Dining, dancing and the Pittsburgh mob
Organized crime has always had a home in Pittsburgh, says professor DAVID S. ROTENSTEIN. Their hangout: the Ankara nightclub in Pleasant Hills
For nearly 30 years, the Ankara nightclub on Route 51 in Pleasant Hills ranked among Pittsburgh’s swankiest nightspots.
It also was a popular mob hangout.
The establishment catered to leaders in the city’s Sicilian and Jewish organized crime syndicates. These racketeers ran the region’s underground gambling casinos and numbers games for most of the 20th century.
Organized crime thrived in Pittsburgh. Its origins date to gambling rings that operated policy games throughout the city starting in the 1880s. Policy is like a lottery. Players bet that a sequence of numbers would be drawn in state and municipal lotteries.
Numbers also is like a lottery. Players bet a nickel, dime or quarter on a three-digit number. Each day’s number came from New York financial markets, the returns reported by telegraph wires and newspapers each afternoon. The odds were good, 1 in 1,000, and the payouts were even better: 600to-1. A nickel bet could bring a $30 payday. For a steelworker making a little more than that each week, that was a lot of money.
The popular game originated in Harlem around the turn of the 20th century. By the mid-1920s, Pullman porters, baseball players, musicians and migrating laborers brought numbers gambling to big cities, small towns and rural communities throughout the nation. The new gambling rings merged with existing bootlegging rackets, and powerful vice syndicates were born.
Immigrants from Europe and the Deep South, who settled in the Hill District and North Side, began collaborating and competing to make, move and sell liquor during Prohibition. Black and European bootleggers already had formed collaborative networks when numbers gambling arrived in Pittsburgh around 1925. Hill District entertainment entrepreneurs like Gus Greenlee and Woogie Harris became some of the best-known leaders in these early rackets.
Catering to the mob
The Ankara could trace its lineage to earlier speakeasies, pool halls and private social clubs founded in the Hill District and North Side in the first decades of the 20th century. Several wellknown nightclubs and restaurants catered to Pittsburgh’s mob elite.
Monroeville’s Holiday House was one of the most infamous. In the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI and local newspapers repeatedly photographed such well-known racketeers as Michael Genovese, John LaRocca, Chucky Porter and others entering and leaving.
Garrulous mob boss Tony Grosso held court for several decades in his Bethel Park restaurant, the Living Room.
Other popular nightspots included Lenny Litman’s Copa Downtown on Liberty Avenue. Over its decadelong run between 1948 and 1959, the Copa featured some of the hottest acts at the time.
“The Copa was their club. They all hung there. Yeah, that was their club,” recalled Leonard Zucco in a 2019 interview. His father, Tony Zucco, was a numbers racketeer active in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Ankara opens
The Ankara opened in 1946 on Route 51 near Lewis Run Road. It was the heyday of Pittsburgh’s dance band era, according to historians Paul Roth and Patricia Finkel, who wrote about the city’s big band era for Western Pennsylvania History magazine in 2013. Owner Charlie Jamal had emigrated from Turkey to the United States before World War I. Jamal was living in Butte, Mont., working as a waiter in a downtown restaurant when he registered for the draft in 1917.
By 1942, Jamal was living in Clairton, where he ran a coffee shop. His World War II draft card described him as a diminutive man, only 5 feet, 2 inches tall and 132 pounds. He had gray eyes, brown hair and a ruddy complexion. That 1942 document is Jamal’s only known description.
Post-Gazette entertainment columnist Harold V. Cohen announced the new club’s opening on Oct. 1, 1946: “The town’s newest night spot, the Ankara, on Route 51, beyond Bill Green’s, expects to open in another two or three weeks.”
The club actually opened on Nov. 6. It was swamped, turning away hundreds of people.
Local bands and national touring acts played regular gigs at the Ankara during its first few years. Jamal tweaked his entertainment offerings and ultimately settled on regular floor shows featuring dance bands and comedians. In 1951, Jamal added an ice revue featuring local skaters George and June Arnold. One of the club’s hallmark features was a permanent ice rink concealed beneath a movable dance floor.
It didn’t take long for local organized crime figures and their close associates to infiltrate the club’s top ranks. In the summer of 1947, Pittsburgh native Sid Rubin took over as the Ankara’s manager. Rubin had owned a popular Washington Boulevard bar, the MerryGo-Round, before it burned down in 1941.
Rubin’s stepfather, Nathan Mattes, began a decadeslong career in vice in the 1920s as a bootlegger. Mattes was born in Russia in 1898 and his family moved to the Hill District in 1906 after emigrating to the United States. They lived in rented homes for more than 20 years before moving to Highland Park.
Mattes, along with his two brothers, over three decades racked up arrests and headlines for liquor, gambling and corruption.
Mattes’ older brother, Israel, was a former Pittsburgh police officer. He killed himself in a Squirrel Hill garage in 1935. Newspaper reports said that his nickname was the “Big Six of gambling circles.”
Another brother, Sam, was a former Allegheny County employee who was tried and convicted of voter fraud. In 1935 he began serving a sentence in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.
Nathan Mattes, however, made the most enduring imprint in Pittsburgh’s organized crime history. In the 1920s and early 1930s, city police and federal Prohibition agents regularly raided the family’s Squirrel Hill homes.
Sid Rubin’s role in the Mattes crime family is opaque. He was arrested and then released in 1935 after borrowing Mattes’ car and trying to reclaim it after it had been impounded. Pittsburgh police had seized the car after it ignited — a lit cigarette butt was blamed — while parked Downtown. A search yielded two shopping bags full of numbers slips and it led police to the Mattes home, where they found more bags of numbers slips and a roulette wheel.
By then, Mattes had already acquired a reputation among the city’s gamblers and police as a major figure in the city’s numbers rackets, a “big shot,” according to court accounts reported in local newspapers.
Mattes made headlines between 1943 and 1947 for operating his numbers racket out of Leonard’s Cigar Store, a rented Liberty Avenue storefront in the iconic Triangle Building. After multiple raids, Allegheny County District Attorney Robert Park got a judge to issue an injunction forcing the landlord to evict Mattes and close his store.
Four months later, Jamal hired Rubin to manage the Ankara. Rubin’s tenure was short-lived, however. The next year, he and Mattes opened a restaurant outside of Morgantown, W.Va. Rubin ran the Cheat Lake Supper Club on the first floor and Mattes oversaw the upstairs gambling operation, according to one of Rubin’s surviving siblings who asked to remain anonymous to protect the family’s privacy.
Jamal sought a buyer for the Ankara in early 1952. Initially, newspapers named Mattes as one of the potential buyers. When the sale closed that summer, his name didn’t appear in the sale or the approved liquor license transfer. Jamal died in 1957, a year after federal authorities slapped a $137,000 lien on his assets for income tax liabilities covering 1941 through 1950.
Squirrel Hill resident Fred Cenname became the Ankara’s legal owner. Yet Mattes’ family believed he had an ownership interest and newspapers variably described him as an owner and the club’s manager, according to Rubin’s surviving sibling.
The end
In 1954, the Post-Gazette reported that Ben Harvey, Mattes’ brother-in-law, was planning to open a new 90-unit resort motel in Miami Beach. Its name: the Motel Ankara. Before moving to Florida, Harvey lived in Squirrel Hill and worked in real estate.
The Motel Ankara’s December 1954 grand opening included fireworks, Turkish-themed entertainment and a marching band. The motel was expanded several times and it is still in business, though under a new name and different ownership. Its distinctive mid-century modern architecture makes it a landmark in Miami Beach’s Collins Waterfront Historic District.
Nathan Mattes’ run with the Ankara lasted until 1960, when he took a job as the manager of an East End social club with a history of gambling raids. He died in 1962 at age 63; his death certificate identified him as a “salesman.”
The Ankara stayed open until 1969 when Cenname sold it. He cited changing times and increased real estate values as the reasons for selling it to a local car dealer. “Many of the earliest patrons have retired or died and the young people don’t believe in going out early for dinner any more,” he told the Monongahela Daily Republican.
The Ankara’s demolition later that year marked the end of an era in Pittsburgh. The days of splashy entertainment revues, dance bands and swank racketeer dinners were over. A Dean Honda dealership now occupies the Route 51 site.
The Next Page is different every week: Jerry Micco, jmicco@post-gazette.com, 412-263-3052.