It’s His World
When Al Latta moves, he shimmers.
His face is masked by cigar smoke, but his short, boxy frame is lit up by amber ceiling lights, and his dark suit is ringed with golden sequins.
It’s standing room only inside the Cigar Box, a dimly lighted downtown bar next door to the neon glow of Totally Nude Temptations on Grand Avenue.
A group of thirtysomething regulars — men in dark suits, ties askew, and women in sleeveless blouses — hem the white-cloaked, rose-adorned tables in the back. Twentysomethings jostle for position near the bar, a scrum of punks and Plaza refugees.
The Cigar Box sits at the base of downtown’s revitalization. The Kansas City Live entertainment district is set to break ground this year; the Sprint Center Arena should be open by 2007; and new offices for H&R Block, the IRS and the Federal Reserve will pour thousands of people into downtown. Last August, Totally Nude Temptations announced it was hoping to double its capacity and gain sponsorship from Penthouse. At the Cigar Box, though, the downtown revival has already started.
The Cigar Box used to cater to a semiformal, middle-aged crowd, regulars say. But over the past year, younger people have been showing up and the place has become an underground sensation. It’s a depot for waiters and mechanics, a sanctum for downtown singles, a mixer for every nightlife stratum: the baby-faced mortgage broker who’s looking to score, the Cerner tech who’s been coming for years to smoke cigars, the young-looking woman in a flapper cap and oversized gold-hoop earrings.
Her date brought her here, but she has fallen in love with Al Latta’s shtick.
“I think he’s sexy,” she says, teasing her date. “I want to go home with him.”
Latta says he’s 50. Accompanied not by a band but by a simple amplifier and a minidisc player loaded with backup music, Latta covers standards by Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr. and Neil Diamond, singing in a low growl just … behind … the beat, then rushing to finish each line.
Words come out fast and sometimes garbled. He changes costumes constantly, using the kitchen as a dressing room. He wears a black-and-gold jacket for Sinatra, a white jacket with blue and red sequins for Neil Diamond.
His show slowly crescendos. During “Brown Eyed Girl,” he might spin in fast circles alone onstage or find a young lady to pull beside him. He’ll grind on her hip-to-hip or lock her up from behind in a sort of lifeguard hold, thrusting the microphone beneath her chin and asking for help with the chorus. Other times, he heads into the crowd to hug familiar men or plant kisses on the lips and cheeks of unsuspecting women. If he spots someone he knows, he’ll give a shout-out on the mike: “This one is to Rocky, my friend!” Working the lineup of people on bar stools, he’ll cajole each to shout into the mike as an impromptu accompanist.
Request a song and he’ll sing it. Buy him a shot and he’ll take it. Again and again, he leans too close to his sound system; each song is followed by a trail of feedback.
His repertoire is deep — between songs made famous by Elvis, Wayne Newton and Kenny Rogers, he does impressions of Clint Eastwood, Muhammad Ali, Sylvester Stallone, Ronald Reagan, Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Nicholson, Archie Bunker, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Porky Pig.
He’s done this gig five days a week, Tuesday though Saturday, for the past five years. Tonight is Friday: He can tell by the size of the crowd. He knows it’s Saturday morning when a second tide of partygoers rolls in.
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Until this point, Al Latta’s show has been perfect. But then he turns to his minidisc player and selects Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” The beat hits the speakers, and within the first verse, Latta is screwed.
Four slender sorority sisters, Kappa Alpha Thetas from the University of Kansas, clamber onstage to dance beside him. Then a guy with spiky hair, faded jeans and a patch-covered T-shirt jumps up to grind beside them. And then the audience stops making eye contact with Latta. Fists pump the air like this is a rock show. Catcalls drown out his words.
This is his great fear. “A cover singer involves the audience in the show but still controls the show,” he will say later. He considers guys who cede that power the lowest rung of musicians: fucking karaoke artists.
Latta finds a stubbed-out cigarette and relights it. Cordless mike in one hand, cigarette in the other, he swaggers offstage as the music to Jackson’s never-ending keep on with the force, don’t stop chorus recycles. Once again, he’s level with the audience.
Taking a short blonde under his arm, he proclaims, “I’m in love with her sister.” Then he stops a brunette near her muscled boyfriend. “I didn’t touch her, I swear,” he says to the boyfriend. He’s ditched his dress shirt, and his suit jacket hangs open, revealing his bare chest.
Finally, the Jackson track rolls into Latta’s favorite Frank Sinatra song, “The Way You Look Tonight.” Standing in the audience, drenched in sweat, he reaches up to the blue-eyed Theta onstage, serenading:
Someday, when I’m awfully low,
When the world is cold,
I will feel a glow just thinking of you.
When she turns toward him, the crowd follows her gaze. The back-table bachelor party. The women in their pink boas and tiaras and fur coats. The drunks who shout that he’s wearing a toupee. (He doesn’t deny it.) When he does stunts like this, he owns them.
Right now there are a handful of other Italian-named artists in black suits and tuxedos playing at Italian-themed bars across the metro — Anthony’s downtown, the Touche in Overland Park, Vivace in the River Market, the Copa Room in midtown. Guys like Frank Cherrito and Rudy Amato. Both men still have day jobs, as a car salesman and a building maintenance manager, respectively. They inhabit a world Latta has mostly left behind.
He started gigging Wednesday and Saturday nights at Touche when it opened in 1997, eventually farming himself out to Anthony’s and the now-defunct Café New Yorker in Overland Park. When he had enough stage cred, he started moonlighting on the party circuit, working hotel convention rooms and suburban living rooms.
“He was looking for a place where he could hang his hat every night,” says Touche owner Danny Accurso. “People would seek him out. It’s not that big of a town, and word gets around quickly. He did get recruited.”
One Saturday, after he had finished his set at Touche, a couple of men in dark suits with raspy voices — “like they were choking on gunpowder,” Latta says — asked him to go for a ride.
It was nearly 3 a.m. when they climbed into a sedan and headed downtown to the Cigar Box. The place was empty except for one man. Seated at a table by himself was Louis Ribaste, who asked Latta if he wanted a full-time job.
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In the mid-’70s, Ribaste had owned a cocktail lounge called Judge Roy Bean’s at Fourth Street and Wyandotte in the River Quay (now the River Market). An explosion leveled it, along with the entire block — which was owned by mob snitch Fred Bonadonna — in March 1977. Ribaste collected insurance money. Three months later, his other downtown club near Ninth Street burned to the ground. Police never determined who was responsible for the bombing or the suspected arson.
Another member of the Ribaste family, Peter Ribaste, moved to Las Vegas in 1989 after doing six months in prison for mail fraud; he had failed to disclose $90,000 in Las Vegas gambling debts on loan applications to buy a Kansas City car dealership. In 1998 the Las Vegas Gaming Commission, citing mob ties, banned Peter from local casinos. In 2003, according to news reports, Peter transferred his ownership interest in Totally Nude Temptations, the strip club adjoining the Cigar Box, to his wife, who transferred the ownership to another family member, John Ribaste.
John Pisciotta has owned the Cigar Box since it opened in 1997. He bought the land beneath the club from Louis Ribaste in 2001. The Pitch could not locate Ribaste to request an interview.
Regardless of whether the Cigar Box deserves its reputation, plenty of the partiers there buy into the club’s underworld allure. When asked about it, people who could dispel any such notions suddenly turn goodfella, invoking a code of silence.
Bring up the club’s rumored mob connections and Latta becomes visibly agitated, like an actor threatening a young punk about asking too many questions. Pisciotta shuns the press. Pisciotta’s attorney, Richard Bryant, strongly discourages mafia-related questions. No one brings trouble here, says the club’s only enforcer, the gray-haired, hulking bouncer who works the humidor.
“What people do, that’s their own thing,” Latta says of the Cigar Box’s reputation. “It’s like anything else. You fuck with the wrong people, you get hurt. I never asked anybody what they do. Everybody always liked me, and I always liked everybody.”
The mythology surrounding the club hasn’t hurt Latta’s stage persona — barroom lore even has it that his years performing at the Cigar Box are to pay off debts to the mob. “No, that’s so far from the truth,” Latta says. “If that’s what they think, it’s crazy.”
His love and loyalty lie with Pisciotta.
Latta says he’s well-paid and makes good money in tips. Pisciotta has helped him finance two cars, he says. On most nights, his 2002 electric-blue Corvette is parked out front. The vanity plate reads ALLATA.
“Who you go with, who you party with, I have an image to keep up with myself,” Latta says.
A television reporter has seen his act and wants to do a story on him for a February-sweeps tie-in with American Idol. Latta created a new outfit for the taping, staying up all night after a Friday gig to sew silver sequins like stars across a red jacket. He stayed up past dawn, and then past noon, until just after 1 p.m. Saturday, when he decided he didn’t like the design and tore apart the tiny universe.
Saturday night, 30 minutes before showtime, Latta sits on a stool in a third-floor loft at 20th Street and Grand. WDAF Fox 4 reporter Tom Gauer faces him. A cameraman revolves around the two men.
Through the camera lens, Latta appears as someone at ease beneath vaulted ceilings and polished hardwood floors, flanked by windows that offer expansive views of the city.
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A man on top of the world in his sequined black-and-gold outfit.
His left foot is on the floor. His right foot rests on a stool rung. He holds his hands in front of him, rubbing them together over and over and over in a washing motion.
He grew up in Greenwich Village, he tells the camera. Before coming to Kansas City, he played Vegas.
“You want the audience. That is your high,” he says. “It’s like anything else — there are times I don’t want to get to work, but then I come in, and then I hit the first note, and then I’m fine.”
He’d never sung Sinatra before gigging in Kansas City, but the audiences demanded it, so he learned the songs — not just the words but what they meant. “The music is so soothing, and there’s something about the songs. Everybody knows them,” he says. “Someone in their 60s is singing it, and someone in their 20s is singing it. And the words are the real magic, maybe, that’s in the heart.”
He’s written an original song and a screenplay about his last five years in Kansas City and how his wife recently left him, taking their 4-year-old son with her to live in Vegas, he tells Gauer. Of course, he never performs the song. It’s too personal, he says. The movie of his life is called When Everything Is Not Enough. Latta says a private company, which he won’t name, is scheduled to start shooting in mid-March.
A friend of Latta’s, musician Scott Cameron, watches while smoking a cigarette near a giant flat-screen television. A stout 34-year-old guitarist in the band Etc., Cameron has known Latta for almost four years. They used to play open-mike nights at the Cigar Box together and later found out that Cameron’s grandfather and Latta’s father used to work at the same restaurant in New York City. Cameron says Latta isn’t close to his own family, which makes the musician his closest thing to kin.
“He’s a guy who knows a million people, but only a few people know him,” Cameron tells the Pitch.
When Latta leaves for the Cigar Box, Cameron locks up. This is his loft.
Latta lived downstairs for a few months after he and his wife split, but he has since moved out.
Latta stays in a room on the third floor of a $30-a-night motel near an industrial area off Interstate 40. The lobby is decorated with a thin carpet, tarnished chandeliers and a four-way security monitor. The numbers have fallen off the door to Latta’s room, so they’re scrawled in indelible marker.
Since the divorce, Latta has garaged the Corvette in a storage unit off Noland Road. A 1998 Lincoln, his ex-wife’s car, is parked by the limestone lodge. It’s unmistakably his — cigarette butts scattered near the beverage console, an Elvis karaoke tape in the back seat.
Both the room and the car are registered to a man named Al, but his last name isn’t Latta. Latta requests that the Pitch not print his real surname.
Latta spent most of his life sleeping in motels. At age 12, he started singing doo-wop with a group of Sicilian kids on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He didn’t like school and skipped out on college to play in New Jersey nightclubs with names like The Avalon and The Jetty.
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Latta peaked in 1981, singing with a latter-day version of the Duprees, a 1960s-era male-harmony group like the Drifters, the Coasters and the Platters. With their crooned romantic lyrics and three-part backing harmonies and sha-la-la-las, a couple of the Duprees’ songs had been make-out standards. In 1962, the group’s big-band-backed cover of the 1940s Glenn Miller song “You Belong to Me” sold more than a million copies and made Billboard’s Top 10. That year, other Duprees songs — “My Own True Love,” “Have You Heard” and “Why Don’t You Believe Me” — broke the Top 40.
By the 1980s, though, the Duprees were more a brand than a band. When Latta joined the group, only one original member, Michael Arnone, remained, says Ron O’Brien, who has managed the act for the past eight years.
“Although he didn’t sing on the original recordings, there was a time he did sing with the Duprees,” says O’Brien, who remembers seeing Latta perform with the group at an Atlantic City casino in 1982. The Duprees still perform at casinos and private parties — without any of the group’s original members. “The emphasis should be on the Duprees, because there never was any glory in it [for individual members],” O’Brien says.
But there was glory for Latta. Traveling with the Duprees, he played a series of rock-and-roll revivals at Philadelphia’s Spectrum, Madison Square Garden, Kemper Arena and the Midland Theatre, where the band shared booking with his idols: the Drifters, Chuck Berry and Ricky Nelson.
“Any old guy you can imagine, I’ve worked with,” he says. “It was like meeting people that you admire all your life. People you used to dream about and admire on TV. To work on the same stage as those people — oh, my god.”
By the late ’80s, Latta had left the Duprees and started his own band. The name Al Latta began appearing on handbills.
“I had enough of doing backup and doing lead,” he says. “I wanted to be known for myself.”
So he concentrated on impressions.
Dressed in his stage regalia, he would spend hours in front of a mirror, practicing facial expressions and comparing them to video clips of his subjects, recording his own voice and listening to it against celebrities’ albums.
“I really made music for myself,” he says. “That was when I found out what my forte was.”
He spent late nights partying in after-hours clubs across the country. It was a white-dusted era. “You could get messed up and crash your car into a fucking pole and leave it there, and nothing would happen to you,” he says almost wistfully. “Those were the days where cocaine was flowing rapidly. Everything seemed to come so easily.”
On Kansas City stops, he played smoky lounges at Anthony’s and at the 28-story Americana Hotel (now the downtown Doubletree). He took his band to Canada and was getting good reviews, he says. In 1987, he says, Manitoba’s Brandon Sun called him a “rock and roll champion.”
But in the early ’90s, Latta’s band fell apart. A few years earlier, he had met a singer from Wichita at a hotel gig in Texas. The two married, and he moved to Topeka to live with her. There, he took a job laying carpet. The live-act industry had shifted by that time, anyway. An era that saw big bands enjoying $4,000-a-week payouts collapsed when club owners learned they could hire cheap karaoke acts and the audience would sing the same standards for free.
Latta’s marriage fell apart, too, and in 1993 he went solo, having accumulated enough sound equipment for a one-man show. He played winter gigs at a Branson mall and summer gigs at Palm Beach resorts, but he settled in Kansas City and played at Touche until Louis Ribaste called for him.
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In the Cigar Box, Al Latta found a venue with the reputation he needed to get noticed. He also found a waitress to provide his act with plenty of broken-heart material.
Both Latta and Darlene Leto are guarded about their relationship, but the love affair has been chronicled in property-tax records and late-night barroom tales.
“It was a wonderful act,” Leto says. “It wasn’t anything to woo me. I loved everything he did. I loved all of his songs. I would sing behind the bar and bartend and just keep that pounding in my heart with all his songs. It was so good.”
After closing time, he and the busty brunette, ten years his junior, had breakfast dates at an all-night diner inside Harrah’s Casino.
The relationship got serious fast. They got together on Valentine’s Day in 2000, then eloped to Vegas, Latta says. Leto got pregnant, and their son, Michael Valentino, was born in December that year. They bought a house in Blue Springs in January 2001, a two-story brick-and-shingle home within earshot of a nearby elementary school.
Latta never missed a night at the Cigar Box. He could drink three Mandarin and Sevens 30 minutes before hitting the stage and still hit all of his notes. But with domesticity, he couldn’t get a break. One night, he ran over the couple’s cocker spaniel by mistake. Twice.
“Entertainers lead very different lives,” Latta says. “We work weekends and nights. We try so hard to make so many people happy that you forget to make the most important people happy. She’d wake up, and I’d be talking like Wayne Newton. She never knew who she was sleeping with.”
“It was a good ride,” she says. “It was a four-year ride. It was a thrill ride that I’ll never forget. That’s for sure.”
One night last spring, he came home and Leto was gone. She had taken Michael Valentino and left for Vegas.
A few days before this past Christmas, Latta bellied up to the bar.
He was 40 pounds lighter than he’d been six months earlier —the result, he says, of being bitten by a brown recluse spider at another hotel.
He’d been contemplating a flight to Vegas to see his ex-wife and son. Maybe she’d come pick him up. Maybe not.
“What a scene in the movie that would be!” he exclaimed. He leaned toward a nearby bartender. “Hey, Val, if my ex-wife told me to go fuck myself, does that mean she wants to see me?”
The Christmas Eve trip was a gamble. He didn’t call ahead of time.
Inside McCarran International Airport, Latta called Leto from a pay phone. No answer. He says he spent 24 hours alone in the airport before flying back to Kansas City.
One day in late January, Latta is back at the bar with a legal pad. The script for his movie is almost finished, he says. It’s written in ballpoint on a yellow legal pad. He tears out two pages and sets them on the bar:
Scene I
Camera moving inside the club. People talking, lots of voices, band playing.
Scene II
Outside the club the music still playing, car pulls up, Al gets out of car.
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Scene III
Steve comes out of bar. Stops. Al walks up to Steve.
Steve: Al Latta, you better be ready. It’s packed there.
Al: Well forget about the front walk me around.
Cameras start rolling on a Monday night, his night off. At stage left, Nick, wearing a white golf cap, and his friend Dan, a heavyset guy in a plaid shirt, sit at a table cluttered with empty beer bottles. At stage right, Latta stands in his usual shimmering outfit. Deep wrinkles crease his face. His outsized shadow falls along the wall behind him.
This isn’t his movie. For the past hour, an independent film crew has been shooting takes for a movie called Bust, a “raunchy sex comedy” about a woman whose dating life is impaired by her obsession with other women’s big boobs.
The director, Kris Stankiewicz, is a short blonde in a slinky blue dress. While attending college in Los Angeles, she spent the early ’90s working as an extra on Baywatch and Beverly Hills 90210. She moved back to Johnson County after finishing graduation, and then to a downtown loft last April. That’s when she discovered the Cigar Box.
“I live downtown, so I want to make a movie that feels like it revolves around downtown,” she says.
She had originally planned to shoot at a standard dive like Kelly’s, but she realized while celebrating her 34th birthday at the Cigar Box in December that the dynamic of the club had changed. “It was a very young crowd,” she says. “It was almost getting trendy.”
She decided that having an old-school lounge singer in a sex spoof could be the definition of hip. Ironically anachronistic.
Action!
Latta snaps his fingers, crooning as he saunters toward the table.
Someday, when I’m awfully low,
When the world is cold,
I will feel a glow just thinking of you.
Nick takes a pull from a beer bottle. Dan looks down at his glass of soda. Reciting their lines, the two commiserate about how Dan’s girlfriend has just left him. Stankiewicz stops the crew midscene, offering the actors more direction.
In the wings, two women in low-cut black dresses sit on a couch. Even though Stankiewicz has called cut and the camera has stopped, Latta approaches, microphone in hand. Bending over, he kisses one of them on the back of her hand. Then he finishes his song.
It’s standing room only again. Color fliers advertising the Valentine’s Day installment of “The Al Latta Show” have been placed beneath the glass at each place setting on each table: Limited seating. Make reservations now.
Clad in zebra-striped pants (switching blazers throughout the evening, as usual), Latta works the room. When a couple at the front bar offers him a shot, he takes it. When a guy in a Chiefs coat enters the bar and offers him a high-five, he nails it. After he changes into a white jacket, a waitress in go-go boots and a miniskirt spills a tray of drinks on him. He touches his chest and licks his fingers, smiling while improving the lyrics of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”:
I’m feeling all wet, and you wonder why,
I’m sitting here kinda cold from the drinks I’ve had spilled all night,
I keep singing through it all. No matter what, keep singing through it all,
I keep singing, and I’ll be happy with life. If I did have my way, then I’d have my kid and my life,
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You don’t bring me flowers anymore.
Earlier in the day, he played the members-only Kansas City Club at Ninth Street and Baltimore. After the set, he told his audience that he wanted to join the club, and someone agreed to sponsor him. He thinks it will be a good chance to make friends.
He’s going to make an offer on a new home in Independence, he says. And he’s planning to burn 200 more copies of his CD, Coming to America, an album of standards recorded at a studio in Belton. The original 400 copies have sold out.
“I got my act together,” he says.
He pulls a bar stool beside a trim 24-year-old, her face framed in blond highlights, and leans close, telling her how he loves pretty women and how he loves Vegas and how he’s a single father who flies to Vegas to see his only son and how he recently gave his son a cell phone to call him.
A few minutes later, he cues generic big-band backing.
“I wrote this song,” he says to no one in particular. Stepping off the stage, he stands in the center of the room, eyes closed, one arm raised like a conductor’s. He sings softly, mumbling words that are drowned out by cheers and banter around him.
In my life, the stars will shine … and glow … and my life … my life, in our room … in the summer of my life. And the time of my life went fast … What do I say to my child?
The crowd watches him warily. No one has heard this tune or seen this impression. A guy in a chef’s uniform bumps into Latta, but Latta’s eyes remain closed. The waitress in the go-go boots — the one who always turns heads — squeezes by with another tray of glassware, but he doesn’t see her.
The audience disappears. Al Latta is singing for himself.
