Prologue
When the task force of government cars and wagons rolled into Frank Francis Colacurcio’s driveway and courtyard on a Monday morning in 2008, doors flew open and squads of local cops and federal agents poured out. They rushed to the entryway of the $1.2 million, sand-colored home with a swimming pool overlooking Lake Washington. The three-bedroom, quarter-acre ranch house, built in Frank’s heyday fifties and remodeled in 2004, was tucked into the side of the hill above Sheridan Beach. Its southern exposure looked away from the prying traffic that typically flew past on Bothell Way Northeast in Lake Forest Park. That day, cars slowed outside the compound’s wall as drivers gawked at the scene: with all the FBI jackets, it might have looked like a national security incident. In fact, the lead task force investigator formerly worked on the FBI’s international terrorism squad. But while Frank may have been considered an enemy combatant of sorts, his record was more that of an underwear bomber.
The front door opened, and the legendary stripper king appeared. The godfather of what might be called Nudity Inc.—his half-century-old, once far-flung empire of topless and fully nude dance joints featuring lap dances and hand jobs—had been a squat, barrel-chested brawler with wavy black hair and a thing for gold medallions. Now, in the doorway, he was a bent and balding grandfather of ninety-one with chicken-fuzz hair, greeting his landing party in a bathrobe. “Search warrant,” one of the feds said. No vice-raid virgin, Frank knew the drill. He stood back so the force could swarm in. Then he went to phone the lawyers.
His bathrobe didn’t necessarily mean the old man had been roused from sleep. Rolled up in his robe pocket was $10,000, mostly in hundreds. He liked to be prepared. At his age, senior citizens tended to plan their day around activities that cause the least drooling and heart attacks. Frank liked to hit the bedroom floor running, cane in hand, anticipating drop-ins by one of his dancers. “He gets laid every night,” recalled one of the young women from the strip joints he has been operating for more than forty years—in more recent times featuring full frontal, and “backal,” nudity. Dancers said he had a standing (well, laying) offer: earn up to $1,000 a day working at home—his. “It’s surprising that a guy so old still wants it so much,” another dancer had told some of the investigators now pawing through Frank’s papers and searching his cupboards. “He tried to get me to go and have sex with him for $500!”
It had to be tempting for his underpaid girls. In the eighties, tired of restrictive state liquor laws and nosy inspectors, Frank converted his dance joints to soda pop clubs. To make up for the lost revenue, he began charging his dancers to strip. They were required to pay “rent” of more than $100 a shift, which they had to earn back, hopefully with a profit, from table dances and tips. Some weren’t successful and resorted to the hands-on approach. As one club manager told a dancer reluctant to have sex with a paying customer, “Well honey, you’ve got to get in there and compete.”
Frank liked to fish and play cards, but a toss in the hay was life itself. If he couldn’t participate, he could watch, sometimes cutting peepholes into walls at his clubs, ogling girls in the dressing rooms or spying on them having sex with customers in the bar. On one occasion, a dancer warned Frank that sex was getting rampantly in and out of hand in the secluded VIP booths at Rick’s, his nightclub in Seattle, just up the road from his Sheridan Beach spread. “I think a couple girls are bad,” she said. “They do the real dirty stuff.” Frank stopped her right there. “Where are they?” he asked. “I need one!”
This was not unexpected from a man whose 38-foot fishing boat was named 4PLAY. In the seven decades that law enforcement had been coming to his door, one way or another it was about sex. In 1943 it was a teen girl he was convicted of raping under the pretense of showing her the ghosts that haunted his family’s Eastside farm. Sixty years later, it was a young woman whose nipple he decided to grab—because he could. He was in his late eighties then and still feeding off the breast. He arose each day wondering how to get girls, or get money to get girls, or how to get girls to sell sex to get him money to get more girls. His wife, twenty-three years his junior, put up with it for three decades, then sent him divorce papers in prison. He had taken to keeping a number of girlfriends and several sets of books—the ledgers he stuffed in his pockets and the ones he showed the IRS. He devised an accounting system he called “ins and outs,” as he once explained to a jury, wherein a chunk of the untaxed profits flows in and out and ends up as “miscellaneous.” That was partly why the feds showed up at his home that morning in 2008. They thought Frank was doing the ins and outs again, known as skimming, which had already earned him two of his five prison terms.
Frank was saying nothing. Maybe he was offended. Having money didn’t always mean he embezzled it. His criminal record had forced him into so-called retirement—he preferred to be called a “consultant” to his own strip business—but he’d paid taxes on a lot of those millions too. Stocks, banks, and real estate could have a bad season, but a nude dancing concession is almost recession-proof, with a built-in stimulus. To Frank, the tax harassment—“this police business”—was petty. Once, in 2007, after he’d supposedly retired, one of his club managers was arrested with several dancers for vice infractions at Rick’s. The manager called Frank from King County Jail to make sure he knew they needed bail. The dancers were busted for the usual touching and groping violations, the manager said.
“But,” she added on the recorded jail phone, “we have one with a really funny charge, and we’re not quite sure why.”
“What was it?” Frank asked.
“They’re saying it’s prostitution,” said the manager. “But it’s not a girl that I usually have a prostitution charge on ... Maybe she was arrested by mistake.”
“Ohhh,” said a seething Frank, “them bastards!”
As an iconic entrepreneur, Frank Colacurcio had nothing to do with making Seattle what it is best known for today: caffeine, software, airplanes, and books by mail. Of course, before his clubs switched to soda pop, he did supply Howard Schultz’s coffee market with customers who needed sobering up. He contributed to Bill Gates’s tech world by creating a small demand for government software to track his crimes and tomelike court records. He did fly on the jets of William Boeing’s airline customers to many clubs and prisons in the West, and to San Francisco that one day to hang a guy out a hotel window. An eighth-grade dropout, he wasn’t much of a market booster for Jeff Bezos. Still, unlike Amazon.com, Frank’s start-ups always made money.
He rose from farm worker to CEO of one of the nation’s oldest and most successful vice businesses, and by the time he hit ninety, in 2007, more than $1 million a month in revenues was flowing through club Bank of America accounts. So his was a criminal enterprise, as the feds called it. But who hasn’t said that about big corporations everywhere? And were Howard, Bill, William, and Jeff willing to go to prison for what they believed in? Frank was, again and again.
Back when Gates and Paul Allen were sprouting peach fuzz and entering geekdom, Frank’s fleshy nightclub enterprise already stretched from Seattle to the Southwest, Canada, Alaska, and Hawaii. The key ingredient, tits and ass, was supplied by the dancers from Talents West, the Seattle personnel agency run by Frank and his macho girlie men. He’d gotten in and out of the pinball and jukebox businesses, and began buying up restaurants and selling sex and booze to the mass market. He got a rolling start from a corrupt vice tolerance policy blessed by Seattle’s City Hall and carried out by police headquarters in a unique kind of public safety campaign: in the belief that sin couldn’t be stopped but could be controlled, Seattle cops “regulated” gambling, prostitution, and other vices in a civic shakedown that peaked in the fifties and sixties.
Though such vices and devices were illegal, they were nonetheless licensed and overseen by government. The level of police enforcement was undertaken on a sliding scale, based on how much some businesses were willing to pay cops and city officials in bribes and kickbacks in order to obtain licenses, avoid fines, and remain open. It was a freaky-deaky policy, legalizing illegality, and paid off handsomely for the corrupt. Politicians larded their war chests, and cops stored stacks of cash in their attics. The Seattle police vice squad alone was collecting $6,000 in monthly payoffs from operators, taking a cut and distributing the rest up the rotted food chain. An otherwise conservative and industrious blue-collar town with the imagination to build a floating bridge and a Space Needle was, at its heart, a decadent city on the take.
Frank grew up to see cops and politicians with their hands out and figured it to be a career move. He would wind up as the tolerance policy’s poster boy—enforcer, extortionist, and reputed Italian American mobster to boot—then go to prison for it. Decades later he’d be caught up in another City Hall payoff scandal. But by then he’d mastered the art of corruption: after the scheme was exposed in 2003, Frank and his associates got their money back.
Not that he needed it. Frank made a fortune operating in the Mafia-free zones of the West. The outside family mobs considered much of it Frank’s turf or perhaps not worth the effort. He dominated other regional vice lords as well, such as the dangerously screwball Carbone gang of Tacoma, the Elkins mob of Portland, and small-time operators around the Northwest. He worked with the Teamsters and their crooked Northwest leaders, including Dave Beck, and madams such as Ann Thompson, a wise businesswoman who convinced an expansion-minded Frank that, alas, even with support from all those horny Teamsters, whorehouses wouldn’t be profitable in undersexed Portland. He helped create a regional environment of sin and corruption for others, including Nellie Curtis, Seattle and Aberdeen’s most memorable cathouse madam, and a former Miss Washington, Rose Marie Williams, whose hobbies were sewing, swimming, and screwing most of King County. Of course, Frank outpimped them all, with legions of his club girls servicing thousands of his eager customers over the years in VIP rooms and parking lots. The yellow brick road to today’s Emerald City is littered with his strip club condoms.
Unlike his fellow Seattle CEOs today, Frank never earned a spot on the Forbes 500s, his fortune regularly plundered by defense attorneys. But he’d always been a shy member of the filthy rich, and rode around in a used Lincoln Town Car piloted by a retired lounge singer. Like Gates, Chairman Frank eventually stepped down from his leadership role to concentrate on his own charity of sorts, Frank’s Foundation for Wayward Girls. But his influence and persistence continued to dazzle observers—among them, tireless FBI agent Corey Cote, who tailed Frank for years and called him “patriarch of the criminal organization.” Though Cote and other investigators discovered Frank rubbed elbows with a few Mafia figures during his career, they saw him as an independent contractor. They believed him when he said the Cosa Nostra talk was “Mafia malarkey,” even if he seemed to dabble in it. A friend of his said Frank joked about being Seattle’s Brando-like boss, and one former associate tells the story that a Colacurcio mobster once left a bloody horse’s head in a foe’s bed, mocking a scene from The Godfather.
Conversely, Frank tended to understate the facts. He wasn’t violent and never hurt anyone, he insisted. Yet he had a felony assault conviction and once beat a man until he pleaded for his life. The vice rackets, for all their good times, were also bloody and now and then fatal. Frank was accused of associating with killers and orchestrating some hackings—cold-case detectives loosely linked him to four or five deaths. Sometimes targeted by other local gangsters, Frank kept a cache of guns around, and in bar fights he could swing a mean club.
The fact that he remained a free man didn’t sit well with the sore losers of law and order. As this century began, they formed a local, state, and federal Task Force to Get Frank. It cost millions—something much of the public saw as a wasteful intrusion into the world of consenting adults—resulting in a whole new series of federal racketeering, money laundering, and prostitution charges against him. The massive collection of evidence included more than 120,000 pages of documents and assorted audio, video, and business records stored on almost 2,300 CDs and DVDs. One undercover officer made more than 160 visits to Frank’s clubs in recent years, contributing an estimated $18,000 in taxpayer funds to Frank’s bank account. He made no arrests, according to court papers, but he took notes.
Frank was pretty sore about the indictment. The cops came barging in with a warrant while he held his bathrobe closed, for gods sakes! Used to be they’d pay him off for a crime like this.
Go look at Seattle vice history; you’ll see.