Rick Anderson’s “Seattle Vice” Catches the Emerald City Pants Down

Veteran muckraker Rick Anderson has long been one of the pleasures of occasional thumbings through the Seattle Weekly. He’s institutional memory in a town that likes to forget the unpleasantness of its rowdier days. Writes Anderson:

Civic scandals used to mean something in Seattle. Gunslinger Wyatt Earp paid off City Hall to operate his 1890s gambling joint here. In the 1950s, bar owners were leaving lunch bags of money on their counters for beat cops who threatened to shut them down if they didn’t. A half-century later, aging mobster Frank Colacurcio did what he could to keep corruption alive with a political payoff scandal known as Strippergate.  

His true-crime expedition Seattle Vice, from local publishers Sasquatch Books, uses the life of stripper magnate Frank Colacurcio to tie together Seattle’s frontier years with its internet-age reinvention. The long-lived Colacurcio died at 93, and was a crime figure with connections for about three-quarters of a century, beginning with a morals charge for having sex with a 16-year-old girl when he was 25. He was defended by pre-Governor A. D. Rosellini, but was convicted.

Sixty years later, Rosellini would prove to be “part of the effort led by Frankie to provide cash to family and friends that would be forwarded as individual donations to the three Council members, Nicastro, Wills, and Compton.” It was quickly dubbed Strippergate, and Colacurcio’s attempt to negotiate favorable rezoning of a strip club’s parking lot blew up into something far bigger, ending the Council careers of the three mentioned. Rosellini, it appears, was guilty only of poor judgment.

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As Anderson tells it, this kind of canoodling is purely traditional, stemming from the Seattle “Nice” that visitors hear so much about. Whether it’s true tolerance or just an unwillingness to be bothered, as late as the mid-’50s madam Nellie Curtis was running a string of brothels in Aberdeen; she’d moved out there after paying off Seattle’s police cut into her profit margins too substantially. (Payoffs to the SPD continued through the 1970s, when gay bars found that money could keep busts away.)

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Besides charting Colacurcio’s rise, Anderson takes time out for Bobby Kennedy’s investigation of the Teamsters, Tacoma’s “Carboneheads,” Chinatown’s Wah Mee shooting spree, downtown’s hapless “Smooth,” and Seth Warshavsky’s short-but-happy internet porn empire, while exploring why the Northwest is no country for young mobsters, just older burn-outs in Witness Protection.

It’s all recounted in hardboiled journalist deadpan; some of the most interesting moments come when you suspect the unnamed reporter getting the quote from Colacurcio, working behind the bar at the Firelite Room (now the Nitelite), could have been Anderson himself. You’ll probably want to take a shower (or two) after reading, but when it comes to understanding polite Seattle’s blindness to a criminal status quo, Seattle Vice shows you that there’s usually money being made.