Palisades Empire: The Gangs of Fort Lee

Sunday is the season 2 premiere of HBO’s hit series Boardwalk Empire. The show is based on the Atlantic City of the 1920s and Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, an Atlantic City Republican political boss and so-called racketeer. He was the undisputed boss of the Atlantic City Republican machine from 1910 until his imprisonment in 1941. That machine ran Atlantic City during the days of prohibition. 

A friend of mine, the Jersey City born writer Helene Stapinski, today wrote a rundown of this era in the New York Times and I suggest you check it out. (Click here for full story in the Times)

What, say you, has this to do with Fort Lee? Well, my friends, our nascent film industry in 1912 produced--via D.W. Griffith--the first American gangster film, The Musketeers of Pig Alley. I wrote of this groundbreaking film in a previous archive piece. This would be just a prelude of things to come for Fort Lee. 

Once the movie industry left Fort Lee, the town took a major hit to the local economy. The building of the George Washington Bridge in the late 1920s seemed to bring about a spurt of economic activity that led to the borough building both Fort Lee High School and the Fort Lee Municipal Building  - both of these magnificent structures were opened in the year of 1929--also the year the Great Depression visited America. 

The bridge opened in 1931, but the Depression lingered, and the borough was in receivership, its finances a wreck. But one business that grew by leaps and bounds during this period was that of illegal gambling. 

New York City’s reform Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the Little Flower, vowed to rid New York of organized crime and gambling. The Little Flower appeared in newsreels of the day smashing slot machines with a sledgehammer. Thus a lot of the gambling activity soon came across the Hudson River to our very own Borough of Fort Lee. There was large-stakes gambling in the carriage factory, which was located about where the present-day Port Authority offices are on Bruce Reynolds Blvd.

Higher stakes and more refined gambling took place at the Riviera Nightclub nestled atop the cliffs of the Palisades. There were tens of thousands of dollars riding on a single throw of the dice at the club.  When the original Riviera Nightclub burned down on Thanksgiving night in 1936, owner Ben Marden immediately planned for a new art deco club about a half mile south, closer to the George Washington Bridge. That club opened in May of 1937, a mere six months after the first club was destroyed. 

There was too much money at stake in the gambling to not open the club as soon as possible. During World War II, the nightclub closed for a while, but it reopened better than ever under the ownership of Bill Miller in 1946 and ran successfully through 1953, when the Palisades Interstate Park condemned it for the construction of the Palisades Interstate Parkway. 

The club under Bill Miller continued to have gambling. 

According to Fort Lee native Tom Austin, whose father was a special security officer at the club, in order to gain access to the second floor, you entered a large janitor’s room at the end of the first-floor art deco bar and then you went by a large fan and plugged it into the wall wherein the opposite wall opened to a hidden stairway that led to the extravagant gaming parlor on the second floor. Tom is currently finishing a History Press book on The Riviera, which will be out in December.

But who really owned the Riviera? Truth be told, famous underworld figures Willie Moretti and Longie Zwillman had controlling interests in the club, and their contacts brought the best acts in America to the stage of the Riviera. Willie Moretti was a good friend of Frank Sinatra, and Sinatra made his famous comeback appearance at the Riviera September 1-15, 1953. 

The singer in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather goes to The Godfather to get him out of his contract with a certain bandleader.  Rumor has it that Willie Moretti went to Tommy Dorsey to get Frank Sinatra out of his restrictive contract with Dorsey in the early 1940s. 

Moretti also was in charge of gambling in other areas, and he appeared famously at the televised Kefauver hearings in Washington.  The hearings produced evidence that many Fort Lee housewives would rent telephone lines out of their houses or apartments to gangsters who would use the lines for illegal gambling.

Another famous Fort Lee resident and gangster was the head of Murder Inc., Albert Anastasia. Anastasia lived in a palatial mansion on the cliffs of the Palisades in the exclusive Palisades section of Fort Lee.  Comedian Buddy Hackett moved into this house after Anastasia’s untimely death. 

Prior to his death in a barber chair, Albert Anastasia had Willie Moretti killed on October 4, 1951, as Moretti dined at Joe's Elbow Room Restaurant in nearby Cliffside Park, the present day site of Villa Amalfi Restaurant. You can see the famous photo of Moretti on the floor of the restaurant – the photo appeared in the The Godfather.

Here, you can see newsreel footage of Anastasia outside his Fort Lee house.

Anastasia finally met his death on October 25, 1957 in the barber chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City. For a very funny take on Anastasia’s time in Fort Lee read the book Cutty One Rock by Fort Lee native and Poet Laureate Auggie Kleinzahler.

Other names “connected” to Fort Lee are Joe Adonis (buried in Madonna Cemetery) and Tommy Eboli. Writer Mark Seal did a wonderful piece for Vanity Fair in 2009 that centered on a visit made to Eboli's Fort Lee home by the cast before shooting The Godfather in 1971.

So long before the fictional "Sopranos" came to New Jersey, Fort Lee had its own date with organized crime, a time of mobsters, and gambling, and nightclubs and stars in a small community atop the bluffs of the Palisades.