Cold Cases, Partly Thawed

“It just drew more police attention to the stripper business. That’s why he got killed.”

Frank’s public persona was that of a tough but nonviolent “charmer”—one reporter used that word in a profile of him. But that wasn’t always how he came off to the media, such as the day during Strippergate when he told a TV photographer, “I’ll take that camera away from you pretty quick!” if the photographer didn’t stop taking Frank’s picture (he stopped). Then there was an incident that took place one night in the eighties outside the Firelite, his topless joint typically crowded beyond capacity.

In view of several reporters waiting to get in, a big man began drunkenly banging on the door, tired of waiting. Suddenly, the glass in the door shattered and flew into the club. The big guy stepped back, surprised at what he’d done. In a split second, Frank was out the door.

“You broke the window!” he said to the guy who was seemingly twice his size. “Hey ...” the guy said, holding out his hands and apparently beginning to apologize. Frank raised a long metal rod in the air—he had walked out the door, bootlegging it behind him. Whack, whack! The big guy was on the pavement, screaming, holding his bloody hands over his battered face as Frank continued to raise the rod to full extension over him. He stroked it like a golf club on the customer’s head and back.

“Stop! Don’t hit me no more!” the guy pleaded, crying. He just went in his pants, he said.

Just then, two beat cops came through the crowd. Frank put the rod down against his backside again. The cops looked at Frank, then at the bloodied man cowering on the pavement.

“Hey, Frank,” one said with a smile and a wave. “This guy giving you trouble?”

The bum broke my window, Frank said.

“We’ll take care of it,” one of the cops said. They got him up off the walk and led him down the street, bloodied and looking like someone happy to be arrested. (They sent him to the hospital.)

No one has been able to pin any killings on Frank, although federal and local investigators have been trying to do just that. In May 2007 the Seattle Times did take a bold stab at it with its own investigation. Under the headline “The Cops Vs. Colacurcio—the Last Round,” reporters Steve Miletich and Jim Brunner wrote a mostly unsourced story about the “execution-style slayings of five people who had crossed [Frank]”:

The victims: a rival strip-club operator and his fiancée, a bar owner in Central Washington, a mechanic in a murder-for-hire scheme, and a police informant.

The slayings, which took place in the 1970s and 1980s, have drawn little attention for more than twenty years.

Now, federal and local investigators have reopened the cases, trying to find out once and for all whether Colacurcio had anything to do with the deaths. Most recently, investigators reopened the slain-informant case, which might offer them their best hope.

Authorities had already made arrests in four of the killings, the Times reported, but had not directly connected Frank or his associates to them. The slaying victims included Frank’s Seattle topless club rival Frank “Sharkey” Hinkley, forty-five, and his girlfriend Barbara Rosenfeld, forty-four, found shot to death in 1975 inside Hinkley’s Bear Cave bar in Seattle. Hinkley, who constantly ran afoul of the law—he was cited for lewd activity nearly two-hundred times—became the first Seattle strip club owner to convert to soda pop. “My flea-bag place is packed every night until two-thirty,” he said after the conversion in the seventies. “Some guys come in and spend their whole pay-check.” That helped him buy two Cadillacs and one Edmonds home with a swimming pool, twelve-foot bathtub, dance floor, sauna, and view of Puget Sound. He’d also earned the animosity of some of his rivals, investigators thought.

In a short interview, Frank waved off the probe as the usual malarkey. Cops had a habit of trying to pin their unsolved crimes on him, he said. “They have been investigating me since the time I was born.”

What brought this on? Strippergate, Frank and Frankie’s emboldened move to buy a City Hall favor. If Frank wanted to resurrect old tactics, then authorities would resurrect old cases and maybe end his lawbreaking ways.

But while they produced new testimony, clues, and the convictions of others, the revived investigations left Frank, as usual, untouched. That was the outcome of another cold-case probe as well.

The pajama-clad body of Seattle labor leader Mario Vaccarino was discovered seasoned with Parmesan cheese and floating face-down in his bathtub on October 24, 1985, at his Shorewood home in south King County. He had been violently drowned, his head held underwater, the medical examiner concluded. His year-old Buick was found parked at a McDonald’s restaurant in White Center, and his wallet was left in a tavern men’s room. It was a dramatically staged murder. Twenty-five years after his death, he had joined the list of bar owners and others whose cold cases investigators had been trying to link to Frank Colacurcio.

Frank “Sharkey” Hinkley outside the Lucky Lady Tavern, January 1973. Investigators tried unsuccessfully to link his death to Frank Colacurcio. (Photo: Jerry Gay/The Seattle Times)

“We’re reviewing all those cases,” King County Sheriff’s detective Scott Tompkins confirmed in a 2009 interview. His cold-case team worked with the Seattle and federal task forces probing the murders detailed in the Times but was pursing the union case separately. “Vaccarino’s death is one we’re actively trying to solve,” he said, and Frank was among the usual suspects.

This is what’s known: Vaccarino, sixty-one, head of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) union Local 8, may have been killed by a man who ended up sentenced to prison for another murder. Or he was the man who at least hired the hit man. A Colacurcio associate who had heard underworld talk about the murder originally provided the somewhat sketchy details to Seattle Weekly and said he thought the killer was still in prison in Alaska.

But was Frank in any way involved? The Colacurcio associate didn’t think so. And according to newspaper stories from the era, the trail had actually led away from Colacurcio, who was among many angry restaurant owners who had cause to dislike the not exactly lovable Vaccarino. “What we’re learning,” a police investigator said then, “is that there are fifty people with a motive for killing him.” Fred Peitz, who took over as business agent for the union, pointed out, “There were some people who liked him and some people who hated him. That was true professionally and personally.”

Vaccarino’s former fiancée, Rhonda Hiller, who became a union international vice president, took control of Local 8 as a trustee, vowing to clean up the labor messes Vaccarino left behind, including a $200,000 debt and dwindling membership. She was saddened by his death but also remembered him as a sometimes-violent housemate. Court records show she and her twelve-year-old son from a previous marriage moved out of the home she shared with Vaccarino after he physically attacked her. “I thought my nose was broken, my lip was swollen, and I was in a lot of pain and my head hurt,” she reported, recalling also how he would “push me, spit at me, slap me, and on at least one occasion, choke me.”

The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that organized crime had infiltrated HERE’s international union, and Vaccarino’s name had come up in a federal probe of a New Jersey union linked to organized crime. Yet wouldn’t a mob contract killer use a gun? Doesn’t the grated cheese, car theft, and dumping of the wallet indicate some kind of amateur night antics? That’s what the Colacurcio source thought. “He was supposed to just go to Mario’s house and rough him up, but took it too far. He ended up putting the body in the tub and sprinkling it with Parmesan to suggest it was an Italian mob killing.” The medical examiner concluded death was by drowning, and that indeed may have been the ultimate cause, the source said. But Vaccarino had fought back while getting roughed up, and it all ended in the bathroom. You don’t just walk into a house and fill a tub, the source said, then say “step in so I can kill you.” In the end, the source concluded—contrary to investigators’ ongoing suspicions today—that Frank had no demonstrable hand in Vaccarino’s death.

Frank would say only that those kinds of stories kept him entertained. His group’s not a mob and he had nothing to do with any killings, period, he said. “I’ve given them [prosecutors] every chance to prove it,” he said. “They’re still trying, I guess.”