February 16, 2023 • 52 mins
The fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club was not in Los Angeles, but Kentucky. Which happened to be Las Vegas before Vegas was Vegas. Confused? Listen in and all will be clear.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should know a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is
stuff you should know about Northern Kentucky, that's right, which
(00:21):
was in the nineteen thirties and forties the casino capital
of the United States. It was the Vegas of the
United States before Vegas and fifties too. Even it's hard
to believe I've never knew any of this. So much
of this is very cinematic. I was just trying to
(00:43):
work out how to tell the story in a movie
without doing flash forwards and flashbacks. But that's probably how
you would have to do it. So I grew up
in Northern Ohio, which is not that far from Northern Kentucky,
on the other end of Ohio from it, because the
area we're talking about just across the river from Cincinnati. Um,
(01:04):
And I guess I had heard of this before. It's
one of those things where I can't remember if my
mind is telling me that I had a memory before
I actually had a memory, Like I didn't really have one,
I just want to think I did. It might be
one of those scenarios but regardless, it is like a huge,
huge piece of northern Kentucky southern Ohio history. And in fact,
(01:25):
the more you learn about it, if you were alive
and sentient, you know, in the um mid to late seventies,
it was a national thing. Like it was a really
big deal that this happened, this Beverly Hill supper club
fire that we're going to talk about today. Yeah, it
was definitely one of the worst, um sort of entertainment
(01:46):
club fires in US history. I would have to look
at numbers. I mean, it's probably one of the deadliest
fires in US history because a hundred and sixty five
people died in horrific fashion obvious, See, dying by fire
is always horrific. But this was as bad as it gets, um,
and I didn't know anything about it. So a big
(02:07):
thanks to you for uh commissioning this from Dave Rouse,
my friend, you did No, I didn't. I didn't commission this.
I didn't either. We're gonna have to this. May be
occasionally Dave will say like, hey, have you heard of
this cool thing? And we'll say, oh, yeah, just that
sounds great. So that may have been one of these
(02:29):
because I didn't know about this I don't think. What
day is it? Uh? It is Tuesday? I think, are
we Is this a job? Am I dreaming? You're like
that kid David on the way home from the dentist?
Is this real? All right? So let's go to Newport,
Kentucky in the way back machine. We haven't pulled that
(02:51):
thing out in a while, so let's dust it out.
That's fired up through the wiring, so I'll have to
hot wire it. Luckily, I'm good at that. So let's
get it fired up and let's go back to the
nineteen twenties Prohibition era Northern kentuckt Okay, here we are,
(03:16):
Chuck and uh. It turns out that despite prohibition being
in full force, UM liquors really really easy to get,
especially especially because there was a loophole in the Volstad
Act that said, and I know we talked about this
in the Prohibition episode UM that said that if you
(03:37):
UM are making alcohol for medicinal use, you can't. You
have to have a huge license. Each bottle has to
be bonded by the government. You can't be it's got
to be a hundred proof on the nose. There is
a bunch of like criteria, but you could legally produce
um alcohol. And there was a guy named George Remus
(03:57):
who who was a lawyer. He also was a pharmacist
by trade, but he had been defending all sorts of
bootleggers in Chicago and realized, man, there's a lot of
money in bootlegging. So I saw that. He did a
little research, found out that of the legal booze producing
the United States was coming out of the Cincinnati area,
and he moved over there and said, I'm going to
(04:19):
get into organized crime. And boy did he ever. Yeah,
he was living in Chicago at the time, and if
you're leaving the organized crime in Chicago to go to Cincinnati,
then he must have some good insider information, and indeed
he did. He was known after he made that move
as a king of the bootleggers because he would um
(04:41):
and you know, it's a great scam. He would manufacture
this quote unquote medicinal whiskey and then he would have
a setup where his guys would steal the truck, hijack
the truck, and then sell it. And this money number
is staggering because it says at one point this guy
was making forty million dollars a year in the nineteen twenties. Yeah,
(05:04):
it's about nine hundred million dollars today, So I mean
that's that made him probably one of the wealthiest people
in the United States if he would have been able
to keep the you know, that operation up, But of
course he wasn't for sure. So if you were a
politician or um, a police chief or even probably a
local cop in the area, it made you pretty wealthy too.
(05:27):
Because one of the reasons why he set up in
northern Kentucky's, particularly in Newport, was because you could pay
people off a lot easier. It was a small town.
You could basically make it your fiefdom. And that's what
George Remis did. And you're right he Um. He got
caught pretty quickly, I think, um within just a few
years of setting up this organized crime syndicate. UM. And
(05:50):
I just a little aside on him. He was really interesting.
He had a sellmate in jail who turned out to
be an FBI agent, not an informant, and actual agent
who has planted there. The agent found out about all
the money that Remus had that his wife control that
was in her name. The guy left the jail, quit
(06:11):
the FBI, and started an affair with Remus's wife, Imogene,
and then talked her into basically like selling off all
his stuff and funnel money from her. So the FBI
guy robbed and blind. Remus was so mad that when
he got out of prison, he he tracked down his
wife and shot her in public in broad daylight. Did
(06:32):
he get pinched for that? He got pinched. He was
convicted but found not guilty and reason of insanity, was
taken to UM Sanitarium right sanatorium ortarium, I can't remember
um a mental hospital, and then, because he was a lawyer,
used the prosecutor's reasoning that he wasn't insane to get
(06:53):
himself released from the actual UM, the mental hospital, and
became a freeman very quickly. Boy, he knew all the angles,
Yeah he did. And also one other thing about him
is that it's pretty much a certainty that Jay Gatsby
from the Great Gatsby was based on George D. Remus
because he had met um F Scott Fitzgerald at some point. Yeah,
(07:13):
and probably through some pretty wild parties would be my guests.
But he didn't drink or smoke. Well, I don't, well
did Gatsby here? I could think gets to be drinks
something yeah, I um, alright, so it's he's in jail.
But by this time he had established such an operation
there in northern Kentucky that a little industry of sleeves
(07:36):
grew up around it. Uh, kind of a red light district,
is how Dave put it. And this is where we
get to the birth of what was then called the
Beverly Hills Country Club. Uh. There was a guy named
Peachman who now factors in the story, who used to
be a driver for Remus and in seven he bought
this old roadhouse outside of Newport, Newport perched upon a
(07:58):
hill and and and basically renovated it into a casino,
and a really nice one. They had casinos there, but
they were they were called bust out joints. They were
kind of again, they were kind of sleazy places to go.
And the Beverly Hills Country Club was what was known
as a carpet joint, and it was a it was
a nice place. It was it was the blueprint for
(08:21):
what ended up being Las Vegas. Like a nice place
where you could go and you could gamble, and you
get a dinner and some drink and even see a show. Yeah.
So the thing about that is yes, it was. The
whole jam was kind of sleazy. In fact, Newport earned
the nickname Since City back in the thirties. And again,
Las Vegas is a glimmer in anybody's eye at this point.
(08:44):
It's a it's a tumble wheat. No like Newport is
Las Vegas and Atlantic City wrapped into one. And if
you were a tourist like you were, you were totally fine.
You were safe. The streets were clean, like nobody was
gonna mess with you because it was so fully mob run.
But it was mob run by a bunch of like
different disparate people who used to work with George Remus
(09:07):
and the Cleveland mob that led by Moe Deletes, who
went on to help found Las Vegas. He was one
of the original founders. He said, I want this action.
This is like just off the border of Cincinnati. Were
in Cleveland. We're going to get in on this. And
he moved in on Newport and started buying up casinos
around town. Delete Deletes, that's what I saw. Oh really,
(09:31):
I know. I want to say dallots, but it's not dallots.
It it's delightful as what it is. If you look
at uh deletes, Uh he looks exactly what you would
think of mobster. Moe Deletes would look like he was
a big time mobster. Like he was one of the
ones that was grilled by the Kaffer Committee. He was
(09:55):
one of the ones that that helped found Las Vegas
years later, right, right, Yeah, that's what I was saying.
But this was years and years later. And again one
of the reasons Las Vegas was found was because Mo
de Letz was one of the first, like big time
mob guys who showed up in Newport and took over
it was. It was just the blueprint for Vegas later on. Alright,
So Schmidt and again Chuck, I want to just really
(10:17):
drive home. We're talking about northern Kentucky. M hm okay, yeah,
Uh you know how I know that because we said
northern Kentucky like sixty times so far I know. But
it's just still boggles the mind. So Schmidt owns this
Beverly Hills country club, and uh doesn't want to give
it up despite mob pressure. He's like, no, this is
(10:38):
my place. I want to own it. So what looks
like happened as the mom said, fine, we'll burn it down. Uh,
this was not the big fire obviously that came, you know,
forty years later, this was in February. Only one fatality,
very sadly, h five year old girl, the niece of
the club's caretaker, died. And here's the thing. They didn't
(11:01):
prove arson. But again, everyone was on the take, so
it was kind of just understood that it was burned
down because Schmidt wouldn't sell well. Plus also, right after
the fire, Mo Deletes came and said you want to
sell now? And uh that was it. Mo Deletes now
own the Beverly Hills Country Club and with that he
basically owned Newport in conjunction with a couple other big
(11:24):
time heavy hitter Cleveland bosses. Yeah, with whatever they're whatever
Cleveland accent is. So you want to take a I
don't know that there is one actually know that you
mentioned it. It's kind of midwestern. Uh, hey, what do
you say, Let's let's go down to Newport and run
the plate. That's a Cleveland accent, I think by way
(11:48):
Steve Bush and me is it's all right, We'll take
that break and we'll we'll come back right after this, Okay, Chuck,
(12:25):
So Mo Deletes and the Cleveland mob have taken over Newport.
And this is when it really becomes like the casino
capital of America. Yeah, it's bustling. People are and this
isn't like, oh I came in from Cleveland or Cincinnati.
People are coming in from the West coast in New
York and Chicago. I think the population was about thirty thousand,
(12:47):
and uh seventy thousand people, you know, more than double
that amount would come in on the weekends to hang
out and see young Jerry Lewis and Frank Sinatra and
Dean Martin. And it was a literal blue print again
for Vegas. They were doing it all. Duke Ellington was playing,
and Marilyn Monroe was there and it was just, uh,
it was quite a scene. Again where in northern Kentucky
(13:14):
and the others. The other thing about it too, is
there was no legalized gambling in Kentucky. This was all
just flouting the law. And the reason why because everybody
was on the take. They just looked the other way.
And it was the casino Capital of America was located
in a state that didn't have legalized gambling. Yeah, so
(13:34):
so it wasn't like this is a a back room
poker game like they were literal casinos that they got
away with it, and eventually, you know, of course the
feds are going to take note, and the American Municipal
Association uh started complaining to the federal government and said, hey,
we got a real organized crime problem in this country.
(13:55):
So that Cafalbre Committee that you were talking about earlier,
it was a stab bush by the Senate. These big
televised hearings. They trotted out everyone, including deletes, including Frank
Costello and people like that. And here's the thing, it
kept going that had no effect on shutting Newport down.
(14:16):
This was in nineteen or fifty, and throughout the fifties
it was still booming. Yeah. One of the reasons why
they were able to get away with this was this
was before even the FBI would admit that there was
a national crime syndicate of organized crime. Like Up to
the like late fifties, the general consensus among law enforcement,
(14:39):
at least officially, was that it was all just local
hoods and thugs and you know, criminals. But there was
certainly no organized crime that didn't exist. Even after the
ki father Um Committee like revealed like, no, these people
wh are in touch with one another and they're all
mobbed up like this does exist, it still didn't quite take.
It wasn't until the Appalachian me of nineteen fifty seven
(15:01):
in Appalati to New York, where they literally caught a
hundred mob bosses from around the country in Cuba and
Italy meeting to figure out how to organize their crime better.
The people, including the FBI, were finally like, okay, fine,
there's organized crime. But that's one way that they were
able to get away with this is because they just
refused to accept that this was an organized crime syndicate. Yeah,
(15:25):
which it very much was. Uh. And it played out
in Newport in ways that you would expect in the
nineteen fifties. They're homicide rate and you know this, you know,
pretty small place was four times the national average. Uh.
There were a lot of people that just vanished. Basically.
Dave introduced me to a new term called the Newport nightgown,
(15:46):
which was when you were wrapped up in chains and
thrown off a bridge. Uh. There was a reporter in
fifty seven that counted three hundred sex workers per mile
in Newport And eventually nineteen six one rolls around and
a football player, former player from Notre dame in the
Browns there in Cleveland named George Raderman ran for sheriff
(16:09):
in Newport as a reform candidate. Okay, you know that reference?
No is that from No No, No, no, No. Good
guess though it was Oh brother were art dal the
Coen Brothers great movie where Charles Dunning said, people want
that reform. Oh yeah. It was a good character. Yeah,
(16:31):
he was a southern politician. But this is what uh
Raderman ran for. Basically, I'm going to clean this place up. Uh.
And it was all going fine in his campaign until
he was found naked and passed out in a hotel
room with a sex worker and arrested. But it kind
of came back to sting the mob, didn't it. It
did because they did blood tests on George Raderman, probably
(16:54):
at his insistence. He said that he was drugged, and
it turned out that yes, indeed, he was drugged with
oral hydrate, which is the basis of a mickey a
Mickey finn. If you slip someone and mickey, you give
him chloral hydrate in a drink. And that's what they
did to George Raderman and framed him. The mob, in
conjunction with the local police framed this guy who was
running for sheriff. It is a trope, but this was
(17:16):
actually happening. Drug him and throw him dead naked with
his sex order and take his and call the cops. Exactly.
So um with with black and white picture. It's got
to be black and white photos. Right. So Raderman actually
goes on to win the election. He like, he comes
out of this and clears his name, wins the election,
and then all of the national attention that was given
(17:36):
to this incredibly like just like almost mythical thing that
happened to him. Um. Robert Kennedy, who was new as
the U. S. Attorney General, said what is going on
down there? And started sending feds to Newport, and all
of a sudden, the party was over. That's right, The
party was very much over by this town. This was
the sixties, so Vegas was it's earlier days and people
(18:03):
skipped down. Basically, he said, all right, let's go out
there in the sunshine. Uh, Newport is done. And in
the mid nineteen sixties, the Beverly Hills Country Club closed,
but not for good, because, as we will see, it
was revived, which will ultimately lead us to our tragedy. Yeah,
It sounds like a break spot, but it's not because
(18:24):
we just took one, that's right. This is also the
time when the famous song Goodbye Northern Kentucky I'm going
to Las Vegas was written that Inglebert Humperdink or Gordon Lightfoot.
It was a duet. Okay, yeah, yeah, it was a
sea shantie that's right, sung into Cleveland accent. Alright. So
(18:45):
then we will enter another character, Dick Schilling Richard Chilling Jr.
He was working at these casinos when he was just
a kid and eventually rose up to like management and
in the late sick season sixty nine, when Newport wasn't
doing great, he had the foresight to buy this abandoned property,
(19:07):
the Beverly Hills Supper and renamed it the Beverly Hills
Supper Club. This time, I was like, I'm going to
restore this um giant, giant facility. I mean, like, the
more we looked into this, that video you sent me
that kind of lays out the not the schematic, but
the floor plan. It's unbelievable how big this place was.
(19:31):
Like they would have half a dozen wedding parties going
on at this and the same night in addition to
the thousand seat to Frank Sinatra. Yeah, in the other room,
like it was nuts and it was really lavishly done.
Like Dick Schilling like did a really good job bringing
this thing back and put it back on the map again.
(19:53):
The thing is is that long standing tradition of a
legitimate business owner buying the place, fixing it up, and
uh being unwilling to sell it to the mob, who
in short order turned around and burn it down. Um,
that happened again, just like a year after he revamped it,
right before he was able to open, and amazingly, Dick
(20:14):
Schilling said, no, I'm doing this, stop at mob. You're
not gonna You're not gonna deter me and the mobs
and fine, fine, go ahead and open and he did
in and you know, in just a few years it
was it was like I think they called it the
show place of the nation, a supper club in northern Kentucky. Uh.
(20:36):
And it's like, how many times can this place burn down?
And I guess the answer is three at least. Yes,
Uh and big thanks to we need to mention Dave
used to book for this research by a man named
Peter Bronson, who wrote easily I would say, the quintessential
book on the Beverly Hill Supper Club Fire. Uh and
(20:59):
Northern Kentucky Forbidden Fruit. Colon since Cities Underworld in the
supper Club Inferno. And was that who it was in
the video that you said to No, there's another guy
named Robert Webster who was in that video. I sent tune.
He wrote another definitive book on it, um called the
the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire, The Store the Untold
(21:20):
story behind Kentucky's greatest tragedy. And it's really exhaustive too.
Apparently it's got five years of research behind it as well.
Colon everything that Bronson guy missed. Right, they're famously feuding
with each other to this day. They keep burning down
one another supper clubs. Oh no, no, no, alright, So
this thing, like you said, opening seventy burned, reopened in
(21:41):
seventy one. Chilling was not to be deterred. And uh,
it was a big deal. And Frank Sinatra came back
even he was like that place is open again. All right,
I'm back. You can still get a flight into Cincinnati, right. Uh.
Ella Fitzgerald played their Red Fox, The Righteous Brothers. It was.
It was again a big deal, and such a big
(22:04):
deal that they would routinely um over sell and overpacked
that place out. So I saw, this is under dispute.
So I think Robert Webster in particular, he chalked reports
of that up to poor reporting, early reporting after the fire,
that they routinely flaunted the building capacity, the fire marshal's
(22:28):
capacity um number. I don't know that that's necessarily true,
but it posses though. But no, but they they were.
They said that there was some minor um violations, but
nothing that costs anyone in their lives. So that to
that tells me right there that no, they weren't doing
any major violations like over capacity crowding. Okay, And it
(22:51):
was a huge place too. It was so mind bogglingly
big that I think people were like, oh, there's people there,
obviously it's over capacity. Well, I mean I think they were.
They said there were people in that one room, yeah,
where the main stage was, which was that was a
sweet looking, uh place. I mean this the decor in
(23:12):
this place was awesome. Alright. So Memorial Day weekend is
obviously going to be a big deal at a place
like this, and it was certainly the case in nineteen
seventy seven. John Davidson was the headliner that night. John Davidson,
who would later make noise in the eighties for guys
(23:33):
like us as a co host of a show called
Real People. Isn't that right? That's incredible? Okay, Real People
was the other one. Yeah, it was the downmarket version
or maybe the upmarket version of Real People. I think
that's incredible. It was just that was the one with
Tarkenton and Kathy Rick I think, yeah. Remember she always
(23:56):
came out wearing a beard of bees like every episode.
I just remember the guy. I remember two guys. There
was one guy that could catch arrows. That was Kathy Rigby.
That was that would bring on people to do this
kufas uh. And then the other guy. I think I
even remember his name for some reason. It's funny how
these things stick with you as an adult from when
(24:17):
you were a kid. I think he was the Yogi Kudu.
He was the guy that could fold himself and put
him in a tiny, little clear cube. That was Kathy
Rigby too. You were a very confused young man. I'm
gonna have to look that up. I better. I think
it was Yogiku do Um, so, Chuck, we kind of
set the stage. Um, Kathy Lee Crosby, Oh nice, Okay,
(24:39):
good Cathy Rigby. It was a gymnast, all right. I'm
glad I said that, but I was thinking of Kathy
Lee Crosby. I just had the name wrong with you,
but that's who I was thinking of. At any rate,
we've set the stage for this seven night at the
Beverly Hill Supper Club. Yep. John Davidson's kind of go
on apparently shaving backstage at this moment, and I say,
(24:59):
we take a little break, leave John Davidson to his shaving,
and come back and really talk about the fire. All right,
(25:34):
you missed a spot, John, Yeah, imagine like shaving right
before we go on stage. I'd be like I would
nick myself and I'd come out bleeding, like your face
isn't supposed to bleed when you are entertaining. You know.
I'm so glad I don't shave. I hated shaving. I
don't like it either. Yeah, I didn't like shaving. So
John Davidson apparently loved to shave, do it five times
(25:57):
a day. He liked to come out there with a clean,
clean clothes, shaved who were the two comedians that were
opening up for him, Kethy Rig It was in the video,
but I don't remember now. Peter and McDonald. They were
a comedy duo plus a ventriloquist act on tops of
everyone back then had a had a dummy at their disposal. Yeah,
(26:19):
and but also I think they were kind of like,
we're kind of funny, we need to somehow, we're not
funny enough to just be a comedy duo, right, No
shade towards the carrot top because he will beat me
up now, Oh dude. Yeah, So all right, this the
club is packed out the um there was a wedding
(26:39):
receptions going on, and what was called the Zebra Room,
Like you said, the cab cabernet room. I'm sorry, the
cabaret room, but the curtains could make it called the
cabernet room for sure. And all the wine you couldn't
me Um. I bet they were serving some usty supermanty
in that joint. Uh they they that was where Davidson was.
(27:03):
But the point is there was just there was activity
all over this place such that if there was a fire,
like we will soon see, the other part of the
facility wouldn't even know what was going on. No, not
at all. Um, there I saw that there was essentially
three thousand people in that building at the time, in
(27:24):
the complex, I should say, But it's not like it
was a bunch of different buildings. It was one big
building with a bunch of huge rooms. So, um, yes,
so there's three thousand people there on this this what
was this Saturday night? I think Friday night that was
So there were three thousand people there, and um, there
was a wedding party, one of the like half dozen
(27:45):
wedding parties that were celebrating that day. Um, we're in
the Zebra room. And they left, they were done, their
wedding party was over, and I think a couple of
servers came in to get some some trades I think
out of the place and noticed that there was a
thing of smoke that was kind of bunching up in
the back of the room. And they're like, well, that's
(28:07):
kind of odd, and they went and got um Dick
Schilling's son, Rick, who came in with a fire extinguisher.
But by the time he got there, apparently it was
spreading pretty quickly, and it was made even worse by
a bus boy whose name has lost to history or
at the very least day didn't um use his name
who opened the doors to the Zebra room to kind
(28:29):
of help put the fire out, but instead that had
the exact opposite effect. Yeah, the whole backdraft effect. All
that oxygen entering the room basically made I mean, it
didn't explode, but it did not explode. Like everything in
that room all of a sudden was on fire and this, uh,
that was really really black smoke. Um. We'll talk a
(28:52):
little bit later about what all was in it, but
it was incredibly noxious, as you would expect from a
lavishly decorated place in late night, all manner of like
terrible plastics and and fabrics that were terrible when burned. Um.
(29:12):
So the Zebra rooms on fire, and apparently the um
when the flames kind of burst in the Zebra room,
it moved really quickly up the hall of mirrors, which
will become suspicious later on, and it's moving towards the
cabaret room. Well, there was a I saw sixteen year
old This says eighteen year old. Regardless, there was a
(29:34):
teenage bus boy working there and he heard didn't see anything,
He just heard over the grapevine that there was a
fire in the Zebra room and he had the wherewithal
to go on stage interrupting the great Teeter and McDonald
during their comedy act, asked them for the microphone and
very calmly said, folks, there's a fire in an adjoining room.
(29:58):
It's nothing to panic about, but we all need to leave.
So there are exits here and here. Please go ahead
and make your way to the exits. And about a
third to a half of the crowd laughed and clapped
because they thought that Walter Bailey was part of Teter
McDonald's comedy and Teeter and McDonald said, man, we need
to steal that and added to our act later on
(30:19):
because it got a huge response. Yeah, there's no way
that they didn't uh get that ventriloquist thing out and
say who's this dummy when that guy got on stage.
There is no way. But Walter Bailey is a huge
here and there are a lot of heroes and we'll
see but he I mean, imagine being like sixteen to
eighteen years old and without anybody telling you to, like,
(30:40):
just getting on stage, interrupting an act and telling everyone, calmly,
calmly leave. Yeah, everyone across the board says that he
very calmly told everyone, we need to go ahead and
go out the doors. Hats off to Walter Bailey. So
people sort of started to leave. Other people would like,
we're kicking back and drinking their drinks and stuff and
(31:01):
wondering what was going on. And eventually the cabernet room
it became evident when flames and heat and smoke burst
through that entrance door, and exactly what you would think
happened happened, which is people started, uh panicking. They started
(31:21):
trying to get out any way they knew how, which
it turns out was pretty confusing in a big place
like this smoke um. There were two back exits, but
two of the doors pushed out, two of them pulled in. Uh.
They found survivors who were basically crushed against those inward
pulling doors, because you know, once you get to that
(31:43):
door and you have a a rush of people pushing
and you can't even get the door open. So it's
it's that that sad, sad typical seeing you hear about
with a rush of people where a crush happens and
people are stepping on one another trying to get out.
So part of it also, I it was started when
a man in a dinner jacket who was kind of
(32:04):
quickly making his way to that one exit where one
of the doors was closed and the other was open.
He tripped and fell, and a woman very closely behind
him fell on him, and then the people behind her
fell on her, and they just kind of stacked up,
sealing the fate of the people behind them, because the
margin of error in getting out of the cabaret room
(32:25):
at that time was razor thin. I saw it. Put
like whether you lived or died depended on what side
of the table you were sitting on and having to
get out of that cabaret room. That's how noxious that
smoke was and how quickly it was killing people who
were overcome. And so when that pile of people started
(32:45):
um piling up by that one exit, there was only
one exit to be had, and that was on the
other side of this thousand person room. So a a
lot died at that blocked exit right there. Yeah, I
think that was um There were several dead ends that
people thought were exits, like hallways that led to closets
(33:06):
and coat closets and things like that. Uh and again,
and you know when this thing is when panic is
set in. There are people everywhere, it's full of smoke.
You're just going in a direction basically at that point. Uh.
And if you see a hallway and you run down
it and you hit a dead end, then that that's
basically it for you in this kind of scenario. Um.
Very sadly, there were people who actually made it outside
(33:30):
only to like collapse and die on the front lawn
because they couldn't get like fresh air into their lungs
soon enough. A lot of people made it out. A
surprising number of people made it out. So bear in
mind there's about three thousand people there and something on
the order of twenty people made it out safely. Yeah,
the vast majority of the people who did die died
(33:52):
at that one exit. Yeah, there were no uh sprinklers
installed and this was not a requirement, so that wasn't negligent.
But it does bear mentioning. Um. And you know, thanks
to people like Walter Bailey and the five firefighters who
rushed to the scene and this thing burned for seven hours.
(34:12):
But uh, I mean, you nail it, man. A hundred
and sixty five people is a lot of people to lose.
But considering how massive this place was and how many
people were in there, um, And it's not like you're
ever prepared to flee a burning building, but I think
out drinking and having a good time after nine, like
(34:32):
half of more probably drunk by that point. Um. It
was just a very tough situation and and I think
they're lucky that more didn't perish. So a hundred victims
were found at that one blocked exit that was blocked
by people, uh, some people who had made it through
that exit. Like you said, it wasn't clear which way
(34:53):
to go. The exits weren't clearly marked. Thirty people were recovered,
um from the hallway off of that ex it, and
then there was a closet off of that hallway that
looked like an exit, but it was just a closet,
and another twenty people were found there. So a hundred
sixty people died. A hundred and fifty of them were
all just uh scattered in this really localized area off
(35:16):
of the cabaret room, right inside of the cabaret room
and right outside of the cabaret room. Yeah, um, the
uh you sent me this video. It was a presentation
and it's well worth watching if you're into this kind
of like even more thorough explanation of the layout of
the place. But it was the what was his name
that wrote that other book, Robert Webster. Yeah, Webster was
(35:38):
presenting and he, you know, at one point in the
video he talks about some of the pictures he was
showing and he was like, you know, I really debated
on what I felt like I could show, uh as
far as how kind of gruesome it got, but he said,
I did choose to show some of this because he's said,
I feel like, you know, people that have never heard
of this need to see a little bit of what
(35:59):
really happened to have its full impact. Um. And it
didn't get too gruesome, but he did show I mean
there were no like close ups, but he did show
shots of people like, you know, dead on the lawn. Um.
I think just kind of drive home how awful it was. Yeah,
for sure, I mean it's it's it looks kind of
like people like the people who were able to be
(36:20):
gotten out, including like the ones like you said, just
collapsed after they made it out themselves, Like they just
looked like they were sleeping. Said this one kid, um
who his name was Bill. He was thirteen at the time,
he was another kind of hero in helping people. Bill Klingenberg,
Um he uh. He said that it looked like people
(36:40):
were just sleeping. Um. And it wasn't until like you realized,
like you, it sunk in that they were dead. You
were looking at a hundred plus dead people just laying
around that it really became just nightmarish. And they moved
people to the nearby National Armory Jim and used it
as a makeshift morgue for families to come and identify people.
(37:04):
And that's that's really worth pointing out. Like the this
is a smallest town I think, like you said, thirty people,
probably less because a lot of people fled to Las
Vegas a decade before, so it was a fairly small town.
And the people who were going there were residents. Um,
they worked there, They m the whole town was essentially
(37:29):
devastated by this fire. One way or another. You were
touched by this fire, whether you lost somebody directly, or
you knew someone who lost somebody, or you knew someone
who was psychologically damaged now for having survived it. It
was Um, it was. It's it's just hard to overstate
what a big deal it was. Not just nationally, but
especially in this area where it happened. Yeah. I mean
(37:51):
there were another hundred and sixteen that suffered severe injuries, um,
obviously from from the burns and the smoke inhalation. Uh.
So the question then is, did was this arson? Did
the mob do this? Yet? Again? Uh? And depending on
who you ask, they will say it's either officially undetermined,
(38:12):
which it is officially um or um. If you're the
author of that first book, Bronson, he will say, no,
this was absolutely the mob. Um. There were six official investigations.
The first one was obviously ordered by the governor of
Kentucky at the time, Julian Carroll, and said it was
likely electrical and nature and blamed on aluminum wiring. But
(38:37):
that zebra room where it started was bulldozed the next day. Uh.
Supposedly to get um more bodies out there and recover
more more people, but um, who knows. Some people contend
that it was raised as part of the cover up.
They certainly couldn't do the investigation any further investigations like
they wanted to after that, So that bulldozing happened by
(38:59):
director order of Julie and Carol, the the governor of Kentucky,
which is a really weird thing to do. And um,
some authors, I think Bronson also Robert Webster is basically
like that guy was so mobbed up it's not even funny.
The upshot of this is like we've entered into this
period or this this realm where we're like, well, these
(39:20):
are conspiracy theories. The area was so mob influenced and
it has such a history of things burning down because
of arson that it's really it's not far fetched at all.
This isn't just you know, local residents trying to make
sense of something really psychologically damaging. Uh. This really like
(39:42):
these are historians and local, like longtime journalists who are
writing books saying like, yeah, the governor literally covered up
this fire that killed a hundred and sixty five people
that was set under orders from the mob. Yeah there was.
There was an annual major nightclub five are every year
for seven straight years in northern Kentucky. Uh this was
(40:06):
the most deadly, so it got the most news. But
for seven straight years from seventy to seventy seven, one
of these nightclubs burned to the ground. Uh. And it's
that's not coincidence, you know. Um, there was like we said,
a grand jury investigation into um Dick Chilling and whether
or not he was negligent in any way. Uh. They
(40:28):
said that at least the findings of the grand jury
was that he clearly violated the fire code, but not
to a criminal degree. Uh. And as Bronson put it,
basically because apparently the fire marshals, they're like, well, it's
really their fault, and then they're pointing fingers and Bronson
the author eventually said everyone was guilty. So nobody was guilty,
(40:50):
which sometimes is how those things go down. Yeah, So,
like you said, the cause remains undetermined. It was ruled
in accident. A lot of people say, no, this was arson,
and there were um, there were people who worked at
UM the supper club who came forward afterward, because, like
you said, a half dozen investigations were launched. So these
people were either spoken to or they came forward on
(41:12):
their own accord and said, hey, there was some really
weird stuff going on at the supper club in the
in the days and weeks leading up to this UM
including there are a couple of guys who were found
in the basement laundry room right below the Zebra room,
who caused an explosion a week before the fire, and
these two guys said that they were working on the
(41:33):
air conditioning and told the hostess UM to leave, go ahead,
get out of here, which is not something that air
conditioning repair people say to the people who are working
there very frequently. What else There was an FBI memo
apparently a couple of weeks before the fire that said
an anonymous tipster M heard I'm sorry, I had conversations
(41:53):
with a stranger on a plane who predicted that it
would be burned down. UM. And that could have been
a real thing, or it could have been just like, hey,
that places burned twice, it'll burn again. So I kind
of put that one in the maybe category personally. Uh.
What else? UM? There was a an employee who said that, UM,
(42:14):
she overheard a heated discussion UM where two men wanted
to buy the supper club and she said that, UM,
no one followed up on the tip and that she's
received threatening phone calls to telling telling her to keep
quiet about that. And then also this one was I
think multiple people said that they saw men that they
couldn't identify wiping down the walls of the Hall of
(42:36):
Mirrors with some weird smelling liquid. On the day of
the fire, I remember the Zebra Um room caught fire,
but then the fire spread very quickly up the hall
of mirrors to the cabaret room. And apparently there was
another fire in nineteen where UM investigators found that the
Pink Pussycat Lounge in Newport had been saturated in lubri
(43:00):
can oil to help use as an accelerant, and it's
entirely possible this was used as well in this There's
other stuff too. If you watch that Robert Webster presentation
I think on YouTube, it's the same title of his
book The Beverly Hills Supper Club colin The Untold Story
Behind Kentucky's Worst Tragedy UM. He says that there were
(43:20):
like timers found in the basement underneath the Zebra Room,
that the wiring had been ripped out from plugs and
put into outlets, and that essentially the the upshot of
this of people who believe that this was arson, or
may even actually know for a fact it was arson,
that it was not meant to happen on that Saturday night,
(43:42):
that it was supposed to happen on Sunday morning, and
that the two goons who actually set up the timers
set some to PM rather than a M and caused
this massive tragedy. Oh and that it was supposed to
have been just burned to the ground with no one there. Yeah,
because typically if you burned down a business and night
club something like that in Northern GA, not trying to
murder people. No, you did it on a Sunday morning. Basically,
(44:06):
I think there was one employee to that reported that
they saw John Davidson shaving backstage. He was he caused
a spark. Uh. So that is the story. There was
one little um a bit here at the end that
Dave included that it was also notable in legal terms
(44:26):
historically because it was the first um disaster case that
ended up having a class action mass tort lawsuit applied.
There was a lawyer named Stan Chesley who would later
be known as a Master of Disaster, who got all
these claims together more than three victims, into a class
action suit against the aluminum wiring industry. Uh. And even
(44:50):
though that was never proven as the reason for the fire,
they did have to admit that they knew that the
wire could catch fire from overheating, and the jury awarded
bucks and damages and I think the families received about
thirty million dollars. Yeah, and I think that actually was
the beginning of the end for aluminum wiring. Um. The
(45:11):
there's still like ongoing litigation over it. So UM, you know,
we talked largely about Newport, but um, the supper club
itself was up Highway twenty seven or I guess down
Highway twenty seven in Southgate, just outside of Newport, and
um that's hollow ground to the people in that area.
But it was recently sold. The entire site was sold
(45:32):
to a developer who intended to put like condos in
an assisted living facility and stuff on it. And so
there's been a bunch of lawsuits saying like, no, don't
build at all, or you can build, but you just
can't build on the side of the supper club, or
you can build inside the supper club, you just can't
build over the cabaret room where most of the deaths occurred.
And I can't quite tell if the if the project
(45:53):
is moving forward or if it's just stalled out right now,
or what they're going to do, but I believe that
they put m Morial up where the cabaret room is,
or if they haven't yet. They're going to very soon.
All this news was like, oh, well that's good. Yeah,
so there's still and apparently there's there's people convinced that
(46:14):
there are still remains on the site. Um, and I
guess there. I saw a picture taken in the woods
and there's a burned like cocktail tray um in in
the woods. And this is like a picture taken in
like two thousand eight or nine or something like that.
So they're like, there's still stuff in the woods. So
it really is hollow ground for sure. Yeah, you got
(46:35):
anything else? No, this is a story I've never heard.
And uh, I guess Dave thought of it, so I'm
glad he did. Yeah, way to go, Dave. Thanks for
this one. Uh And since I said way to go Dave,
that means, of course, everybody, it's time for listener mail.
This is about avocado Toast. Hey, guys, love the show.
(46:56):
I've been working my way through the bad catalog as
I'm doing some d i y work on our house.
You have saved my sanity. But I wanted to address
Josh's comment about the relatively recent hipster fascination with toast.
Giving us avocado Toast is a correction. Now it's not
a correction. Okay, great, I love this one. Yeah, this
is just a little I guess what thing? Hey, guys,
(47:18):
So my dad has mashed an avocado onto toast and
added salt and pepper since I was a kid in
the n uh It's funny. It seems like a very
seventies dad thing to do. And then with a kid
going like why do you do and and he's like, oh,
it's delicious, He's like, leave me alone and get back
to your macro main As a matter of fact, I'm
not a big avocado fan in general, but I still
(47:39):
love that version of avocado toast. And just in case
you're wondering, my dad was not a foodie. Far from it.
Kate Hamburger steak and microwave vegetables every night for dinner
for decades. My siblings and I used to joke that
his biography should be called beyond practicality. I grew up
in San Diego, which I think grows more avocados and
anywhere else in the US, so we could usually just
(48:01):
get them cheaply in season. I bet your dad was
stealing them from the neighbor's yard, would be my guess.
I just want to let you know that some of
us have been Avocado Toast enthusiasts more than fifty years.
Thanks again for keeping me entertained and educated with the show.
It's fantastic. I really can't thank you enough. And that
is from Cookie Davis. Nice Cookie. First of all, awesome name. Secondly,
(48:25):
thanks for the story. I appreciate it. And then third day,
I have a question for Cookie or anybody you can answer.
It is a hamburger steak, just like a hamburger without
the button. Is that right? Yeah? I used to, uh,
when I was a line cook when I was believe
it or not, thirteen years old at JJ's barbecue. Yeah,
(48:45):
I would. I would cook the grittled bread, garlic bread
and the hamburger steaks. And hamburger steak is just ground
beef shaped like a New York strip and that's all
it is. So it's not like round like a hamburger.
I guess comple you conserve it that way. But the
idea is to make it long and rectangular like it's
its steak. And uh, it's really kind of funny, but
(49:07):
you want to hear something funnier. I made one of
those two weeks ago for myself. I got this we
get in our c s A Our c s A Miami.
That's a little when you go to the some parking
lot and a bunch of farmers partner hippies give you
a bag of stuff. Yeah, or go up. What's the
(49:28):
c s A. I think it's called a c s
A co Op Surprise r vark. But they got this
really delicious local, locally raised, humanely raised ground beef and
it's delicious, like the most noticeable difference you could imagine
(49:49):
from like something you would get in a grocery store.
And I was like, you know what, I don't have
anything else here in the house, so I'm gonna make
some veggies and make a hamburger steak. So I've been
making some really great recipes from your friend, uh Kenji
Lopez all delete he is. That guy is just amazing.
(50:09):
I'm a big fan of now. Yeah, he's the best,
and I'm not sure how much we can mention him
and be ignored. But here's yet another. Yeah, I was
gonna say, if he's a friend of the show and
doesn't know it, yeah, exactly, but yeah, it's um. I
think I made the carne asada. I can't remember the
name of the recipe, but it was like the best
carne asada or something like that. It was so easy
(50:30):
but so good. And it all comes down to like
doing your own stuff, like rather than using ground cuman,
like buying human whole human like seeds, toasting them and
then putting them in like a grinder. Sounds like a lot,
it's actually really easy and it produces like just amazing stuff.
Or like using like whole dried chilies, um and then
(50:54):
reconstituting them, like just just little things like that that
maybe you're like an extra step that makes it just
a nor of this world of difference. It's almost as
if eating real whole foods is the better way. Almost chuck. Almost.
He's a food scientist. He knows his stuff beyond chef um. Uh,
just bake a batch of his chocolate chip cookies and
(51:16):
see me in the morning. Oh. By the way, I know,
I told everybody about um Sally's baking addictions chocolate brown
butter chocolate chip cookies, and I I went to go
look at the recipe um to see about browning butter again.
And in the comments there's like ten people are like
Josh from stuff you Should Know set me here. It
was like weird, like bizarre thing because I wasn't expecting
(51:38):
it at all. But the upshot of it is I
tried Sally's Baking Addiction brown butter sugar cookies. They may
be even better than the brown butter chocolate chip cookies.
So if you tried the chocolate chip cookies, please, I
beseech you go make the sugar cookies too. Yeah, and
trunk and chocolate chip cookies. Okay, we'll try them all.
I've got no problem with that. They're all good. You
(52:01):
got anything else? Nothing, I'm just starving now. Who was
that cookie that wrote in? That was Cookie? Yeah? Cool? Great? Well,
if you want to be like Cookie and get us
going about cookies, you can send us an email to
stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts
(52:24):
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff you Should know a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is
stuff you should know about Northern Kentucky, that's right, which
(00:21):
was in the nineteen thirties and forties the casino capital
of the United States. It was the Vegas of the
United States before Vegas and fifties too. Even it's hard
to believe I've never knew any of this. So much
of this is very cinematic. I was just trying to
(00:43):
work out how to tell the story in a movie
without doing flash forwards and flashbacks. But that's probably how
you would have to do it. So I grew up
in Northern Ohio, which is not that far from Northern Kentucky,
on the other end of Ohio from it, because the
area we're talking about just across the river from Cincinnati. Um,
(01:04):
And I guess I had heard of this before. It's
one of those things where I can't remember if my
mind is telling me that I had a memory before
I actually had a memory, Like I didn't really have one,
I just want to think I did. It might be
one of those scenarios but regardless, it is like a huge,
huge piece of northern Kentucky southern Ohio history. And in fact,
(01:25):
the more you learn about it, if you were alive
and sentient, you know, in the um mid to late seventies,
it was a national thing. Like it was a really
big deal that this happened, this Beverly Hill supper club
fire that we're going to talk about today. Yeah, it
was definitely one of the worst, um sort of entertainment
(01:46):
club fires in US history. I would have to look
at numbers. I mean, it's probably one of the deadliest
fires in US history because a hundred and sixty five
people died in horrific fashion obvious, See, dying by fire
is always horrific. But this was as bad as it gets, um,
and I didn't know anything about it. So a big
(02:07):
thanks to you for uh commissioning this from Dave Rouse,
my friend, you did No, I didn't. I didn't commission this.
I didn't either. We're gonna have to this. May be
occasionally Dave will say like, hey, have you heard of
this cool thing? And we'll say, oh, yeah, just that
sounds great. So that may have been one of these
(02:29):
because I didn't know about this I don't think. What
day is it? Uh? It is Tuesday? I think, are
we Is this a job? Am I dreaming? You're like
that kid David on the way home from the dentist?
Is this real? All right? So let's go to Newport,
Kentucky in the way back machine. We haven't pulled that
(02:51):
thing out in a while, so let's dust it out.
That's fired up through the wiring, so I'll have to
hot wire it. Luckily, I'm good at that. So let's
get it fired up and let's go back to the
nineteen twenties Prohibition era Northern kentuckt Okay, here we are,
(03:16):
Chuck and uh. It turns out that despite prohibition being
in full force, UM liquors really really easy to get,
especially especially because there was a loophole in the Volstad
Act that said, and I know we talked about this
in the Prohibition episode UM that said that if you
(03:37):
UM are making alcohol for medicinal use, you can't. You
have to have a huge license. Each bottle has to
be bonded by the government. You can't be it's got
to be a hundred proof on the nose. There is
a bunch of like criteria, but you could legally produce
um alcohol. And there was a guy named George Remus
(03:57):
who who was a lawyer. He also was a pharmacist
by trade, but he had been defending all sorts of
bootleggers in Chicago and realized, man, there's a lot of
money in bootlegging. So I saw that. He did a
little research, found out that of the legal booze producing
the United States was coming out of the Cincinnati area,
and he moved over there and said, I'm going to
(04:19):
get into organized crime. And boy did he ever. Yeah,
he was living in Chicago at the time, and if
you're leaving the organized crime in Chicago to go to Cincinnati,
then he must have some good insider information, and indeed
he did. He was known after he made that move
as a king of the bootleggers because he would um
(04:41):
and you know, it's a great scam. He would manufacture
this quote unquote medicinal whiskey and then he would have
a setup where his guys would steal the truck, hijack
the truck, and then sell it. And this money number
is staggering because it says at one point this guy
was making forty million dollars a year in the nineteen twenties. Yeah,
(05:04):
it's about nine hundred million dollars today, So I mean
that's that made him probably one of the wealthiest people
in the United States if he would have been able
to keep the you know, that operation up, But of
course he wasn't for sure. So if you were a
politician or um, a police chief or even probably a
local cop in the area, it made you pretty wealthy too.
(05:27):
Because one of the reasons why he set up in
northern Kentucky's, particularly in Newport, was because you could pay
people off a lot easier. It was a small town.
You could basically make it your fiefdom. And that's what
George Remis did. And you're right he Um. He got
caught pretty quickly, I think, um within just a few
years of setting up this organized crime syndicate. UM. And
(05:50):
I just a little aside on him. He was really interesting.
He had a sellmate in jail who turned out to
be an FBI agent, not an informant, and actual agent
who has planted there. The agent found out about all
the money that Remus had that his wife control that
was in her name. The guy left the jail, quit
(06:11):
the FBI, and started an affair with Remus's wife, Imogene,
and then talked her into basically like selling off all
his stuff and funnel money from her. So the FBI
guy robbed and blind. Remus was so mad that when
he got out of prison, he he tracked down his
wife and shot her in public in broad daylight. Did
(06:32):
he get pinched for that? He got pinched. He was
convicted but found not guilty and reason of insanity, was
taken to UM Sanitarium right sanatorium ortarium, I can't remember
um a mental hospital, and then, because he was a lawyer,
used the prosecutor's reasoning that he wasn't insane to get
(06:53):
himself released from the actual UM, the mental hospital, and
became a freeman very quickly. Boy, he knew all the angles,
Yeah he did. And also one other thing about him
is that it's pretty much a certainty that Jay Gatsby
from the Great Gatsby was based on George D. Remus
because he had met um F Scott Fitzgerald at some point. Yeah,
(07:13):
and probably through some pretty wild parties would be my guests.
But he didn't drink or smoke. Well, I don't, well
did Gatsby here? I could think gets to be drinks
something yeah, I um, alright, so it's he's in jail.
But by this time he had established such an operation
there in northern Kentucky that a little industry of sleeves
(07:36):
grew up around it. Uh, kind of a red light district,
is how Dave put it. And this is where we
get to the birth of what was then called the
Beverly Hills Country Club. Uh. There was a guy named
Peachman who now factors in the story, who used to
be a driver for Remus and in seven he bought
this old roadhouse outside of Newport, Newport perched upon a
(07:58):
hill and and and basically renovated it into a casino,
and a really nice one. They had casinos there, but
they were they were called bust out joints. They were
kind of again, they were kind of sleazy places to go.
And the Beverly Hills Country Club was what was known
as a carpet joint, and it was a it was
a nice place. It was it was the blueprint for
(08:21):
what ended up being Las Vegas. Like a nice place
where you could go and you could gamble, and you
get a dinner and some drink and even see a show. Yeah.
So the thing about that is yes, it was. The
whole jam was kind of sleazy. In fact, Newport earned
the nickname Since City back in the thirties. And again,
Las Vegas is a glimmer in anybody's eye at this point.
(08:44):
It's a it's a tumble wheat. No like Newport is
Las Vegas and Atlantic City wrapped into one. And if
you were a tourist like you were, you were totally fine.
You were safe. The streets were clean, like nobody was
gonna mess with you because it was so fully mob run.
But it was mob run by a bunch of like
different disparate people who used to work with George Remus
(09:07):
and the Cleveland mob that led by Moe Deletes, who
went on to help found Las Vegas. He was one
of the original founders. He said, I want this action.
This is like just off the border of Cincinnati. Were
in Cleveland. We're going to get in on this. And
he moved in on Newport and started buying up casinos
around town. Delete Deletes, that's what I saw. Oh really,
(09:31):
I know. I want to say dallots, but it's not dallots.
It it's delightful as what it is. If you look
at uh deletes, Uh he looks exactly what you would
think of mobster. Moe Deletes would look like he was
a big time mobster. Like he was one of the
ones that was grilled by the Kaffer Committee. He was
(09:55):
one of the ones that that helped found Las Vegas
years later, right, right, Yeah, that's what I was saying.
But this was years and years later. And again one
of the reasons Las Vegas was found was because Mo
de Letz was one of the first, like big time
mob guys who showed up in Newport and took over
it was. It was just the blueprint for Vegas later on. Alright,
So Schmidt and again Chuck, I want to just really
(10:17):
drive home. We're talking about northern Kentucky. M hm okay, yeah,
Uh you know how I know that because we said
northern Kentucky like sixty times so far I know. But
it's just still boggles the mind. So Schmidt owns this
Beverly Hills country club, and uh doesn't want to give
it up despite mob pressure. He's like, no, this is
(10:38):
my place. I want to own it. So what looks
like happened as the mom said, fine, we'll burn it down. Uh,
this was not the big fire obviously that came, you know,
forty years later, this was in February. Only one fatality,
very sadly, h five year old girl, the niece of
the club's caretaker, died. And here's the thing. They didn't
(11:01):
prove arson. But again, everyone was on the take, so
it was kind of just understood that it was burned
down because Schmidt wouldn't sell well. Plus also, right after
the fire, Mo Deletes came and said you want to
sell now? And uh that was it. Mo Deletes now
own the Beverly Hills Country Club and with that he
basically owned Newport in conjunction with a couple other big
(11:24):
time heavy hitter Cleveland bosses. Yeah, with whatever they're whatever
Cleveland accent is. So you want to take a I
don't know that there is one actually know that you
mentioned it. It's kind of midwestern. Uh, hey, what do
you say, Let's let's go down to Newport and run
the plate. That's a Cleveland accent, I think by way
(11:48):
Steve Bush and me is it's all right, We'll take
that break and we'll we'll come back right after this, Okay, Chuck,
(12:25):
So Mo Deletes and the Cleveland mob have taken over Newport.
And this is when it really becomes like the casino
capital of America. Yeah, it's bustling. People are and this
isn't like, oh I came in from Cleveland or Cincinnati.
People are coming in from the West coast in New
York and Chicago. I think the population was about thirty thousand,
(12:47):
and uh seventy thousand people, you know, more than double
that amount would come in on the weekends to hang
out and see young Jerry Lewis and Frank Sinatra and
Dean Martin. And it was a literal blue print again
for Vegas. They were doing it all. Duke Ellington was playing,
and Marilyn Monroe was there and it was just, uh,
it was quite a scene. Again where in northern Kentucky
(13:14):
and the others. The other thing about it too, is
there was no legalized gambling in Kentucky. This was all
just flouting the law. And the reason why because everybody
was on the take. They just looked the other way.
And it was the casino Capital of America was located
in a state that didn't have legalized gambling. Yeah, so
(13:34):
so it wasn't like this is a a back room
poker game like they were literal casinos that they got
away with it, and eventually, you know, of course the
feds are going to take note, and the American Municipal
Association uh started complaining to the federal government and said, hey,
we got a real organized crime problem in this country.
(13:55):
So that Cafalbre Committee that you were talking about earlier,
it was a stab bush by the Senate. These big
televised hearings. They trotted out everyone, including deletes, including Frank
Costello and people like that. And here's the thing, it
kept going that had no effect on shutting Newport down.
(14:16):
This was in nineteen or fifty, and throughout the fifties
it was still booming. Yeah. One of the reasons why
they were able to get away with this was this
was before even the FBI would admit that there was
a national crime syndicate of organized crime. Like Up to
the like late fifties, the general consensus among law enforcement,
(14:39):
at least officially, was that it was all just local
hoods and thugs and you know, criminals. But there was
certainly no organized crime that didn't exist. Even after the
ki father Um Committee like revealed like, no, these people
wh are in touch with one another and they're all
mobbed up like this does exist, it still didn't quite take.
It wasn't until the Appalachian me of nineteen fifty seven
(15:01):
in Appalati to New York, where they literally caught a
hundred mob bosses from around the country in Cuba and
Italy meeting to figure out how to organize their crime better.
The people, including the FBI, were finally like, okay, fine,
there's organized crime. But that's one way that they were
able to get away with this is because they just
refused to accept that this was an organized crime syndicate. Yeah,
(15:25):
which it very much was. Uh. And it played out
in Newport in ways that you would expect in the
nineteen fifties. They're homicide rate and you know this, you know,
pretty small place was four times the national average. Uh.
There were a lot of people that just vanished. Basically.
Dave introduced me to a new term called the Newport nightgown,
(15:46):
which was when you were wrapped up in chains and
thrown off a bridge. Uh. There was a reporter in
fifty seven that counted three hundred sex workers per mile
in Newport And eventually nineteen six one rolls around and
a football player, former player from Notre dame in the
Browns there in Cleveland named George Raderman ran for sheriff
(16:09):
in Newport as a reform candidate. Okay, you know that reference?
No is that from No No, No, no, No. Good
guess though it was Oh brother were art dal the
Coen Brothers great movie where Charles Dunning said, people want
that reform. Oh yeah. It was a good character. Yeah,
(16:31):
he was a southern politician. But this is what uh
Raderman ran for. Basically, I'm going to clean this place up. Uh.
And it was all going fine in his campaign until
he was found naked and passed out in a hotel
room with a sex worker and arrested. But it kind
of came back to sting the mob, didn't it. It
did because they did blood tests on George Raderman, probably
(16:54):
at his insistence. He said that he was drugged, and
it turned out that yes, indeed, he was drugged with
oral hydrate, which is the basis of a mickey a
Mickey finn. If you slip someone and mickey, you give
him chloral hydrate in a drink. And that's what they
did to George Raderman and framed him. The mob, in
conjunction with the local police framed this guy who was
running for sheriff. It is a trope, but this was
(17:16):
actually happening. Drug him and throw him dead naked with
his sex order and take his and call the cops. Exactly.
So um with with black and white picture. It's got
to be black and white photos. Right. So Raderman actually
goes on to win the election. He like, he comes
out of this and clears his name, wins the election,
and then all of the national attention that was given
(17:36):
to this incredibly like just like almost mythical thing that
happened to him. Um. Robert Kennedy, who was new as
the U. S. Attorney General, said what is going on
down there? And started sending feds to Newport, and all
of a sudden, the party was over. That's right, The
party was very much over by this town. This was
the sixties, so Vegas was it's earlier days and people
(18:03):
skipped down. Basically, he said, all right, let's go out
there in the sunshine. Uh, Newport is done. And in
the mid nineteen sixties, the Beverly Hills Country Club closed,
but not for good, because, as we will see, it
was revived, which will ultimately lead us to our tragedy. Yeah,
It sounds like a break spot, but it's not because
(18:24):
we just took one, that's right. This is also the
time when the famous song Goodbye Northern Kentucky I'm going
to Las Vegas was written that Inglebert Humperdink or Gordon Lightfoot.
It was a duet. Okay, yeah, yeah, it was a
sea shantie that's right, sung into Cleveland accent. Alright. So
(18:45):
then we will enter another character, Dick Schilling Richard Chilling Jr.
He was working at these casinos when he was just
a kid and eventually rose up to like management and
in the late sick season sixty nine, when Newport wasn't
doing great, he had the foresight to buy this abandoned property,
(19:07):
the Beverly Hills Supper and renamed it the Beverly Hills
Supper Club. This time, I was like, I'm going to
restore this um giant, giant facility. I mean, like, the
more we looked into this, that video you sent me
that kind of lays out the not the schematic, but
the floor plan. It's unbelievable how big this place was.
(19:31):
Like they would have half a dozen wedding parties going
on at this and the same night in addition to
the thousand seat to Frank Sinatra. Yeah, in the other room,
like it was nuts and it was really lavishly done.
Like Dick Schilling like did a really good job bringing
this thing back and put it back on the map again.
(19:53):
The thing is is that long standing tradition of a
legitimate business owner buying the place, fixing it up, and
uh being unwilling to sell it to the mob, who
in short order turned around and burn it down. Um,
that happened again, just like a year after he revamped it,
right before he was able to open, and amazingly, Dick
(20:14):
Schilling said, no, I'm doing this, stop at mob. You're
not gonna You're not gonna deter me and the mobs
and fine, fine, go ahead and open and he did
in and you know, in just a few years it
was it was like I think they called it the
show place of the nation, a supper club in northern Kentucky. Uh.
(20:36):
And it's like, how many times can this place burn down?
And I guess the answer is three at least. Yes,
Uh and big thanks to we need to mention Dave
used to book for this research by a man named
Peter Bronson, who wrote easily I would say, the quintessential
book on the Beverly Hill Supper Club Fire. Uh and
(20:59):
Northern Kentucky Forbidden Fruit. Colon since Cities Underworld in the
supper Club Inferno. And was that who it was in
the video that you said to No, there's another guy
named Robert Webster who was in that video. I sent tune.
He wrote another definitive book on it, um called the
the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire, The Store the Untold
(21:20):
story behind Kentucky's greatest tragedy. And it's really exhaustive too.
Apparently it's got five years of research behind it as well.
Colon everything that Bronson guy missed. Right, they're famously feuding
with each other to this day. They keep burning down
one another supper clubs. Oh no, no, no, alright, So
this thing, like you said, opening seventy burned, reopened in
(21:41):
seventy one. Chilling was not to be deterred. And uh,
it was a big deal. And Frank Sinatra came back
even he was like that place is open again. All right,
I'm back. You can still get a flight into Cincinnati, right. Uh.
Ella Fitzgerald played their Red Fox, The Righteous Brothers. It was.
It was again a big deal, and such a big
(22:04):
deal that they would routinely um over sell and overpacked
that place out. So I saw, this is under dispute.
So I think Robert Webster in particular, he chalked reports
of that up to poor reporting, early reporting after the fire,
that they routinely flaunted the building capacity, the fire marshal's
(22:28):
capacity um number. I don't know that that's necessarily true,
but it posses though. But no, but they they were.
They said that there was some minor um violations, but
nothing that costs anyone in their lives. So that to
that tells me right there that no, they weren't doing
any major violations like over capacity crowding. Okay, And it
(22:51):
was a huge place too. It was so mind bogglingly
big that I think people were like, oh, there's people there,
obviously it's over capacity. Well, I mean I think they were.
They said there were people in that one room, yeah,
where the main stage was, which was that was a
sweet looking, uh place. I mean this the decor in
(23:12):
this place was awesome. Alright. So Memorial Day weekend is
obviously going to be a big deal at a place
like this, and it was certainly the case in nineteen
seventy seven. John Davidson was the headliner that night. John Davidson,
who would later make noise in the eighties for guys
(23:33):
like us as a co host of a show called
Real People. Isn't that right? That's incredible? Okay, Real People
was the other one. Yeah, it was the downmarket version
or maybe the upmarket version of Real People. I think
that's incredible. It was just that was the one with
Tarkenton and Kathy Rick I think, yeah. Remember she always
(23:56):
came out wearing a beard of bees like every episode.
I just remember the guy. I remember two guys. There
was one guy that could catch arrows. That was Kathy Rigby.
That was that would bring on people to do this
kufas uh. And then the other guy. I think I
even remember his name for some reason. It's funny how
these things stick with you as an adult from when
(24:17):
you were a kid. I think he was the Yogi Kudu.
He was the guy that could fold himself and put
him in a tiny, little clear cube. That was Kathy
Rigby too. You were a very confused young man. I'm
gonna have to look that up. I better. I think
it was Yogiku do Um, so, Chuck, we kind of
set the stage. Um, Kathy Lee Crosby, Oh nice, Okay,
(24:39):
good Cathy Rigby. It was a gymnast, all right. I'm
glad I said that, but I was thinking of Kathy
Lee Crosby. I just had the name wrong with you,
but that's who I was thinking of. At any rate,
we've set the stage for this seven night at the
Beverly Hill Supper Club. Yep. John Davidson's kind of go
on apparently shaving backstage at this moment, and I say,
(24:59):
we take a little break, leave John Davidson to his shaving,
and come back and really talk about the fire. All right,
(25:34):
you missed a spot, John, Yeah, imagine like shaving right
before we go on stage. I'd be like I would
nick myself and I'd come out bleeding, like your face
isn't supposed to bleed when you are entertaining. You know.
I'm so glad I don't shave. I hated shaving. I
don't like it either. Yeah, I didn't like shaving. So
John Davidson apparently loved to shave, do it five times
(25:57):
a day. He liked to come out there with a clean,
clean clothes, shaved who were the two comedians that were
opening up for him, Kethy Rig It was in the video,
but I don't remember now. Peter and McDonald. They were
a comedy duo plus a ventriloquist act on tops of
everyone back then had a had a dummy at their disposal. Yeah,
(26:19):
and but also I think they were kind of like,
we're kind of funny, we need to somehow, we're not
funny enough to just be a comedy duo, right, No
shade towards the carrot top because he will beat me
up now, Oh dude. Yeah, So all right, this the
club is packed out the um there was a wedding
(26:39):
receptions going on, and what was called the Zebra Room,
Like you said, the cab cabernet room. I'm sorry, the
cabaret room, but the curtains could make it called the
cabernet room for sure. And all the wine you couldn't
me Um. I bet they were serving some usty supermanty
in that joint. Uh they they that was where Davidson was.
(27:03):
But the point is there was just there was activity
all over this place such that if there was a fire,
like we will soon see, the other part of the
facility wouldn't even know what was going on. No, not
at all. Um, there I saw that there was essentially
three thousand people in that building at the time, in
(27:24):
the complex, I should say, But it's not like it
was a bunch of different buildings. It was one big
building with a bunch of huge rooms. So, um, yes,
so there's three thousand people there on this this what
was this Saturday night? I think Friday night that was
So there were three thousand people there, and um, there
was a wedding party, one of the like half dozen
(27:45):
wedding parties that were celebrating that day. Um, we're in
the Zebra room. And they left, they were done, their
wedding party was over, and I think a couple of
servers came in to get some some trades I think
out of the place and noticed that there was a
thing of smoke that was kind of bunching up in
the back of the room. And they're like, well, that's
(28:07):
kind of odd, and they went and got um Dick
Schilling's son, Rick, who came in with a fire extinguisher.
But by the time he got there, apparently it was
spreading pretty quickly, and it was made even worse by
a bus boy whose name has lost to history or
at the very least day didn't um use his name
who opened the doors to the Zebra room to kind
(28:29):
of help put the fire out, but instead that had
the exact opposite effect. Yeah, the whole backdraft effect. All
that oxygen entering the room basically made I mean, it
didn't explode, but it did not explode. Like everything in
that room all of a sudden was on fire and this, uh,
that was really really black smoke. Um. We'll talk a
(28:52):
little bit later about what all was in it, but
it was incredibly noxious, as you would expect from a
lavishly decorated place in late night, all manner of like
terrible plastics and and fabrics that were terrible when burned. Um.
(29:12):
So the Zebra rooms on fire, and apparently the um
when the flames kind of burst in the Zebra room,
it moved really quickly up the hall of mirrors, which
will become suspicious later on, and it's moving towards the
cabaret room. Well, there was a I saw sixteen year
old This says eighteen year old. Regardless, there was a
(29:34):
teenage bus boy working there and he heard didn't see anything,
He just heard over the grapevine that there was a
fire in the Zebra room and he had the wherewithal
to go on stage interrupting the great Teeter and McDonald
during their comedy act, asked them for the microphone and
very calmly said, folks, there's a fire in an adjoining room.
(29:58):
It's nothing to panic about, but we all need to leave.
So there are exits here and here. Please go ahead
and make your way to the exits. And about a
third to a half of the crowd laughed and clapped
because they thought that Walter Bailey was part of Teter
McDonald's comedy and Teeter and McDonald said, man, we need
to steal that and added to our act later on
(30:19):
because it got a huge response. Yeah, there's no way
that they didn't uh get that ventriloquist thing out and
say who's this dummy when that guy got on stage.
There is no way. But Walter Bailey is a huge
here and there are a lot of heroes and we'll
see but he I mean, imagine being like sixteen to
eighteen years old and without anybody telling you to, like,
(30:40):
just getting on stage, interrupting an act and telling everyone, calmly,
calmly leave. Yeah, everyone across the board says that he
very calmly told everyone, we need to go ahead and
go out the doors. Hats off to Walter Bailey. So
people sort of started to leave. Other people would like,
we're kicking back and drinking their drinks and stuff and
(31:01):
wondering what was going on. And eventually the cabernet room
it became evident when flames and heat and smoke burst
through that entrance door, and exactly what you would think
happened happened, which is people started, uh panicking. They started
(31:21):
trying to get out any way they knew how, which
it turns out was pretty confusing in a big place
like this smoke um. There were two back exits, but
two of the doors pushed out, two of them pulled in. Uh.
They found survivors who were basically crushed against those inward
pulling doors, because you know, once you get to that
(31:43):
door and you have a a rush of people pushing
and you can't even get the door open. So it's
it's that that sad, sad typical seeing you hear about
with a rush of people where a crush happens and
people are stepping on one another trying to get out.
So part of it also, I it was started when
a man in a dinner jacket who was kind of
(32:04):
quickly making his way to that one exit where one
of the doors was closed and the other was open.
He tripped and fell, and a woman very closely behind
him fell on him, and then the people behind her
fell on her, and they just kind of stacked up,
sealing the fate of the people behind them, because the
margin of error in getting out of the cabaret room
(32:25):
at that time was razor thin. I saw it. Put
like whether you lived or died depended on what side
of the table you were sitting on and having to
get out of that cabaret room. That's how noxious that
smoke was and how quickly it was killing people who
were overcome. And so when that pile of people started
(32:45):
um piling up by that one exit, there was only
one exit to be had, and that was on the
other side of this thousand person room. So a a
lot died at that blocked exit right there. Yeah, I
think that was um There were several dead ends that
people thought were exits, like hallways that led to closets
(33:06):
and coat closets and things like that. Uh and again,
and you know when this thing is when panic is
set in. There are people everywhere, it's full of smoke.
You're just going in a direction basically at that point. Uh.
And if you see a hallway and you run down
it and you hit a dead end, then that that's
basically it for you in this kind of scenario. Um.
Very sadly, there were people who actually made it outside
(33:30):
only to like collapse and die on the front lawn
because they couldn't get like fresh air into their lungs
soon enough. A lot of people made it out. A
surprising number of people made it out. So bear in
mind there's about three thousand people there and something on
the order of twenty people made it out safely. Yeah,
the vast majority of the people who did die died
(33:52):
at that one exit. Yeah, there were no uh sprinklers
installed and this was not a requirement, so that wasn't negligent.
But it does bear mentioning. Um. And you know, thanks
to people like Walter Bailey and the five firefighters who
rushed to the scene and this thing burned for seven hours.
(34:12):
But uh, I mean, you nail it, man. A hundred
and sixty five people is a lot of people to lose.
But considering how massive this place was and how many
people were in there, um, And it's not like you're
ever prepared to flee a burning building, but I think
out drinking and having a good time after nine, like
(34:32):
half of more probably drunk by that point. Um. It
was just a very tough situation and and I think
they're lucky that more didn't perish. So a hundred victims
were found at that one blocked exit that was blocked
by people, uh, some people who had made it through
that exit. Like you said, it wasn't clear which way
(34:53):
to go. The exits weren't clearly marked. Thirty people were recovered,
um from the hallway off of that ex it, and
then there was a closet off of that hallway that
looked like an exit, but it was just a closet,
and another twenty people were found there. So a hundred
sixty people died. A hundred and fifty of them were
all just uh scattered in this really localized area off
(35:16):
of the cabaret room, right inside of the cabaret room
and right outside of the cabaret room. Yeah, um, the
uh you sent me this video. It was a presentation
and it's well worth watching if you're into this kind
of like even more thorough explanation of the layout of
the place. But it was the what was his name
that wrote that other book, Robert Webster. Yeah, Webster was
(35:38):
presenting and he, you know, at one point in the
video he talks about some of the pictures he was
showing and he was like, you know, I really debated
on what I felt like I could show, uh as
far as how kind of gruesome it got, but he said,
I did choose to show some of this because he's said,
I feel like, you know, people that have never heard
of this need to see a little bit of what
(35:59):
really happened to have its full impact. Um. And it
didn't get too gruesome, but he did show I mean
there were no like close ups, but he did show
shots of people like, you know, dead on the lawn. Um.
I think just kind of drive home how awful it was. Yeah,
for sure, I mean it's it's it looks kind of
like people like the people who were able to be
(36:20):
gotten out, including like the ones like you said, just
collapsed after they made it out themselves, Like they just
looked like they were sleeping. Said this one kid, um
who his name was Bill. He was thirteen at the time,
he was another kind of hero in helping people. Bill Klingenberg,
Um he uh. He said that it looked like people
(36:40):
were just sleeping. Um. And it wasn't until like you realized,
like you, it sunk in that they were dead. You
were looking at a hundred plus dead people just laying
around that it really became just nightmarish. And they moved
people to the nearby National Armory Jim and used it
as a makeshift morgue for families to come and identify people.
(37:04):
And that's that's really worth pointing out. Like the this
is a smallest town I think, like you said, thirty people,
probably less because a lot of people fled to Las
Vegas a decade before, so it was a fairly small town.
And the people who were going there were residents. Um,
they worked there, They m the whole town was essentially
(37:29):
devastated by this fire. One way or another. You were
touched by this fire, whether you lost somebody directly, or
you knew someone who lost somebody, or you knew someone
who was psychologically damaged now for having survived it. It
was Um, it was. It's it's just hard to overstate
what a big deal it was. Not just nationally, but
especially in this area where it happened. Yeah. I mean
(37:51):
there were another hundred and sixteen that suffered severe injuries, um,
obviously from from the burns and the smoke inhalation. Uh.
So the question then is, did was this arson? Did
the mob do this? Yet? Again? Uh? And depending on
who you ask, they will say it's either officially undetermined,
(38:12):
which it is officially um or um. If you're the
author of that first book, Bronson, he will say, no,
this was absolutely the mob. Um. There were six official investigations.
The first one was obviously ordered by the governor of
Kentucky at the time, Julian Carroll, and said it was
likely electrical and nature and blamed on aluminum wiring. But
(38:37):
that zebra room where it started was bulldozed the next day. Uh.
Supposedly to get um more bodies out there and recover
more more people, but um, who knows. Some people contend
that it was raised as part of the cover up.
They certainly couldn't do the investigation any further investigations like
they wanted to after that, So that bulldozing happened by
(38:59):
director order of Julie and Carol, the the governor of Kentucky,
which is a really weird thing to do. And um,
some authors, I think Bronson also Robert Webster is basically
like that guy was so mobbed up it's not even funny.
The upshot of this is like we've entered into this
period or this this realm where we're like, well, these
(39:20):
are conspiracy theories. The area was so mob influenced and
it has such a history of things burning down because
of arson that it's really it's not far fetched at all.
This isn't just you know, local residents trying to make
sense of something really psychologically damaging. Uh. This really like
(39:42):
these are historians and local, like longtime journalists who are
writing books saying like, yeah, the governor literally covered up
this fire that killed a hundred and sixty five people
that was set under orders from the mob. Yeah there was.
There was an annual major nightclub five are every year
for seven straight years in northern Kentucky. Uh this was
(40:06):
the most deadly, so it got the most news. But
for seven straight years from seventy to seventy seven, one
of these nightclubs burned to the ground. Uh. And it's
that's not coincidence, you know. Um, there was like we said,
a grand jury investigation into um Dick Chilling and whether
or not he was negligent in any way. Uh. They
(40:28):
said that at least the findings of the grand jury
was that he clearly violated the fire code, but not
to a criminal degree. Uh. And as Bronson put it,
basically because apparently the fire marshals, they're like, well, it's
really their fault, and then they're pointing fingers and Bronson
the author eventually said everyone was guilty. So nobody was guilty,
(40:50):
which sometimes is how those things go down. Yeah, So,
like you said, the cause remains undetermined. It was ruled
in accident. A lot of people say, no, this was arson,
and there were um, there were people who worked at
UM the supper club who came forward afterward, because, like
you said, a half dozen investigations were launched. So these
people were either spoken to or they came forward on
(41:12):
their own accord and said, hey, there was some really
weird stuff going on at the supper club in the
in the days and weeks leading up to this UM
including there are a couple of guys who were found
in the basement laundry room right below the Zebra room,
who caused an explosion a week before the fire, and
these two guys said that they were working on the
(41:33):
air conditioning and told the hostess UM to leave, go ahead,
get out of here, which is not something that air
conditioning repair people say to the people who are working
there very frequently. What else There was an FBI memo
apparently a couple of weeks before the fire that said
an anonymous tipster M heard I'm sorry, I had conversations
(41:53):
with a stranger on a plane who predicted that it
would be burned down. UM. And that could have been
a real thing, or it could have been just like, hey,
that places burned twice, it'll burn again. So I kind
of put that one in the maybe category personally. Uh.
What else? UM? There was a an employee who said that, UM,
(42:14):
she overheard a heated discussion UM where two men wanted
to buy the supper club and she said that, UM,
no one followed up on the tip and that she's
received threatening phone calls to telling telling her to keep
quiet about that. And then also this one was I
think multiple people said that they saw men that they
couldn't identify wiping down the walls of the Hall of
(42:36):
Mirrors with some weird smelling liquid. On the day of
the fire, I remember the Zebra Um room caught fire,
but then the fire spread very quickly up the hall
of mirrors to the cabaret room. And apparently there was
another fire in nineteen where UM investigators found that the
Pink Pussycat Lounge in Newport had been saturated in lubri
(43:00):
can oil to help use as an accelerant, and it's
entirely possible this was used as well in this There's
other stuff too. If you watch that Robert Webster presentation
I think on YouTube, it's the same title of his
book The Beverly Hills Supper Club colin The Untold Story
Behind Kentucky's Worst Tragedy UM. He says that there were
(43:20):
like timers found in the basement underneath the Zebra Room,
that the wiring had been ripped out from plugs and
put into outlets, and that essentially the the upshot of
this of people who believe that this was arson, or
may even actually know for a fact it was arson,
that it was not meant to happen on that Saturday night,
(43:42):
that it was supposed to happen on Sunday morning, and
that the two goons who actually set up the timers
set some to PM rather than a M and caused
this massive tragedy. Oh and that it was supposed to
have been just burned to the ground with no one there. Yeah,
because typically if you burned down a business and night
club something like that in Northern GA, not trying to
murder people. No, you did it on a Sunday morning. Basically,
(44:06):
I think there was one employee to that reported that
they saw John Davidson shaving backstage. He was he caused
a spark. Uh. So that is the story. There was
one little um a bit here at the end that
Dave included that it was also notable in legal terms
(44:26):
historically because it was the first um disaster case that
ended up having a class action mass tort lawsuit applied.
There was a lawyer named Stan Chesley who would later
be known as a Master of Disaster, who got all
these claims together more than three victims, into a class
action suit against the aluminum wiring industry. Uh. And even
(44:50):
though that was never proven as the reason for the fire,
they did have to admit that they knew that the
wire could catch fire from overheating, and the jury awarded
bucks and damages and I think the families received about
thirty million dollars. Yeah, and I think that actually was
the beginning of the end for aluminum wiring. Um. The
(45:11):
there's still like ongoing litigation over it. So UM, you know,
we talked largely about Newport, but um, the supper club
itself was up Highway twenty seven or I guess down
Highway twenty seven in Southgate, just outside of Newport, and
um that's hollow ground to the people in that area.
But it was recently sold. The entire site was sold
(45:32):
to a developer who intended to put like condos in
an assisted living facility and stuff on it. And so
there's been a bunch of lawsuits saying like, no, don't
build at all, or you can build, but you just
can't build on the side of the supper club, or
you can build inside the supper club, you just can't
build over the cabaret room where most of the deaths occurred.
And I can't quite tell if the if the project
(45:53):
is moving forward or if it's just stalled out right now,
or what they're going to do, but I believe that
they put m Morial up where the cabaret room is,
or if they haven't yet. They're going to very soon.
All this news was like, oh, well that's good. Yeah,
so there's still and apparently there's there's people convinced that
(46:14):
there are still remains on the site. Um, and I
guess there. I saw a picture taken in the woods
and there's a burned like cocktail tray um in in
the woods. And this is like a picture taken in
like two thousand eight or nine or something like that.
So they're like, there's still stuff in the woods. So
it really is hollow ground for sure. Yeah, you got
(46:35):
anything else? No, this is a story I've never heard.
And uh, I guess Dave thought of it, so I'm
glad he did. Yeah, way to go, Dave. Thanks for
this one. Uh And since I said way to go Dave,
that means, of course, everybody, it's time for listener mail.
This is about avocado Toast. Hey, guys, love the show.
(46:56):
I've been working my way through the bad catalog as
I'm doing some d i y work on our house.
You have saved my sanity. But I wanted to address
Josh's comment about the relatively recent hipster fascination with toast.
Giving us avocado Toast is a correction. Now it's not
a correction. Okay, great, I love this one. Yeah, this
is just a little I guess what thing? Hey, guys,
(47:18):
So my dad has mashed an avocado onto toast and
added salt and pepper since I was a kid in
the n uh It's funny. It seems like a very
seventies dad thing to do. And then with a kid
going like why do you do and and he's like, oh,
it's delicious, He's like, leave me alone and get back
to your macro main As a matter of fact, I'm
not a big avocado fan in general, but I still
(47:39):
love that version of avocado toast. And just in case
you're wondering, my dad was not a foodie. Far from it.
Kate Hamburger steak and microwave vegetables every night for dinner
for decades. My siblings and I used to joke that
his biography should be called beyond practicality. I grew up
in San Diego, which I think grows more avocados and
anywhere else in the US, so we could usually just
(48:01):
get them cheaply in season. I bet your dad was
stealing them from the neighbor's yard, would be my guess.
I just want to let you know that some of
us have been Avocado Toast enthusiasts more than fifty years.
Thanks again for keeping me entertained and educated with the show.
It's fantastic. I really can't thank you enough. And that
is from Cookie Davis. Nice Cookie. First of all, awesome name. Secondly,
(48:25):
thanks for the story. I appreciate it. And then third day,
I have a question for Cookie or anybody you can answer.
It is a hamburger steak, just like a hamburger without
the button. Is that right? Yeah? I used to, uh,
when I was a line cook when I was believe
it or not, thirteen years old at JJ's barbecue. Yeah,
(48:45):
I would. I would cook the grittled bread, garlic bread
and the hamburger steaks. And hamburger steak is just ground
beef shaped like a New York strip and that's all
it is. So it's not like round like a hamburger.
I guess comple you conserve it that way. But the
idea is to make it long and rectangular like it's
its steak. And uh, it's really kind of funny, but
(49:07):
you want to hear something funnier. I made one of
those two weeks ago for myself. I got this we
get in our c s A Our c s A Miami.
That's a little when you go to the some parking
lot and a bunch of farmers partner hippies give you
a bag of stuff. Yeah, or go up. What's the
(49:28):
c s A. I think it's called a c s
A co Op Surprise r vark. But they got this
really delicious local, locally raised, humanely raised ground beef and
it's delicious, like the most noticeable difference you could imagine
(49:49):
from like something you would get in a grocery store.
And I was like, you know what, I don't have
anything else here in the house, so I'm gonna make
some veggies and make a hamburger steak. So I've been
making some really great recipes from your friend, uh Kenji
Lopez all delete he is. That guy is just amazing.
(50:09):
I'm a big fan of now. Yeah, he's the best,
and I'm not sure how much we can mention him
and be ignored. But here's yet another. Yeah, I was
gonna say, if he's a friend of the show and
doesn't know it, yeah, exactly, but yeah, it's um. I
think I made the carne asada. I can't remember the
name of the recipe, but it was like the best
carne asada or something like that. It was so easy
(50:30):
but so good. And it all comes down to like
doing your own stuff, like rather than using ground cuman,
like buying human whole human like seeds, toasting them and
then putting them in like a grinder. Sounds like a lot,
it's actually really easy and it produces like just amazing stuff.
Or like using like whole dried chilies, um and then
(50:54):
reconstituting them, like just just little things like that that
maybe you're like an extra step that makes it just
a nor of this world of difference. It's almost as
if eating real whole foods is the better way. Almost chuck. Almost.
He's a food scientist. He knows his stuff beyond chef um. Uh,
just bake a batch of his chocolate chip cookies and
(51:16):
see me in the morning. Oh. By the way, I know,
I told everybody about um Sally's baking addictions chocolate brown
butter chocolate chip cookies, and I I went to go
look at the recipe um to see about browning butter again.
And in the comments there's like ten people are like
Josh from stuff you Should Know set me here. It
was like weird, like bizarre thing because I wasn't expecting
(51:38):
it at all. But the upshot of it is I
tried Sally's Baking Addiction brown butter sugar cookies. They may
be even better than the brown butter chocolate chip cookies.
So if you tried the chocolate chip cookies, please, I
beseech you go make the sugar cookies too. Yeah, and
trunk and chocolate chip cookies. Okay, we'll try them all.
I've got no problem with that. They're all good. You
(52:01):
got anything else? Nothing, I'm just starving now. Who was
that cookie that wrote in? That was Cookie? Yeah? Cool? Great? Well,
if you want to be like Cookie and get us
going about cookies, you can send us an email to
stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts
(52:24):
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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