If you ever feel like you must be the most unobservant person in the world, remember: I once spent half a year failing to notice that my new favourite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the Ukrainian mafia.
(I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in retrospect, the fact that it was always dead no matter the time of day - I think the busiest I ever saw it was five people, myself included - well, that should have been a tipoff. Also, the waitstaff kept calling me “Mr. Prokopetz”, which I had assumed was just part of the restaurant’s gimmick, but given that “Prokopetz” is a Ukrainian surname, I’m now force to wonder whether they’d thought I was, you know, in the business. I just liked the pierogi!)
What I need to know is how on earth did OP finally realize his favorite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the mafia.
I’d like to say I put together the clues, but in reality, I just showed up one day to find that the place had been indefinitely shut down, and later learned it was because the managers had all been arrested.
What I really want to know is how good the food was?
Excellent, if your tastes run to the “heavy cream and too much garlic” end of the spectrum.
Every crime front I’ve ever eaten at has had completely amazing food, honestly. I am pretty convinced that if you want to open a front, you don’t choose “restaurant” as your front-business unless you have a relative who loves to cook.
It tickles me that this is evidently a sufficiently common experience that people find it relatable. (Seriously, check the notes!) We should write reviews or something.
did I just read the line “every crime front I’ve ever eaten at” with my own two eyes
Look, I went to college and lived my early adulthood in a town whose entire thing was import/export, and we had a lot of restaurants that were suspiciously empty except when they were closed and filled with very serious men in nice clothes.
They were usually run by someone who was about the right age to be some adult’s parents or grandparents, and in the case of the two Korean restaurants matching this description, they didn’t speak English. Universally though, they were very pleased to see customers, very proud of their cooking, and very very interested in keeping us far away from the aforementioned serious men in nice clothes. And despite having huge dining rooms and never having more than a couple customers, they never went out of business.
Also, because I am very, very stupid and sometimes don’t think before I talk, I once said loudly, over the phone, while sitting in one of these places, “Hey! Yeah if you want to meet us, we’re eating at [place]. You know…[place]? You totally know it. The Front, on Warwick st!”
The looks I got from every single employee were amazing and then I left.
We had a corner store/deli-place near our apartment in college. Everyone knew they were in on something and no one cared because they looked out for their customers and their neighborhood as a whole.
They started stocking my favorites because I mentioned them within hearing range once, would tell their “vendors” to move out of the way if we stopped in. I walked a different route home and got harassed one night and they asked after me. When they found out what happened, they declared “Consider it taken care of, you should never be afraid around here.” Never happened again.
Everyone needs their friendly neighborhood crime lord.
This is both my favorite and makes me fondly remember home. Less of the eateries, more of the mysterious retail joints that never seem to close despite no one ever buying anything, though. Well. Aside from the juice bar. Didnt last, though.
I found these places everywhere I lived. My favorite was an omurice place near my home in Japan, and a mother/son officially ran it. The food was incredible, and one night I was there and there was a boisterous crowd of BLATANTLY yakuza men eating and drinking. They started talking to me, and were super nice. Said they wanted to “practice their English,” and paid for my food and drinks and then said they wanted to take me to karaoke. That was a little alarming, but the mother/son, who seriously looked after me as the only foreigner in the area, said I should go, and the son came along. So we piled into a white landboat Cadillac and partied until dawn.
One of the older men at the party took me to my neighborhood and dropped me off out front (the car was literally too big to fit down the small neighborhood streets) and said that I had his blessing.
Which was confusing, but I was drunk, so whatever. Then I went back to the restaurant about a week later and the mother said, “the family approves of you. You may marry our son if you wish and be welcomed.”
I did not marry him, but wow. There were no hard feelings, either. They still helped out if I got harassed by the cops (which happened a lot in these smaller towns with no foreigners) or anything like that.
Not a restaurant story, but when I was eight a hapkido studio opened in my town. I live in the kind of small, Canadian town where you have to drive for the better part of an hour to buy anything more than basic groceries (or to go to high school for that matter), and the biggest things to happen are someone occasionally getting busted for growing and selling pot, or elementary school being cancelled because a cougar had decided to take a nap outside the front door.
So no one really questioned the motives of this large Korean family that moved to town and had a martial arts studio built. I mean, maybe we should have, since no one ever moves there, but we didn’t. (Or maybe we did, but I was eight so idk)
Anyway, the kids’ class had about a dozen of us, which was a lot for any sort of organized extracurricular, ranging from my brother at five to me at eight.
It was great. Hapkido was a lot of fun, and the older man who ran it made sure we had a class at least once a month or so where we learned self defense well enough that we’d actually be able to apply it if the need ever came up. Occasionally his “friends from Korea” would come to “visit him” and they would guest teach a class.
By the time I was thirteen, I had made my way through quite a few belt levels, and he gave me a part time job helping teach the new under five class. A few of them had joined the volunteer fire department, the moms helped with bake sales at the elementary school, my sister was really good friends with the daughter that was her age, and they were all a pretty big part of the community.
Until one day when we’re in class. At this point, I was still in the kids’ class, despite an offer to be moved up to the adults’ one, because I’d finally managed to convince some of my friends to join and they were in the kids’ class.
So, picture this. An older-boarding-on-elder Korean man teaching martial arts to a dozen or so kids. Parents sitting in the adjoining room, watching through the one way glass and gossiping over tea. The door slams open, and a half dozen police officers come in, guns out and yelling.
We all dropped to the floor, freaking out, because nothing like this happens ever. One time, my neighbours got high and lit their car on fire and drove it into a ditch, and the fire fighters had to wait around for three hours before the police finally showed up, that’s how much they hate having to drive out to our town from one of the near-ish cities.
But here they were, interrupting our class.
And the teacher? He booked it out the back door as soon as they entered.
Turns out the studio was a front to smuggle drugs from Korea.
I was only thirteen so nobody really wanted to give me all the details and it may have been 2010, but the elementary school was still the only place with internet, so I couldn’t even look it up.
From what I remember, though, the police caught the hapkido teacher pretty quickly. I’m not sure if they got everyone from the family or not, but I do remember that one of his friends was supposed to be visiting and teaching a class later in the week, so I’m pretty confident they caught him too. I’m pretty sure they were some sort of mafia, because I remember overhearing a conversation between my parents about the amount of paperwork and meetings my dad had to do to convince the higher ups that he had no idea he was letting mafia members into his fire hall.
I also had to go to a couple of interviews with the police since, technically, I worked for them. It didn’t take them long to see that I was just a nerdy little thirteen year old, and that there was no way I was actually involved in this mafia. I got some serious street cred, though, and when I started grade eight in the neighbouring city that fall, I got a lot of questions about what it was like to be in a mafia.
I still don’t know how the police caught onto them, or why it took them five years. I definitely would have kept my job at the studio through high school if they hadn’t been arrested (it was infinitely better than working as a cashier at the tiny grocery store), and I sometimes wonder how much that would have gotten me mixed up in their real business over time.
So yeah. That’s the story of how I was taught martial arts and self defense from drug smugglers and accidentally worked for a mafia. It was also definitely the most interesting thing to happen in my town ever.
Vegans of tumblr, listen up. Harvesting agave in the quantities required so you dont have to eat honey is killing mexican long-nosed bats. They feed off the nectar and pollinate the plants. They need the agave. You want to help the environment? Go back to honey. Your liver and thyroid will thank you, as well. Agave is 90% fructose, which can cause a host of issues. Bye.
So let me get this straight ,vegans should stop eating the food of the Mexcian long-nosed bats, because the bats need it, and instead vegans should instead eat honey, the food of bees, that their larvae need, even though the bee populations are facing ecological issues as it stands.
10/10 post, dude.
Did you forget the whole part where only excess is taken and all their needs are met and then some orrrr?
Like, did you read it orrrrr?
Anyway, BUY HONEY SAVE BEES
It is a 10/10 post. Because OP is right.
Bees do not suffer when beekeepers take their honey, because experienced beekeepers do not take all of their honey, in fact, they leave plenty of honey left for the bees to consume over the winter. If we do not collect their honey, 1 of two things will happen.
1. they will leave for a bigger home. Which at first seems fine until you remember that bees are dying very quickly out in the wild.
or
2. They will start using the areas that they reserve for their young as a place to make more honey. This is bad because if no more young are being produced, then the hive will start to die out because no new workers are coming into the world, and the average live only 150 days, so it would also mean the loss of more bees.
So yeah, eating honey isn’t inhumane at all. In fact, you’re helping the bees by eating what they produce and giving money to the bee keepers who are the ones making sure that the hive will keep being healthy.
so i was talking to my dad about guardians of the galaxy and when i mentioned chris pratt my dad sighs and says “I dont know how parents could be mean enough to name their child after a fried rodent” and i sat there looking really confused and he just whispered “crisp rat.”
men who try to shame women for liking calming games like animal crossing or minecraft or whatever are so pitiful. like maybe if u planted some virtual flowers to some calming music for a few hours u wouldnt be such a lil bitch
