A lot of people don't know that the Sunset Strip music scene was created by two former Outfit connected police officers from Chicago, Elmer Valentine and Mario Maglieri. They opened up the Wiskey A Go Go, the Roxy and the Rainbow Bar and Grill. Elmer was very close to Milwaukee Phil and had to get his assistance when Chuckie English tried to muscle in on him. Elmer died in 2008 but Mario is still alive at the age of 92. Below is an article about Elmer from 2000 and some clips from the article. Very interesting.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2000/11/live-at-the-whisky-david-kampValentine had moved to Los Angeles from Chicago in 1960. (That first trip to California, in 1937 on the freight trains, was merely a youthful escapade.) “I left Chicago because my wife dumped me, and I was flipped out,” he says. He was also having a little career trouble. When I ask him what kind of cop he was—meaning detective, beat cop, or whatever—he cheerfully responds, “Corrupt!” In the grand tradition of Chicago law enforcement, Valentine was on the take from the Mob. “It was a way of life,” he says unapologetically. One Chicago old-timer from that milieu remembers Valentine as a “real sharp dresser, a nice-looking fellow,” who worked as a so-called Captainʼs Man, “collecting the filthy lucre on behalf of the captain.” But the authorities caught on to him, and he was indicted for extortion. Though he was never convicted, it was in Valentineʼs best interests to get out of town. Fortunately, he had picked up another vocational skill while on the Chicago force. “I used to moonlight running nightclubs for the outfit,” he says. “For gangsters.”
But the runaway success of Rivers and the Whisky was not without its consequences. When Valentineʼs mobster associates in Chicago caught wind of their old buddyʼs gangbusters business, they swooped in, looking for a piece of Riversʼs action. One night, Adler recalls, he was summoned to Riversʼs dressing room. There, he found the terrified guitarist quaking in the presence of some very large gentlemen. “He said, ʻThese guys want me to sign these papers,ʼ” says Adler, meaning documents turning over a percentage of Riversʼs earnings. “I said, ʻYouʼre not gonna sign any papers.ʼ And the guy said to me something like ʻHow would you like me to rip off your arms and choke you to death with ʼem?ʼ” Adler managed to stall long enough to get Valentine involved, but Valentine had to travel all the way back to Chicago to get his friends to call off the goons for good.
An implicit part of the respect accorded Valentine and his partners by the under-30 crowd was the widespread perception that the Whisky was a Mafia-run club. Even now, the Byrdsʼ Chris Hillman shudders as he says, “Whoever financed Elmer, I donʼt want to know.” Frank Zappa was more explicit in his memoir The Real Frank Zappa Book, dryly asserting that the Trip and the Whisky were “owned by the same ʻethnic organization.ʼ” This perception was only encouraged by the fact that Valentine was half-Italian—“My father was a Wop and a greenhorn named Valenti”—and the fact that his most prominent early partner was an L.A. gambler and cardplayer named Phil Tanzini, who, says Valentine, was “involved in the gin-rummy scandal at the Friars Club—he was the eye in the sky, looking at playersʼ hands through a hole in the ceiling.” (“Tanzini was a nightmare—sleazeball-desperate,” says Gail Zappa, a victim of his roving hands in her secretarial days.)
With his customary blithe candor, Valentine cheerily explains that, while he was not necessarily of the Chicago Mafia, he was certainly friendly with its members. He even had some gangsterish tendencies of his own in the old days. Thereʼs an extraordinary photograph on his bedroom wall that captures him in his 20s, sitting in a restaurant booth flanked by two ugly mugs straight out of Little Caesar. “Thatʼs right after we held up a gambling joint,” Valentine says. Given that he was a cop, I take this to mean theyʼd all just staged a vice raid. No, he says, thatʼs him with two of his gangster friends: “We held ʼem up! We said weʼd fuckinʼ shoot ʼem if they didnʼt hand over the money!” Did Elmer ever actually fuckinʼ shoot anyone? “Thatʼs personal,” he says.
One “very close friend” of Valentineʼs in his Chicago days was Felix Alderisio, also known as Milwaukee Phil, who was arguably the most feared hit man in the country in the 1950s and 60s, carrying out at least 14 murders for Sam Giancana and other Chicago bosses. “Milwaukee Phil would chin himself on the go-go cage as it was being built,” Valentine remembers. His friendship with Alderisio came in especially handy when Bill Gazzarri decided to voice his displeasure that Valentine had poached Rivers from his place. Gazzarri, calling in connections of his own, sicced another famous Chicago gangster on Valentine, Charles Carmen Inglesia, better known as Chuckie English, who was Giancanaʼs top lieutenant in the early 60s (and who met his end when he was shot between the eyes on February 14, 1985—the 56th anniversary of the Saint Valentineʼs Day Massacre). One day, Chuckie English paid Valentine an unexpected visit and announced, “Johnny Rivers back to Gazzarriʼs or youʼre a dead motherfucker.” “So I got Milwaukee Phil to come in from Chicago, and it was straightened out,” Valentine says. (Gazzarri didnʼt exactly suffer anyway—he relocated his club to the Strip, where it persisted well into the 1990s as a heavy-metal showcase.)
