Sex and Car Bombshells
“I seen the belly dancers and what they were doing and whatnot. That’s how it became this type of table dancing and whatnot that it is today.”
 
Frank never testified before the McClellan Committee, but reportedly had a phone chat with Bobby Kennedy in early 1959, though there is no record of it in the committee’s papers. He had more pressing problems locally. The Seattle City Council was weighing whether to take away the Colacurcio brothers’ jukebox licenses, just as it took away their pinball license. Police recommended the jukebox revocation based on Frank’s strong-arm tactics.
The council decided five to four to put the company on probation for the time being and to see what happened. Frank followed that up with a sort of thank-you letter, telling the council that the false accusations about his criminal history, including the accusations from the McClellan hearings, had damaged his reputation. In a four-page letter, Colacurcio’s longtime attorney, Joe Moschetto, said tales of Frank’s influence peddling and pinball syndication operation were “inaccurate and damaging misrepresentations.” After all, the claim that Frank was a racketeer had never been proved.
Frank asked for a hearing to clear his name. The council merely filed away the letter. The impression was left to linger. It clearly stressed him out. At age forty-two, Frank suffered a mild heart attack and was laid up for weeks.
By 1960, brother Bill, after his pinball license had been given to a competitor, went to court to get it back. Within a week, a pinball war broke out in Seattle. Several cars belonging to gambling figures were firebombed, along with the vehicle of mayoral candidate Gordon Newell, who’d taken a campaign stand against the games. The industry group, Amusement Association of Seattle, offered a $6,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the pinball bombers (there had also been several related car bombings in 1958). The association’s secretary-treasurer, Fred Galeno—who co-owned a racehorse with Teamster leader Frank Brewster—said his members would agree to take polygraph tests and sign affidavits to prove they told all they knew about the bombings. Police later took him and his members up on the offer, with Galeno first in line. He passed. Then Mayor Gordon Clinton said he would shut down pinball operations citywide if the bombings weren’t solved. Deputy Police Chief (later head chief) Frank Ramon said his department had investigated five car bombings, three of them in recent months, but none were ever solved.
A former Colacurcio employee says some bombings were undertaken by his former bosses. “I don’t know about the cars,” who exactly bombed them, he says today, “but we used dynamite caps on the [rivals’ amusement] machines. It was easy. You light the fuse and then just slap the cap onto the underside of the machine and walk out. Boom, coins all over, and you’re down the street.”
State officials pushed for new gambling laws and Seattle followed suit, no longer allowing pinball machines to pay off—indeed, for amusement only—and disallowing prizes for punchboard winners as well. A few days after the vote, squads of cops fanned out across the city to see if all businesses were complying. They collected exactly nine dice cups that businessmen had neglected to put away. Almost three hundred pinballs remained licensed as amusement devices, and more than sixty punchboard operations were approved for noncash rewards. But they didn’t attract many customers since the county, unlike the city, continued to license pinball gambling.
Frank, though, had already moved into another field, something where clothing was optional. “From the vending business,” he’d recall years later, “we loaned money to different bars, restaurants, lounges. And [when] they weren’t able to pay, we took over several of them to make them [profitable].” One of his first joints was the Firelite Room—now a retro club called the Nitelite—in the Moore Hotel on Second Avenue, where, according to Frank, go-go dancing in Seattle first evolved into topless dancing fifty years ago. “I had a fellow from the Mideast that worked for me, and I seen the belly dancers and what they were doing and whatnot,” he recalled. “That’s how it became this type of table dancing and whatnot that it is today.”
At forty-five Frank opened the Diamond Horseshoe, a beer garden and eatery at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. He also quickly set a trend for his future in the bar and restaurant field by immediately getting busted: he’d hired teenage girls to go-go dance for him. Prosecutors said he advised the four minors to lie about their ages to state liquor inspectors. Colacurcio was booked and released on bond, and a justice court (today called municipal court) case dragged on for months before he was fined $500 and given a suspended six-month sentence for contributing to the delinquency of minors.
That didn’t do much for Frank’s image or, for that matter, for Mike Budnick, who was running for sheriff at the time with Frank’s backing. Frank and brother Sam “played a part” in getting Budnick to run, the candidate admitted, but he wasn’t getting much in return from the duo, other than $500 Sam donated. He used some of the money to hold a political fund-raiser at Seattle’s historic ballpark, Sick’s Seattle Stadium, in the Rainier Valley. Unfortunately, the gate wasn’t enough to cover costs of the big names he’d brought in to entertain folks, including showman George Jessel and jazz singer Anita O’Day (the extravaganza was promoted by George McFarland, best known as Spanky, the formerly chubby and angelic member of the Our Gang comedy movie series). “I mortgaged my home to help raise campaign funds, and I have nothing in my personal bank account,” Budnick said, insisting he wasn’t beholden to the Colacurcios. “No outsiders are going to get to Budnick!” he said.
By then, Frank was taking particular offense at slights to his character. In the wake of those late fifties McClellan hearings that fingered him as a racketeer, forty-year-old Frank met a teenager named Jacqueline Austin, a local hairdresser who was twenty-three years his junior. They were married on January 24, 1961, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Known as Jackie, she would stay out of the headlines through most of their thirty-three years of marriage. In 1962 she gave birth to their son, Frank Francis Jr., and five years later the duo would buy the Sheridan Beach home, paying it off within a decade. With a wife and child, Frank now had a family to protect from his growing reputation.
His brother Bill was also feeling the heat and finally sold off the assets of the licenseless family pinball business for $175,000. He claimed to be concentrating mostly on real estate deals, but was still sore about how the council took away his license. “Maybe this is the wrong town for me,” he lamented. He was on to something. In early 1963, at age forty, he opened the door to federal agents standing on his doorstep with a summons. He was commanded to appear before a federal grand jury convened by then U.S. prosecutor Brock Adams—who’d go on to become a congressman, secretary of transportation under Jimmy Carter, and a one-term U.S. senator. Then eight women accused him of sexual misconduct ranging from sexual harassment to rape. He denied the claims but, facing certain defeat, chose to retire in 1993.
The grand jury launched a headline-making review of the pinball industry, which would later spill over into an even wider investigation of tolerance policy kickbacks and payoffs in the next decade. The jury probe was already in full swing when Bill was called to the stand in May 1963. A dozen defendants, in violation of the newest state law prohibiting cash payments from pinball machines, had already been charged with unlawful interstate transportation of gambling equipment: the machines. Under questioning, Bill twice refused to discuss a mysterious tape recording that FBI agents had seized from his Capitol Hill home six months earlier. Prosecutor Adams indicated the tape contained conversations between several pinball industry figures. Bill said he knew what was on the tape, “but I can’t talk about it.”
Faced with criminal contempt for balking before the grand jury, Bill claimed his testimony wasn’t really needed, and at a hearing his attorney dramatically called prosecutor Adams to the witness stand and grilled him about the tape. Adams gave few details—the tape contained a general discussion of pinball operations, he said. A deputy prosecutor then objected, saying that forcing Adams to give specifics would violate the secrecy rule of grand jury testimony. U.S. Judge William Lindberg therein halted the inquiry. Bill agreed to talk to the grand jury the following month, but at the last minute balked one more time. Lindberg immediately dispatched him to prison for eight months. After three hours in custody, Bill cried uncle. He answered all thirteen questions that Adams asked about the tape.
Afterward, Bill told Don Duncan of the Seattle Times that he was tired of the Colacurcio family “being known as gangsters” and hoped his cooperation with prosecutors “will help clear the name.” He was also worried the publicity was having a poor effect on his ailing mother, he said. “It wasn’t fear of jail or anything like that. I called my mother from jail and she was crying, and I was afraid she might have another heart attack. She doesn’t understand about contempt. To her, it’s the same as murder.” As Duncan wrote:
“I told my mom that I’ve done nothing, that I’ve got immunity. I said that all the federals want me to do is to testify. But she doesn’t understand.”
Colacurcio said he had been out of the pinball business about five years.
“When I was in it, it was a business licensed by the City Council,” he said.
While Colacurcio spoke, he petted his German Shepherd, Tequito.
“Tequito really charged when the police arrived to search my place,” Colacurcio said with a smile. “When they opened the door, he tore right into them and out into the street.
“I wish I’d never heard of the tape. I’ve got a feeling that they are trying to weave the whole case around me, that I’m the central figure. They told me they want me to testify again in September. Yes, I’ll be around. I’m not going anywhere.
“It seems anything that happens in this town, we [Colacurcios] get blamed. I’ve got six brothers [five, unless he was errantly including himself] and three sisters. My sisters get digs all the time, like ‘Oh, your brothers are gangsters.’ How would you like that?”
Colacurcio telephoned his mother at her Bow Lake home this morning. She was pleased he was home again.
What was on the tape? Bill Colacurcio clammed up, and authorities didn’t want to talk about it. The defendants charged with pinball violations all agreed to plead no contest and were fined. The tape was never played in court and is forever sealed in a court repository.
But, says a former Colacurcio associate today, the tape included specific details of the payoff system by businesses to keep police from busting pinball and other vice operators, including how the money worked its way up the line to City Hall.
“The tape was a recording Bill made [apparently surreptitiously] of a city councilman describing how the payoff system worked, how the cops picked up the money and then passed it down the line—to him and others,” says the associate, who ran bars and hotels for Colacurcio. “I understand that they played the tape for him [the council member, whose name the associate couldn’t remember] one day and he suddenly felt too old to seek re-election.”