Colacurcio family no stranger to controversy

With a frequency rivaling the traffic outside on Lake City Way, young women in halter tops and short-shorts parade into a modest North Seattle office building, where the man some call the don of Seattle's topless nightclub industry offers his version of fact and fiction.

The latest flap about his son's campaign contributions to three Seattle City Council members is overblown, the old man says, much like the notorious mystique that has followed his family's name for nearly half a century.


		P-I / 1980
	Frank Colacurcio

"The mafia, all that talk, it's a farce," he says. "The opinions of my family and me, let's look where all that started: Someone who had nothing invented something and made lies."

Frank Colacurcio is 86 years old. A halo of white hair and tinted bifocals frame a round face and otherwise shiny pate. The brawn that once described his build in long-yellowed newspaper clippings has mostly vanished with age, much like his name from headlines in recent years.

The name is back in newsprint again, enmeshed in what some city insiders call tongue-in-cheek "StripperGate" -- but what Colacurcio dismisses as nothing more than a trumped-up scandal not worth the two-bits that decades ago fed the jukeboxes and pinball machines that helped spawn an adult entertainment empire.

Officially, it's Frank Jr. -- Colacurcio's 41-year-old only child -- who runs the family's nightclub operations now. And officially, it's political donations by Frank Jr. and his associates that are raising eyebrows these days: at least $31,000 split among City Council members Judy Nicastro, Heidi Wills and Jim Compton. More than half of that money went to Nicastro.

But suggestions that he was buying City Council votes for a favorable zoning decision last month so he could expand the parking lot of one of his clubs, the younger Colacurcio says, have much more to do with election-year politics than anything else.

It's mudslinging, he claims, simply attempts of some political foes bent on sullying candidates he supports by linking them to the Colacurcio name and topless dancing.

"We've always hard-nosed through all of this folklore," Frank Jr. says. "We knew the truth. But it gets irritating because I hate to see my children get all of this reflected on them."

But it's tough to rewrite history, or get around one of the most infamous names in Seattle's past, one intertwined with a seamy underbelly of cheats and scams, police payoffs and political corruption.

Reminders of that past still linger even here -- on the wood-paneled walls of Talents West, booking agency to exotic dancers and longtime headquarters of the Colacurcios' business enterprises.

A blown-up black and white press photo hanging on one of those walls captures the elder Colacurcio in younger days as he exits a federal courthouse in Portland -- during a 1981 tax-evasion trial that would return the once-convicted racketeer to prison.

A decade later, his son would also spend six months behind bars for tax evasion -- pleading guilty with his father to charges they skimmed profits from two strip clubs in Alaska.

Today, as ex-cons stripped of their voting rights, father and son say greasing the wheels of politics with campaign contributions is among the only voices they have left in the political realm. Like it or not, they point out, nude dance clubs are legal.

And like any other businessman with business interests to protect, Frank Jr. adds, "you'd be a fool to think (businesses) don't encourage associates to donate toward political candidates."

Thoughts of being a mechanic

The "empire" that young Frank inherited, he says, today amounts to three topless clubs -- Rick's in North Seattle, Honey's near Lynnwood and Fox's in Tacoma. Frank Jr. adds that "we supply girls" to a fourth club he once owned -- Sugar's in Shoreline.

A married father of three who lives in an upscale Kirkland home, Colacurcio Jr. is a millionaire who says he lives comfortably and quietly -- much as he did while growing up at the family home near Sheridan Beach.

"When I was growing up, I never really paid any notice to (the business)," Junior says. "It wasn't like any of the girls were over at the house or there were parties. It was a very normal family life."

A teenager who tinkered on old cars, Frank Jr. says his first ambition was to be a mechanic. He never had designs to take over his father's nude club enterprises, nor did his dad want him in the business.

"I tried to get him in school," Colacurcio Sr. says of his son. "He started college, but then he got in the business and I couldn't keep him in college."

The older Colacurcio adds that his son is a relative "cream puff" compared with him -- as their respective rap sheets seem to suggest.

"I grew up under tough terms and tough living and tough life," Frank Sr. says. "You had to get out, dig and suffer for what you got. It's not like today. You guys sit on your fannies and this and that and have it fall out of the sky."

Ditched school in 8th grade

Born to immigrants from southern Italy, Colacurcio was the oldest son of nine children. He grew up working his father's vegetable farm on land where Boeing Field lies today. During the Great Depression, he ditched school for good in eighth grade, striking out to "work and do what I could" to support the family.

Colacurcio worked as a butcher, on farms and as a truck driver. He then took a job at an Everett pulp mill.

"The money I saved there, I bought my first truck and went in business for myself -- the trucking business. I was by the time 18."

Colacurcio's first legal troubles would come soon after. In 1943, he was convicted of "carnal knowledge" for having sex with an underage girl. His attorney: Al Rosellini, later the governor. Colarcurcio served more than a year at the Monroe State Reformatory.

Sometime after his release, Colacurcio got into the vending business with his brothers -- installing cigarette machines, jukeboxes and pinball machines in local taverns and clubs.

"From the vending business, we loaned money to different bars, restaurants, lounges," Colacurcio says. "And (when) they weren't able to pay, we took over several of them to make them (profitable)."

To avoid trouble obtaining liquor licenses, Colacurcio says he had relatives and associates front as business owners. It was in 1958 at one such downtown club, the Firelite Lounge at the Moore Hotel -- now the Nitelite -- where Frank says nude dancing began in Seattle.

"I had a fellow from the Mideast that worked for me, and I seen the belly dancers and what they were doing and whatnot," he says. "That's how it became this type of table dancing and whatnot that it is today."

The following year, Colacurcio would be called to Washington, D.C., subpoenaed by the Senate Rackets Committee. Although he'd never testify, committee counsel Robert F. Kennedy questioned him about his alleged involvement in racketeering.

"I would say that was kind of the beginning of this folklore thing," Frank Jr. says.

But many others say that "folklore" is fact -- plain and simple.

'I've never paid off anybody'

"It was the heyday of the tolerance policy in Washington, and Colacurcio was every bit a part of that," recalls Lou Guzzo, former managing editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which in the 1960s began investigating Seattle's nightclub and gambling rackets.

Though gambling was illegal under Washington law, Seattle allowed such operations to flourish. In exchange for kickbacks from the city's vice lords, cops and politicos agreed not to shakedown the bingo parlors, card rooms and cabarets.

"The excuse was it would keep the Mafia out of Washington," Guzzo says. "But we had our own little mafia with the Colacurcios."

By the end of the 1960s, Seattle's rackets began to unravel. For conspiring to bring bingo equipment into the state and collecting monthly $3,000 payoffs for police, Colacurcio was convicted of racketeering in 1971 -- a charge he still disputes.

"That was life in that time," he says. "Say you were an operator in Seattle during the tolerance policy. You had a business, you had to go along with the show.

"(But) I've never paid off anybody for anything," he adds. "I'm not a person who's going to be shook for any money."

An additional tax-evasion conviction based on Colacurcio's racketeering charge would later be overturned. He spent 25 months in prison at McNeil Island.

Meanwhile, through family members and associates, Colacurcio's strip club operations only grew, authorities say.

By the late 1970s, "the Colacurcio organization" numbered some 50 people with strip clubs in about 10 states, says former King County police investigator Larry Mayes.

"It was more of a home-grown kind of organized crime," says Mayes, who investigated the family's network of nightclubs from 1974 to 1985. "They had everything tied up back here so the traditional crime organizations from the East Coast really couldn't get in."

By the time Frank Sr. was convicted of filing false tax returns and skimming tens of thousands of dollars in nightly receipts from two King County topless bars in 1981, his only son had broken into the business.

"When I was 18, I worked the front office here," Frank Jr. says from his desk at Talents West. "I answered phones -- did about everything you could do."

With dad away in prison again, authorities say, Frank Jr. and his father's associates began expanding Washington operations by opening "soda pop clubs" -- strip joints that served only soft drinks to avoid the state's liquor restrictions on topless establishments.

During the 1980s, more convictions would come, helping curb the family's operations, authorities say. Colacurcio relatives and associates, including three of Frank Sr.'s brothers, would plead guilty to a variety of charges in this state and others.

And father and son would both plead guilty in 1991 to filing false tax returns and skimming profits from topless clubs in Alaska. After he got out of federal prison, Frank Sr. would be sent back for probation violations after he fondled a young woman seeking employment at Talents West.

No syndicate exists, they say

Yet father and son continue to dispute that a family crime organization ever existed.

"I've never even been into any of their clubs," Frank Jr. says of his uncles. "I could not even tell you what type of business they have."

Both claim descriptions of a family syndicate are purely legend -- like most media accounts of them.

They point to recent descriptions of a "wad of cash" and "plate of steak and eggs" littering Frank Jr.'s desk in a recent newspaper report as an example -- unfair implications, they claim, that the Colacurcios live some sort of mobster lifestyle.

The "wad of cash," Frank Jr. says, amounted to $28 -- money left over from a friendly Super Bowl wager among employees that's kept around for lunch money.

And the steak and eggs?

"I'm on that there Atkins diet," Frank Sr. says.

Frank Jr. also offers that his and others' recent donations to City Council incumbents are simply his latest foray into political activism.

"For ages, I've been encouraging people to get involved in politics, because I think it's one of the fundamental rights in America," he says. "That's my only crime."

Though he says he encouraged "everyone" he knows to donate to the three City Council members -- particularly to Nicastro -- Colacurcio Jr. says the contributions were made only because he and his wife liked what they saw of the candidates at fund-raisers.

"I never talked to any of the candidates on the subject of Rick's, and I was surprised because I expected the vote not to go through and favor Rick's," Colacurcio Jr. says.

Regardless, Junior says, the donations were all above the board.

Just as his father insists that his son is suffering because of an infamous name.

"It looks bad for him because I was a bad guy and now they're trying to make him a bad guy," Frank Sr. says. "In the paper, all these years they printed me as a bad guy. But he's like a cream puff, you know what I mean?"

Still, others who know the Colacurcio history well say the whole matter stinks.

One former police detective who investigated the family and asked not to be named noted that many of the campaign donors are longtime players of the elder Colacurcio's syndicate.

"It's like d�j� vu all over again. Only they seem a little bolder now," the officer said. "They must be feeling really protected now to come out from their hiding spots."

P-I reporter Lewis Kamb can be reached at 206-448-8336 or lewiskamb@seattlepi.com

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