Editor’s word: This archival article was first printed on Aug. 5, 2021.
ST. PAUL — When federal regulation enforcement started their crackdown on prostitution and intercourse trafficking within the Midwest within the Nineteen Fifties — setting their sights on a Minneapolis “funhouse” that served as an epicenter of crime — they’d some unlikely allies: the victims themselves.
It started on Thursday, Aug. 14, 1952, when law enforcement officials raided a house in Minneapolis’ Lowry Hill neighborhood the place guests would go to “see a present,” in line with Minneapolis Star Tribune archives. Officer Pat Walling, who led the squad, advised the Star Tribune that he stated he was a businessman entertaining two out-of-town company. The officers had been charged $20 a chunk to witness a “present which, (officers) charged, contained immoral acts.”
Minneapolis police arrested the 4 adults current — Nile Grand Morrison, his spouse Darlene Morrison, Gloria Jean Jordell and Phyllis June Bennett — and charged them with sodomy.
Jordell and Bennett had been each North Dakotans who had been trafficked all through the area. They might show to be useful assets for officers and the U.S. Legal professional’s Workplace within the years to come back, serving as key witnesses in a number of instances whose testimony incriminated a number of women and men who had been trafficking within the area.
By 1956, U.S. Legal professional for Minnesota George MacKinnon’s workplace would convict 110 women and men within the area of violating the Mann Act, a federal regulation prohibiting the transport of girls throughout state traces for “immoral functions.”
On the heart of the Midwest enterprise was an unassuming brick constructing on a avenue nook in northeast Minneapolis: John’s Bar and Funhouse, owned and operated by brothers John and Frank Gawron. When you go to the identical avenue nook right now, you may discover new condo buildings and a more moderen, well-known Twin Cities dangle: Betty Hazard’s Nation Membership.
From 2500 Marshall St. NE, the trafficking enterprise stretched an online tons of of miles in each course, connecting to brothels and pimps in Chicago; LaCrosse, Wisconsin; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Superior, Wisconsin, and extra. Together with John Gawron, Chicagoans Dee Wheeler and Frances Elliot ran the Minneapolis operation.
In March 1953 Jordell and Bennett’s pimps stood trial in federal courtroom. Austin Hatch and Harry Lengthy, who owned the 428 Groveland Ave. home the place the ladies had been arrested for the “present,” had been discovered responsible of transporting the ladies throughout state traces from Minneapolis to La Crosse, violating the Mann Act.
As soon as Hatch and Lengthy had been convicted, the opposite dominoes fell. Seeing Hatch and Lengthy’s convictions, Gawron, Wheeler and Elliot pled responsible to their costs.
At Gawron, Wheeler and Elliot’s sentencing listening to in Could 1953, Federal Choose Gunnar Nordbye mused of Gawron, “It is obscure how a person equivalent to you possibly can turn into concerned in an operation of this sort,” in line with Star Tribune archives.
Gawron was sentenced to two-and-a-half years for his crimes, Wheeler to 4 years and Elliot three.
In April 1953, Jordell got here again to courtroom from her sentence at a Minneapolis workhouse — the place she was serving time for her sodomy conviction — to inform the courtroom the story of how she was pressured into intercourse trafficking. Together with a sufferer named Sally Peters, the ladies described being “plied with liquor, compromised after which ‘blackmailed’ into the lives of prostitution,” the Star Tribune reported. That testimony led to 4 extra convictions of traffickers based mostly in Sioux Falls, Anoka and Minneapolis.
Bennett and Darlene Morrison went on to testify in opposition to Robert Mast, a former police officer in Superior, who was convicted of transporting the ladies between Minnesota and Wisconsin and referring them to work at a brothel in Superior. He claimed he did not understand it was a brothel.
A jury discovered Mast responsible in October 1953, and the Star Tribune reported that as he left the courtroom, he shouted at an FBI agent, “I hope you are happy. You may by no means get something.”
