One Last Shot
When 89-year-old Vic Maceo walked into the office of a Galveston accountant and opened fire, the incident brought back memories of the Island’s gangster past.
(Page 2 of 3)
Maceo stood up again and repeated the question: “You value forty thousand dollars more than you value you life, eh, Pete?” The scene was so ludicrous that Miller had to laugh, not at the old man but at the situation: He wasn’t just watching a bad movie, he was becoming a principal character. Leaning back in his chair, Miller studied Maceo with detached fascination, saw Maceo’s eyes go cold, saw his hand disappear again inside his coat. Then he saw the gun and heard the blast. Maceo fired two shots. Miller still isn’t sure if it was the first bullet that slammed into the wall and the second that struck just above his elbow and traveled up his arm or vice versa, but he tumbled out of his chair and was facedown on the floor, trying to get up, when Maceo walked around the desk and looked down at him. “Here comes the big one,” Miller thought. Instead, Maceo turned and walked out of the room. “I shot you boss,” he told Miller’s secretary, who dialed 911 as Maceo headed off in the direction of the parking lot.
Maceo had just climbed into his sports car and was pulling away when the cops arrived and flagged him down. The surrender was peaceable, even touching. Brian Gately, one of the arresting officers, remembers that Maceo took him by the hand and said in a firm grandfatherly voice, “When you look a guy in the eye and tell him he owes you forty grand and he tells you, ‘Let me get the file,’ you know that the son of a bitch is lying.” Word went around that as the cops slapped him in cuffs, the old gangster complained, “You don’t handcuff a gentleman in this town!”
It has been a long time since the name Maceo reverberated across the Island. The name means little or nothing to younger Islanders or newcomers, but to anyone over the age of fifty who was born on the Island, the name evokes the timeless magic of nostalgia. For thirty years the Maceos ran Galveston—economically, politically, spiritually. Papa Rose and Big Sam were the undisputed dons of the gang, and their brothers, Vincent and Frank, along with a number of cousins and in-laws, ran various parts of the operation. Gigolo managed the Studio Lounge on the second floor of the Turf Athletic Club, and other family members managed the Balinese Room, the Western Room, the Moulin Rouge, and a variety of Maceo ventures on the Island as well as the mainland part of Galveston County, which they also controlled; motorists driving south from Houston spoke of crossing the “Maceo-Dickinson Line.” The black sheep of the family was Vic, a feisty runt of a man who enjoyed acting like a big shot but was seldom trusted with anything important. “He usually just hung around the Turf,” recalled Angelo Montalbano, the one-time blackjack dealer. “They gave him little jobs. That’s about it. He was always out of step with the other Maceos.”
The Maceos had migrated from Palermo, Sicily, to Louisiana around the turn of the century, when Sam was six and Rose was thirteen. Vic was born in Louisiana in 1903, seven years before the family moved to Galveston. In their early days on the Island, Rose and Sam were barbers. Sam, who was smoother and more sophisticated and spoke better English, worked at the new ritzy Galvez Hotel. Rose, who was meaner, tougher, and more ambitious, had a barber’s chair on Murdoch’s Pier, which was a hangout for Ollie Quinn and the Beach Gang. Quinn’s gang and the rival Downtown Gang (Broadway divided the territory) dominated the Island’s lucrative rum-running trade and controlled gambling, which in those days consisted of a few seedy clubs and an operation that leased slot and pinball machines and sold tip books—similar to the scratch-off lottery tickets sold today by the state.
The Maceo brothers began performing small services for Quinn. Rose sold bottles of bootleg liquor concealed in hollowed-out loaves of French bread and allowed the Beach Gang to stash crates of smuggled booze under his raised beach cottage. Sam looked to the future, to the day when Prohibition would end, and urged Quinn to forget the penny-ante stuff and build a big-time nightclub. In an era of great gangsters, Rose and Sam were, so to speak, to the manor born: a pair of naturals, the enforcer and the visionary. By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, Rose and Sam had taken over the Beach Gang, run the rival Downtown Gang off the Island, and consolidated power in a way that even the Island’s traditional ruling families—the Kempners, the Sealys, and the Moodys—had not been able to accomplish.
In 1926 the Maceos opened Galveston’s first big-time night spot, the Hollywood Dinner Club, which they built from the ground up on the western edge of the city, at the intersection of Sixty-first and Avenue S. A consummate showman, Sam Maceo began his tradition of booking only the biggest names in the entertainment business: Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, Peggy Lee, Jimmy Dorsey, Phil Harris. Houston high rollers like Diamond Jim West, Glenn McCarthy, and Jack Josey were regulars at the gaming tables. With its Spanish architecture and crystal chandeliers, the Hollywood was the swankest night spot on the Gulf Coast and a landmark in the gaming industry. Two decades before Las Vegas cashed in on the same idea, the Maceos introduced fancy food, big-name entertainment, public gambling, and air conditioning (a technology almost unknown at the time)—all under one enormous roof.
In the early thirties the Maceos opened a second dinner club and casino on a pier at the head of Twenty-first Street, called the Grotto originally and the Balinese Room later. In accordance with the Island’s traditional live-and-let-live style, the syndicate permitted other gambling joints to operate, as long as their owner understood that they existed at the pleasure of Papa Rose and Big Sam. By the late thirties, Seawall Boulevard was lined with glittering casinos, while lesser clubs were scattered from one end of the Island to the other. Eventually, casinos occupied all four corners of the intersection of Sixty-first Street and Avenue S.
Downtown, the action was even faster, more hard-core. The madams of the city’s notorious red-light district, located on Postoffice Street between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-ninth, were not required to pay a percentage to the Maceos, but they had the good sense to forbid gambling in their establishments, lest the Maceos take offense at the competition. The headquarters of the syndicate was the Turf Athletic Club, a three story building on Twenty-third near Market that housed a casino, two restaurants, and the athletic club. On the ground floor was a bookmaking parlor where a bettor could wager on any sporting event in the country. Horse races were broadcast live on the public address system.
In the years before World War II, gambling, prostitution, and massive violations of the state’s alcoholic beverage code were not unknown in other parts of Texas, but most mainland cities at least pretended to uphold the law. Not the Free State of Galveston, as it came to be known. Galveston’s red-light district may have been the only one in the country that thrived with the blessings of both city hall and the Catholic church. Proportionally, it was probably the largest red-light district in the world, boasting 1 hooker for every 62 citizens. Chicago, by comparison, had a ratio of 1 to 430, Paris 1 to 481, and Shanghai 1 to 130.
What outsiders viewed as corruption, Islanders called business as usual. Walter Johnston, the longtime police commissioner, once bragged that he was on the payroll of 46 whorehouses. Frank L. Biaggne, who was the sheriff of Galveston County from 1933 to 1957, explained to a state investigative committee that the reason he had never raided the Balinese was because it was a private club and he wasn’t a member. Occasionally, the Texas Rangers—in those days, effectively the governor’s private police force—swept down from the mainland and smashed a few slot machines, but not one of the Maceo’s clubs was ever closed for long. The skinny was that the family had close contacts in the governor’s office by which they were warned of approaching trouble. Gambling paraphernalia at the Balinese was designed to convert into billiard and bridge tables so that by the time the Rangers arrived, all they found were some well-dressed patrons playing bridge and sipping soft drinks.
My Library
