Indiana Avenue, south from Locke Street, Sinclair Gas, Salge Brothers Grocery, 1912 – Indiana Historical Society
Goosie Lee was one of those flamboyant characters that history tends to forget. He doesn’t have a very big role in Whiskey Covenant, but he serves to show that many cities during the Prohibition were run by the real players, like kings with their petty kingdoms, down sharply divided political, racial, and ethnic lines.
Goosie Lee came from Tennessee where he was born in 1893 and came to Indianapolis with his parents in 1902. For a black man of his era, he made a big impact in Indianapolis during Prohibition and was eulogized at length in the 1943 Indianapolis Recorder when he passed:
Born in the Deep South, Mr. Lee was brought to Indianapolis when quite young. Destiny decided the course he was to take in later life. He rose from the depths to scale the heights of business success by his untiring devotion to friends and his unfaltering determination to forge ahead and to carve a niche for himself that would become the teachings of his loving mother. Maggie Lee. His life story reads like a fable. With a meager education he became a dominant figure in the civic, political and business life of the community.
He was known for his operation of the Hollywood Cafe on Indiana Avenue, in what was then known as the “colored section” of town. As influential as he was, he was not immune from raids and was subject to the occasional raids through the 1920s. Establishments like the Hollywood Cafe were well known also as gambling venues for the notorious “pea shakes” and numbers rackets. Another such venue was the Slovene‑run Westside Club in West Indianapolis. These gambling operations were easy to hide, hard to prosecute and most often the police looked the other way or were easily bribed anyway. These raids were often more performative than punitive.
In Whiskey Covenant, I tried to capture the atmosphere of Goosie’s world— the casual danger, and the way men like him operated with a mix of bravado and political protection.
The Hollywood Café catered to an overwhelmingly colored clientele but was frequented by a smattering of white men bent on the gambling that Goosie had on offer. Mick stood at the entrance watching the room through a haze of smoke and jazz. A few men hunched over a worn and beaten plank that served as a bar. Goosie enjoyed a measure of protection from the Whitcombs, so he didn’t feel the need to have a doorman or a password to enter. There was a certain brazenness in how he ran his establishment. Almost every eye turned towards Mick as he entered. Goosie came forward. He and Mick knew one another casually. Mick had sold him booze one winter when Goosie’s usual supplier had been picked up by the police. Otherwise they didn’t run in the same circles.
“You lookin for sumpin’, Daugherty?”
“Someone,” Mick corrected him. Mick looked just past him, to the unmistakable sound of dry peas in a can, like a child’s homemade maraca. He’d laid eyes on the oil slicked hair of the only other white man in the Hollywood Café. “And I just found ‘im.”
Goosie shrugged and flung a bar towel over his shoulder. “Suit yourself. If you gonna beat anyone up, take it outside, okay?”
Goosie was working as a bond man in the early ‘20s when he was arrested for having a car full of one gallon jugs of whiskey in his car. But at this point, who wasn’t running booze in certain sectors of the city? Still Goosie Lee ran the African American Republican Party, activism on Indiana Avenue and considered himself a respectable businessman regardless of whatever rackets he might have been involved with. He didn’t actively look for trouble. Still trouble had a way of coming to blind tigers run by those of any color, as Mick aptly demonstrates in Whiskey Covenant:
Then, without warning or hesitation, Mick drove his boot into Barrett’s ribs. Once. Twice. A third time. Barrette groaned, curling in on himself, but Mick didn’t stop. A sharp kick to the side of his head sent the secretary sprawling, his body going limp against the pavement.
Mick rolled his shoulders, exhaled, and looked down at the unconscious man at his feet.
“Guess I’ll have to deliver t’ message myself.” He looked up and saw he had an audience. Goosie and some of his clientele had come out to the alleyway. They stood in silence. “Seen enough of t’ show?” Mick asked them crisply. “T’at’s all you’re gonna see. Don’t worry, Goosie, I ain’t gonna li’er your alley wit’ my trash.”
He hauled Barrette upright and pulled him over his shoulders, carrying him to his car, he threw him in the back seat. Still, no one had said a word. He knew they wouldn’t. Goosie would say what he always said. “Let the white man’s problems be the white man’s problems.” Less said, less seen.
Like the fictional Flying Dutchman and The Claddagh run by Mick Daugherty and many other such venues catering to varying clientele and social classes, Goosie Lee’s Hollywood Cafe is yet another real life blind tiger that contributed to the colorful and enigmatic history of Prohibition era Indianapolis that went unreported and often ignored.