Rainmakers: Feeding the Pool Food Chain

Lassiter was one of the bigger sharks preying on Whitey.

Norfolk Whitey

Although the action at Cleo's place was rough and heady, it pales in comparison to that of Norfolk, Va., which, during the 1940s, became the greatest action town ever. There, you could find all the top players: Wimpy Lassiter, Marcel Camp, Rags Fitzpatrick, Johnny Irish, Minnesota Fats. I've written previously about the influence of the military during those days - how the shipwrights and the World War II recruits flooded the town with fast money. I've written about the full-blooming bachelor culture. But eyewitnesses also credit a single man for all that action: Charles "Norfolk Whitey" Howard, an excellent pool player, an excellent gambler - and a man unafraid of losing money.

And sweet Jesus, how he lost money. A full 20 years before Cleo Vaughn lost his thousands, Norfolk Whitey lost 10 times that amount. He would gamble on everything: pool, horses, probably even the time of day. "It's pretty well documented that he bet three games of baseball, for $150,000 each, in one day - and lost all three,'' said Bob McKown, an old friend of Whitey's. "He said he wasn't worried about it. He said with the system he had, he'd bounce right back.''

What do we know about Norfolk Whitey? Through interviews with McKown, veteran player George Rood, stakehorse Rusty Miller, Rags Fitzpatrick's widow, Christine Schaffer, and a few others, a picture begins to emerge. First off, Whitey likely made millions through the operation of several speakeasy-style nightclubs. They have been identified variously as "The Commando Club," "The Zam-Zam Club," "Piney Point" or simply "Whitey's."

Those that remember said they included floor shows, wide-open casino gambling, and food. He also may have operated a bookmaking operation and avoided needless grief by paying off the cops. Whitey was said to have drawn $10,000 cash money, each week, from the clubs, through the sale of alcohol, and through his gambling interests. That equates to about a half million a year - again, in 1940s dollars - making Whitey quite wealthy indeed.

It was that money, and the fun-time lure of those speakeasies, that helped attract hundreds of high-rollers to Norfolk. Fats, in his autobiography, "The Bank Shot, and Other Great Robberies," recalls those heady days: "Back then, there were about 300 high rollers all told around Norfolk and when the good times started in the 1940s, Whitey happened to be one of the high rollers himself. But Whitey hit a real hot streak and won enough cash to buy a piece of property about 14 miles out of downtown Norfolk and he built a fabulous joint to accommodate the 300 genuine high rollers and nobody else.

"Whitey ran a very discriminating joint on account he wouldn't allow a sucker near it. He always said suckers were good for one thing: trouble. So by word-of-mouth he let it be known that suckers were not welcome at his place, which was a tremendous arrangement because if you happened to break a guy down to his alligator-skin shoes, you never had to worry that he needed the money to feed a wife and a half-dozen kids. Whitey only skinned his own kind. "Whitey had every known gambling game at his joint and if you happened to be a pool player he even had a special billiard room where you could go broke in quiet and peace with as little pain as possible."

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