Tag: Prohibition

Goosie Lee, Indiana Avenue, and the Notorious Hollywood Café

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. 

The Many Incarnations Of the Slippery Noodle

I like to write about real people and real places that weave seamlessly into the fictional worlds I build. One of my favorites is Moore’s Restaurant, the Prohibition‑era dive that appears throughout Whiskey Covenant. Today the building is known as The Slippery Noodle Inn, but its history stretches back far beyond its blues‑bar reputation. 

The structure began life as the Tremont House during the Civil War, and local lore insists it served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The name Tremont House is still visible on the brick if you stand across South Meridian Street and look up. 

By the late 19th century it had become the Concordia House, a German‑American social club that fell out of favor during World War I when anti‑German sentiment swept Indianapolis. After that, the building shifted identities again, eventually becoming Moore’s Restaurant — though “restaurant” was generous even by Prohibition standards. 

During the 1920s and early 1930s, Moore’s had a reputation as the hangout for every underground heister in Indianapolis. The steak was supposedly decent, but the real draw was the booze, the gambling, the women, and the secrets. Stills bubbled in the basement. Politicians and cops drifted through the doors when they needed something done quietly. It was a place where the city’s filth pooled, and everyone knew it. For Mick Daugherty, it’s the perfect place to drop an ear to the ground: 

Moore’s wasn’t just a bar. It was the gutter where the city’s filth pooled—bootleggers, gamblers, pimps, union bosses, the kind of men who made things happen, legal or not. Politicians slunk through its doors like rats sniffing for opportunity. It was Mick’s backyard.  
Mick found his best fighters here. The ones who could take a beating and give it back twice as hard. If they had the right instincts, they moved up—enforcers, men who knew when to break bones and when to break spirits. Mick had been recruited here at seventeen after a drunken brawl in which he had faced off a brute twice his size. Hinkey Dink, one of the brashest, most colorful patrons of Moore’s, had picked him up off the floor and declared him just the material he needed in his prizefighting ring. Now Mick stepped into Moore’s, the dark interior exuding filth and vice, smelling of spilled whiskey and tobacco. The cops never raided this place. They knew better. It billed itself as a restaurant and indeed you could get a half decent steak, but what men really came here for was the booze and the secrets. He paused in the doorway, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim lighting that gleamed off the pressed tin ceilings. About the only thing that gleamed in this place. The floor was cracked and warped. The brick walls were dingy. Everything had a veneer of tobacco smoke. 

Moore’s as it is today as The Slippery Noodle

Moore’s was notorious for attracting corrupt law enforcement, especially during the Duvall administration. And corrupt law enforcement in Mick’s pocket is an advantage he can’t afford to ignore. And Moore’s is just as lucrative for Mick in Devil’s Track as it is in Whiskey Covenant: 

Mick hadn’t anticipated seeing the cop in here, but so much the better. Any scuttlebutt was better than no scuttlebutt. “Well, if it ain’t the only bleedin’ cop in Indy who charges a fee to not solve a murder.” 

Fogarty looked around in the dim confines of Moore’s, till he saw Mick. He strode over to Mick’s table, throwing his Fedora on it and pulling up a chair and sat down. Well, if it ain’t the walking tax write-off who thinks ‘subtle’ is a word you boil in an Irish stew.

Mick flicked ash off the cigarette. ”You hoping to warn me or bury me, Fogarty? I forget which way your compass spins these days.” 

“I gotta ask,” Fogarty said, squinting at him. “How the hell does the Slovene over at the Westside owe you anything?” 

And Moore’s had a reputation for being a bit of a brothel as well as a purveyor of illicit booze and scuttlebutt.

He heard  Lilly come downstairs, her silk kimono trailing like a whisper behind her on the stairs.  She straddled his lap, silk slipping off one shoulder, scent of rosewater brushing his throat, as she leaned in and breathed deep. “That’s not my perfume,” she said. “No,” he admitted. “It’s isn’t. But it stayed on my coat. She didn’t” 

She didn’t pull away. Didn’t accuse. Just rested her cheek against his collarbone, her fingers curled loosely in the open neck of his shirt.  

 “Do I have to ask?”  

 He let out a breath, warm against her hair. “No.”  

 “Do I need to worry?”  He lifts her chin, eyes meeting hers without deflection.  

“Not unless I stop coming home.”  A long moment. Then she pressed her lips to the corner of his mouth. Not a kiss. A claim. And one he let her take.  

 “You go to Moore’s for what you need… and come home for what you want.” 

“I go for the talk, not the tumble,” he told her shortly. 

“Maybe not, but those girls would walk over broken glass to sink their claws into you. We both know it.” 

Moore’s was one of those places that was as gritty as it was colorful. Today the Slippery Noodle Inn is known as Indiana’s oldest continuously operating bar and one of the state’s most iconic blues venues. Even if you’ve never stepped inside, you know the name. It’s part of the city’s cultural vocabulary, the kind of place people speak of with a mix of nostalgia and pride. The ghosts of Moore’s are long gone, but the bones of the place still hum with history 

When the Archives Whisper Back: The Real Life “Hots” Gardner

I believe it was Bertrand Russell who said, “There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.” I don’t know if other historical fiction writers ever mourn the fact that so much of their carefully researched information will go unnoticed and underappreciated, but I certainly do. Research is the engine that drives plot and the texture that gives a story its bones. And in the case of the Daugherty Saga, some events look so wild you’d swear I invented them — but some of them came straight from the archives of the Indianapolis Times, preserved nowhere else because they weren’t considered important enough to chronicle. 

So today I’m diving back into blogging with the stories behind the stories — the strange, forgotten, and utterly real events that fed the Daugherty Saga. The real people no one remembers but should. Reading between the lines. Consider it an insider’s view of the Daughertys’ moonshine‑soaked world. 

Today we delve into the story behind George “Hots” Gardner. Hots Gardner was a real person — a dirt‑track driver who met a violent end in 1932. 

The newspapers never explained why Gardner carried the nickname “Hots,” but in Prohibition‑era slang, “hot” almost always referred to stolen cars or hotwiring. Dirt‑track drivers were notorious for running “hot” vehicles, so I leaned into that history when shaping his fictional counterpart. We are first introduced to Hots at the Sugar Creek Speedway, my fictional counterpart for the real Jungle Park track in Parke County, Indiana. 

“Ach,” Karl Reinhardt spat on the floor. In his leering face, never had the name “Vulf” been more appropriate. “Go to hell, Irish.” 

Hots folded his arms across his chest. “Car blew to hell, Daugherty? Sure you didn’t just try to hotwire it and get your wires crossed maybe?” 

“Know something about hotwiring, Gardner?” Mick snapped to the driver. “You and all t’ose cars between here, Indy and Muncie that just happened to disappear from their owners, maybe? I don’t need advice from a shite car heister.” He turned to the German. “Keep looking over your shoulder, Reinhardt. One day, it won’t be me you see first.” 

This April 9 Indianapolis Times article tells us what went down: 

HIJACKER SLAIN IN BATTLE WITH BOOZE RUNNERS Companion, Illinois Gangster, Shot in Head; Flees After Returning Riddled Body to West Side Home. George (Hots) Gardner, Dirt Track Race Pilot, Greeted by Spray of Slugs From Rum Car, Police Believe. 

In Devil’s Track, I used this real‑life incident as the backbone of a fictionalized encounter: 

Ahead in the road, a dark shape loomed. Tommy slammed on the brakes and the truck spun in a squealing of tires. At that moment, Mick felt the impact of a bullet punching into the side of the truck. It sent his senses instantly on fire. The truck was positioned diagonally in the road, but its headlights illuminated the car ahead. There were three men positioned around it. Mick jabbed his door open. He already had a round in each chamber. Leaning over the hood of the truck, he aimed at the men around the car. A holler told him that some of his 12-guage double -aught buck had found its mark. Answering fire made him duck, but on the other side of the truck Tommy was already chambering more shells in his shotgun. Mick unloaded the other barrel at the car before digging in his pockets for more shells.  Tommy snapped off another round while Mick broke open his shotgun and chambered two more rounds. For a moment the thunder of gunfire was all he could concentrate on. But he saw first one and then two figures taking off down the river.  They were out of range now. But one figure remained by the car. Tommy’s answering gunfire dropped him, spinning into the dirt. When he didn’t move, Mick moved closer. He had two more rounds chambered, but he held off. In the headlights from the bullet ridden car, he recognized the face of “Hots” Gardner. Gardner twisted his body, reaching for the revolver that had fallen from his hand. He raised it. Before he could fire, Mick let him have the two chambered shells, one after the other. Gardner’s body jumped and buckled under the force of the buckshot.  

Tommy approached behind him “You reckon this is Vulf’s work?” 

“It ain’t now. He’s gone,” Mick said dryly. “His goons took off and let him eat buckshot. Some friends.” 

“They’re rigged for bootleg liquor. Hijacking, I’m guessing,” Tommy said.  

“Sure, but out t’is way?” Mick said. “T’ey wanted our booze but t’is also a message. He’s a Vulf stooge t’rough and t’rough.” 

‘What now?” Tommy said.  

Mick glanced up at the outline of the shanty town. We get this goon loaded up in his car and drop ‘im back at his boarding house. T’at way his friends know we know who he is.” 

Tommy eyed their truck. We got a few holes ventilating our truck. We’ll have to patch a tire.” 

Imagine my surprise when I later came across a follow‑up article dated April 15: 

COPS TIPPED ON GARDNER’S PAL Mysterious “Mickey” Believed North Side Gangster… 

The police were searching for a mysterious “Mickey” who “figured in” the hijacking that killed Gardner. I had already written Mick Daugherty — owner of the legitimate Daugherty Construction Company and operator of several less‑legitimate enterprises — long before I ever saw this clipping. To find a real “Mickey” lurking in the historical record felt like history tapping me on the shoulder. 

Though we will never know what really went down that April night or who the real Mickey was, it isn’t the first time the archives of the Indianapolis Times have given me fodder for weaving little‑known historical incidents and forgotten people into my fiction. Sometimes the past hands you a gift. Sometimes it hands you a ghost.