Another seemingly puny dispute also ended in death, this time at the Forge. In 1977, Richard Schwartz, the stepson of mob chieftain Meyer Lansky, was having a drink at the restaurant with an acquaintance, Craig Teriaca, the son of an alleged underworld figure. When it came time to settle the tab, the two began to quarrel over ownership of a ten-dollar bill sitting in front of them on the bar. So Schwartz pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and shot Teriaca dead. Three months later Schwartz ended up on the wrong end of a shotgun, murdered while sitting in his Cadillac behind the Bay Harbor Islands restaurant he owned (the Inside Restaurant, on Kane Concourse). While the assailant was never found, it was widely speculated that Teriaca's compatriots were avenging his death.
Considering the amount of past mob activity in Miami, and adding in the gregariousness of your average goodfella, it's no surprise that mobsters have been commonplace in local eateries. Meyer Lansky, for instance, masticated and machinated at his favorite Miami Beach haunts, which included the Rascal House on Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles; the coffee shop at the old Singapore Hotel on Collins Avenue; the coffee shop at the Imperial House, also on Collins Avenue; and a former incarnation of Embers Restaurant on 23rd Street.
In Robert Lacey's biography of Lansky, Little Man, the author recounts the aging gangster's affection for Wolfie's in the years before his death in 1983. "It was a daily ritual, this gathering over the coffee and cake," Lacey writes. "Meyer Lansky did some of the best deals of his life in deli booths, the bowl of pickles on the table, the ashtray filling with butts. The morning 'meet' over coffee and Danish was the daily partners' conference, where the progress of existing business was checked up on, and where new business was done."
In the Sixties and early Seventies, a considerable amount of mob activity occurred in North Bay Village. Where today that sleepy burg functions as little more than a Miami/Miami Beach thruway (okay, it's also the home of a television station charitable enough to employ Rick Sanchez), 30 years ago it was jumping with all-night parties and rocking nightclubs. Dean Martin owned a place on the town's bustling Restaurant Row, and entertainers such as Jerry Lewis and Frank Sinatra (no surprise) were visitors.
In fact, Miami's most famous mob-related hit took place on Halloween night in 1967 at a North Bay Village restaurant called Place For Steak. There, Tony Esperti mowed down Tommy Altamura, a Mafia enforcer. The restaurant, located on 79th Street, is now being transformed into a branch of the Nicaraguan restaurant chain El Novillo. (Churrasco con balas, anyone?)
Finally, the 1993 bust of an alleged mob chief on charges of gambling, loan sharking, drug dealing, bribery, and credit-card fraud depended in part on some evidence collected at A you guessed it A Denny's. The capo and his henchmen allegedly paid $30,000 to agents posing as helpful cops. Of that amount, $200 stuffed in a pack of cigarettes was handed to an officer at a Denny's in Hollywood. (Perhaps the same Hollywood Denny's where, ten years earlier, the presidents of South Florida's two largest soda-bottling companies met over breakfast and decided to gouge their customers.)
While mobsters in South Florida don't often knowingly socialize with their adversaries on the other side of the badge, Dade Assistant State Attorney Dennis Bedard recalls a bar in Manhattan where the law and the lawless would congregate. "There used to be a place in Little Italy where after a trial many FBI agents would go, and many of the defense lawyers and mobsters would be there too," explains Bedard, who was formerly an assistant district attorney on Long Island. "Everyone would leave each other alone."
Peaceful coexistence of that sort depends, of course, on a certain basic awareness: You must know your enemies as well as your allies. In Miami, where not everyone is actually who they seem, the line between crook and cop often blurs. Attorney Mark Schnapp has seen how this fuzziness can get hazardous. Several years ago when he was still an assistant U.S. attorney, Schnapp showed up one evening at the Taurus Steak House in Coconut Grove just as the dust began to settle from a near-brawl. "An argument started and it escalated into a fight A a lot of pushing and yelling," Schnapp remembers. "Then someone said, 'I'm a federal agent.' And then another guy said, 'I'm a federal agent, too.'" Then a couple of the pugilists revealed they were off-duty police officers. "Everybody involved in the fight," Schnapp chortles, "turned out to be either an agent or a cop!
