{"id":30882,"date":"2025-11-11T08:21:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T08:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/30882\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T08:21:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T08:21:12","slug":"move-over-epstein-pittsburgh-has-its-own-history-of-black-books-pittsburgh-city-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/30882\/","title":{"rendered":"Move over, Epstein: Pittsburgh has its own history of “black books” – Pittsburgh City Paper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s \u201cblack book\u201d and the federal government\u2019s investigative files on the convicted sex offender have dominated headlines for years since the convicted sex offender died in 2019. The Epstein files allegedly are one factor contributing to U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson\u2019s recent refusal to reconvene the House of Representatives<\/a>. It\u2019s rumored that Epstein\u2019s alleged black book contains a Who\u2019s Who of business and political leaders. There hasn\u2019t been such a fuss over black books since the case of \u201cHollywood Madam\u201d Heidi Fleiss<\/a> in the 1990s and \u201cD.C. Madam\u201d Deborah Jean Palfrey<\/a> in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n

Pittsburgh history has its own black books and versions of the Epstein files, with examples stretching back more than a century.<\/p>\n

Black books belonging to Pittsburgh madams Nettie Gordon and Mae Scheible and the membership rolls of a prominent 1980s gay bar contained bombshells that threatened generations of Pittsburgh men.<\/p>\n

\"AMae Scheible in 1936 Credit: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley<\/p>\n

Yinzers don\u2019t need to look to Hollywood or Washington for salacious stories attached to little black books, rolodexes, card files or spreadsheets. We have plenty of our own tales of rich and powerful men and their secrets.<\/p>\n

Never found: Nettie Gordon\u2019s black book<\/p>\n

Dubbed Pittsburgh\u2019s \u201cQueen of the Underworld\u201d in a 1934 Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph headline announcing her death, North Side madam Nettie Gordon built a sex work empire with more than 40 brothels.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A political powerhouse and Republican ward leader, Gordon opened her brothels to local pols for meetings. For several decades in the 20th century, Gordon serviced and mingled among the city\u2019s wealthiest and most powerful residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHer clients consisted of just your average guy on the street who wanted to get laid,\u201d author Richard Gazarik tells Pittsburgh City Paper. \u201cIt also included police and it included politicians. And it included public officials who all were enamored of her stable of women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Art Rooney in the 1920s and early 1930s was an up-and-coming racketeer sports team owner whose politically well-connected family was close to Gordon. After Rooney\u2019s uncle Miles died in 1931 from a gunshot wound, Gordon infamously placed a large flower arrangement next to the casket at the wake.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAgnes, Miles\u2019s sister, took offense and moved the flowers into a corner,\u201d wrote Rob Ruck, Maggie Patterson, and Michael Weber in their 2010 Rooney biography, Rooney: A Sporting Life. \u201cSomeone moved them back, and a silent tussle sent the arrangement back and forth throughout the wake.\u201d<\/p>\n

More subtle was how Gordon\u2019s friends and recipients of her graft handled her widely rumored black book. In its obituary detailing Gordon\u2019s long career, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted that she kept a such a book. It allegedly contained a list of all the payoffs she made to stay out of jail.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe \u2018black book\u2019 that told of the shameless avarice of police and politicians over a generation is closed for good,\u201d the Post-Gazette wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n

No one ever found Gordon\u2019s black book.<\/p>\n

Mae Scheible\u2019s bombshell black book<\/p>\n

Born Mae Kegel in what\u2019s now Pittsburgh\u2019s North Side in 1894, Mae \u201cBillie\u201d Scheible<\/a> cut a path through the 20th century becoming one of the nation\u2019s most colorful and successful madams. She began her career in a North Hills roadhouse with a financial stake provided by wealthy real estate entrepreneur Herman Kamin.<\/p>\n

In 1926 or 1927, Scheible opened a brothel in Oakland that attracted a wide slice of Pittsburgh men, from prominent attorneys and judges to elected officials and street cops. There were so many prominent figures that Scheible\u2019s black book might have doubled as Pittsburgh\u2019s \u201cBlue Book\u201d \u2014 the city\u2019s elite social register.<\/p>\n

\"\"Page from Mae Scheible\u2019s FBI file with transcribed entries from Scheible\u2019s black book Credit: National Archives<\/p>\n

Squabbles over Scheible\u2019s black book broke out in 1934 after raids on her Pittsburgh and New York City brothels. Scheible\u2019s attorneys successfully lobbied to keep the client records out of evidence and away from the press. They also scored a major victory by keeping the names of prominent Schieble clients and enablers, including Kamin\u2019s, out of court records.<\/p>\n

Scheible\u2019s attorney Lewis Landes told prosecutors and reporters that her records could be used as political weapons because they contained \u201cthe names of prominent Republican citizens,\u201d the New York Times reported in 1935.<\/p>\n

After getting ahold of Scheible\u2019s black book, FBI agents transcribed its entries. An excerpt containing more than 20 typed pages is included in microfilmed FBI records in the National Archives. The FBI transcription reads, \u201cThe following is a list of names, addresses, and telephone numbers \u2026 of numerous men found in the apartment of Mrs. Mae Scheible \u2026 when the list was [transcribed] by Bureau Agents recently.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, the actual book was probably destroyed,\u201d says historian Jessica Pliley, who has written extensively about Scheible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pliley said that long-serving FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover closely guarded Scheible\u2019s files, along with thousands of others he collected. \u201cI would assume that they were moved into his personal office, where he had this kind of file system that was devoted to sexually salacious material that he thought was too sensitive to be in the general files of the FBI,\u201d Pliley says.<\/p>\n

Hoover died in 1972, and Pliley believes that the original black books were destroyed along with all of Hoover\u2019s other records.<\/p>\n

The Travelers Social Club<\/p>\n

Founded in 1967 by LGBTQ+ entertainment entrepreneur Robert \u201cLucky\u201d Johns, the Travelers Social Club in 1983 bought an old East Liberty slaughterhouse that for 20 years had been the headquarters of an old Italian American social club<\/a>. Not long after Travelers moved into the building, raids began by Pittsburgh police, fire department, and state alcohol enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n

In 1984, the club sued the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) and several of its then-agents for selective prosecution and harassment (liquor control enforcement transitioned from the PLCB to the Bureau of Liquor Control Enforcement [BLCE] between 1987 and 1988).<\/p>\n

\"\"Complaint page from the 1988 federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the Travelers Social Club against state and local officials after the 1988 \u201cSt. Valentine\u2019s Day Massacre\u201d raid Credit: National Archives<\/p>\n

As the lawsuit worked its way through state court, raids continued. On February 14, 1988, BLCE agents, Pittsburgh police and fire department officials descended on the club and arrested club members and officers. The \u201cSt. Valentines Day Massacre<\/a>\u201d became a pivotal point in Pittsburgh LGBTQ+ and civil rights history.<\/p>\n

The club subsequently sued city and state officials in federal court alleging civil rights violations. During the case, lawyers for the state requested copies of Travelers\u2019 membership lists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The club\u2019s membership was a sensitive subject. Keeping the list secret was a major concern during the case.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told the other lawyer I wasn\u2019t producing them,\u201d attorney Jon Pushinsky tells\u00a0 City Paper. Pushinsky and his then-partner, Michael Rosenfield, represented Travelers in the case.<\/p>\n

Pushinsky recalls telling the other laywer, \u201cThere are a lot of prominent people on that list, including elected public officials, and I\u2019m not going to ruin their lives by giving it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Members included closeted elected and appointed public officials and businessmen. \u201cThe social, political environment was very different and there were a lot of people who didn\u2019t want it to be known that they were gay,\u201d Pushinsky said. \u201cI mean, there were people who were at the club that night who said I don\u2019t want to be a witness or you can\u2019t call me \u2014 no one can find out I was here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"The former site of the Traveler\u2019s Social Club at 6525 Hamilton Ave. Credit: Mars Johnson \/ CP<\/p>\n

Though the membership list was fair game under the rules of discovery, the state\u2019s lawyer dropped never again asked for the list. \u201cThat request just kind of disappeared because he could\u2019ve gone to court for an order requiring me to produce them, but he never did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even today, Lucky\u2019s silent partners in the club and its membership remain anonymous. Historian and Pittsburgh Queer History Project founder Harrison Apple used pseudonyms for them in their 2021 Ph.D. dissertation<\/a> on the history of Pittsburgh\u2019s gay bars. After CP discovered one of the silent partner\u2019s names \u2014 a married suburban businessman \u2014 among legal records, Apple wrote in an email, \u201cPlease do not use [his] name, by request of his surviving family.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article appears in Nov. 5-11, 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n

RELATED\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s \u201cblack book\u201d and the federal government\u2019s investigative files on the convicted sex offender have dominated headlines…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[19594,19595,19596,19597,19598,73,75,74],"class_list":["post-30882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-art-rooney","tag-herman-kamin","tag-jeffrey-epstein","tag-mae-scheible","tag-nettie-gordon","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}