Throwback Thursday: Two Credible Ties Between Bowling Green and the Mafia

A few years ago, we reported on the night the College St. bridge nearly burned the rest of Bowling Green to the ground in 1915. A cryptic note found near the bridge blamed Judges Henry Denhardt and Thomas Hines, the Daily News reported. Although we didn’t see the Black Hand signature on the note at the time, we found it again about a month ago while working on another project. Here’s the story of Bowling Green’s possible mob ties.

Sam, “Mooney” or “Mo”, Giancana is said to have had the CIA and President John F. Kennedy in his pocket. His own half-brother, Chuck, names six other presidents going back to Calvin Coolidge as Mafiosi in his biography. In the mid-1910s, when the Bowling Green Bridge fire destroyed it, Giancana was only eight years old. At age 10, however, he joined the Chicago gangsters, the 42s. Black Hand was the oldest gang in Chicago, founded in 1890. Between the 42s and Black Hand, there were families who betrayed each other with mixed loyalties.

At the time, Diamond Joe Esposito, one of Giancana’s mentors, was running organized prostitution in Chicago and was looking to move south. Diamond Joe and his cronies were also running bootleg liquor and sugar deals all the way to Cuba. In 1925, Diamond Joe sent Giancana to Louisville for an illegal bourbon run. Giancana was arrested for vagrancy and hated Kentucky ever since.

Nevertheless, the Syndicate, all the gangs together, continued their business dealings in Kentucky and tried to grow. Diamond Joe was murdered by Giancana in the late 1920s. His successor continued to run prostitution all over the country. There was a lot of evidence that Black Hand operated in Louisville, where Pauline Tabor ran a brothel for a while before returning to Bowling Green. It would make sense if she mentioned it in her autobiography and continued to pursue it in Bowling Green, which she said twice in her book.

After Prohibition ended, the Syndicate held a mass meeting and decided that they all had to diversify their businesses because there was no money in the bootlegging trade. Organized prostitution and union control became their main sources of income and they could influence every election. Their influence extended to the motion picture unions where the Mafia literally controlled what the audience at Hollywood movies got to eat.

It all adds credibility to what Pauline Tabor intended without endangering her life. Giancana was murdered in 1972, killed the mob, but after Tabor’s book was published. Sam Giancana played a role in ending Diamond Joe and helping his successor into organized crime.

The mob’s interest in Bowling Green certainly took hold. In his book, Chuck Giancana names the radical idiots the mob hired to assassinate elected officials and steal the loot, people who on paper would not be connected to them, which explains the fire on the College Street Bridge.

Judge Denhardt was a difficult and hard man. His decisions within the National Guard and his personal relationships with women were shaky at best, as his fiancée and female colleagues were found murdered in the 1930s.

Did locals use the mafia’s Black Hand disguise for their threats against him? Maybe. Was a local hired by the mafia as a scapegoat to burn the bridge? Maybe.

What do you believe?