancers wearing tight black slit skirts, rounders with diamond rings on their pinky fingers, and strangers who’d simply come to pay their respects. It was just as Joe would have wanted it—a full house.

  Front page of the Vancouver Sun, September 22, 1983.

  There was one significant woman not in attendance at the funeral—Joe’s mother. Maria Rosa, now ninety-two years old, blind and almost deaf, had been in such frail condition that the family decided to postpone telling her about Joe’s death. They discussed having a doctor on hand when they did, and slowly prepared her for the shock.