I tried to make contact with Mr. Patrick in 2019 after I did a piece on horse racing and a horse that ran second, Kellycanrun, who produced a sizable place price for finishing second, even while a short-priced favorite finished first. A $26 place price is nothing to sneeze at.
Cashing in on a second place finish reminded me of the novel The Pope of Greenwich Village written by Mr. Patrick that was turned into a move starring Mickey Rourke (when he still had an acting future ahead of him), Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts.
Also in The movie The Pope of Greenwich Village was Burt Young, who just passed away as well. Mr. Young played a mob boss known as Bed Bug Eddie who meets his ending while drinking expresso with an additive. For some reason, Mr. Young's role in that movie is not in his NYT obit. Why anyone would write an obit and not take the opportunity to name Bed Bug Eddie is unknown to me. I'm beginning to think these NYT obit writers need to stop doing so much work from home and come in and talk to colleagues more.
The story in part revolves around two waiters of mismatched intelligence who go to Atlantic City with a hot tip who wisely play a horse to win and place, and come out ahead when Charlie, the Mickey Rourke character and the wiser of the two, distributes the betting money and doesn't go all in on the nose. This is called hedging your bet. His cousin Paulie, (5th cousin) is elated when Charlie tells him they're not broke for finishing second.
But the main part of the story is when Paulie gets the bright idea to crack a safe that contains mob money and ropes Charlie into the caper.
Mr. Patrick is described as a man who grew up with all kinds of grifters, gamblers and minor mobsters (his own father ran numbers) who with eclectic job experience met these type when he was a bartender in what is described as a Gramercy Park restaurant.
Now that restaurant is not named, but could have easily been Pete's Tavern on Irving Place at 18th Street. I've written about Pete's Tavern so often that I'm not going to repeat myself here, only to say that the photo used in Mr. Patrick's obit is from his dust jacket of The Pope Of Greenwich Village where he is clearly to the knowing eye standing in front of Pete's Tavern.
The knucklehead cousins who pull off the safe cracking with help are based on a real-life event of Crazy Joe Gallo breaking into Café Ferrara's safe in Little Italy in 1972 and hauling off with the Easter weekend receipts. No one was ever fingered for the job, but the strong suspicion was that Crazy Joe Gallo pulled off the job
To the uninitiated in New York mobster lore, Crazy Joe was head of the Gallo crime family who made their headquarters on President Street in South Brooklyn. Jimmy Breslin's book The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight sort of adds a comic touch to the enterprising Goodfellas. Crazy Joe did keep a lion in the cellar of the social club, and did orchestra the murder of Joseph Columbo Sr. at an Italian Solidarity Day event in Columbus Circle in 1971.
Joseph Columbo Sr. had started a sort of Anti-Defamation League for Italians to counter what he felt was the stereotyping of them as nothing but mobsters, despite the fact that he was head of the Columbo crime family and at odds with Crazy Joe.
It was the second year of the Italian-American Solidarity Day. The reach of the organization was such that all the pizza parlors in New York City were closed on that day! Imagine not being able to buy a slice of pizza for a whole day in the Big Apple. That was as bad as trying to buy a No. 10 envelope on Yom Kippur.
Joe Columbo was not attracting the kind of attention that other crime families relished, so Crazy Joe enlisted a fellow prisoner from his stretch in Sing Sing to shoot Joseph Columbo Sr. This fellow did, and was immediately killed by someone who kept him quiet. Joseph Columbo Sr. remained in a coma for many years, finally passing away in 1978.
In Crazy Joe's eyes, Columbo Sr. had to go. The '70s were full of mob rub outs in New York City Crazy Joe eventually got his in a famous shooting at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy in 1972, as he and his friends were continuing to celebrate his birthday at 4 A.M. His bodyguard flipped on him. One thing mobsters can be counted on doing is eating at all hours.
The Irving Place strip runs from 20th Street to 14th Street, between 3rd Avenue and Park Avenue South, and at one time had Paul and Jimmy's Restaurant, Sal Anthony's and Pete's Tavern. Only Pete's remains on Irving Place; Paul and Jimmy's is nearby on East 18th Street.
As I recounted in my posting of Vincent Patrick years ago, I was talking to one of the managers at Pete's Tavern, Manny, about my family's connection to Pete's. (I got dessert comped). He told me the story of the guys in Mr. Patrick's book, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Charlie and Paulie worked at Pete's, but then stole the recipe for the sauce and gave it to Sal Anthony's, a restaurant across the street from Pete's on Irving Place, up a nice flight of stairs from the sidewalk.
Given Mr. Patrick's upbringing and experience, the last thing you would select from a Family Feud category is that he eventually went to NYU and got a degree in mechanical engineering, and before setting off on a career of writing helped start an engineering firm that at some point helped a client build a better assembly line for building caskets.
Mr. Patrick was a true New Yorker.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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