SC SC- Charlie Russo, 64, saxophonist, member of Charlie Spivak Quintet, fatally shot @Ye Old Fireplace restaurant, Greenville, 29/5/75 *New initiative*

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• 'Sep 8, 2023
  Investigators in Greenville are working to shed new light on one of the city's most notorious cold cases'.
• Details, pictures released on 17 cold cases in Greenville
• Charlie Russo, 64 years old

Charlie Russo
Date: May 29, 1975
Address: Ye Old Fireplace, South Pleasantburg Drive
Cause of Death: Gunshot
More information: On May 29, 1975, at approximately 12:15 a.m., two white male subjects entered the back door (kitchen) of the restaurant at closing time. The suspects rounded up the staff and guests as they made their way through the large, multi-room restaurant, and then ordered everyone to the floor and made them crawl to the bathrooms. Charlie Russo (a highly-regarded saxophonist and member of the Charlie Spivak Quintet) was in the band room when he was confronted and gunned down. The owner of Ye Old Fireplace, Charlie Grubbs, reported a Smith & Wesson 38-caliber revolver (serial number 925J45) stolen during the robbery. This handgun has never been recovered. Grubbs also reported a yellow gold Pulsar wrist watch taken. After the robbery, the suspects took Charlie Grubbs' Continental, which was later recovered at a nearby Howard Johnsons Motor Lodge located on South Pleasantburg Drive at Augusta Road. The murder weapon was later recovered in Columbia during a drug raid.''

 

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Lengthy, rbbm

Charlie Russo shot down at Ye Olde Fireplace

It was the last place you'd expect a homicide to happen.

www.greenvilleonline.com

Judith Bainbridge 2017

''In one of the most horrifying crimes of Greenville’s crime-ridden 1970s, Charlie Russo, a popular alto saxophonist, was shot in cold blood during a robbery at Ye Olde Fireplace.
For eight years, Greenville’s flossiest restaurant had been featuring Charlie Spivak and his band in the red-carpeted King Charles Room of the Pleasantburg Drive dinner club. It was the most luxurious place to dine in Greenville.
Spivak’s band, initially funded by band leader Glen Miller, had been one of the great successes of the age of swing music. From the beginning, the band featured Russo as a principal player. When Spivak retired from an active career in New York, he and Russo moved to Greenville where their brand of dance music was immediately popular.''

''On the night of May 29, 1975, after the restaurant had closed and staff members were cleaning up, two young and masked white men invaded the place, waving guns and threatening waitresses, cleaning crew, and owner Charlie Grubbs. The men entered the bar, where Russo was chatting with a bartender, and told them to crawl to the men’s room. As Russo, then about 70, raised his hands, he was shot. The crime has never been solved.''