Confessions of a Lucky Storyteller (me and the mob)

You don’t know you’re handing a drink to a member of the mob until someone tells you.

I based a few things in “Vampire Mob” on the mafia in Boston in the eighties, when the leader of the Patriarca family got busted in a sting run by the FBI, leaving a scramble for power and feuds between families.  I also borrowed one of the names from this period in Boston mafia history, Cadillac Frank.

I was working at a hotel in Boston in the late eighties and early nineties, doing what a lot of art school grads do, whatever pays.  I started as a barback and then worked as a bartender.  When you work at bars in a hotel, you have regulars for a week, then they fly back home and you never see them again.  But you also have local regulars and that’s how I met Frank Salemme, Jr. son of Cadillac Frank Salemme. 

According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Salemme) Frank Salemme Jr. is dead and Cadillac Frank is thought to be in the federal witness protection program, as of February 2009.  

Frank Salemme Jr. sat down at my bar during a lunch shift, well before noon, and ordered an espresso and sambuca.  No one else was at the bar.   I learned later, from one of the bartenders, who he was.  It was a world without wikipedia. 

Wearing a black turtleneck, with a suit jacket over it, hair slicked back; Frank sipped his espresso and shot the sambuca back, well before the lunch rush started.  He told me he was headed to the Cambridge Courthouse.  I didn’t ask why and I think he liked that I didn’t, so we kept talking. 

Sometimes Frank came in after court adjourned, when there were more people at the bar and less time to chat.  But when he came in during the day, when no one was there, it was just the two of us and a TV affixed to the wall, providing new topics of conversation.  He kept coming in, I guess it was a long trial.  He always tipped me ten bucks, always, which was way over a 20% tip.  The guy was also fucking charming, undeniably so. 

Frank offered me a job bartending at his strip joint.  I declined citing benefits the hotel provided, it was a good gig as I struggled to make a living as a photographer/artist.  He agreed and it was a nice, polite out from the topic.  He then offered to help me find studio space in South Boston, where his strip joint was located, in the former rock club “The Channel,” which I had seen a ton of shows at in college.  That was a topic I left open, like, “yeah, if you hear about something let me know.” 

I really wanted a warehouse space to work in, but I had this feeling that a favor was being done for me, and, imagining a scene from the Godfather, would I have to return the favor?

Thanks to the FBI, no.

I was at home, it was a little past eleven at night and the phone rang, it was one of the other bartenders screaming at me to turn on the television.  I did, and there was Frank, holding a number, it was his mug shot. 

The FBI had set-up a fake movie production company in Santa Monica, California and they were looking for cheaper ways to deal with unions, like the teamsters, and apparently bribery was one way to deal with this.  (http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/16/us/4-indicted-in-fbi-investigation-into-corruption-in-film-industry.html)  

I never asked Cadillac Frank if it was okay to use his name for a character, but I’m guessing he’d be really hard to find. 

1. joewilsontv reblogged this from vampiremob
2. vampiremob posted this