Augie's Secrets

Theres an old Yiddish saying: two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. But two living people could keep a secretas long as one of them was Augie.Augie Ratner, the proprietor of Augies Theater Lounge & Bar on Hennepin Avenue, was the unofficial mayor of Minneapoliss downtown strip in the 1940s and 50s. In a few blocks between the swanky clubs and restaurants on Eighth Street and the sleazy flophouses and bars of the Gateway District, the citys shakers-and-movers and shake-down artists mingled. Gangsters and celebrities, comedians and politicians, the rich and the famous and the infamousall of them met at Augies: Jimmy Hoffa, Henny Youngman, Kid Cann, John Dillinger, Jack Dempsey, Peggy Lee, Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce, and Gypsy Rose Lee. Augie Ratner knew everyone, and everyone knew and liked Augie, and they told him everything.Mixing careful research with long suppressed family and community stories, Neal Karlen, Augies great-nephew, tells the real story of the seamy underside of Minneapolis, where Jewish mobsters controlled the liquor trade, invented the point spread in sports betting, and ran national sports gambling operations. Even after Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey supposedly cleaned up the town, organized crime quietly flourished. And Augie was at the center, observing it all.