The Sicilian bar in The Godfather, where Michael Corleone asked the father of Apollinia to help arrange the match, is still open for business today. Nothing has changed at Bar Vitelli since the movie’s release in 1972.
This video shows Bar Vitelli and the surrounding streets in Savoca.
In The Godfather, Sonny Corleone murders two enemies, then flees from New York City to hide in Italy. He goes to the a small town in Sicily and meets a pretty woman named Apollonia. He approaches her father at a bar and asks for permission to court her. You can watch the scene here.
The scenes were shot in the Sicilian town of Savoca. The bar is a real bar called Bar Vitelli. It still exists and remains open.
The book I Heard You Paint Houses came out in 2003, so it’s been gathering some dust on a number of bookshelves around the country for quite some time.
The book’s title, according to Amazon, comes from the first words infamous Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa ever spoke to Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran. To paint a house is to kill a man. The paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors.
The book is essentially the deathbed biography of one-time Delaware Teamster boss and mob hit-man Frank Sheeran and truly is a fascinating read.
[Spoiler alert: Before he died, Sheeran claimed to be the one who killed his friend and mentor, Jimmy Hoffa–whose body was apparently later cremated.]
Despite the book purportedly being made into a movie called The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro , Al Pacino , Joe Pesci, as well as directed by Martin Scorcese, it has not been released yet.
While the book has been out for some time, it wasn’t until last night, during Joe Biden’s prime time speech, that I was reminded of some of the books contents, most notably this piece that appeared in the Orange County Register a few weeks ago:
One additional item relates to Biden’s integrity. In the fascinating biography of Teamsters and Mafia hit-man Frank Sheeran, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” the lifelong thug describes a favor he performed while he was president of Teamsters Local 326 in Wilmington, Delaware.
In 1972 Sheeran received a visit from “a very prominent lawyer” he knew who was “very big in the Democratic Party” in Delaware. The November general election was approaching, and the race for the U.S. Senate seat held by a Republican was expected to be close. The lawyer wanted help in preventing the distribution of a paid Republican political ad – an insert in the Delaware-wide newspapers – that would run for a week and expose the campaign misrepresentations by the Democratic challenger. Sheeran promised the operative that he “would hire some people and put them on the picket line.” He added, “People nobody would mess with.”
The picket line went up, the papers were not delivered all week, and, as Sheeran said, “The day after the election the informational picket line came down, and the newspaper went back to normal and Delaware had a new United States Senator.” His name was Joe Biden. Thereafter, said admitted extortionist, thief and murderer Sheeran, of Biden, “You could reach out for him, and he would listen.” [Emphasis added.]
So, there you have it. The Vice President of the United States got his job as U.S. Senator with help from a Mafia hit-man and Delaware Teamster boss. No wonder Barack Obama picked Joe as his running mate.
The gun is called “lemon squeezer” because when the user break-opens the frame it exposes the cylinder and resembles a lemon squeezer.
“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone,” once said prohibition-era gangster Al Capone.
Heritage Auctions has just listed a very special Harrington & Richardson top-break revolver that once belonged to none other than Al Capone. While he’s more frequently remembered for his hat and cigar, there’s little doubt that he knew his way around guns, too.
The revolver is a Harrington & Richardson Second Model chambered for .38 S&W with a 3 1/2-inch barrel. These were popular pistols at the time and H&R made them by the truckload. They can still be found today, usually for less than $200.
Of course, Capone’s Second Model is expected to fetch a higher price. The opening bid is $7,500 and the auction house predicts the gun will sell for $15,000 to $20,000.
The estimate may be on the conservative side. Capone’s property, especially his guns, are hard to come by. Combined with his legendary notoriety, Capone’s guns fetch high prices at auction.
Capone rose to a position of fame as a bootlegger, along with his syndicate, the Chicago outfit, which eventually became known as “The Capones.” Running underground alcohol during the Prohibition in Illinois was widely held to be a public service, although his reputation sank after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was a gang-related shooting that lead to the ascension of the South Side Italian Gang over the North Side Irish Gang in Chicago in 1929. The massacre allowed the Capones to take over control of the city’s organized crime but cost Capone himself his reputation as a then-modern-day Robin Hood.
A Colt Police Positive .38 Special that once belonged to Capone sold for more than $100,000 just a few years ago at Christie’s.
So a guy came by the office the other day. I’ll call him Bill. Bill was accompanied by an established journalist that several Gawker staffers know. Bill had something he wanted to show us, and the journalist was making an introduction. What he wanted to show us: Chris Christie and several unidentified males having sex with a woman, on tape.
I was actually out sick on the day in question. Around 2 p.m., I got an IM from Gawker deputy editor Max Read:
[Gawker senior writer Hamilton Nolan] has got these two guys int he conference room right now
one who used to be w/ [redacted]
and they have what looks to be a chris christie sex tape
I got dressed and went into work.
When I arrived, Bill was still there, but the journalist who’d brought him in had left. Bill opened up his laptop and showed me a Microsoft Word document into which he had pasted hundreds of photos of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s face, positioned next to what looked like stills from a pornographic film. The photos were arranged so that the face of a male participant in that film was placed directly adjacent to cropped images of Christie’s face, with the angles of the two faces roughly matching. There were close-ups, too: The two mens’ ears side-by-side, and zoomed-in photos of what appeared to be moles on the cheeks of both men. The upshot: The man in the pornographic film looked a lot like Christie. The ears, the chins, the eyes, the hair. A lot.
The man in the film was much, much thinner than Christie is now. But Bill’s Microsoft Word document also included photographs of Christie as a younger, much thinner man. His physique back then seemed compatible with the man in the porn stills.
It shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone paying attention, but it’s still shocking to hear stories like this. Are we expected to chalk it up to coincidence?
Watch out patriots. We are next!
Apparently the Thug-in-Chief sent his boys over to try to rough Ben Carson up a little after his famous National Prayer Breakfast speech earlier this year:
DAILY CALLER – At an event in Birmingham, Ala. Monday night, former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson revealed that he had received a visit from the Internal Revenue Service following his much-noted remarks at a National Prayer Breakfast earlier this year.
“I had my first encounter with the IRS this year, unsurprisingly after the prayer breakfast,” Carson told an audience that at the annual Business Council of Alabama Chairman’s Dinner, according to a report from Cliff Sims of the Montgomery, Ala.-based Yellowhammer News.
The thuggery never ends with this president. Never.
