Civic scandals used to mean something in Seattle. Gunslinger Wyatt Earp paid off City Hall to operate his 1890s gambling joint here. In the 1950s, bar owners were leaving lunch bags of money on their counters for beat cops who threatened to shut them down if they didn't. A half-century later, aging mobster Frank Colacurcio did what he could to keep corruption alive with a political payoff scandal known as Strippergate. Though Colacurcio was later indicted for racketeering and prostitution, he beat that rap this year with a sure-fire defense: sudden death.
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Rick Anderson will read from Seattle Vice at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop (117 Cherry St., 587-5737, seattlemystery.com) on Saturday, November 20 at noon.
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Alas, what passes for scandal today is a city council member rudely signing a piece of paper that the mayor was supposed to sign, but wouldn't. The dust-up did have an underworld aspect—it had to do with Seattle's proposed car tunnel—and conflicted with the mayor's personal vice: a perverse fondness for bicycles. But it was a pitiful turn for a city with such a rich history of shame, dishonesty, and corruption. Our cops used to row people out to the middle of Lake Washington with large metal balls clamped around their necks, and tell them to swim back—or talk. We endured gangland murders and car bombings, and had a steady daisy chain of bribes, kickbacks, and payoffs moving up through the police department to the top floors of City Hall.
As detailed in my new book Seattle Vice (Sasquatch Books, $17.95, out Nov. 1), which is excerpted here, we once had the kind of corruption worth bragging about. And for a good part of a century, it was accepted and expected. As Colacurcio observed, "You go with the flow." And in Seattle sex, violence, and dirty money began flowing about 120 years ago. RICK ANDERSON
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The recorded legacy of Seattle vice and corruption reaches back to saloon impresario John Considine, who helped introduce Seattle to drinks, debauchery, and a risqué belly dancer named Little Egypt in the late 19th century. He memorably battled rival Alexander Pantages for Seattle's vaudeville turf, with both men stealing each other's acts and rising to eventual fame in Hollywood: Considine as a silent-film producer and head of an acting family, and Pantages as a movie mogul and theater-chain owner.
But it was Considine's hidden payments to beat officers that made lesser-known history, ranking among some of Seattle's first street-level bribes. Just as a Colacurcio would do half a century later while dominating his era's vices, Considine offered cops cash to look the other way as he violated Seattle's sin laws. Among the statutes he paid to break was the 1894 "barmaid ordinance." The law prevented women from working where alcohol was served, and Considine clearly needed them at his People's Theater, in what is now Pioneer Square. The "box-house" saloon and card room featured female performers who danced, sang, and serviced a willing crowd, mostly lusty prospectors who spilled into town during the Klondike Gold Rush.
Considine also ran three illegal betting parlors by paying fines and bribing cops under a vice-tolerance policy that would appear, disappear, and reappear in Seattle throughout the next century. His cozy relationship with Seattle Police Chief C. S. Reed allowed him to monopolize the action for a few years until competitors, some formidable, bought in. Among them was gunslinger Wyatt Earp, described in 1899—18 years after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral—by the Seattle Star (a racy Seattle Post-Intelligencer rival that folded in 1947) as "a man of great reputation among the toughs and criminals, inasmuch as he formerly walked the streets of a rough frontier mining town with big pistols stuck in his belt, spurs on his boots and a devil-may-care expression upon his official face." His Union Club betting parlor and saloon at First Avenue and Union Street thrived for more than a year until a citywide crackdown on gambling drove him to San Francisco.
Only months after Earp departed, Considine's joints reopened. He didn't get along as well with the next police chief, so he killed him. In a 1901 showdown, Considine shot the dislikable William Meredith three times after the chief fired at him first, his bullet described in one news report as "scraping along the back of Considine's neck and lodging in the arm of a messenger boy having sarsaparilla at a soda fountain." Considine's actions were deemed self-defense by a jury that took just three hours to decide they didn't like Meredith either.
The police payoff system continued under Charles "Wappy" Wappenstein, Seattle's head cop from 1906 to 1907. He became security chief at Seattle's first World's Fair, the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, held where the University of Washington now stands. He was reappointed chief in 1910 by new mayor Hiram Gill, an early believer in tolerance policies, if not outright corruption. Wappenstein immediately informed the madams of Seattle's thriving brothels that they each owed $10 per harlot per month, payable to him or his beat officers.
Wappenstein had everything under control. Mayor Gill didn't. He left town for a pleasure trip one day, and an acting mayor quickly formed a committee to investigate Seattle's vice. The P-I also investigated and spread the word about City Hall corruption—just as it would again 50 years later, exposing yet another regime of cops and politicians who "tolerated" vice in return for bribes and kickbacks. Gill was tossed out of office by voters in a 1911 recall. The deciding ballots came from women whose right to vote—briefly granted, then taken away in 1887—had only recently been restored. Wappenstein also lost his job, and was indicted by a grand jury.
