Alaska Confidential: The Alaskan Mafia
Be careful who you step to, you never know who's connected.
I kept noticing a certain trend after I finished high school and left Fairbanks at age eighteen and went to college and travelled the country and met different kinds of people.
A lot of the guys my age, the college bros, idolized mafioso culture.
Some more than significant percentage of them had movie posters of The Godfather, Goodfellas, or Scarface hanging in their crummy collegiate apartment or frat house rec room.
(Scarface isn’t technically a mafia movie, but it’s about a murderous drug lord so let’s just include it in the genre.)
I didn’t understand the statement these posters made, the symbolism, what was it that these mostly rich kids found admirable about fictional characters who were violent degenerates, and all ended up murdered, broke, or in prison?
But now I get it.
At some point, as a man, some guy will try and intimidate you, belittle you, try make you submit to him, try and make you afraid of him.
Threaten to beat you up, or just embarrass you in front of a group of people by pulling your pants down.
This has happened to most every man, and woman by the way, but women have their ways of dealing with it, whereas men will stew on one incident well into their geriatric years and express themselves by hoarding hundreds of firearms or becoming a police officer or some other insane coping mechanism.
This is where the fascination with mafia movies comes in. The allure of the mob. Watching The Godfather over and over, vicariously.
They protect each other. When someone insults a fellow member, the others either beat the person senseless or shoot him and bury him in the desert.
With that protection comes some power. The power to be yourself, without fear of reprisal from the unaffiliated thugs and goons, who might just decide to hit you because you’re getting a lot of laughs telling a story at a party or talking to a certain girl.
These are usually the guys who are unaffiliated, who are not cool enough to be in the group, to be protected.
I get it now, because most every friend I had in Fairbanks was in the mafia.
Here’s what I mean by that.
I was at Frank’s house in Fairbanks, sixteen years old, with my regular crew.
We were just hanging out like always, having a four-hour debate about the merits of going to this place or the other, each scenario eventually being shot down because there really was absolutely nothing to do, it was more of a thought exercise than a strategizing session, and that was fine, because that’s what hanging out was for us.
Suddenly Frank got a call on the housephone, one of his little cousins who lived out of town was in Fairbanks and had some business at the Big Dipper Ice Rink, a complex on the south side of town which housed a minor league hockey team and often hosted other events, and some guys were bothering him, threatening to beat him up.
We all jumped in my car, six or seven guys, most all of them rearing for a fight except me and Marty, who were more than happy to be background actors in this production.
I could tell their adrenaline was pumping whereas I felt nothing, the prospect of a few guys acting tough didn’t concern me whatsoever because I always had protection, to this day I carry a certain affect and any random yahoo flexing their muscles is about as intimidating to me as a hissing cat, for better or worse.
By the time we got there, not ten minutes later, a band of eight or nine cars were surrounding three guys in the parking lot, and these three shitheads were standing back-to-back-to-back, triangulated, like a group of poor buffalo knowing they were about to be slaughtered.
More and more people showed up, mostly guys we knew, definitely guys who we knew, knew, and they were getting out of their cars and inquiring as to exactly what the problem was, and, I swear, soon there were three hundred guys there, and these three goons were attempting to explain how there was a miscommunication, and Frank’s little cousin stood there just staring at them with a confident grin on his face, you messed with the wrong guy.
And that’s a feeling that people who haven’t experienced that kind of loyalty crave.
But I think what’s most appealing about the mafia, about being Henry Hill, is that often times, you don’t even have to call anyone. It’s the assuredness that comes with knowing you could. That’s the string-pulling element.
Fast forward twenty years later. I was living in Los Angeles, and I got a call from Frank.
Our brother, the sweetest, coolest, funniest guy anyone knew, happily married with a wonderful kid, died suddenly, freakishly, through no fault of his own, but that is a story for another time.
I was pacing around my LA apartment on the phone, getting some details of the story, “I don’t know what to say,” was all I could say over and over.
“I think you should come home,” said Frank.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
Not a few minutes later I got an alert on my phone, Frank had sent a plane ticket to my email account, I’m still unsure how he was able to book it, I hadn’t talked to him in a while, usually you need someone’s date of birth, the last four digits of their social security number, information like that to buy a ticket for someone, apparently he had a file on me.
I hadn’t been back in over a decade, and it was late December, well below zero, I got off the plane, no longer owning the proper winter attire, and into a car with the same old crew.
We went to a high school basketball game, and I was offered a few choices of couches to sleep on.
The next day was the service, and afterwards a big group of friends, family rather, retired to The Boatel, a dive bar on the Chena River, to have some beers.
I stayed behind in the parking lot for a few minutes as everyone filed in, looking at a little hint of the northern lights, and then trudged through some fresh snow into the warm glow of the bar.
When I walked in, to my surprise, there were a lot of unfamiliar faces mixed in with those that I knew, and as I watched everyone socializing, I felt a tinge of social anxiety just for a second, nothing serious, but I elected to stand off to the side of the bar by myself for a minute to get my bearings.
As I was lingering there, I was approached by a younger girl, much younger than my crowd but old enough to be in a bar, a Native girl who was bubbly and gregarious, she said she saw me at the basketball game and that I didn’t look like I was from around these parts, which drew a laugh.
“I’m from a few blocks away,” I said.
We were having a friendly conversation, but I was now keeping one eye on her and one on a guy seated at the bar and who was staring right at me, not breaking eye contact.
A few scenarios ran through my head. It was likely I knew this guy, that I had grown up with him somehow, and that he was staring at me out of recognition, but that could either be the good or the bad kind.
Maybe we’d been in the third grade together, but were we briefly friends, or had he always hated me?
Over the next thirty seconds of a mostly one-sided staring match, I started to rule out this being someone I had previously met. He was older, but he also didn’t look like someone who’d run in the same circles.
My crew all looked like respectable people who could for the most part blend in in any strip-mall sports bar or steakhouse in America.
This guy was straight out of Roadhouse, a greasy ponytail, scar running down his cheek, dressed like a Jersey townie, a sickly hued jean vest, cheap Army surplus flannel, dangling earring.
“Hey, sorry, do you know that guy over there by chance?” I said, interrupting the girl, fairly confident at this point that she did know him in some capacity, but this couldn’t be a boyfriend, she was way out of his league.
“Oh, yeah, that’s just my uncle,” she said, carrying on, but now I gave him a look and threw my palms up a little in hopes of brokering a resolution, are we going to be doing this dance all night?
He approached me now, getting too close to my face, awful Marlboro 100 and Rainier beer breath.
“I think you need to leave her alone,” he growled.
“Leave her alone? I’m sorry, was I bothering you?” I said, turning to her.
“No,” she said matter-of-factly, herself pretty unconcerned about a confrontation.
I smiled smugly and craned my head around the bar. I recognized about fifty people right off the bat, forty-six guys, four girls.
I looked over at where he had been seated at the bar, nobody was looking back at me from there, this guy was stag, a lone wolf as they say, a phrase which was highly likely stenciled onto the back window of his pickup truck in the parking lot.
A lot of these guys were former athletes, most were drunk, but for obvious reasons they were all very emotional tonight, the phrase I love you man already widely circulating.
But this guy didn’t know that I was one of them. I had been standing by myself. I hadn’t set foot in town in many years. And these optics almost certainly factored into his decision to confront me.
He thought I was a random like him, yet I was anything but.
This was a conundrum. All I would have to do was raise my voice slightly and say something like, “Is there a problem here?” and he would have immediately been dragged out to the parking lot by an angry mob.
But I didn’t want that for him. I can always do without the drama, and it would have been satisfying only for a brief second but then ruined the night.
I feigned concern, “Oh, sorry,” I said, my heart at its normal rate.
“That’s right,” he said back.
Now he was pushing his luck and I really considered it, but instead I excused myself and joined some friends, which he observed, and then pretty promptly left.
Later on, past the possibility for an incident, I was walking back to a house with the guys.
“Did you see that guy in the jean vest, he was talking shit to me,” I said.
“What?” said Frank, turning around on a dime, “let’s go back.”
“Nah, let’s not,” I said.
“Man, I would have beat the shit out of that little bitch!”
“Yes, I am aware.”
This guy, who I have not seen nor thought of since, had no idea the favor I did for him. That’s the aspect of pulling strings, that’s why those posters adorn those walls, I realize now.
The frat guys, the college bros I met in the states, most of them could never be in the mafia.
Their affiliations were often engineered, born out of convenience, not from anything organic.
To be in the real Mafia, the Cosa Nostra, you have to be Italian, and your birth family matters a great deal, and similar criteria exist for other organized crime families.
To be in the Alaskan mafia you have to be cool, that’s it, and you’re a made man.