Author’s Note

In the eighties, convicted racketeer Frank Colacurcio Sr. told me that mob stories about him were made up. “Fairy tales,” he said. Twenty years later, with a few more prison stretches to his name, he told me, “Organized crime, you just never had it here.” If he meant the Mafia, true; if he meant himself, he was likely saying his crimes were sometimes disorganized, as his conviction rate indicates: seven felonies, one reversed.

His mob did incorporate some of the structural elements of the Mafia, or at least the Army—loyal volunteers willing to do mayhem, have sex, and drink beer. As future U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy indicated in the fifties and Seattle mayor Greg Nickels said half a century later, Colacurcio was some kind of godfather. “I believe that there is organized crime involved in at least that club and perhaps others,” the mayor said of Frank’s flagship nudie joint in Seattle. Frank laughed. “Oh, I think he’s just trying to win an election,” he told me. “It’s not the old days anymore, I should know.”

He did. In the vaginal valley of Seattle vice, Frank was the polluted river that runs through it. Drawing from the historic tributaries—bad cops, corrupt pols, cathouse madams, bookmakers, pornographers, and drug dealers, whose tales flow into his—the stripper king carried us from one Seattle century to the next, meandering through Tacoma, Portland, and the West. In the process, fact has blended with fiction, creating a Mafia mythology. But the preponderance of evidence—Frank’s central, decades-long role in the vice rackets and as head of an operation that reached into ten Western states and many of their prisons—affirmed his place as a unique American crime figure. His story is told in hundreds of thousands of pages of law enforcement and court documents and the background interviews I’ve had with investigators, attorneys, prosecutors, and Frank’s friends and foes, in addition to historical research through books and newspapers and my own past encounters with him.

He notched his first felony, a sex-related charge, during the Roosevelt presidency. He was charged with his eighth felony, a sex-related charge, under the Obama administration. It is an endurance record in lawbreaking rivaling, if not besting, New York’s legendary Mafia godfathers. Really, how many of them could boast they were under indictment at age ninety-three and still trying to get laid?