Opinion

A mob tale with a TWIST

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The week of their infamous appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the Beatles drank and danced at two sister clubs in New York and Miami, both called the Peppermint Lounge.

At the Miami club, as Ringo Starr did the Twist with one of the venue’s regular dancers, a friend of the club’s owner found himself unimpressed with the gregarious moptop.

A mob hitman named Romeo “Scarface” Martin grew increasingly angry at the effect the Beatle was having on his girlfriend, Darlene.

“All she keeps talking about is that Ringo,” he told Scatsy Biello, brother of the club’s secret owner, Genovese family caporegime Johnny Biello.

“Ringo this, Ringo that. I’m gonna clip that motherf – – – er Ringo’s hair off. Enough already. I’m gonna bring her a souvenir.”

Knowing that when a killer like Martin talked about “clipping someone’s hair off” that the head could easily come with it, Scatsy wondered if his violent associate would really kill one of the much-beloved Fab Four.

“Do what you got to do with them, but do it after they leave,” Scatsy told Martin. “Let us get a little play out of them being here.”

A lively and colorful new history, “Peppermint Twist: The Mob, the Music, and the Most Famous Dance Club of the ’60s” (St. Martin’s Press), tells the story of the Peppermint Lounge, the club that introduced the Twist to the world — helping popularize rock ’n’ roll in the process — and its secret history as a front for the New York mob.

It’s largely the tale of two men: Johnny Biello, the club’s secret owner, and his son-in-law (and one of the book’s co-authors), Dick Cami.

Biello and brother Scatsy grew up poor in the South Bronx, turning to crime as kids. One day, not yet a teenager, Biello stole the tires off a chrome-plated Roadster. Later, while shining shoes at a speakeasy for extra cash, an angry man stormed in, demanding to know who had stolen his tires.

The man, it turned out, was bootlegging pioneer and sadistic mobster Dutch Schultz, a man who “once blinded a rival by tying him up and taping rags filled with pus to his eyes.” When Biello told Schultz that he had stolen the tires — “who knew it was yours?” he said — “everyone held their breath until Schultz threw his head back and burst into laughter.”

When Biello was 14, he confronted a vicious Italian gangster who was terrorizing his neighborhood.

“Shut up, kid, this is not you business,” said the gangster, who then slapped Biello across the face. Biello responded by grabbing a butcher knife and plunging it through the man’s stomach. As the hood tried to fight back, threatening Biello with death, Biello stomped his head in as the gathering crowd cheered him on.

By his mid-20s, Biello had graduated to robbing jewelry stores and wound up in Sing Sing, where he befriended a close associate of mob bosses Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Frank Costello. When he got out, he and Scatsy went to work for Costello — then Luciano’s consigliere — and Biello moved up the ranks, eventually succeeding Schultz as “the big man in The Bronx.”

When Dick Camillucci — later shortened to Cami — got engaged to Johnny Biello’s daughter Joanie, her father’s career would play a strange role in their nuptials.

Joanie wanted “a lavish storybook wedding,” but this proved problematic for Biello. Costello had recently survived an assassination attempt from the gun of Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, who had been hired by mob boss and Costello rival Vito Genovese. When Costello took over Luciano’s gang after Luciano went to prison, Genovese felt slighted.

Accordingly, Biello wanted to avoid the high profile of a big wedding and asked Cami if he could just give the couple “30 or 40Gs or something” and have them elope.

The situation resolved itself when Costello retired, handing Genovese the reins in exchange for his safety (before later engineering a comeback that sent Genovese to prison).

The big wedding was back on, as were the large, cash-filled envelopes mobsters traditionally gave as wedding gifts.

Shortly before the wedding, Cami was reading a newspaper in Biello’s home when the older man walked in smiling and tapped the paper’s front page.

“ ‘That’s gonna cost you five grand,’ he said.

“When Dick turned the page, he saw a picture of a body lying under a sheet in the barbershop of the Sheraton Hotel. The caption identified the deceased as Albert Anastasia.

“‘He was coming to the wedding,’ Johnny said. ‘Now he can’t make it.’ ”

Biello went on to open both legitimate businesses and fronts. At one club he owned, a singer who pulled in big crowds began missing shows due to his drinking. After warnings went unheeded, the club’s manager brought the singer “down to the basement of the club and chained him to the water heater. The only times the kid got free was to go to the bathroom and go onstage. He ate chained up.”

In the late ’50s, Biello ended up owning a bar on West 45th Street called the Wagon Wheel. Biello made his son-in-law a partner, and they set about reinventing the business.

Cami convinced Biello to feature the new rock ’n’ roll music instead of jazz, and as they brainstormed possible names, one of Biello’s associates was “struggling to open a pack of blue-and-white peppermints.” When he finally succeeded, he “popped one in his mouth,” and then said, “Why don’t you call it the Peppermint Lounge?”

On Aug. 6, 1960, a singer named Chubby Checker played a song called “The Twist” on “The Dick Clark Show.” He also explained how to dance to it: “Just pretend you are wiping your bottom with a towel and putting out a cigarette with both feet.”

The song hit No. 1, but it wasn’t until a year later that the dance became a sensation. In September 1961, a friend of Biello’s named Lee Ratner visited the club to talk shop. While he did, his girlfriend watched people gyrating on the dance floor and fell in love with their moves.

Intrigued, Ratner, through contacts in the press, passed the information to an influential syndicated society columnist who went by the name Cholly Knickerbocker, but was really Igor Cassini, younger brother of Jackie Kennedy designer Oleg.

Cassini planted a false item about a Russian aristocrat “dancing the Twist at New York’s ‘chic’ Peppermint Lounge,” and just like that, both the Twist and the Peppermint Lounge exploded.

The Lounge was soon besieged by the rich and famous.

Herald Tribune columnist Tom Wolfe wrote that all of society was “laying fives, 10s and 20-dollar bills on cops, doormen and a couple of sets of maitre d’s to get within sight of the bandstand and a dance floor the size of somebody’s kitchen.”

“Actual socialites, curious to see what they were missing, came to the West 45th Street dive in their diamonds and pearls,” the authors, John Johnson, Jr. and Joel Selvin, write. “Since the club was in the Theater District, Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Shelley Winters and Tallulah Bankhead started dropping by. A writer asked screen goddess Monroe if she did the Twist.

“I do the Twister,” she said. “I put something extra in it.”

Lines to get in ran all the way around the corner onto Broadway.

The Lounge — whose doormen included future wrestling manager Lou Albano, and another wrestler named Lenny Montana who later gained fame playing Luca Brasi in “The Godfather” — was so consistently packed that when a customer asked one of Biello’s associates the location of the restroom, the reply was, “Go in your pocket — you’ll never make it.”

The Twist phenomenon grew beyond the Lounge, soon consuming the entire nation. The club’s house band, Joey Dee and the Starliters, recorded their own version called “The Peppermint Twist,” and it replaced Checker’s song as the country’s No. 1. Versions of the song appeared from artists as diverse as Sam Cooke (“Twistin’ The Night Away”), The Isley Brothers (“Twist and Shout”), and even Frank Sinatra, who recorded a regrettable tune called “Everybody’s Twistin’.”

Twist-related merchandise included a line of black and red “His Twisters” tennis shoes, and a Twist Kit that came with a footprint guide on how to do the dance. There were also rejected proposals, including a Twisting sex toy with “a battery inside that made it do the Twist, like the dancing mushrooms in ‘Fantasia.’ ”

As with many a dance craze, opposition came from various quarters. Religious leaders cited it as “evidence of moral decay,” the Soviet Union and Vietnam banned it and even former President Eisenhower noted that “it does represent some kind of change in our standards.”

Biello saw the Twist as his chance to go legit. He opened a companion club in Miami, put Cami in charge and pledged to stay away in order to “avoid stinking up the place.”

The Miami club was a success, but Cami was unprepared for the area’s then endemic racism. Black performers could work in clubs, but the Florida state beverage commission banned them as customers, a rule that was strictly — and way too enjoyably — enforced.

One black sax player who performed there asked if his family could watch him play. Cami welcomed them and sat them in the balcony. But when a state beverage agent came by and asked, “Are there any n – – – ers here tonight,” Cami was forced to ask the family to leave.

“Dick never forgot the look on the faces of the family,” the authors write, “as they filed past him on the way out.”

These backwards attitudes affected many performers, including future hitmakers and legends. “Soul Man” singers Sam & Dave brought the crowd to its feet, but when some of them wound up on stage, Cami was terrified. “Imagine what would have happened,” he later said, “if they’d seen a stage full of white girls dancing with Sam & Dave.”

The situation came to a head when the Ronettes — whose leader, Ronnie Bennett (later to become Ronnie Spector), had gotten her start at the New York club — came off stage one night, and the same agent who chased off the sax player’s family told Cami, “those n – – – er girls are cute,” then asked Cami to fix him up with one of them.

Fed up, Cami “hit him with a forearm shiver,” and “the guy sank to the floor like the bag of s – – t he was.”

He and Scatsy dragged him out to an alley, and Cami told him that “if he ever showed his face in the place again, he’d get worse than a broken jaw.”

They never saw him again.

By 1963, the Twist was old news, but rock ’n’ roll kept both clubs going. When the Beatles hit New York in 1964 for their first Ed Sullivan appearance, documentarians the Maysles brothers filmed the band sipping cocktails at the Lounge, footage of which inspired the club scene in “A Hard Day’s Night.”

While the clubs’ heyday was bright, it was also short, and Biello sold both clubs in 1965. Cami went on to become a top restaurateur in Miami, and Biello was gunned down in a 1967 shooting that was never solved.

Biello’s funeral was attended by many of his associates and watched through telephoto lenses by the FBI — who, it turned out, had a file on him that was 4,259 pages long.

After the service, the funeral director informed Cami that they were one pall bearer short and asked who they should use.

“ ‘You see that guy with the blue suit and dark tie?’ Dick said, pointing to one of the FBI agents. ‘He was a good friend of Johnny’s.’

“When the funeral director approached him, the guy couldn’t hide his disbelief. He wanted to refuse, but Dick knew he wouldn’t be able to say no. Dick knew Johnny would have loved it.”