a crook.” The fact that he almost did hard time in prison based on credible accusations of raping teenage girls added credence to this perception. “Nobody likes a little nigger pussy better than Joe Glaser” was his profane response. By 1928, he had received a ten-year sentence for attacking a fourteen-year-old girl. Still, a grateful Satchmo argued that Glaser “saved me from the gangsters.” Besides music and boxing, the well-connected Glaser introduced the future movie mogul Jules Stein to mob mouthpiece Sidney Korshak: “Everyone knew that Stein worked for Al Capone in Chicago,” remarked actor Robert Mitchum, indicating the reach of organized racketeering.43 Like Kirk, bassist Milt Hinton was no fan of Glaser either. He was “the guy we all disliked because he was a terror … I knew him, I knew his … mother” he said of a man he dismissed as a mere “pimp.”44
Glaser was born in 1897 and raised in Chicago and admits to running a “booking agency” at 127 North Dearborn by the early 1920s as musicians began descending upon the town.45 He also owned and operated the Sunset Café, which later became the Grand Terrace, both hotspots for the new music. He claims that he boosted Armstrong’s career when he hired him for “Carroll Dickenson’s band,” where he played “1st trumpet.”46 Glaser, the son of a physician, intended on following in his father’s footsteps before he discovered an aversion to the sight of blood. He then left medical school. Often accused of running a “plantation,” he also managed boxers, including such titans as Sugar Ray Robinson, Sonny Liston, and the man then known as Cassius Clay; he also dabbled in dog breeding and baseball. The wealth accrued allowed him to tool around town in a Rolls-Royce.47 Prohibition’s end, in other words, did not end opportunities for corrupt profiteering; it simply allowed exploiters to move their ill-gotten gains into other businesses or deepen their penetration of the music business.48 The blustering Glaser, backed up by mobsters, had a grating voice and a low boiling point that terrified those forced to endure his unbridled wrath.49 Profane curses and brutal imprecations were directed at those who displeased him, including clients responsible for his wealth, not to mention those seeking to hire his clients.50 The tough voice and evil temperament terrified anyone confronted for the first time by his wrath.
The Chicago Defender, a lodestar of the Negro press, reported in 1928 that Glaser was a “firm member of the Al Capone organization”51 and was said to have administered an “opium pad.” The mob connected lawyer Sidney Korshak was Glaser’s attorney, helping to make sure he did not wind up behind bars. The comedian and actor Bob Hope, who was to become fabulously wealthy, was also a Glaser client. Still, Armstrong was a prized client, as suggested by Glaser’s impecuniousness when he first met the trumpeter. Soon he was raking in tens of thousands of dollars per week, with Armstrong a major reason why. In return, Glaser gifted a Star of David with rubies on a gold chain that adorned Armstrong’s neck for the rest of his life. The cynicism of this arrangement was exposed when Glaser purportedly said of those like Armstrong, “these shines are all alike. They’re so lazy.” But the artist had few options. In the early 1930s he was confronted by cutthroats who demanded money and offered to “protect” him for a fee, inducing Armstrong to flee to Europe,52 where he spent a year nursing a lip worn by overwork.53
This was a wise exit on his part since these mobsters had demanded $6,000 and threatened to murder him if he did not comply.54 Safely abroad, Armstrong then unburdened himself, telling a journalist about the anxiety he felt when these miscreants invaded his dressing room in Chicago. “I stood up to them,” he said from the safety of Europe, though quickly he “called for help. Thereafter I had a bodyguard of six men and one night the gangsters shot at me through the window of my motor car…. That really was the start of the campaign,” he said with anger, adding boldly, “I had the opportunity to defy them.”55
Glaser made no secret of his ties to Capone, apparently feeling that it could be intimidating. “Shine” was not the only disparaging term he heaped on his Negro clients; he added “schwarzes,” a like insult. The critic Nat Hentoff once saw a painting of the antebellum South on the wall of his office, featuring “happy darkies playing banjo and singing.”56 Glaser was asked once how he became involved in show business. “On account of the whorehouses,” was his prompt reply, implying that enterprise’s tie to the performing arts. Digging into the bottom drawer of his desk, he extracted a photo of two old brown-stones. The picture revealed two men standing by a used car lot with a large sign reading “Joe Glaser’s Used Car Symposium”: one man was Glaser, the other was Roger Touhy, one of his salesmen, an apprenticeship before he became a leading racketeer and a supplier for Glaser’s brothels.57
Jimmy McPartland, a former spouse of the more celebrated Marian, a pianist, confirms that “everybody worked for the mob in Chicago. Al Capone used to come into one place where I was … he’d send one of his torpedoes over with a fifty or a hundred. One night one of ’em shot a hole in Jim Lanigan’s bass and then asked him how much a new one would cost,” a maneuver that doubtlessly was attention grabbing.58
Earl “Fatha” Hines the pianist, born in 1903, knew well the racketeer-influenced Grand Terrace in Chicago where he often performed. “They always had four or five men there—floating [near] me” and “pistol play” was recurrent. “I was heading for the kitchen one night and this guy went pounding past and another guy came up behind me and told me to stand still and rested a pistol on my shoulder and aimed at the first guy and would have fired if the kitchen door hadn’t swung shut in time. Some of the waiters even had pistols.” Unabashedly, he confessed, “Racketeers owned me too,” but fortunately, as the progressive movement gained momentum, Hines said he “bought my way out of the Grand Terrace in 1940 after I finally learned about all the money I was making and wasn’t seeing.”59 Hines worked routinely from 10:30 in the evening until 4:30 in the morning, seven nights per week. Despite the violent madness swirling all around, he and his bandmates were “like three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Otherwise you might be found dead in Jackson Park someplace.”60 The critic Stanley Dance commented about the pianist, “There is scarcely anything he hates more than writing letters”61—unsurprisingly, and to the detriment of history, but perhaps a reflection of nervousness about committing innermost thoughts to paper for fear of where they might end up.
Seeking to protect the value of this performer, Capone provided Hines with a bodyguard. Unlike other artists, Hines said he did not pack a pistol though he had an astonishing “40 or 50 bodyguards” alongside him. He may have needed every one when he arrived in Valdosta, Georgia: “Some hecklers in the crowd turned off the light and exploded a bomb under the bandstand. Sometimes when we came into a town, the driver of our chartered bus would tell us to move to the back of the bus to make it look all right and not get anyone riled up.” The problem? Those soaked in the brine of Jim Crow “never expected to see the Negroes dressed like we were, have the intelligence and self-assurance that we had.” “We were the first freedom riders,” said a weary Hines later, speaking of his travails then: “It was brutal in those days.” As for mobsters, he said, “I knew Al Capone like I’m talking to you … he used to come to the Grand Terrace two or three times a week and he would say, ‘I don’t like your handkerchief. And fix the handkerchief and there was a fifty dollar [bill] in it.’”62
“Pittsburgh was no heaven,” said Hines, speaking of his former city of residence, “but when I got to Chicago, I thought it was the worst town in the world. I found some of the most dangerous people in the country on 35th Street when I started working there. I knew how to duck and dodge but somebody was always getting hurt. Everybody carried a gun and you had to act as though you were at least a bit bad.”63
Hines was a stern critic of the evolving economic underpinning of the music business. A “good part of the blame for the doldrums that has many top-rate musicians toting bags in railroad stations belongs with the handful of booking agents who are strangling jazz with their monopoly hold,” he said. This was a “hangover from the days when gangsters muscled in on the entertainment world and used nightclubs
