Is Northern Kentucky’s vice history good for business?

Northern Kentucky once was one of the most criminally corrupt places in the United States.

Covington and Newport were hotbeds of bootlegging, gambling and prostitution. Many public officials, if they couldn’t be bought by racketeers, were themselves criminals.

The ways that Covington and Newport deal with that history are complicated. Newport, in some ways, leans into it, while Covington tends to ignore it.

In 1950 and 1951, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver held televised hearings — the nation’s first — on organized crime in the United States. His committee produced 19 reports, and the volume covering Kentucky includes 242 pages of witness testimony and documents.

Even now, 75 years later, the investigations still resonate locally. Newport community leaders continue to struggle with the stigma of being labeled a “sin city.” A 2023 LINK nky article about Newport’s seedy past elicited a strong response from then-city manager Tom Fromme.

“I don’t think there was anything there that was wrong at all,” Fromme, who retired earlier this year, recently told LINK nky. “My concern was, why are we doing it now?”

To understand Fromme’s take on the article, LINK nky dug into the very different ways that Covington and Newport deal with their mobbed-up histories.

Wide Open or Hidden History?

“In Covington, you could go to a club like the Lookout House, which was the equivalent of the Beverly Hills,” Northern Kentucky University history professor Paul Tenkotte said. “You could, in the 1950s, go into many places along the Dixie Highway in Kenton County and many places throughout the city of Covington — stores, shops, bars, and play some slot machines.”

The Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate burned to the ground in a 1977 fire that killed 165 people. It was one of the best-known mob nightclubs in American history for the deadly fire and for its decades of organized crime ties.

“Newport was a wide-open city,” Tenkotte said. “Just about every man who came into a convention in Cincinnati would … for a good time, go to Newport. I think Covington did a slightly better job of keeping it more under wraps, more undercover, not so much in everyone’s face.”

Historian and Kenton County Libraries executive director Dave Schroeder said he agrees.

“Most people in Northern Kentucky tend to focus on Newport,” Schroeder said.

He cites several factors that include the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire; a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy’s 1961 campaign against organized crime there; and one of the most sensational episodes in mob history that dominated headlines in 1961.

George Ratterman, a former professional football player, was running for Campbell County sheriff on a platform vowing to clean up Newport. Concerned about what a Ratterman victory would do to their businesses, organized crime figures drugged Ratterman and took him to a downtown Newport hotel room.

Newport police and newspaper photographers burst into the room to find Ratterman undressed and in bed with stripper Juanita Hodges (also known as “April Flowers”).

A blood test revealed the drugs in Ratterman’s system, and the racketeers’ plan backfired. Ratterman won the election, and several mob figures were indicted and prosecuted.

“I think memory is playing a role in what they focus on,” Schroeder said. “Then the whole Ratterman thing is so salacious and so interesting that people have never let go of that story. So I think Covington gets forgotten.”

The tendency to lump all of Newport’s underworld history into a condensed singular history is what rankled Fromme the most about the earlier LINK nky story. From his vantage point as a former beat cop, police chief and city manager, the Newport native witnessed much of the city’s transformation into a family-friendly destination as new businesses replaced the many porn theaters and strip clubs.

 “You’ve got to differentiate,” Fromme said. He believes that the city left its organized crime ties in the distant past when the mob pulled up stakes in the 1960s. “The gangsters all left and went to Las Vegas. We’re talking about what was the aftermath of it.”

The porn was homegrown vice and the bootleggers and gamblers were something different, he said.

Whatever the time period and social poison, it’s all the same to Fromme: something that should be left in the past. He says dredging up any of that history is bad for Newport’s image.

“People are coming to the city now, they’re not even aware of what happened 50 years ago,” he said. “You know, they glorify it.” In his opinion, the message it sends is “Newport’s a bad place to go.”

Missed Opportunities

Is Covington missing an opportunity to capitalize on its racketist history? Local amateur historian Heather Churchman thinks so. Since 2019, she’s run the Covington Uncovered social media accounts where she posts photos of local buildings and pairs them with brief histories.

“Covington really just doesn’t do enough to capitalize on its history,” Churchman laments about the city’s underworld past.

One of Churchman’s favorite Covington buildings is a bungalow in the Licking-Riverside neighborhood once owned by bootlegger Carl Weber.

“That is one of my favorite stories,” Churchman said. “The design included separate entrances to the basement and the upstairs, where they say betting and drinking took place. They even had Western Union telegraph wires in the house.”

The Western Union wires were bookies’ direct link to horse racing results, which came in from racetracks around the country.

“I don’t know if that’s lore or if that’s truth, but I’ve heard that from multiple people that the alleys had separate wires that attached certain saloons,” Schroeder said of the stories he’s heard in Covington and Newport.

There are still some places left, like Webb’s Barbecue in Newport, where the folklore becomes fact. Located in a building that once housed several cafes that fronted for betting parlors, Webb tells visitors that an intercom mounted on a wall in the back dining room once connected to several dozen lines coming into the building.

Newport has professionally-run gangster tours, historical markers like the one in front of the house once owned by the inventor of some gangsters’ weapon of choice, the Thompson submachine gun, and gangster-themed nightspots.

It’s even possible to see the city’s seedy history portrayed in public art, like a painted bourbon barrel on Monmouth Street that depicts mobsters.

You won’t find any of that in Covington, despite heritage tourism’s big role in Northern Kentucky’s economy.

“History serves as a significant driver for all of the marketing that we do to attract visitors,” said Amanda Johannemann, meetNKY’s Destination Marketing & Communications director. “We have some great data that shows us that visitors to this destination are particularly interested in history, culture, and architecture.”

According to data collected by meetNKY, Northern Kentucky, which is lumped into the greater Cincinnati region, historical and cultural attractions, like Newport’s BB Riverboats, attract large numbers of visitors from within the region and beyond.

Johannemann wouldn’t speculate about the reasons why Covington and Newport deal with their criminal histories so differently.

“While Newport perhaps leans in more to their gangster history, I think in Covington, you see that kind of thread more through their pre-Prohibition and their bourbon culture history,” Johannmann said.

Long gone are the days of banner headlines in local and national newspapers that aired Northern Kentucky’s dirty laundry for all to see.

Back in the day, the Sept. 11, 1950, front page headline that read “Covington Leads State in Number of U.S. Slot Machine Permits” might have been a reason for shame. Decades later, it’s a sign that there’s more to Covington’s history than Germans, bourbon and beer.

Many of the buildings that once housed casinos, betting parlors and speakeasies are gone, razed and redeveloped. A few — like Weber’s home — have survived.

Another survivor is the former 514 Club at 514 Madison Ave. Between the mid-1940s and 1970s, the 514 Club hosted sports books, slot machines, and a strip bar while also being a preferred meeting spot for some of Covington’s business and political leaders.

Raided many times and featured prominently in Kefauver’s investigations, in 1968, a newspaper reporter described the bar’s back room as a “miniature Las Vegas casino.”

Covington’s vice history remains accessible, but it takes some digging through old newspaper archives and long-forgotten investigations. Residents and visitors are surrounded by this history. Churchman points to Weber’s home as a prime example. “It was just a simple-looking house and then it takes some digging,” she said.