In the 1960s Mayfield Heights was enjoying a warp-speed shift from sleepy rural backwater to bustling residential and commercial hub. This also was the case for many recently incorporated “automobile suburbs”—locales like Brook Park and Middleburg Heights, whose populations were being supercharged by the construction of nearby freeway interchanges and the white-flight relocation of city and inner-ring-suburban residents. Vast increases in Russian, Italian, and Jewish residents typified Mayfield Heights; but two things about the city also drew visitors by the thousands. First was a flood of early big-box stores—Gold Circle, Uncle Bills, and Topps—forerunners of today’s Walmarts and Targets. But the second distinction was way more entertaining than strolling through a mundane discount store. Simply put, Mayfield Heights was an epicenter of recreation. Facing Mayfield Road just west of SOM Center Road was The Giant Slide—twelve lanes of slippery and tolerably dangerous fun. Nearby, trampolines and an Arnold Palmer Putt-Putt course hosted myriad date-nights and group outings. A quarter mile away, toward the back of Golden Gate Plaza, a gigantic roller rink welcomed seasoned and novice skaters. The floorboards of the mall’s Half-Price Books store are believed to be from the Roller Palace. Look closely and maybe you’ll see the butt-print of a hapless skater. A slot car raceway at Mayland Shopping Center drew thousands of enthusiasts, and in a field behind the Golden Gate Plaza, visits from the Big Top Circus were a regular occurrence.

But the don of east-side entertainment stood at the back of Eastgate Shopping Center on the current site of a Target store. A palatial but architecturally uninteresting structure with a somewhat sordid underside: This was the Eastgate Coliseum.

The Coliseum had something for everyone. Miniature golf, martial arts room, and a nursery brought in families. Fifty lanes of bowling awaited drop-ins, league players, and professionals. A banquet hall hosted birthday parties, wedding receptions, all-night after-prom parties, and bar mitzvahs. A colossal game room—The Wonderland—featured everything from billiards to Skee-ball to Astroblaster. There was even an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool that saw added duty as a practice venue for several suburban high school swim teams. Some patrons later recalled that the pool had so much chlorine that their bathing suits turned colors.

For those over 18—or kids in possession of an authentic-looking ID—the Coliseum also sported a lounge called the In Spot with two stages and two bands every weekend. Over the years, scores of fresh-faced locals performed there: Tony & the Twilighters, The Charades, Robo & the Turtles, Bocky Boo & the Visions. The Twilighters even scored a local hit record with "Be Faithful" in 1966. National acts such as Lesley Gore, Tony Orlando and Dawn, and Wilson Pickett also performed at the Eastgate Coliseum. The In Spot closed in the late 1960s, ostensibly due to frighteningly frequent fights among patrons. As one observer remembered, cops clutching binoculars scanned the parking lot from the roof to head off trouble.

The Eastgate Coliseum opened in January 1961, but its genesis dates to 1957. This was the year that notorious Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa took control of investing the huge amounts of money pouring into the Union’s Central States Pension Fund (CSPF). Prior to 1957, a variety of banks had managed most of CSPF’s money, funneling it into high-grade common stocks, corporate bonds, and governmental securities. But Hoffa wanted more, which meant far-riskier ventures, principally the holding of mortgages on hotels like Miami’s Castaways and Las Vegas’s Caesar’s Palace, Sands, and Stardust. According to a Forbes magazine article, “Hoffa also arranged for substantial loans to mobsters who were partners in Las Vegas casinos and Southern California real estate developments.” CSPF also made several real estate investments in the Cleveland area. In fact, the first mortgage let by the Fund’s trustees was a $1 million mortgage on the Cleveland Raceways track in Willowick. U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy later challenged the prudence of this investment and Cleveland Raceways terminated the relationship. However, the Raceways investment defined the nature of most subsequent CSPF investments. As noted in Jerome Skolnik’s House of Cards, “By 1974, while other pension funds held 1.8 percent of their assets in mortgages, 58.3 percent of the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund’s assets were mortgages.”

In 1961 the Central States Pension Fund trustees followed a similar pattern to the Cleveland Raceways investment with the construction of the Eastgate Coliseum. Secured by a roughly $1 million loan from the CSPF, the deal was brokered by a group of speculators headed by Ohio Teamsters president William Presser and his son Jackie Presser. According to The Wall Street Journal (July 1972) there existed a “long standing Pension Fund rule authorizing kickbacks of no less than 10% of the total of the loan;" and this was likely the case (albeit never proved) with the Coliseum. Only a year before, incidentally, William Presser had been convicted of obstruction of justice.

Controversy dogged the Coliseum within a year of its opening. In August 1962, three African American teenagers were refused admission to the pool. Following demonstrations by the NAACP, the Coliseum committed to an anti-discrimination policy. Two years later, in January 1964, CSPF foreclosed on the Coliseum, claiming that Eastgate Investment Co. owed more than $1 million in principal and unpaid interest on three mortgage loans. At the time, the president of Eastgate Investment Co. was none other than Jackie Presser, who had purchased the facility from the original owner, Marvin Bilsky, who also headed the Cleveland & Sandusky Brewing Co. William Presser was listed as a trustee of the Pension Fund, along with Jimmy Hoffa. By late September the Coliseum was put up for auction and subsequently purchased by (guess who?) the Central States Pension Fund.

After the mid 1960s, the Eastgate Coliseum managed to stay mostly out of the newspapers, save for a 1973 drowning; hundreds of help-wanted ads, bowling scores, and public events announcements; and periodic flareups over the exorbitant salaries paid to union officials. (Indeed, by the mid 1970s, William Presser was reputedly the highest-paid union official in the world.) However, the Teamsters, the CSPF, and their officers and local affiliates garnered headlines on a stunningly regular basis. In 1971, William Presser was convicted of illegal shakedowns of local businesses. In 1977 Jackie Presser, Teamsters President Frank Fitzsimmons, and other Teamster leaders were forced to resign as trustees of the CSPF—charged with making improper loans to mob-controlled Las Vegas casinos, racetracks, and real estate ventures. By the late ’70s both Pressers had become Mob-focused informants for the FBI and transcripts of wiretaps linked each to organized crime figures. Shortly before his death in 1981, Bill Presser was forced to resign the vice presidency of the International Union of Teamsters after he was convicted of extortion and obstruction of justice. Jackie Presser succeeded him and, very shortly after, the U.S. Department of Labor began investigating Jackie for allegedly padding the Teamsters Local 507 payroll with "ghost employees." In April 1983, then President Roy Williams was convicted for conspiring to bribe a U.S. Senator. In May 1986, Jackie Presser was targeted in a fraud investigation by federal prosecutors. Through it all, the Eastgate Coliseum lived on—until the mid 1990s when, in a literal sense, it too became a Target.

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In a business where circulation numbers have historically counted for nearly everything, there was probably never any love lost between the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Leader. The Plain Dealer--a partisan Democrat paper, was founded in 1842. The Leader--founded a decade later, became the Republican counterpart when, in 1859, fiery Edwin Cowles became its editor. In the years that followed, the ideological competition between the papers took on a personal dimension as the editors often exchanged barbs, including this one which appeared in an article reprinted by the Leader in 1876: "When the snarling, ill-conditioned editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer gets drunk and falls out of the third story window of his boarding house, people in the street who catch a glimpse of his florid face and sanguinary hair cry out: 'Behold, that blazing meteor!' " In 1885, the competition, if anything, intensified, when the new owner of the Plain Dealer, Liberty Holden, began publishing a morning edition in direct competition with the Leader.

It wasn't long after these competitive foundations of the relationship between the Plain Dealer and Leader were formed that the twentieth century arrived, ushering in a period that has been called Cleveland's "golden era of journalism." The two rivals were just two of the city's six dailies--not to mention the numerous weeklies and ethnic newspapers, all of whom were vying for the attention of the city's reading population. The situation for these newspapers soon reached critical mass and some sought new methods to improve their bottom line, or to at least stay in business. One was merger. In 1905, the number of dailies operating in the city was reduced to four when the Cleveland News was created from the merger of three of the dailies. Then, Dan R. Hanna, the son of the late Republican kingmaker Marcus Hanna, employed a different type of merger. In 1910, he purchased the Leader and then purchased the News two years later. But despite this merger of ownership, a year later both the Leader and the News trailed the Press and the Plain Dealer in circulation. As the old adage goes, desperate times now demanded desperate measures.

According to Plain Dealer accounts, the Circulation War began in the summer of 1913 when Hanna, who had ties to Chicago's newspaper industry through his brother-in-law Joseph Medill McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, imported a number of Chicagoans to Cleveland. These included William P. Leech, formerly an editor of a Chicago newspaper, and two other men, who would later be widely associated with organized crime--Arthur "Mickey" McBride, who founded the Cleveland Browns in 1944 and was a target of the Kefauver Crime Commission hearings here in 1951, and James "The Built" Ragen, who was gunned down in Chicago in 1946 by mobsters who had taken over Al Capone's gang. Leech became Hanna's general manager for both papers and Ragen the Circulation Manager for the Leader, while McBride was assigned the same Circulation position, which entailed building up the paper's circulation numbers, at the News.

Despite his recent arrival in Cleveland, James Ragen wasted no time in going after the Plain Dealer. At his direction, newsboys (also called "newsies"), hawking the Plain Dealer at well-traveled intersections of the city, were threatened or roughed up. Bundles of Plain Dealer papers dropped off at street corners all over the city were torn up or mysteriously ended up in dumps. And, just to show that he was a hands-on manager, Ragen, on November 17, 1913, personally participated in an attack on Joseph Unger, a Plain Dealer newspaper distributor (also called a "circulator") on the east side of town. For his part in that attack, Ragen was convicted in a Cleveland court in January 1914 of assault. Amazingly, he retained his job at the Leader.

For the next year, attacks against newsboys and their distributors took place all over Cleveland, most of them initiated by employees of the Leader. One of the last occurred on November 17, 1914, when three armed men attacked William "Scance" Chambers, a west side distributor for the Plain Dealer, at the corner of West 117th and Detroit Avenue. Chambers, who some believed was also a member of a west side Irish street gang, didn't take the attack sitting down. According to Cleveland News reports--which though biased carried a certain ring of truth, he and another Plain Dealer distributor assembled a group of "toughs," and on the evening of November 21 transported them to Detroit Center--a cluster of retail stores and saloons on Detroit Avenue near its intersection with West 75th Street and Lake Avenue, to exact some revenge. While most of the hired toughs were having a drink at Louis Schwartz' saloon at 7507 Detroit, Chambers and Thomas Gibbons stood outside watching for the Leader delivery truck. They were standing there when it showed up at around 9 PM. Soon, several shots rang out and Gibbons fell to the ground, bleeding from a bullet wound to the neck. He was rushed to German (Fairview) Hospital, but later died from his injuries.

The killing of Thomas Gibbons--regardless of whether he was an innocent victim, as alleged by the Plain Dealer, or a co-conspirator as alleged in the Cleveland News, galvanized the public to stop Cleveland's Circulation War. Mayor Newton Baker was outraged by the killing and promised that the war between the Leader and the Plain Dealer would soon end. Two Leader employees--Harvey Callahan and Frank O'Neill, were indicted for murder. After a two week jury trial in January 1915, however, which featured dozens of witnesses and wildly differing reports by the competing newspapers, Callahan, was acquitted. The charges against O'Neill, his alleged accomplice, were then dropped. Despite the prosecutor's failure to get a conviction in the case, there were thereafter no reported new incidents of violence between Cleveland Plain Dealer and Leader employees. Perhaps the owners of the two newspapers had sat down over a martini and declared a truce. Clearly at some point they did sit down, because just two years later, in August 1917, Hanna sold the newspaper to the Estate of Liberty Holden, now owner of the Plain Dealer. Publication of the Cleveland Leader abruptly came to an end, also ending more than a half century of competition, as well as at least one war, between these two historic Cleveland newspapers.

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Daniel "Danny" John Patrick Greene (November 9, 1929 – October 6, 1977) son of John and Irene Greene, suffered from a difficult childhood. His mother passed away due to medical complications shortly after the boy's birth. His father, devastated by his loss, began to drink away his sorrows, placing his son in the care of Parmadale Children's Home until Danny found a permanent home with his paternal grandfather.

In his youth, Daniel dabbled in delinquency, dropped out of high school, and earned himself a reputation as an alley-fighter. As an adult, he seemed to mellow out. In 1956, he married a local waitress and the following year took employment as a stevedore on the banks of Lake Erie. Here he was quickly elected president of the Local 1317 International Longshoremen's Association.

Sometime during this period Greene began to travel a path of illegal activity. On November 13, 1964, Greene was indicted by the federal grand jury on charges of embezzlement and falsifying records. Accused of stealing $11,542.38 in union funds, Daniel Greene stood trial in spring 1966 alongside the union's vice president Leon J. Ponikvar. It only took the twelve jurors five and a half hours to deliberate Greene's fate. With proof that he had deposited 19 grain boat checks into his personal account at the Rockefeller branch of Central National Bank, Greene was found guilty. The ruling however, was overturned in August 1968 because "the Government's cross-examination of Greene about his high living on his union expense account was prejudicial."

In the years following his indictment, Daniel Greene, forbidden to participate in union activity, formed the Cleveland Trade Solid Waste Guild. Chartered by the state in June 1969, the guild was intended to unify the commercial rubbish business in the city of Cleveland. Membership was solely voluntary, but many collectors reported that they joined for fear of being put out of business. In a membership meeting held on June 25th of the same year Danny is quoted as saying "If others don't join we will follow their trucks and take away their 'stops', offer to pick up for less and take away their business at the cheapest price- and knock them out of the box." In July 1971, Greene once again found himself in a legal hotspot, as police noted a connection between organized crime and the violence amongst private rubbish haulers.

Greene's connections with organized crime went beyond the world of waste. In the early 1970s there was a reported 35 homicides linked to explosives, many of which could be linked to Greene or one of his associates. Over the next few years multiple attempts were made on Danny Greene's life until he met his end in a car blast outside of his dentist's office on October 6, 1977.

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The story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer read like a script from one of Bruce Willis's Die Hard movies. In the early morning hours of September 29, 1947, a dozen masked commandos armed with submachine guns and referring to each other by numbers attacked the Mounds Club, one of the Cleveland area's most glamorous night clubs. They penetrated the electrified fence surrounding the Club, overwhelmed the Club's security forces and then robbed 300 club patrons of an estimated $450,000 in jewelry and cash. While both the local Mayfield Mob and the infamous Purple Gang from Detroit were suspected of the armed robbery, no one was ever charged and the crime remains unsolved to this day.

The Mounds Club was built in 1930 by Thomas "Black Jack" McGinty, a second generation Irish-American who was then known as Cleveland's biggest sports and gambling promoter. He was also known to be an associate of the Cleveland Gang, an organized crime group that controlled gambling and other illegal enterprises in Cleveland in the decades of the1930s and 1940s. Several members of the Cleveland Gang, including Moe Dalitz and Morris Kleinman, were reputed to be silent owners of the Mounds Club.

Located on Chardon Road in Willoughby Hills, just across the Lake County line at the site of present day La-Vera Party Center, the Mounds Club was conveniently placed just out of the reach of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County law enforcement officials. The Mounds Club did indeed offer its patrons opportunities to gamble and drink illegal liquor. It also, however, featured some of the best entertainment in the Cleveland area in that era. Well-known singers like Sophie Tucker, Helen Morgan and Lena Horne, and comedians like Joe E. Lewis, performed there. When the Club was attacked by masked robbers in 1947, comedian Peter Lind Hayes and his wife, singer Mary Healy, were actually on stage performing. The careers of a number of Hollywood singers and actresses began with stints at the Mounds Club.

In the years 1930-1948, the Mounds Club had been the target of a number of raids by Lake County and State of Ohio law enforcement officials. The Club nevertheless had always managed to stay in business and one step ahead of the law until Frank Lausche was elected to his second term as Ohio's Governor in 1948. In early 1949, Governor Lausche vowed to close the Mounds Club which he claimed had for too long flouted Ohio's gambling and liquor laws.

In July 1949, Governor Lausche's state liquor law enforcement officials did just that, obtaining a court order to close down and padlock the Mounds Club. While owner Thomas "Black Jack" McGinty appealed the order closing his club, he clearly saw the writing on the wall. He and his Cleveland Gang associates sold their interests in the Mounds Club in 1950, taking their money out of Ohio and investing it in a new and what they believed would be safer and even more lucrative enterprise—the new Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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He wasn't called "Black Jack" when, in 1912, he married Helen Mulgrew from West 67th Street and the two newly weds moved into a house at 1377 West 69th Street. In 1912, he was Tommy McGinty, and he was one of Cleveland's best featherweight boxers.

Like world featherweight boxing champion Johnny Kilbane, Tommy McGinty was a second generation Irish-American who grew up in Cleveland's Old Angle and saw boxing as a way out of the poverty that was endemic to the Angle in early twentieth century Cleveland. By 1909, Tommy McGinty, just like Johnny Kilbane, was boxing under the management of the legendary Jimmy Dunn. Also like Kilbane, McGinty moved uptown in the years just before World War I to what is now the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood. However, while Kilbane went on to win the featherweight boxing title in 1912, McGinty's career was cut short in 1911 by an injury he suffered in a fight. Turning lemons into lemonade, McGinty withdrew from the ring and became one of Cleveland's earliest and most successful fight promoters.

In addition to promoting boxing matches in Cleveland, however, Tommy McGinty also promoted gambling, operating a cheat spot at 2077 West 25th Street that was famously raided by Cleveland Safety Director Elliot Ness on July 21, 1936. It was his promotion of gambling that gave Tommy McGinty the moniker "Black Jack" McGinty.

While McGinty's cheat spot on West 25th street catered to a lower economic class, McGinty also provided gambling opportunities to the rich and famous. In 1930, he built the Mounds Club on Chardon Road, just across the Lake County line. The Mounds Club was famous in Cleveland for two decades as a swanky night club that featured lively entertainment, alcohol and gambling. Like McGinty's cheat spot on West 25th Street, the Mounds Club too was often the target of raids by local law enforcement officials.

In 1950, after the State of Ohio had closed down the Mounds Club, Tommy McGinty, now better known as Thomas J. McGinty, took his gambling operations national and, along with several organized crime figures from Cleveland, founded the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. McGinty's ownership of the Desert Inn, as well as his association with alleged organized crime figures Moe Dalitz and Morris Kleinman, soon drew the attention of federal authorities. In 1951, McGinty was subpoenaed to testify before Senator Estes Kefauver's committee on organized crime in America.

McGinty avoided federal prosecution and shortly thereafter retired to West Palm Beach, Florida, where he died in 1970--a long way away from the home that he and Helen Mulgrew shared on West 69th Street in 1912.

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Vincent Avenue, known in its heyday as "Short Vincent," spans only a single city block between East 6th and East 9th streets, but it was a hub of Cleveland nightlife in the early to mid-twentieth century. Located behind the lavish Hollenden Hotel near the city's center, Short Vincent, with its wild reputation, attracted both tourists and city residents, who flocked to its restaurants, bars, and music clubs. In comparison, East 4th Street could be argued as a modern day equivalent to Short Vincent due to the lure of entertainment packed into a short stretch of road. However, unlike the deliberate planning dedicated to the development East 4th, Short Vincent naturally evolved into a bustling entertainment center in downtown Cleveland.

Establishments sprang up on Short Vincent that catered to many forms of entertainment: drinking, delicious food, and dancing women. The south side of the street became known for its burlesque shows, specifically the performances at the internationally known Roxy Theater. After a show, patrons could stop and pick up a couple of hot dogs or the 39-cent house special of fried eggs, toast and jelly, and coffee at Coney Island right next door. Even the more respectable businesses on Short Vincent were known to attract underworld figures, mob bosses, and gamblers of all types. The Theatrical Grill, opened in 1937, not only hosted the day's top musical stars such as Judy Garland and Dean Martin, but was also the place to score the latest gambling lines and odds on sporting events, thanks to its notorious owner Morris "Mushy" Wexler. The Theatrical Grill also served as a headquarters for the famous Cleveland mobster, Alex "Shondor" Birns.

Bond Clothing, located around the corner from Short Vincent, complemented the "Mad Men" atmosphere that existed between East 9th and East 6th thanks to the male clientele that frequented the varied forms of entertainment that Short Vincent had to offer. Designer Charles Bond and his two business partners, Mortimer Slater and Lester Cohen, founded Bond Clothing in 1914 in Cleveland. In 1920, the trio opened their first men's department store in the old Hickox Building, located near the corner of Euclid and East 9th Street until the structure was torn town in 1946. In that same year, Bond Clothing relocated exactly on the corner of Euclid and East 9th. Bond Clothing's new store location sported a sleek Art Moderne design, and its interior solarium made the building feel like one large room with three floors. As customers walked up the floating staircase with aluminum and glass railings and would pass a mural dedicated to the "Goddess of Fabric." Also, the lighting of the building was carefully choreographed to bend the pastel shades that decorated the interior.

Bond's became nationally known for selling the fifteen-dollar two-piece suit. By the mid 1950s, Bond Clothing boasted over 100 stores nationwide, along with 50 catalogue stores in smaller cities. Bond's, however, did not remain a department store solely for men, and began to create women's clothing as well. Models used to show off the women's clothing line in the large bay window on the third floor. Supposedly, men used to walk by the window on their lunch breaks and gawk at the beautiful ladies wearing the latest fashions. Patrons could also look down from the upper floors of the Bond Clothing building and view burlesque dancers sunbathing on the roof of the Roxy.

Activity on the Short Vincent peaked in the 1930s and 1940s, steadily waning after World War II as suburbanization lessened the vitality of downtown Cleveland. Most of the fun on Short Vincent had ended by the late 1970s, as increasing portions of it were demolished to make way for new office buildings due to city urban renewal plans that did not advocate for restoring existing structures. Also, the Bond Clothing building, along with other Short Vincent establishments, was demolished in 1978 to accommodate the expansion of National City Bank that accompanied its move from a regional operation to a national enterprise.

An emerging trend toward sanitizing downtown entertainment also contributed to the demise of Short Vincent. One example of this these efforts was the closing of Mickey's Lounge Bar. Mickey's, owned by bookie and gambler Charles "Fuzzy" Lakis, closed in 1964 when the location was deemed a common nuisance by the fire marshal - an indirect route taken by the state liquor control board to finally close Mickey's down. Police officers no longer turned a blind eye to the goings on along Vincent Avenue, now enforcing parking bans that were routinely ignored in years past, and escalating their harassment of the bookies that seemed to run Short Vincent. Even though the majority of the establishments that lined Short Vincent no longer exist and the familiar faces that used to run the row have long gone, as a 1967 article of the Cleveland Press states, "If you look hard enough you will conjure them up – sitting on a sidewalk bench, puffing inevitable cigars, with a phone booth nearby because they're always outta business with a phone booth."

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