Visitors to our site may remember reading an entry about the Basin Street Bar, a Casablanca watering hole that provided lots of great memories for many of our local clients.  It was great fun hearing stories about the owner, Jimmy Smith and his bartender Jerry Manilow - their characters took on mythic proportions as the anecdotes were passed along through the years.  The later history, after Jerry died and Jimmy left Morocco, was not so pleasant.  The bar is closed, and has been since the mid-1990's, when the current owners became locked in a bitter battle among themselves and with local authorities over unpaid taxes. 

Just after midnight one evening I received an email message:   ".My father, James Alexander Smith, owned and operated a café in Casablanca, named Rick's, from 1952 until about 1955.  Rick's was renamed Basin Street.Both Rick's and Basin Street were located at 79 Bd de Paris."  I was already excited with this link from the past, but the best was yet to come:  "We are both in Casablanca for a couple of days.we stopped by Rick's this evening for a drink.we plan to have dinner there tomorrow evening and would like to meet you.  My dad is a very interesting character himself, with many stories of Casablanca.I hope you will be available for a few minutes to warm an old man's heart."  Of course I immediately replied that I would be delighted to meet them, and the more stories I heard the better!  It was really great to meet Jim and his son Dodd, to have a chance to get the facts of some anecdotes straight, and to hear Jim regale Dodd and me with tales from his 25 years in Casablanca.  Following is a sampling of our conversation.

 Jim Smith first came to Casablanca when the U.S. air base at Nouasseur (now the Mohammed V International Airport) was under construction.   His job was reading blueprints  for Atlas Construction, the local contractor.   As this project was going on he looked around and saw in Casablanca there was much to do and much to be done.   Morocco was still a French protectorate under French administration, and with the base going in there were a lot of  foreigners looking for business opportunities to service the growing international community.   Jim met a French Attorney in Casablanca early on who he credits for helping and advising him through all his deals.  He can only remember his first name:  Andre.  Though French, he had lost all loyalty to France during WWII and stayed in Morocco.  Andre helped Jim navigate through the legal structure as well as guiding him through the numerous bureaucratic hurdles as he started his businesses.  He remained a trusted advisor and troubleshooter, able to tell him when a venture was a good prospect and when one might be risking legal problems.->

.... He started the Key Club first with a Greek-American partner.  It didn't work out (it was located on the top floor of a building whose elevator seldom worked), so found the location at 79 Bd de Paris which he opened in 1952 as Rick's, a private club. 



Finally he decided to get a full license and in the process changed the name to Basin Street. 

He had a trove of anecdotes regarding the police.  One French police chief came to Casablanca in the 50's direct from "Indochina" .  The French had been defeated in Vietnam, he said, because the U.S. had refused to send in helicopters at Dien Bien Phu.

So he hated all Americans and found Jimmy a logical target. Jimmy had a place called the Camera Club across from the base with machines that drew the  police chief's ire, and he wasn't going to be satisfied until some action was taken against them.  Jim soon received a convocation terming his club was illegal.   One afternoon the police raided the Camera Club and Jim was ordered to have his machines sealed.  In those days the face of the machines were sealed with wax, covering the operating mechinisms as well as the keyhole to the coin box.  Customers at the bar (including some off duty policemen) got a good laugh when, just after the police left, they could see Jim's manager detaching the backs of the machines to remove the money.

 Jim's Camera Club was no more illegal than any of the other private clubs which all had slot machines, roulette and craps tables.  In fact, he said, the laws governing private clubs and licensed establishments was a gray area.  They operated under what they called rules of "tolerance," i.e. "We'll tolerate you.for a certain fee."

 A journalist for a leading local French paper wrote an article critical of Jim and in the headline he was referred to as a "Chicago Gangster."  As Jim was "ironing out" his problems with the sealed machines with the head judge of the tribunal, the judge advised him to sue the journalist and the paper for libel and defamation of character.   On the other hand, Jim struck up an acquaintance with author Robert Ruark who was at that time a New York Times columnist.  Ruark admired this American entrepreneur, navigating through the maze of the Casablanca business world.  He chronicled Jim's story in one of his columns titled:  "Meet Mr. Smith."