Seattle Vice

In the seventies, a new round of corruption erupted in Tacoma, and Frank Colacurcio got a costarring role. The plot centered around a clumsy turf war waged by a gang known as the “Carboneheads,” and if it had all been captured in a book, it would have had to be written by Jimmy Breslin, although some victims might not agree. “One of the U.S. attorneys called them ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,’” bar owner Ron Chase said in an interview. However, he added, “I never saw it in that light. The gang didn’t bungle the fire [at his tavern]. They destroyed the place.” His wife, Pat, seconded that, recalling how Richard Caliguri, a stocky, thickheaded gangster from the John Carbone mob, crawled through a window of her Tacoma house one day and went straight to the kids’ room. At five in the morning, he pointed a gun to the head of Pat’s teenage daughter. “Don’t move,” he said, “or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” Caliguri stared at the teen’s face. “I ought to kill you just because you look so much like your mother,” he said.

Caliguri got the girl out of bed and had her tie up a girlfriend who was staying over while Pat and Ron were away. Known also as “Waco,” which some pronounced “wacko,” Caliguri was under the impression that the Chases ran their bar for absentee title holder Frank Colacurcio, although both the Chases and Frank denied that. Nonetheless, Caliguri and his bosses believed it, so he marched the Chases’ daughter downstairs at gunpoint and picked up a butcher knife, which he first held to her throat and then used to slash the phone line. He left the girl unharmed, but with a message for her parents: “If they don’t get out of the tavern business, they’re dead.”

John Carbone’s Tacoma mob had much the same goal as Frank’s: to control the flow of booze, sin, and corruption on their turf. But the Tacoma Carboneheads were reckless amateurs compared to the Seattle gang, a typical Second City act. “Most Tacomans know they can’t compete with Seattle,” television producer and author Paul LaRosa discovered in gathering material for his book Tacoma Confidential, “but what galls them, what has seeped into the city’s soul over generations, is the way Seattle has beaten Tacoma at every turn for more than a hundred years.” On the other hand, one of the few categories in which Tacoma could compete with Seattle was crime. Al Rosellini’s fifties hearings exposed some of Tacoma’s vast underworld, but let it smolder. The Carboneheads were pushing that history along with a series of assaults and arsons and the help of corrupt public officials. It was a pattern that would continue into the next century as well, when city and police officials conspired to cover up the actions of their sexually addicted and out-of-control Tacoma police chief David Brame, who, in 2003, murdered his wife, Crystal, in front of their children, then shot himself dead.

Frank Colacurcio was a silent owner or investor in some of the Tacoma and Lakewood bars targeted by Carbone, such as the Peking restaurant, formerly known as the Tiki. A topless bar for decades, it was destroyed by an arson fire in 1978. That was the same year Tacomans began to hear about other fires and men with flaming brooms.

A onetime used car dealer, “Handsome Johnny” Carbone graduated from rolling back odometers to opening topless joints, paying off cops, running prostitutes, and operating a corrupt bail bond business. The short, bespectacled Carbone, in his late fifties then, was a flamboyant dresser who’d just sold his 55-foot yacht, Sea Tramp, and was having a 65-footer built to replace it. The buyer of his old boat, for $400,000, was his mob lieutenant, Ron Williams, who choreographed Richard Caliguri’s window entries and paid off cops with turkeys, hams, booze, and women. “It’s hard to forget the guy,” a Seattle Yacht Club member noted about Williams. “You always wondered why, when you’re out yachting, you would need to pack a gun.”

It was that kind of brilliance that characterized the Carboneheads’ takeover of the bar business in South Tacoma and Lakewood. They attempted to burn down one rival bar by using flaming brooms to set its roof on fire. This was taking some time, and a lot of people driving past called police to say there were men running around a building and jumping into the air with brooms on fire. They dashed off before the cops arrived.

The gang did get the fire going at their boss’s house, however. John Carbone thought this would be a good way to earn insurance money and make himself look like a victim. With his $175,000 home in flames, he could pretend he was targeted by the same people who were torching taverns. When they asked him who did it, he could say “that Frank guy.”

This did not go well. A detective went through the charred Gig Harbor house and when he got to the closet, he thought, “Arson.” Carbone did not want his shoes to burn so he took them all out in advance, along with some of the better furniture and valuables. The detective also thought it was important that someone saw a moving van outside the boss’s house the night before the big fire.

Investigators were instantly reminded of an earlier blaze at one of Carbone’s own taverns, which he claimed some rival gang had set ablaze. The night before, a witness said, a big moving van had backed up to the tavern door and took away the beer and stools and every other good thing. Carbone seemed fortunate to always be relocating with the flames at his heels.

Altogether, the Carboneheads managed to torch ten taverns or businesses and four homes over a six-year period, with a $2 million loss. At one tavern, a guard was tied up and left to die in the flames, but escaped. Besides arson and murder threats, the gang performed insurance fraud and ran shakedown and protection scams, prostitution, and gambling.

It didn’t hurt that Carbone had Pierce County Sheriff George Janovich on his side, paid to look the other way. The gang could commit crime with little worry or planning. Richard Caliguri had a free pass to go through anyone’s window and threaten children, and his boss Ron Williams could destroy a competitor’s bar and not look back. As Williams would later explain, giving testimony in a civil trial while he was being held in protective custody: “We would go down to the Players [rival club] and I would throw bottles, like a case of bottles, and break them up and throw them all over.... We would have cars impounded through various deputies for no reason at all. We worked through the bike clubs, bikers, the Shifters, we were giving them money to go down and be rowdy and start fights.” If that wasn’t enough, “We sent minors in. John Carbone got a hold of the liquor board and the sheriff’s department and they raided the place, busted two minors, and got a violation.”

Bribery was a necessary tactic to stay in business, he said. One former county licensing official, Williams recalled, “was a pretty heavy drinker. He would be in there—he always seemed to hit my place at the tail end of his drinking spree—and would want a girl. I would tell him, ‘Pick a girl of your choice.’ He would take her right out of the club, walk right out the door with her. I don’t think we bought a license for a pinball machine, jukebox, dance license, throughout them years.”

Even after the gang was indicted and locked up, along with Sheriff Janovich, some of the victims couldn’t shake their fear that other Carboneheads were lurking. The Chases’ topless-dancing tavern had been firebombed twice and would have been hit a third time had Carbone not hired an undercover cop to handle the torch. The Chases quietly moved their belongings to another residence, kept a gun by the bed, and drove home a different way each night. “You get so used to living like this for so long,” Pat Chase said, “you don’t know when it’s right not to.”

The thing about corruption, she added, was when it goes to the top, there is no one to help. Janovich was a lawman for three decades. After six years as a deputy out of high school, six years as a detective, and thirteen years as chief criminal deputy, he was elected sheriff by a 150,000-vote margin over the incumbent. A balding, rangy man who demanded loyalty and respect, he won praise for consolidating Tacoma police and county sheriff’s record keeping, creating a canine unit, and drawing up the first mutual aid agreement for county law enforcement agencies.

Of course, he was a racketeer too. Federal prosecutors said Janovich ignored prostitution and other lawbreaking at the clubs owned by Carbone and Williams and at several others, independently owned, which catered especially to the military from Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base. Even as he campaigned for sheriff in 1974, according to court testimony, Janovich had reached a deal with the Carbones to make sure their bail bonding company got the cream of his jail’s business by having jailers steer inmates to their office. In return, the Carbones gave tens of thousands of dollars to Janovich for his campaign and as living expenses.

Janovich’s deputies also harassed the Carboneheads’ rival club owners and made sure that arson investigations always hit dead ends. At Williams’s suggestion, Sheriff Janovich steered suspicion in the shooting of state liquor agent Mel Journey away from the Carboneheads and toward other suspects. Journey was shot several times as he was getting into his car outside his Tacoma home in 1977, but survived. The two shooters were later identified by federal agents and convicted; they indeed had been hired by Williams. In a later confession, Williams said Carbone told him to have Journey killed or he, Williams, would be murdered. He also said Carbone got his instructions to kill Journey from Janovich.

The sheriff had to balance competing interests, however, according to court records. He was doing favors for Puyallup Indian tribal leader Bob Satiacum, who needed protection to sell illegal booze and cigarettes. Janovich reportedly told Williams, “You guys can have your topless business, the bail-bond business, your sauna bath business ... [But] I don’t want you going into the smoke shop business, the fireworks business, the Christmas tree business [that] Satiacum is operating.”

Janovich also made sure Williams was tipped off whenever police planned to raid his bars. It was a protection racket that pretty much echoed Seattle’s tolerance policy and also dated back to the fifties, except in this case the county’s top lawman wasn’t just looking the other way, he was directing traffic. In 1979, after a four-month federal trial, Janovich and five others were convicted of racketeering. Another six men earlier had pleaded guilty in the same case. Those sent to prison included John Carbone’s son Joey and enforcer Caliguri, hit with an eighteen-year sentence. The piece of evidence that brought Janovich down was a tape recording, made by an undercover agent, of the sheriff accepting a $1,300 bribe. He was sentenced to twelve years but was released in six, having been moved from prison to prison about thirty times. Prisoners do not play well with the people who put them there. At age seventy-seven, still claiming he’d been wrongly convicted, Janovich died on Father’s Day, 2005, from a ruptured appendix.

Gang boss Williams won freedom a few years later by cooperating with the FBI in the conviction of Indian leader Satiacum and providing information in other cases. His federal sentence was suspended, and a life term for a state conviction related to the attempted murder of Mel Journey was converted to immediate parole.

John Carbone spent fifteen years in prison and later, at age seventy-nine, died a feeble and demented old man at the mental hospital, Western State, down the road from where he’d burned his own tavern. He got a nice send-off in his hometown paper, the News Tribune, where someone with a short memory described him as “a simple guy. A good guy. Really.”

The Carboneheads never got to where they were going, investigators said, but they were thinking big, planning to stretch their reach into Seattle. To that end, prosecutors said, they at one point planned to kill Frank Colacurcio. They got busted before they could get around to it.