Dirty Phenix: Carnal Knowledge, #1

By HL Arledge

This book builds on the public domain writings of journalists Edwin Strickland and Gene Wortsman, leveraging their research to support information provided to journalist H. L. Arledge in interviews with former residents of Phenix City and entertainers working in Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana, among them: Stacey Lawrence, Kitty West, Suzanne Robbins, Blaze Starr, Frieda LaBreche, and Evelyn West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bogart Books
• Release date: Aug 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215459157

HL Arledge

HL Arledge is the author of Bayou Justice, a twice-weekly true crime newspaper column featuring exciting or notable crime-related stories often focusing on cold case files in South Louisiana; stories based on interviews with key players, among them: police investigators, lawyers, victims, and their families. HL Arledge is well established as a journalist, IT Professional, and story teller. Not only is he published in the periodicals and professional journals. HL works in Louisiana state government and lives with his beautiful wife in a farmhouse just north of New Orleans. HL Arledge also writes quirky crime fiction. Literary Agent Elizabeth Pomada said he should describe himself as Elmore Leonard with a southern accent. HL's short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Twilight Zone, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

Book preview

Photography Credits

Photos in this book are copyrighted by their respective holders and included under Fair Use guidelines. Where we could not identify a photo source, we will add credit in future updates and editions as copyright holders contact us.

For example:

Photography from LSU Photos of Stormy at Louisiana State University originated with Life Magazine.

Cover model Amber Smith as Stormy, photographed by the author.

Phenix City photography developed by The Columbus Ledger Enquirer.

While the author and publisher have taken every precaution in preparing this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

The author retained the copyright for this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or via any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the author and publisher except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Preface

Book one of the Carnal Knowledge series builds on the public domain writings of Birmingham newspaper correspondents Edwin Strickland and Gene Wortsman, leveraging their research to support information provided to me in interviews with former residents of Phenix City and entertainers working in Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana, among them: Stacey Lawrence, Kitty West, Doris Kotzan, Suzanne Robbins, Fannie Belle Blaze Starr Fleming Glorioso, Frieda LaBreche, and Evelyn West.

Regarding the stage name, Stacey Lawrence, as I painfully discovered in newspaper archives, the performer and the clubs that booked her spelled the name multiple ways over time. These spellings included: Stacey, Stacy, and Stacie, along with Laurence, Lawrence, and Laurance. In addition, one article gave her the middle name Randolph, which may have been a pseudonym maiden name. Speaking of which, she also lived under the married name Stacie Lester in New York.

For consistency, I am employing the Stacey Lawrence spelling throughout the Carnal Knowledge series.

Text Description automatically generated

Introduction

In 1975, the United States government, through the House Select Committee on Assassinations, ruled John F. Kennedy died of a probable conspiracy, much like Marilyn Monroe died of a probable suicide in 1962.

According to the government’s final report, the Italian La Cosa Nostra had the motive, means, and opportunity to kill the president. Still, naysayers disagree, saying the mafia did not have the power to cover up the crime.

For that, insiders said, the mob needed a racket.

Could the mafia force a government agency to obfuscate everything by finding and framing a low-level intelligence operative?

The Carnal Knowledge book series—the culmination of over 40 years of interviews with dancers, doorkeepers, killers, hookers, police officers, politicos, hoods, bartenders, B-Girls, and others collecting cash working with or within organized crime—fights to answer that question.

As author H. L. Arledge, a veteran investigative journalist, weighed witness claims, impressions, accusations, and implications against others, an alarming cohesiveness developed.

In 1984, burlesque giant Blaze Starr told the author, In barrooms or bedrooms, men can’t keep secrets. So if you really want to know what happened in Dallas, ask a stripper in New Orleans.

Those interviewed insist that:

In New Orleans, Lee Oswald was far from a loner, and reporters photographed him in Miami.

Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby worked as government informants and knew each other.

Oswald fired shots into Edwin Walker’s study while employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Oswald trained exiled Cubans to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Clay Bertrand was not Clay Shaw.

John Kennedy did not sleep with Marilyn Monroe but knew who killed her and why.

Book one of the series, Dirty Phenix: Birth of the Dixie Mafia, explains the connection between the mob in New Orleans and the Dixie Mafia. It also exposes the identity of one of Bourbon Street’s most famous dancers and her relationship with a kid named Lee Harvey Oswald. Those interviewed for this volume include Stacey Lawrence, Kitty West, Suzanne Robbins, Blaze Starr, Frieda LaBreche, and Evelyn West.

John Patterson, a former Alabama governor and Attorney General, estimated the mob made 100 million dollars from illegal rackets in Phenix City annually before his father’s assassination in 1954. In his campaign literature, he added, Mob influence reached the polls, the courts, and even the churches. When the racketeers ran into a crimefighter, they could not buy off, so they murdered him.

This book tells that story through the eyes of a New Orleans icon and two master journalists who covered the crimes in Phenix City firsthand.

An addendum volume will follow book one, providing an in-depth look at Darlene Kern’s Dixie Mafia and how the characters she wrote about relate to crimes in Phenix City, Dallas, and New Orleans.

Carnal Knowledge Book Two, Dirty Bourbon: The New Orleans Mafia, continues the dancer’s relationship with Oswald and explores his time in New Orleans in the months leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Additional New Orleans interviews include Jim Garrison, Joy Pelletier, Tura Satana, Blaze Starr, Delphine Roberts, and Juanita Dale Slusher.

The third book in the series, Dirty Dallas: The Truth about JFK, follows Oswald back to Texas and examines his connection to Marilyn Monroe and Mexico City. The Dallas interviews include Bobbie Lou Meserole, Dixie Evans, Juanita Dale Slusher, Irene Jewell, and Angel Walker.

A person in a uniform holding an object Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Phenix City

Wednesday, February 14, 1956, before introducing General Walter Crack Hanna to a special Florida assembly at Jacksonville State University, Professor J. M. Anders, head of the social science division, reminded his audience about the assassination that brought General Hanna to Alabama.

Before running for state attorney general, 30-year-old Albert Love Patterson, a disabled attorney who walked with a cane, got involved with the Russel Betterment Association, formed to combat vice and corruption in Phenix City.

The racketeers this group fought set Patterson’s office on fire in 1952.

In 1954, Patterson, running on a platform to uproot the corruption and vice in Phenix City, won the nomination for state attorney general for the Democratic Party, then the dominant political party in Alabama.

On June 18, 1954, as Patterson got into his car outside his office, an assassin shot him three times. Wounded, he crossed the street and collapsed in a pool of blood in front of an all-night café.

One bullet pierced Patterson’s throat, keeping him from telling witnesses who killed him.

As the professor recounted the events of Patterson’s death, he introduced the general by saying, We are fortunate General Hanna got the job cleaning up Phenix City. He accomplished the grueling deed in under six months.

General Hanna told his audience it would take six months, speaking around the clock, to recount the whole Phenix City Story, a reference to the motion picture version of the assassination released in 1955.

The best way to describe Phenix City, he said, It was a whole damn town of ill repute.

Referring to the professor’s introduction, General Hanna said he did not consider himself a hero or a crusader.

Governor Persons, he said, appointed him to oversee the clean-up of Phenix City and Russell County, and he just did his job. However, the general said the conditions found there amazed him. The influences of the corrupt town had spread into every county in the state, he said.

Albert Patterson was shot through the mouth, the underworld command to keep your mouth shut, he continued.

General Hanna said the history of the notorious town began 130 years earlier. At that time, he said, Russell County was peopled with renegades and runaway slaves. Phenix City, then called Girard, had one building, a place of gambling and vice.

Girard, he said, had been known for years as a hell-raising town with a fence around it. In each instance, he recounted feeble attempts to clean up the town, disrupted by beatings, murders, and similar tactics.

With the governor’s proclamation of martial law in 1954, he said, the National Guard took over and thereby set a precedent. The authorities saw that the city and county officers had no intention of administering the law, so Hanna’s troops formed a group to do it for them.

In their investigation, the General said, his troops found evidence of every conceivable kind of vice and lawlessness, a veritable gangster paradise. Gangsters controlled the local police and county, state, and federal officials through vote-buying and other means. As a result, these corrupt officials assumed a hands-off attitude, and citizens of the town, although they lamented the situation, kept their mouths closed out of fear.

They knew the leaders employed unlimited methods of defeating anyone who opposed them, including murder. Moreover, records showed that the mob also made sizable contributions to state and national political campaigns. Even the crime-busting Senator Kefauver did not include Phenix City in his wide crusade against crime, the General pointed out.

According to the general, when the National Guard took over Phenix City, they put local and county officials in jail, impounded equipment, and suspended all liquor and gambling licenses.

Overnight, more than three thousand people left Phenix City, and air travel to and from the town dropped seventy-five percent. Entering stores, cafes, and other places of business, the Guard discovered they were fronts for gambling, narcotics rings, safecracking schools, lotteries, and other illegal underworld operations. Behind these fronts, they found evidence of prostitution, the distilling of paregoric and cough syrup, the selling of babies, and countless other nefarious enterprises.

The only legitimate industry found in Phenix City, the general said, made loaded dice and marked cards, and different rackets paid different officials, he said.

Twenty-eight murders had occurred during the previous eight years without a single indictment. However, a grand jury returned over seven hundred indictments during the clean-up.

General Hanna was amazed to learn that vote-buying, stealing, and baby-selling are only misdemeanors in Alabama. Racketeers guilty of these offenses paid small fines but received no jail time.

General Hanna concluded, warning his audience, If we continue to treat vote-stealing as a misdemeanor, he said, It won’t be long before the mob owns the State of Alabama and our country.

Two years earlier, when Phenix City, Alabama, a town of twenty-eight thousand people across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, Georgia, fell, the reputation of America’s original Sin City had spread worldwide.

As General Hanna suggested, there was no vice Phenix City did not offer. Name a transgression, as General Hanna said, and the town openly sold it. Gambling joints lined Fourteenth Street and fringed the city, and sex workers supplied services in all varieties and deviations.

Visitors bet at cock fights, raped performers at full frontal strip shows, got their heads bashed in or rolled for their paychecks, and few cared, provided the city got its cut.

On paydays at nearby Fort Benning, Georgia, for the fifty thousand soldiers stationed there during the second world war, Phenix City became a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

As brothels overflowed with patrons, sex sales spilled into portable houses of prostitution, where canvas-covered pickup trucks found customers by two-way radio.

In the 1940s, Phenix City casino operators paid federal taxes on over 1500 gambling devices and hosted over two hundred professional gamblers and two hundred and seventy-five lottery writers. Conservative estimates suggest their annual vice exceeded fifteen million dollars.

Before the Patterson assassination, the state of Alabama ignored Phenix City’s vice, provided the mobsters who ran the town continued to pay their taxes.

After the Patterson shooting, Governor Gordon Persons sent General Hanna and National Guardsmen to assist the state police in locking down the county.

The governor’s troops pushed local law enforcement officials aside and stood guard as gambling tables and moonshine stills burned in the street.

Governor Persons fired the sheriff, deputies, and police, and General Hanna’s troops raided the gambling places, destroying slot machines and gathering evidence. The investigation ended with seven hundred and forty-nine indictments against one hundred and fifty-two people on charges ranging from prostitution and gambling to murder.

Prosecutors won convictions against all but two of those charged.

Patterson’s assassination led to a 23-day jury trial, which found Deputy Albert Fuller guilty of taking Patterson’s life and sentenced him to life in prison on March 9, 1955. He saw parole in 1965 and died a free man in 1969.

Fuller had earned 300 dollars a month while flashing one thousand dollar bills acquired protecting gangsters. He had a reputation for using excessive force and marking the ballots for the people he paid to vote the mob’s way in the 1952 election.

The National Guard arrested Fuller, wearing a bathrobe and intoxicated from drugs prescribed for a back injury.

Alabama named State Attorney General Silas Garrett, III, a co-conspirator in the Patterson assassination. To escape indictment, Garrett committed himself to a Texas psychiatric hospital.

Patterson’s son, John, became attorney general in place of his father and was later elected governor in 1959.

By 1957, the neon-lighted casinos and brothels of downtown Phenix City vanished, replaced by burned, decaying edifices. The government gave notorious places like Ma Beachie’s, Club El Dorado, the Skyline Club, the Starlite, the Blue Bonnet Café, the Bama, the Bamboo, and the 241 Club two choices: convert to reputable restaurants or face destruction.

A dozen of the once criminal elements converted to solid citizens. Others dispersed across the south, corrupting other towns by selling their illegal services, advertising themselves through word-of-mouth as crossroaders, criminal vagrants for hire in gangs from one to a dozen.

In time, Law Enforcement referred to these loosely connected operators as The Dixie Mafia, as their more infamous operatives worked as the enforcement arm of the Italian mafia in Dallas, Miami, and New Orleans.

A picture containing text, posing Description automatically generated

Midnight on Bourbon Street

Minutes before midnight , Wednesday, July 5, 1944, Joseph Gleason, a taxicab driver with a suspended license, sat alone in his car, a 1939 Mercury Eight, outside 600 Bourbon Street, watching it rain.

A truck passed, splashing water, prompting Gleason to turn up the radio as WWL newsman Don Lewis recounted the hundreds of American soldiers killed fighting German forces on Independence Day.

Joe owned the dark nightclub across the street, but inside the now locked bar, he had no customers and no radio. As the thunder and static made listening to the broadcast impossible, Joe shook his head, wondering if his luck would ever change.

In April 1941, Joe Gleason married Hazel Mae Brooks, and eight months later, she gave birth to Joe Junior at Charity Hospital. As the baby grew, Hazel Mae complained their family had outgrown their one-bedroom apartment, and she insisted they could not raise a child on a cab driver’s pay.

In 1942, Joe took on odd jobs for the Algiers Music Company and a young man named Carlos Marcello. Delivering racehorse machines in the Eighth Police District earned Joe the money to rent Hazel Mae a three-bedroom house at 2513 Melpomene Street.

In September 1943, Joe took ownership of The Old Opera House Cocktail Lounge at 601 Bourbon Street from a Marcello associate named Richard Conaway.

On Monday, May 29, 1944, Joe went to jail, and Hazel Mae filed for divorce.

According to The New Orleans States newspaper, that week, Deputies from the United States Marshall’s Office arrested Joe Gleason and nineteen other taxi drivers for operating cabs on illegal gasoline rations.

Marshall Commissioner R. H. Carter, Jr. told reporters, These charges are in connection with the government’s efforts to halt black market gasoline operations which endanger the war effort and interrupt civilian gasoline supplies.

The commissioner said the racket worked like this:

A man named Charles Lewis owned the V-8 cab company. The cab drivers did not legally work for him. They had private licenses to run their taxis. In fact, most drivers did not have the commercial for hire licenses required by law. These drivers had private plates, and none of those arrested had the certificates of war necessary to receive the supplemental gas rations provided by select gas stations.

Commissioner Carter said, Lewis charged the drivers eight dollars per week for telephone and dispatch service. Ordinarily, taxi-for-hire services paid six dollars per week, but Lewis charged eight dollars to compensate for the added risk of servicing illegal cab operators.

A Marcello associate named A. L. Frey paid Joe Gleason’s thousand-dollar fine, but when he returned home, Hazel Mae had taken their son and left for her mother’s.

From the New Orleans Item, March 22, 1944:

Charged with running an extensive black market in gasoline are Joseph Bonura, Anthony Musacchia, and Carlos Marcello. They were before United States Commissioner R. H. Carter, Jr., illegally possessing gasoline coupons yesterday. The government reported that the men and a fourth, Joseph Barlatto, had in their possession 548 coupons, part of a large batch stolen from the St. John the Baptist war price and rationing board at Reserve. U. S. Attorney Herbert Christenberry said the accused connected to a filling station at 1600 Newton Street in Algiers.

After a squawk of static, the radio announcer came back, jolting Joe Gleason back from his guilt trip.

Another car passed, splashing more water, but this one, a 1942 baby blue Desoto President, poured steam from under its hood. In this rain, Joe decided the driver would need a cab soon, so he followed the Desoto.

The blue coupe died at the corner of Philip and Decatur, near an all-night Morning Call in the French Quarter.

Three gorgeous dames ran from the steaming heap to the coffee stand, and Joe grinned, watching their thin wet dresses stick to their bodies in the rain.

Perhaps, Joe thought, his luck had finally changed.

Inside, Joseph Gleason met Josephine Spellman, Mildred Kidd, and Helen Floyd, three gorgeous ladies from somewhere east. He told them he needed some beautiful women to bring customers to his bar, and in time, they agreed to help, provided Joe forgot he ever saw any 1942 baby blue Desoto President.

A picture containing text, person, person, player Description automatically generated

Stormy

On December 11, 1946 , New Orleans States columnist Jim Sharp wrote:

The most talked-of entertainer in the French Quarter is a gal named Stacey Lawrence, who dances under the name Stormy and works on the unprincipled notion that she should subtract something from her attire after every song chorus.

She’s a striking brunette—sometimes literally—who says her act is a striptease on the artistic, rather than vulgar, side. The striking part relates to her name, given to her by public acclaim after she repulsed an overenthusiastic patron by punting his face out of danger.

Photographed this week by a national picture magazine representative, she is hoping for a career on Broadway, she says.

One month later, Gerald Taitt, a New Orleans Item reporter, followed up:

In a dimly lighted French Quarter nightclub, smoke-filled and clinking of glasses, the pony chorus has blown its last kiss from the small stage. A spotlight plays across the bar as the orchestra swings softly into the strains of the musical number Stormy Weather."

A raven-haired girl mounts a ladder and poses fully clothed, not on stage but atop the bar.

This is it.

Stormy!

As the tempo of the music steps up, Stormy begins her strip routine and rapid undulating dance, which has lured photographers from three national magazines.

As Stormy drops each piece of clothing, the room temperature jumps a corresponding degree.

In a whirlwind finish, she poses atop the ladder, gives one quick whisk to a remaining garment, and leaves her makeshift stage clothed only in the legal minimum, G-String, and pasties.

Elsewhere in the article, the writer explained:

Stormy, actually Stacey Lawrence of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, spoke in a well-modulated and cultured voice. This reporter went to see her at the Old Opera House, where she is under contract until next September.

I’m just about as stage-struck as anyone you’ve ever seen, she said. I had one year of dramatics and piano at Temple University under Mr. Luther Conradi and dramatics at Mae Desmond’s school in Philadelphia.

At present, I’m taking two piano and two voice lessons a week and practice two hours a day—if I have any free time, I go out to the lakefront and go horseback riding.

Stormy’s father was a carnival man, and she just drifted into show business, although her father did not like it, she said.

That seemed strange.

That was my impression, she said, Nevertheless, he resented it.

Stormy said she first came to New Orleans in 1944 and sang at her present spot when it was under different management.

I came here again last February as a dancer and mistress of ceremonies, she said, and then we began to have trouble getting girls for the chorus, and we needed a bang-up closing number.

"Some of the girls resented my interference when I tried to advise them and asked me to try the strip myself if I thought I could do it better.

I said I thought I could, and that was my nemesis.

Stormy got her name right here in New Orleans.

One night, as she danced to her Stormy Weather theme song, a drunken customer grabbed her. When he refused to let go, still moving to the beat of the music, she kicked him in the shins until