It’s three thirty on a humid Saturday morning. Last call in St.
Louis was 45 minutes ago, and now Club Casino’s getting wild. A
party-hungry swarm has completed its migration across the Mississippi
River, drawn like moths to the neon-orange glow of the nightclub’s
marquee. Here, just off Interstate 255 on State Street in the heart of
East St. Louis, they’ll dance till dawn.
Under a moon-size disco ball, the floor is a sea of bobbing
dreadlocks and flat-brimmed ball caps. A syrup-slow bass line thumps
over the speakers, the beat sped up by synthesizers and a jittery
hi-hat. A woman in a tiny pink dress grabs her ankles while her partner
steps up behind her and grinds. Others do a knee-swinging version of
the twist, adding a sly two-step that looks like walking in place with
swagger.
The air-conditioning has been off since an electrical transformer in
the parking lot blew just after midnight. It’s sticky and sweaty, and a
haze of menthol and blunt smoke adds weight to the air. Enclosed in a
tinted glass booth, Derrty DJ C-Note spins minute-long song snippets,
fittingly referred to as “club bangers,” prompting mass sing-alongs to
choruses like “Donk dat booty,” “Do da booty do” and “Ride dat
pussy.”
“Call yo’ people, tell ’em we still open!” C-Note shouts. “We gon’
keep it poppin’! Text yo’ people and tell ’em it is on!”
Seated on a stool beneath the fluorescent lights at the club’s
entrance, holding a fistful of $10 admission cash, Cedric Taylor, Club
Casino’s owner, imparts that attendance on this night is about 280
— less than half of what the club averaged three months ago in
the dead of winter.
That was before the trouble started.
On March 19, leaders from across the metro east gathered at a press
conference and demanded that East St. Louis Mayor Alvin Parks, who also
serves as the city’s liquor commissioner, make the nightclubs in his
jurisdiction close earlier. Several establishments remain open until 6
a.m., and law-enforcement officials say patrons, primed by a night on
the town in neighboring St. Louis, arrive in East St. Louis in the wee
hours and wreak havoc.
A week after the press conference, agents from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation raided Parks’ office in city hall, carting off documents
pertaining to what the mayor has delicately characterized as an
investigation of “unlawful solicitation of money regarding liquor
licenses.”
Responding to mounting public concern, Parks called an “emergency
town-hall meeting” on April 4 to discuss the situation. There he
distributed a survey that asked respondents to circle the time they
would prefer local nightspots to stop serving liquor. The options were
2 a.m., 4 a.m. and 6 a.m.
“After that a lot of people thought we were closing at two,” Cedric
Taylor says. “We had people cruising by at 3:30 who would stop in and
say, ‘I thought you guys were supposed to be closed.’ We did an ad on
the radio — $2,000 just to say, ‘Hey, we’re still open.'”
Parks decided late last month not to curtail the 6 a.m. closing
time, but the controversy is far from resolved. The FBI investigation
looms over the mayor’s head, and his political rivals have pounced on
the galvanizing issue.
Taylor, who maintains he’s merely an upstanding citizen trying to
provide a safe place to party, says his livelihood hangs in the
balance.
“Don’t penalize me because there are some idiots out there who don’t
run their club like a business,” the club owner gripes. “It’s these
little, I call them holes in the wall, that have about 50 people in
them and have an incident every week. We have 500 people and never have
any problems. It reflects poorly on the city, and it’s upsetting to get
lumped in with a problem that we’re not a part of.”
East St. Louis nightlife has long been the stuff of legend. Thanks
to Chuck Berry, the local juke joints were among the first in the world
to feature rock & roll. Ike met the future Tina Turner in a
downtown bar called Club Manhattan. And before Miles Davis became a
jazz icon, he was tooting his horn here, in the city nicknamed “East
Boogie.”
Today, according to Mayor Parks, 70 East St. Louis establishments
are licensed to sell liquor. Of those, 8 are classified as nightclubs
and remain open until 6 a.m. The 2 most popular venues, Club Casino and
Blackmon’s Plaza, have been around for decades.
Cedric Taylor has owned and operated Club Casino for 21 years. When
it opened, the place was called Club 24/7 and was a popular stop for
touring funk and R&B groups. These days it hosts after-parties for
national hip-hop artists who perform across the river in St. Louis. In
the past year, the club has hosted events for rappers Jim Jones, Soulja
Boy, Yo Gotti and St. Louis’ own Nelly, to name just a few.
“We went from the Temptations to Gucci Mane,” Taylor says, conceding
he’s more of a Marvin Gaye sort of guy.
For as long as the city has been known as a place to party till
dawn, it has battled an equally gaudy reputation for crime, violence
and corruption.
“It’s had a wild nightlife since it was founded shortly after the
Civil War,” says Andrew Theising, a political-science professor at
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and author of Made in USA:
East St. Louis, The Rise and Fall of an Industrial River Town. “And
they’ve had federal investigations into their handling of liquor
licenses three times dating back to 1918. It has always been a haven
for crime, sex and drugs. It’s always been there, and it’s still there
today.”
In short, while dancing till sunrise and beyond is the norm in
famous clubbing cities like Barcelona, New York and Las Vegas,
outsiders’ views of the festivities in East St. Louis are a different
story. To many it will forever be the place where a goofy honky from
Chicago named Clark Griswold gets his hubcaps stolen in the movie
Vacation.
Caricatures may depict a machine-gun-toting thug on every corner,
but the sad reality is that the city is mostly desolate. Virtually
every block is dotted with boarded-up or burned-out buildings. Of about
31,000 residents, 98 percent are African American and 24 percent are
unemployed. There were 19 homicides in East St. Louis in 2008 and 31
the previous year. In the eyes of several local officials, the
bloodshed and raucous nightlife are inseparable.
“Let’s face it, if those places were to close at 1:30 a.m. like
everybody else does, East St. Louis would probably get rid of half
their crime,” contends St. Clair County Sheriff Mearl Justus. “I been
sheriff for 27 years. The nightclubs have been a problem since day one.
In the summertime, when it’s warm, my people have been down there, and
there are literally hundreds of people swarming around on Collinsville
Avenue, drinkin’ and druggin’ and everything else going down
there.”
“Our judgment, law enforcement’s judgment, is many of the city’s
problems are caused by nightclubs being allowed to stay open,” echoes
Robert Haida, St. Clair County Prosecuting Attorney. “You get people
who are already intoxicated, and they’re armed, and they get into
trouble on the east side. We know we can save lives by closing the
clubs.”
Justus and Haida made their views public at the March 19 press
conference. They were joined by U.S. Attorney A. Courtney Cox, Illinois
State Patrol Captain Mark Bramlett, U.S. Marshal Don Slaznik, East St.
Louis NAACP president Johnny Scott, three members of the East St. Louis
City Council and a handful of local clergymen.
Conspicuously absent was Mayor Parks. He says he was never
notified.
The next day many reports about the gathering focused on a single
statistic: The Illinois State Patrol stated that fifteen homicides over
the past five years “came directly out of East St. Louis
nightclubs.”
Bramlett concedes the figure is inaccurate: Two of the murders were
actually associated with clubs in nearby Washington Park and Venice,
and one came from a report that vaguely cited “an undetermined East St.
Louis nightclub.”
Nevertheless, Bramlett says, his agency responds to enough
nightclub-related shootings to validate the claim that the bars add to
the body count. Beyond the murders, he notes, there were “five separate
cases of weapons fired into vehicles as patrons are leaving the club
and on their way back to St. Louis, and four cases where individuals
were shot as a result of an issue in one of the clubs.”
The last month of 2008 was a particularly violent one. On December
29 a security guard at the Broadway East nightclub was wounded in the
thigh after trying to break up a fight in the parking lot at 4:45 a.m.
The shooters sped across the Eads Bridge into St. Louis in a red
Lincoln Navigator. Three days earlier a shooting inside the VIP Lounge
at Blackmon’s Plaza had sent more than 300 people fleeing into the
street. And on December 7, a woman walking to her car alone after
leaving Club Etta on State Street was hit in the back by a stray bullet
at 3:45 a.m.
(Nightclubs west of the Mississippi River have not been immune,
however. At about 2:30 a.m. on Friday, May 8, three men were gunned
down after leaving a concert by rapper Yo Gotti at Club Society, near
Union Station in downtown St. Louis.)
Bramlett also cites an episode from January when two cars leaving
East St. Louis at 3:30 a.m. exchanged fire on the Poplar Street Bridge,
killing a 23-year-old woman.
“If these places close down at the same time St. Louis does, then we
don’t have those types of incidents,” the state patrol captain argues.
“It’s that simple.”
On March 26 the FBI raided Alvin Parks’ office and several others
inside East St. Louis City Hall. Parks says about eighteen boxes of
files were carted away, records dating as far back as 2003 that deal
with “what’s taking place with the liquor-selling operations, what’s
happening with how we handle liquor licenses here, liquor penalties and
other aspects related to liquor.”
A spokesman from the FBI’s Springfield, Illinois, office declined to
comment on an ongoing investigation.
The search has yet to produce an arrest or indictment, but Parks’
deputy liquor commissioner, Walter Hill, was placed on administrative
leave shortly afterward. On April 19 the city council voted to
eliminate Hill’s position as part of a citywide spate of job cuts.
Hill could not be reached for comment. Parks says the dismissal of
his appointee, whose duties included “the total management of all
liquor licenses in terms of fees,” is unrelated to the
investigation.
The day after the city hall raid, federal agents struck again. The
U.S. Secret Service, along with deputy U.S. Marshals and East St. Louis
police, arrested Robert Williams, owner of Club TV One, a nightspot in
downtown East St. Louis that had been open less than three months. A
search of the club unearthed 419 pounds of marijuana stuffed into
“eleven large military-style duffel bags.” Williams has been charged
with mail and wire fraud and with transporting more than $5,000 worth
of stolen property across state lines.
Finally, as if to drive home their point, on the morning of Sunday,
April 12, state and federal agencies joined forces to conduct a
“roadside safety check” of all vehicles entering downtown East St.
Louis via eastbound Interstate 64 between midnight and 4 a.m. More than
50 agents, officers and deputies from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives, the Illinois State Patrol and the St. Clair
County Sheriff’s Department were present.
The squad arrested 22 people on outstanding warrants, 7 for driving
under the influence, and 4 for misdemeanor drug possession (3 for
marijuana and 1 for crack cocaine). Another 49 were cited for having an
open alcohol container in a vehicle, and 39 were caught driving with
suspended or revoked licenses. Officers seized two illegal firearms
— an assault rifle and an unregistered pistol.
“If you pulled up and could produce a driver’s license and had your
seatbelt on — unless you rolled down the window and a purple
cloud of [marijuana] smoke came out — you were on your way,”
Bramlett says, adding, “I think it’s indicative of type of clientele
they have coming into the city.”
Beneath its chaotic veneer, East St. Louis possesses a strong sense
of community. There’s a sizable elderly population that can still
remember the days when the population topped 80,000 and jobs were more
plentiful. Churches are ubiquitous and play a vital role in local
politics.
Both camps were up in arms by March 31, when Parks convened his
“emergency town-hall meeting” to discuss the federal investigation and
the suddenly pressing issue of the nightclubs. Several hundred
residents, a noisy herd of media and nearly the entire East St. Louis
police force packed city hall to hear what the mayor had to say.
Dressed in a navy suit, starched white shirt and red tie, the
silver-tongued Parks did his best to charm the crowd. He announced
plans to appoint a commission to study the nightclub situation and
distributed the survey asking residents what time they thought clubs
should close. He even suggested that the raid on his office was a good
thing for the city.
“The people from the U.S. Attorney’s Office are very interested in
helping expand law enforcement in this community,” the mayor declared.
“The positive outcome is that we’re having conversations with them that
we may not have otherwise had. So there are silver linings to this
situation.”
But when he opened the floor, a line of eager and angry critics
quickly formed.
“We in East St. Louis cannot afford to keep going the way things
are,” one middle-aged man said to scattered applause. “You [need to]
shut it down at one o’clock and let people go to sleep.”
Club Casino proprietor Cedric Taylor was one of the few people
present to defend the clubs.
Taylor and his wife, Keisha, are known for their philanthropy. They
have contributed to a number of causes — from purchasing letter
jackets for East St. Louis High School’s state-champion football team
to buying computers and other equipment for the Brooklyn Police
Department to renting a helicopter to help search for a young woman who
was swept away in a flash flood last year.
Taylor pointed to his good deeds and asked that nightclubs be
treated as individual entities rather than lumped together as one
troubled whole.
“Don’t penalize me if I’m running my business effectively and
efficiently,” he pleaded. “Club Casino is a way of life for me; it’s a
way to make a living. We been in business over 21 years. It’s one of
the oldest clubs in East St. Louis. We give back to the community.”
Then it was back to the mayoral skewering. One woman brought up the
subject of Walter Hill, Parks’ erstwhile deputy liquor
commissioner.
“I been told by more than a few employees and club owners,” she
said, “that even your own assistant comes into the business, goes
behind their bar, drinks from the bottle and then asks for some type
of, um, ‘economic facilitation’ to get their liquor license. Mr. Mayor,
are you monitoring your own staff?”
After the hooting died down, Parks, clearly rattled, responded: “If
you know of or you see evidence of public corruption or know of city
employees unlawfully soliciting money or other unlawful activity,
please contact the FBI or the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
Ironically, such a call may have led to the March 19 press
conference.
In November Parks appeared to bend over backward to issue a liquor
license to Johnnie Blackmon, owner of two downtown nightclubs,
Blackmon’s Plaza and Club Illusion, for a new business called the
Gentleman’s Club.
Despite the suggestive name, the promise of pole-dancing and a flier
depicting a woman pulling down her bikini bottom, Parks maintained that
the new venture was not a strip club because the dancers would wear
“swimsuit attire or other attractive clothing.”
The new club was located across the street from a church and near a
cluster of residential homes. Several citizens complained, and the
club, which opened November 12, was forced to close eight days later
when the city council voted unanimously to deny Blackmon’s application
for a business license.
“A lot of things coalesced into the timing of that [press]
conference,” says St. Clair County prosecutor Robert Haida. “Several
citizens groups approached us and asked us to do something. We had been
aware of the problem for a long time, and concerns had been expressed
through official channels. We were asked to increase our efforts and
make it a more public issue.”
Johnnie Blackmon did not respond to requests for an interview for
this story.
East St. Louis is in dire fiscal straits. Facing a $2 million budget
deficit, the city plans to cut seventeen positions, including five
police officers and five firefighters.
In an embarrassing but illustrative example of the depth of the
crisis, the police department’s drug-sniffing dog was nearly
repossessed last month by a breeder who said the city failed to pay him
the $5,000 he was owed for the canine, which changed hands on February
1.
At the town-hall meeting, Parks pointed out that forcing
establishments to close early would have a significant impact on the
city’s strained coffers. Cedric Taylor, who also owns Javon’s Fine
Dining, an east-side restaurant and bar, came prepared with figures to
back the mayor’s claim.
“We paid this year over $150,000 to the state of Illinois and more
than $100,000 to East St. Louis in revenue from sales taxes,” Taylor
told the crowd. “These are the things you have to look at.”
According to statistics kept by the Illinois Department of Revenue,
sales taxes from “Eating and Drinking Places” in East St. Louis
generated more than $1.3 million in 2008. The funds were divided among
the state, county and city.
Beyond the clubs’ direct contributions, others point to a
trickle-down effect on the city’s economy. Parks argues that the
late-night visitors help keep other local businesses afloat. Taylor
points out that he employs fifteen people at Club Casino, almost all of
whom live and spend money in East St. Louis.
“There are a lot of people that work in these clubs. Right now, with
the economy the way it is, you going to take jobs away from
people?” seconds Club Casino’s DJ C-Note. “I need that money at the
club. I got a mortgage. I got kids to feed.”
Willie “Bay-D” Spratt is a promoter who heads a group of East St.
Louis entertainment businesses, primarily record labels, collectively
known as the Coalition. Spratt believes that closing at the same time
as St. Louis’ bars would almost certainly put East St. Louis’
nightclubs out of business, given that the vast majority of customers
arrive after 1:30 a.m.
“Towns die because of things like this,” he says. “Look at Wellston
— they used to be a hotbed for entertainment. If [the clubs]
close, East St. Louis doesn’t have anything going beyond that. It’s a
run-down city already. Imagine what it will be like without this
revenue.”
Further complicating matters is the Casino Queen. Taxes
collected from the riverboat gambling facility account for roughly 40
percent of East St. Louis’ annual operating budget. Because the
Casino Queen has the same type of liquor license as the
nightclubs’, it would be subject to any mandated change in hours. With
business at the casino down 20 percent in 2009, many city leaders are
wary of inflicting further damage.
“We surely don’t want to cut off our nose to spite our face,” says
Delbert Marion, an East St. Louis council member. “If [the nightclubs]
are generating the type of revenue that can offset the losses of the
Casino Queen, then we’ll take that into consideration. But then
again, do we want to take the risk of having people under the influence
of alcohol and drugs pouring into the city, where the police department
is already strained?”
Hard-line nightclub opponents insist that any arguments about the
clubs’ financial contributions to the city are moot.
“The highest priority is saving lives, not whether a bar would go
out of business,” county prosecutor Haida says. “That’s an easy call.
If it’s revenue versus saving lives, I’ll take saving lives every
time.”
Ask anyone who has ever frequented or worked at an East St. Louis
club if the establishments are behind the city’s crime woes, and you’re
likely in for a resounding “no.”
“With clubs and anything else, you have to look at things deeper
than that,” says DJ AJ, of radio station KATZ the Beat (100.3 FM).
“Education, schooling, upbringing — that’s where it falls. I
can’t say a nightclub is the cause of people getting killed and
murdered. I don’t want to hear that as an excuse.
“Violence happens away from the nightclub when people follow each
other outside, so the easy logic is that if the club wasn’t open, those
people wouldn’t have been there in the first place,” he continues. “But
at the end of the day, people who do wrong — whether in the club
or in the mall or whatever — they going to do whatever they going
to do. Using the club as an excuse is valid to a point, but it’s not
everything. Not even close.”
Others argue the violence has subsided in recent years.
“I don’t think at this point it’s as bad as it was in the late ’80s,
when crack hit the scene,” says DJ C-Note. “That’s when it was crazy.
It’s not like that now. It’s gotten a lot better.”
Some say race has played a role in shaping the debate. Many of the
public officials who’ve spoken out against the predominantly black
nightclubs are white.
“Go to any of those [night]clubs in Sauget, and it’s the same thing;
it’s just not talked about,” contends DJ Snow. “They’re trying to
pinpoint it and say it’s just a black thing. It’s not. As a white boy
who has worked in these clubs, I can vouch for that.”
Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of after-hours clubs is that
in some cases the dance floor is the safest place people could be.
“If they got no place to go, it’s only going to be worse,” DJ Lonnie
Bee points out. “That means you have more people giving house parties.
And from my history of DJing, you have more crazy incidents at house
parties than you do at clubs, ’cause there’s no control.”
Nowhere does this line of reasoning hold true more than at Club
Casino, whose security measures may only be rivaled by those at a state
penitentiary.
All patrons are frisked and swiped with a metal detector. Sixteen
video cameras record areas both inside and out. A uniformed East St.
Louis police officer often sits in the entrance. Golf carts shuttle
customers to and from their cars.
And then there’s the crew of nine bouncers who call themselves the
Goon Squad. Four men are stationed in the parking lot, five inside the
club. All look like they could play left tackle for the Rams.
The squad members claim their reputation alone deters most would-be
troublemakers, but if a scrap does break out, they trigger “fight
lights,” strobes placed throughout the club, to alert fellow team
members. The guards generally issue two warnings before giving anyone
the boot. One of the combatants is kept behind for a few minutes to
prevent the clash from continuing outside.
“I would throw my own brother out if I had to,” says Chico, a Goon
Squad member with light skin, sleepy eyes and arms the size of
anacondas. “But honestly, we get more women fights than anything else.
That’s almost worse, because when women locked up, they locked
up.”
The only club rule that seems to be consistently flouted is
Illinois’ statewide smoking ban.
“We try to enforce it,” Taylor says with a shrug. “But when they see
us coming, they just put it out.”
Mark Bramlett of the Illinois State Patrol says that none of the
fifteen homicides mentioned in his agency’s report are linked to Club
Casino. Nevertheless, he says, the club’s patrons cause problems after
they leave the virtual lockdown.
“I can tell you anecdotally that we’ve had shootings on [Interstate]
255 early in the morning from patrons who’ve left that particular
club,” Bramlett says. “I can’t call it a drive-by, ’cause both suspects
were in cars driving down the interstate shooting at each other.”
“There are just certain things that are beyond our control,” Taylor
counters. “You can’t fault us for that.”
Nearly everyone — Taylor included — agrees there’s a
seedy side to East St. Louis nightlife that the city could do without.
There is, however, no such consensus when it comes to a solution.
Many of those in favor of rolling back the clubs’ hours acknowledge
that any new measures will be counterproductive if not applied to all
of St. Clair County.
City council member Delbert Marion has a full-time job as chief of
police in the tiny village of Brooklyn, a few miles north of East St.
Louis on Route 3. The town is home to several popular strip clubs that
remain open all night. Marion says the crowd the strip joints draw
already strains his eight-man police force.
“On a Friday night our population already doubles,” he says. “If
East St. Louis is at the forefront of closing early, those displaced
people are going to come to little communities like Alorton,
Centreville and Washington Park, and other city leaders are going to
have to look at doing the same thing.”
“It doesn’t matter if you close down at 10 p.m. or 2 a.m.,” agrees
former East St. Louis Mayor Carl Officer. “People who really want to go
out and do their drinking will do it in those neighboring
communities.”
Officer proposes setting a last call of 11 p.m. for all places that
sell liquor in East St. Louis. Business owners who want to continue
serving would pay a fee for each additional hour they remain open. The
licenses could be priced on a sliding scale based on square footage and
gross revenue.
Officer, who consulted with Marion and NAACP leader Johnny Scott to
create the plan, says the additional fees could cover the cost of
installing surveillance cameras and stationing a uniformed police
officer at each club.
“How are you going to put men and women out of business strictly
because of an hourly thing?” asks Officer, who now runs his family’s
mortuary business. “Business is tough enough as it is. You need to
treat everyone fairly and protect the employees of these places.”
In terms of enforcement, Bramlett says more roadside safety checks
are in the works, but regularly patrolling the streets around the clubs
isn’t an option.
“We certainly have jurisdiction. We could if we wanted to,” the
state patrol captain says. “We tend to prioritize, putting coverage on
areas where no other police agency is at — such as the interstate
— and allow the places that have police, like East St. Louis, to
police themselves.”
East St. Louis Police Chief Lenzie Stewart did not respond to
requests to discuss his department’s handling of nightclub-related
crime.
Still others, including Robert Haida, insist that as mayor and
liquor commissioner, Parks has had unilateral authority to crack down
on the most egregious offenders but has failed to do so.
“Under the current administration, in my view, there’s been a lax
view taken toward the operation of these clubs,” the county prosecutor
says. “There’s little to no enforcement of laws pertaining to liquor
establishments, and we’ve seen a substantial increase in violence as a
result.”
“I’ve made that abundantly clear to our liquor-selling operations,
if we have a club that is clearly irresponsible in its behavior, we
have the opportunity to shut it down as early as midnight if necessary
or to shut it down for a certain time period,” counters Parks. “We’ve
typically said when we have a troubled nightclub or liquor-selling
establishment, there’s either been a fine or penalty or a suspension of
the license.”
Parks announced late last month at a meeting of the city’s 70
liquor-license holders that nightclub hours would remain the same.
“When you say that these places are basically sources of violence,
that’s not true. The source of the violence is the drugs that people
are trying to deal, and gangs,” he says, explaining the decision. “And
when you’re trying to maximize revenue for your town along with
maximizing health and safety, you don’t do things that restrict
revenue-producing opportunities.”
Parks says there will be a few changes to the current system. Bar
and club owners are now required to post a note that reads “No weapons
allowed on these premises except by properly licensed persons.” He also
recommended that business owners increase the lighting near their
entrances and parking lots and install security cameras.
“They’re not actual laws,” Parks concedes, “but strong, strong
suggestions from the liquor commissioner.”
