In the early ’50s, John Benedict “The Pope” Balboa, Joe Sacci’s predecessor twice removed, moved here from Jersey where he grew up in Ducktown, the Little Italy of Atlantic City. He was homesick and tried to establish this part of town as the Little Italy of LA, buying the building that ultimately became the Venetian and several others farther south on Wilshire. The Pope was an old-school don, an evil motherfucker the East Coast newspapers dubbed the “Jersey Antichrist,” but in the ’60s he developed a soft spot in his heart for Koreans when they started pouring into the neighborhood. At first he hired a few to work for him in menial positions, and he admired how hard they worked and how they bowed and scraped to him, especially the women. His businesses at this end of town eventually went to shit from Italian management, and he ended up leasing practically all his properties to Koreans. The cultural revolution the Pope therefore helped effect turned out to be the Koreans’, and this part of LA is now known as Koreatown.
While I walk to the club entrance, my thoughts spin in the direction of Nico Wang, a guy you cannot fully understand without first learning the Pope’s history. Nico’s an Italorean who runs Sacci’s loan shark operation and oversees his real estate interests. He’s known in his circle as the Pope’s bastard grandson, his Sicilian birth father having hooked up with an illegitimate daughter the Pope sired with a Korean lounge singer. Nico’s shown me pictures of Mama and Grandma, and he always rightly describes them as
belle ragazze,
loosely translated from Italian as
gorgeous babes.
Once, I asked him how he’d describe them in Korean and he said, “Damn if I know.”
Me and Nico got to know each other when the old man went to prison the first time, Nico helping his mom deliver groceries to our house on a weekly basis, courtesy of Joe Sacci. We found common ground in the fact that neither of us had a father—Nico’s was dead (murdered just before Nico was born) and mine might as well have been. Our mothers eventually got into a catfight of some sort—not an unusual occurrence for Lorraine Crucci—and grocery duty fell to another woman much closer to the edge of the Sacci herd than Dottie Wang.
We reunited over a year ago when, not knowing it was Nico, I saw his car weaving across three lanes of traffic and stopped him for suspicion of driving under the influence—
suspicion,
shit, Stevie Wonder could see how flat blasted Nico was. When I discovered it was Nico behind the wheel, I basically said to him, Man, today’s your lucky fucking day, and saw to it that he got home safe, and free of all charges. The next day a messenger brought me an envelope stuffed with C-notes, and one thing led to another, then another.
And now, just this morning, yet another…
Nico’s the only person in sight when I crash through the Venetian’s cramped foyer directly into the bar area, which is wood paneled and plainly appointed in the manner of every neighborhood beer joint I’ve ever been in. The bar is to the right; in front of the bar are five Formica-topped kitchen tables with wobbly chrome legs and mismatched chairs that make up what a person of low standards would refer to as the dining area. The room’s only distinguishing feature hangs high on its far wall: a large, framed poster that depicts J. Edgar Hoover snarling at the camera from behind the sights of a tommy gun,
FREEZE YOU DIRTY RAT!
scrawled at the bottom in blood-red letters.
The old Seeburg jukebox in the corner is playing Clapton’s cover of “
I Shot the Sheriff.”
Nico’s perched on his usual barstool in the middle of the long leg of the L-shaped bar top, talking on his cellphone and nursing a tall screwdriver. His Korean blood was twice diluted, once by the Pope and again by his Sicilian father, and his face doesn’t reveal significant evidence of his Asian genes.
Hell, Nico’s face never reveals significant
While I walk to the club entrance, my thoughts spin in the direction of Nico Wang, a guy you cannot fully understand without first learning the Pope’s history. Nico’s an Italorean who runs Sacci’s loan shark operation and oversees his real estate interests. He’s known in his circle as the Pope’s bastard grandson, his Sicilian birth father having hooked up with an illegitimate daughter the Pope sired with a Korean lounge singer. Nico’s shown me pictures of Mama and Grandma, and he always rightly describes them as
belle ragazze,
loosely translated from Italian as
gorgeous babes.
Once, I asked him how he’d describe them in Korean and he said, “Damn if I know.”
Me and Nico got to know each other when the old man went to prison the first time, Nico helping his mom deliver groceries to our house on a weekly basis, courtesy of Joe Sacci. We found common ground in the fact that neither of us had a father—Nico’s was dead (murdered just before Nico was born) and mine might as well have been. Our mothers eventually got into a catfight of some sort—not an unusual occurrence for Lorraine Crucci—and grocery duty fell to another woman much closer to the edge of the Sacci herd than Dottie Wang.
We reunited over a year ago when, not knowing it was Nico, I saw his car weaving across three lanes of traffic and stopped him for suspicion of driving under the influence—
suspicion,
shit, Stevie Wonder could see how flat blasted Nico was. When I discovered it was Nico behind the wheel, I basically said to him, Man, today’s your lucky fucking day, and saw to it that he got home safe, and free of all charges. The next day a messenger brought me an envelope stuffed with C-notes, and one thing led to another, then another.
And now, just this morning, yet another…
Nico’s the only person in sight when I crash through the Venetian’s cramped foyer directly into the bar area, which is wood paneled and plainly appointed in the manner of every neighborhood beer joint I’ve ever been in. The bar is to the right; in front of the bar are five Formica-topped kitchen tables with wobbly chrome legs and mismatched chairs that make up what a person of low standards would refer to as the dining area. The room’s only distinguishing feature hangs high on its far wall: a large, framed poster that depicts J. Edgar Hoover snarling at the camera from behind the sights of a tommy gun,
FREEZE YOU DIRTY RAT!
scrawled at the bottom in blood-red letters.
The old Seeburg jukebox in the corner is playing Clapton’s cover of “
I Shot the Sheriff.”
Nico’s perched on his usual barstool in the middle of the long leg of the L-shaped bar top, talking on his cellphone and nursing a tall screwdriver. His Korean blood was twice diluted, once by the Pope and again by his Sicilian father, and his face doesn’t reveal significant evidence of his Asian genes.
Hell, Nico’s face never reveals significant
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