Illustration by John Ueland

In Prohibition-era Phoenix, cops drank the contraband, Barry Goldwater brewed basement beer, and the original gangsters were a group of uppity women who temporarily turned off the tap in the West’s most stubborn saloon city.

 Steve Rosenstein squeezes the last of three big organic orange halves between the jaws of a hefty cast aluminum juicer while his wife, Andi, pours a bubbly ginger beer into a 16-ounce Mason jar. “Makin’ a screwdriver for my friend,” he says with a wink to the first-time visitor at the end of the circa-1920s bar, mixing the juice with some fresh blueberries and maraschino cherries and splashing seven counts from an upturned bottle of vodka before passing it on to his wife. Frank Sinatra croons “My Kind of Town” on the overhead speakers.

A visit to The Duce in Downtown Phoenix, a virtual vintage urban neighborhood sprawled inside a lovingly restored   1928 warehouse on Central Avenue and Lincoln Street, is like stepping onto a movie set for Phoenix’s own version of Boardwalk Empire, HBO’s new period drama set at the dawn of Prohibition on the Eastern Seaboard. Except The Duce doesn’t pay homage only to the 1920s – the music wafting throughout veers from Rat Pack swing to ’60s Motown to ’70s pop – and Phoenix, even at its grittiest during those gangster days, was not exactly Atlantic City.

The Rosensteins hail from Chicago, and Steve, a compact scrapper with some old-school Kirk Douglas appeal, developed a clear passion for the style and moxie of the Prohibition-era racketeers.

“That stuff never goes out of style,” he says, noting the hoopla over Boardwalk Empire. Contributing to the current buzz is a best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, and an upcoming Ken Burns documentary based on Okrent’s book slated to air on PBS next fall.

“I think The Sopranos kinda piqued everyone’s interest in the gangster thing again, but there’s always been such a fascination for it,” Rosenstein says. “It’s just bad boy stuff. But there was nothing badder and cooler than Prohibition.”

The couple brought some of that gritty Chicago history with them to The Duce after relocating to north Scottsdale and selling off their successful Fitigues clothing line. Authenticating the retro feel of the speakeasy corner is an old phone booth from Union Station and a beautiful red mahogany bar salvaged from the original Black Orchid Jazz Club, once the center of Chicago’s nightlife.

Photo by Chris Loomis, Clothing provided by Retro Ranch, Hair and makeup by Shauna Thibault Husband and wife Steve and Andi Rosenstein own The Duce in Downtown Phoenix, a renovated 1928 warehouse-turned club, café and gym that features a Prohibition-era bar from Chicago as its centerpiece.

“This is the Prohibition bar,” Steve says, rapping on the single-piece 29-foot-long countertop he had shipped to Phoenix in a semi-trailer. “This came from a club where all the jazz greats played, and there’s a lot of good gangster stories that went down around it. If this thing could talk, it could tell you the whole story from Chicago.

“It doesn’t have any Phoenix history yet,” Rosenstein adds, admitting to only a scant knowledge of Phoenix’s activity during those years – a sketchiness he shares with even many of the city’s long-time residents. “But this building certainly does.”

Indeed. The Duce was named for its location at the center of what was both once the city’s produce district and a crime-ridden skid row that came to be nicknamed “the Deuce,” according to local folklore. It’s the area where a loading dock worker named Ernesto Miranda was collared by cops and coerced to confess to a series of rapes and armed robberies before being advised of his “right to remain silent,” ever after enacting the warning bearing his name that all cops must now recite. Miranda was eventually stabbed to death in a bar near the produce warehouse where he’d worked.

“You look at some of the imperfections in this concrete floor, you have to wonder what huge thing was dropped there to create that,” Rosenstein muses. “I mean, it was a rough crowd using this warehouse back in the day. When we were excavating, I told the crew, ‘If you hit something, better keep it to yourself.’ You never know what’s buried under there!’”

If that old Chicago bar could listen to the floor it’s sitting on, it might indeed get an earful, suspects Michael Levine, the Brooklyn-born artist and developer who’s made his mark in Downtown Phoenix by renovating some of its oldest and most neglected warehouses – including the Rosensteins’ building, which at one point housed the Hensley & Company beer distributorship, owned by brothers Eugene and James Hensley. The latter would eventually father a daughter named Cindy and become father-in-law to future Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

“The Hensley brothers were henchmen for Kemper Marley,” says the characteristically candid Levine, referring to the millionaire Arizona liquor distributor who escaped two indictments in the ’40s on federal liquor-law violations and was later implicated in the 1976 car-bomb murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, who had been investigating Marley’s reputed Mob ties.

“The Hensley boys took the fall for him back in the ’40s, did a short time in jail, and then after they got out, as a reward for keeping their mouths shut, they were given a Budweiser distributorship,” Levine recounts. While the Hensleys went on to grow their business into what is now the third-largest Anheuser-Busch distributorship in the U.S., their convictions on federal conspiracy charges indicated they’d been involved in a robust bootlegging trade under Marley’s charge, falsifying some 1,284 liquor invoices to supply black-market scotch shipments to exclusive Phoenix nightclubs like the Green Gables and the Cowman’s Club.

It’s a great Prohibition crime saga that ends with the tainted Hensley fortune going on to verifiably fund much of McCain’s senate campaigns and 2008 presidential race. Only problem is, it took place after Prohibition’s repeal in 1933.

What actually happened in Phoenix during the 18 years alcohol was banned (in Arizona, a statewide prohibition amendment was enacted in 1915, five years before the national amendment) appears to have stayed in Phoenix – and with the few still living members of what was then a population of less than 20,000.

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