Liquor, Lust and the Law Page 9

  Joe was buried at Ocean View Cemetery near his youngest brother Mickey in a graveside ceremony attended by 200 close friends and family members. When Rose Filippone visited her father’s grave, she often left a cigar at his graveside.

  Police questioned Sid Morrisroe just hours after the killing. He’d maintained his innocence from the beginning, stating he’d cancelled the meeting on the night of the shooting and provided an alibi, having been seen at a bar that night. As he became a known suspect, Morrisroe told police and the media that there had been a $300,000 “hit” placed on him by the Filippone family. Ross denied it, and police found no evidence of it. But he had no idea how close he’d come to street retribution. Days after the funeral, twenty-year-old Danny was working at his job as a ticket seller at Exhibition Park (now Hastings Racetrack) when he recognized Sid Morrisroe walking through the concourse. “I couldn’t believe it. We were all still so upset. I thought to myself, I’m going to get this guy. We all knew he had something to do with it.

  “He was standing there facing the racetrack. I left my window and … started walking up to him, clenching my fists. I got about twenty feet behind him, and suddenly two undercover detectives jumped out of nowhere and grabbed me by the shoulders, hustled me away, and calmed me down. Morrisroe was already under surveillance. I don’t think Sid ever even saw what happened or how close it came.”

  The snare of the police tightened, and on October 3, an investigation led by Detective Joe Orth led to the arrest of Scott Ogilvie Forsyth, who’d drunkenly bragged of the killing to a waitress he was trying to impress. While Forsyth was in custody, he revealed further details of the murder to his cellmate, an undercover RCMP officer posing as a heroin dealer. After Forsyth realized he’d unwittingly made incriminating statements, he confessed the details of the whole plot. Forsyth cooperated with police to intercept and record a telephone call he made from the Vancouver Remand Centre to Morrisroe, where they discussed the robbery. After weeks of surveillance and repeated interviews with Morrisroe, police finally arrested and charged him. After his arrest, Constable Bill Harkema drove Morrisroe to jail in a patrol car. Harkema took a detour down Seymour Street, and drove by the Penthouse. “Morrisroe saw where we were driving. When we passed by, I wanted to see how he’d react, if he’d say anything. Sid slumped in the back seat and muttered, ‘What did you do that for?’ like he was insulted he’d been caught, and he knew he was going down.”

  What played out during the murder trial and over the following years would be enough to fill a book of its own. Forsyth testified that the plan to rob Philliponi was Morrisroe’s from the beginning. Morrisroe owed Philliponi $6,000 and told Forsyth about the storied amount of cash sitting in the Penthouse safe. Morrisroe supplied the gun, but backed out of going to Joe’s apartment that night. It could be said that the nightmare of the 1976 trial was playing out its final card. There had been so much conjecture about how much money the Penthouse was making and what was stashed in that safe that the rumours fanned the flames of Morrisroe’s and Forsyth’s greed.

  Forsyth testified that, on the night of the shooting, he’d panicked and shot Philliponi after he said he’d never pick him out of a line-up. Morrisroe had suggested that Joe was connected to the Vancouver underworld and Forsyth suddenly feared that he wouldn’t even make it to a police line-up before Philliponi had him killed.

  Morrisroe later claimed that police had overlooked evidence when they first arrived at the murder scene, and that they failed to interview the housekeeper Philliponi sent home the night of the shooting. None of it convinced a jury. Both men were convicted of first-degree murder on June 13, 1984, and given life sentences of twenty-five years.

  The story took a further twist in 1993. Morrisroe’s daughter Tami was visiting her father, imprisoned at the minimum-security Ferndale Institution near Mission, BC, when inmate Salvatore Ciancio noticed her, and he liked what he saw. Ciancio fabricated a story that he was a distant cousin to the Filippones and that he knew that her father had been framed for the murder. He told her that Ross Filippone contracted the killing.

  Tami, who was eager for any information to clear her father, fell for Ciancio’s story. When he was released from jail, Tami struck up a relationship with him, hoping to learn further details to free her father. She essentially went undercover, taping her conversations with him. Ciancio always held back, changing the subject if she pressed him. Although she was already married, Tami married Ciancio to gain his confidence. Ciancio told Tami, who entered the witness protection program in 1996, that he belonged to a drug ring connected to a series of grisly underworld executions in 1995. Despite years of investigation by the RCMP, Ciancio was later acquitted in two trials that resulted in hung juries.

  Sid Morrisroe served nineteen years of his sentence before he was granted early parole in 2002. He’d been a model prisoner but was in ill health in his remaining years. He died peacefully in a care facility in 2010, and Tami said she was grateful for the few short years out of jail she was able to spend with her father.

  Sid Morrisroe. Vancouver Province, March 16, 2000.

  “The only regret I have is not proving his innocence,” Tami told the Vancouver Sun when her father died. “It’s the one thing I wanted to do—to clear his name.”[44] That Tami put herself in so much personal danger to prove her father ’s innocence, that she accepted without question Ciancio’s allegation, and that her crusade was essentially instigated by Ciancio’s “pick-up line,” remains astonishing to the Filippone family, who deny any family relationship, distant or otherwise, to Ciancio.

  Ross Filippone told the author in 2007, “It’s in the past now. I went through enough with the legal matters and victim’s impact [statements]. I don’t want to see or hear about Morrisroe. I think he should have served another five. I know he’s maintained his innocence. What else is he gonna say?”

  Scott Forsyth spent the next twenty years in prison for first-degree murder. At a parole hearing, he discussed the crime in detail, expressing remorse, admitting he was heavily intoxicated at the time of the murder. During his sentence, he participated in a number of alcohol and drug programs, and violent “offender relapse” prevention courses. Forsyth was granted full parole in 2004. In 2012, almost thirty years after the murder of Joe Philliponi, he declined to be interviewed for this book.

  The year 1983 saw the passing of another Filippone. On Christmas Day, less than four months after Joe was killed, Maria Rosa Filippone died at age ninety-two. The family had never told her about Joe’s death, “but I think she knew something was wrong with Joe,” said Ross. Weeks before her death, she’d fractured a hip and had been in hospital recuperating. She was blind and almost deaf, and didn’t seem to want to improve, refusing at times to eat or drink, sometimes pulling the intravenous needles from her arms. Ross went to visit her to wish her a Merry Christmas, and while he was there, she died quietly.

  Maria Rosa and Giuseppe Filippone, C. 1940s.

  Ross Filippone and his mother Maria Rosa.

  “With Joe’s death, the energy left the family,” said Penny Marks. “Neither Ross, Jimmy, nor their sister Florence, who worked as the club’s bookkeeper, had the strength to step into Joe’s shoes. We all wondered what was going to happen with the business.”

  Ross seemed like a logical choice to take over, but he was less willing to fulfill the demands of working long hours at the club. He’d given up drinking and smoking and changed his lifestyle; he became a health enthusiast and racquetball player in seniors’ matches and tournaments around the world. “It’s completely the opposite of my old days, when I went to work at seven and came home at five!” he said. It was obvious the Penthouse would need someone new to lead it into the future.

  IX. Changing of the Guard

  The night Ross’s son Danny was born in 1963, legendary comedian George Burns—in attendance as a guest at the Penthouse that night—personally handed out celebratory cigars to the nightclub patrons.

  Visiting celebrities were a
regular part of Danny’s childhood. “I remember my father bringing home Duke Ellington, [hockey player] Stan Mikita, Tony Bennett, and others for dinner. They would have these big parties, where Dad hosted casino nights for friends and rented gaming tables. I remember one night when I was a kid, I wanted to go to bed, but there was a roulette wheel in my bedroom, and I couldn’t. It was just part of the scenery when I was growing up.”

  Exactly what his father’s occupation was remained somewhat of a mystery to Danny as a child. The nightclub was something his father did after Danny’s bedtime, but there were certainly moments that suggested Ross was different from his friends’ fathers and uncles.

  In 1974, as a tip of the hat to the early 1970s fad of naked “streakers” running through public places, the Filippones decided to pull a prank of their own. “My uncle took me to a Vancouver Canucks game at the Pacific Coliseum with these three girls in full-length mink coats,” Danny recalls.

  I didn’t know them; I just thought they were friends of my dad. We had great seats, right down near the ice. I was eleven years old and just excited about the game. I had no idea that Uncle Joe had paid off somebody at the Coliseum to leave the arena gate to the ice unlocked. Sometime in the second period, during a stop in play, the girls put skates on, threw off the mink coats, and streaked across the ice past both benches and out the other side to a Diamond cab waiting to take them back to the Penthouse! Everybody was howling and cheering, and I was just so red-faced shy, I couldn’t believe it. But I still hear about the incident on sports-talk shows; it’s in the fans’ top-ten lists as one of the all-time favourite moments in the Canucks’ history.

  Penthouse streakers at the Vancouver Canucks vs. New York Islanders hockey game, Pacific Coliseum, February 2, 1974.

  The Filippone name was well-known when Danny was growing up. “There weren’t many other prominent Italian families in Vancouver. There were the Capozzis for wines, the Lenarduzzis for soccer, and the Filippones had the nightclubs,” he says. During the 1970s court trial, all of the family experienced some of the occasional discomforts of bearing the Filippone name, even members of the younger generation like Danny. “It was a confusing time. None of the kids at school asked me about it. Maybe they were afraid to ask. My parents sheltered us from a lot of that, keeping us busy, but it was a dark time.”

  Ross took on the role of head of the family after Joe’s death, but he knew the Penthouse would need somebody with the right energy and enthusiasm to take it into its next chapter. While it’s easy to assume today that Danny’s destiny was to run the Penthouse, it was not always that certain. In his early twenties, he hadn’t thought seriously (any more than most people of his age) about his long-term career plans. “I was basically into playing sports and meeting girls!” he says. When he began working as the club’s only male waiter one night a week, he “didn’t know a damn thing. My first order,” he remembers, “this guy asks me for a ‘Fifty-Seven Chevy with Massachusetts tags on it—neat,’ and I think I cried while walking back to the bar, I was so confused!”

  Danny vividly remembers being called to meet his father in their home, just three months after Joe’s death. “Dad said, ‘You have to make a decision. We have to know, as a family, if you want to do this full-time.’ It was a lot to absorb at once. They wanted to know what direction things were going in and if I’d take over the reins. I said I’d do it. My heart was in it, and I liked it.”

  Joe’s legend still cast a long shadow at the Penthouse. “It was weird the first couple of years after he was gone. I could still see him around and hear his voice. I have lots of great memories of Uncle Joe.” But after at first co-managing with his father, Danny learned quickly, and he brought his own ideas to the club. He would choose a new dancers’ talent agency and, while respecting the history of the room, began some much-needed renovations.

  Joe at the office.

  The Penthouse experienced a growth in popularity due to Expo 86, and a number of new Vancouver strip bars opened in its wake, including Champagne Charlie’s, the Austin Flash One, and the Niagara, as almost every hotel bar put in a stage and booked exotic dancers. Danny would see the fads come and go. Within a few years, the thousands of exotic dancers working in Vancouver would dwindle from 4,000 to probably less than 200, and much of the Penthouse’s competition again disappeared. “We’re back to where we started in many ways,” he says. The Penthouse is now, in 2012, one of the city’s only remaining exotic show lounges.

  And though the exotic dancers are still a feature, the club under Danny’s management has opened up the venue for private functions, sports nights, and gay and lesbian parties. The club hosts performances for the Vancouver International Jazz Festival and concerts by alternative local musicians from Bif Naked, Dan Mangan, Maria in the Shower, and Rio Bent, to one local band whose name might have raised the eyebrows of some of the old clientele—Pepper Sprayed by Hookers.

  Danny soon unveiled a wall of photos of new famous visitors to the Penthouse and needs little prompting to tell anecdotes about them with the characteristic ebullience and unique Filippone rhythm and tenor in his voice, the same way his father and uncles told stories of the stars in their day.

  When Marilyn Manson stopped in at the Penthouse a few years ago, for example, Danny says, “He never paid his bill,”[45] and when Bruce Springsteen’s sidekick Steven Van Zandt came to town, he called Danny to ask if, before the club opened for the night, he could just stand on the club’s historic stage.

  Musician Steven Van Zandt with Danny Filippone, 2004.

  Danny and R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, 2007.

  Danny with Nickelback's Chad Kroeger, 2005.

  Impresario Bruce Allen and Danny, 2007.

  The Penthouse plays a strip club in the film Star 80 (1983) starring Eric Roberts.

  Danny has enjoyed operating the Penthouse without any of the notorious police-investigation issues that his father and uncles faced, but has kept the sense of fun and mischief that occasionally results in attention from the authorities. In 1997, when US President Bill Clinton visited Vancouver as part of the APEC meeting, during the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal (Lewinsky was the White House intern whose relationship with Clinton jeopardized his presidency), the Penthouse marquee read, “Welcome President Clinton: Our Lips are Sealed.”

  “A few days before the summit, I got a call from somebody at the White House who was in charge of planning Clinton’s motorcade route,” Danny says. “Driving down Seymour Street, past the Penthouse, was one possibility, and they asked me to change the marquee. It had already been up for a few days, and I wasn’t in the mood for a personal visit from the US Secret Service, so we changed it!”

  Local history tour groups now visit the Penthouse to hear about its place in entertainment history, old tales about the liquor raids, and anecdotes of famous actors and musicians. They see vintage upstairs lounges now closed to the public and mostly used for film shoots for everything from Star 80 (the 1983 Bob Fosse film about murdered Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten, who was from Vancouver), Avril Lavigne and Snoop Dogg music videos, and the 2005–2007 CBC TV drama Intelligence, where it played the fictional strip-club the Chick-a-Dee.

  Ross Filippone lived to see how local heritage groups would come to take an interest in the Penthouse, and although he handed the business over to Danny, he kept an eye on the nightclub. “I still enjoy coming down to the Penthouse once a week, just to check out the nightlife,” he said. Ross passed in October 2007, aged eighty-four.

  Ross at the Penthouse, c. 2005.

  Jimmy Filippone passed away in February 2008. Perhaps the least well-known of the brothers, he was outwardly the most reserved, and some assumed that his early boxing days had left him a little slow of wits. But his shy nature hid a sharp sense of humour that was better known to his close friends and family.

  Jimmy, c. 1950s.

  Left to run Diamond Cabs, Jimmy never had the high profile of his brothers. After the cab business was sold and amalgamated with
Black Top Cabs, Jimmy became the Penthouse’s building manager and maintenance man. “He loved to tinker,” says his daughter JoAnne. “He often arrived to begin his work day while the other three brothers were leaving, after being there all night.”[46]

  When lawyer Russ Chamberlain drives by the club today, he thinks of his nights there in the late ’70s, after they won the case. “I think the Penthouse should be remembered as a place where all walks of life went, met, and had a good time. The Filippones have done nothing but benefit the community with their contributions to business and social sense. It’s provided a lot of great entertainment over the years for a lot of people—and a lot of laughs.”

  The legacy his father and uncles entrusted to Danny almost completely disappeared in the fire of November 2011. By then, more than twenty-five years had passed since he’d driven his father to the Penthouse on the terrible morning of Joe’s murder. This time he made the drive alone. “It seemed like I was the only one on the road. As I came over the Second Narrows Bridge, all I could see was smoke billowing from where I knew the Penthouse stands. The news was already on the radio, and my phone was ringing non-stop.”

  Filippone pulled up two blocks away from the club—as close as he could get because emergency crews blocked the street—left his engine running, and raced down the sidewalk, bursting past the yellow tape that cordoned off the area, only to watch helplessly from the alleyway as fire crews broke in doors and showered the rear of the building with water from their hoses. Within a couple hours, Danny learned that, despite serious damage, the fire had been contained to the back of the building. None of the photos in the Penthouse’s extensive archive—many of the very photos in this book—had been destroyed. “It was an amazing relief, and I finally had a chance to breathe.