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Transcript

Introduction “A restaurant is not a business; it’s a passion.” — Unknown Let us go then, you and I, into your favorite restaurant. Picture the layout, the seating, the staff, the clientele. Relive the smells of the food, the sounds of chatter, the clinking of cutlery, the waitstaff taking orders. Sit in that memory for just a moment. Recall your last visit, your first. Now think of everything you don’t see—everything you don’t experience personally. The long hours of the staff. The resentment of dissatisfied diners. The anger of rivals. The dangers of preparation. The relationships that live and die in those rooms. That is where danger lives. As light as the impact might be on you, for others restaurants can be dark places, heavy places—and that can lead to violence, and even… murder. Welcome to Food Criminals: Last Seating. This is a follow-on to my first book, Food Criminals (published by Pen & Sword as Food & Crime in 2023). Here I’ll revisit some of the crimes mentioned in passing in that earlier volume, while tackling many more, broadly divided into sections that deal with the organized crime figures getting murdered, poisoning, employee murders, robberies, terrorism, and mass killings. Along with those broad views, I’ll be taking a look at individual cases that illuminate the concept and have ties further afield. Each and every one has murders that take place in, or immediately outside, a restaurant. Why only the ones that take place inside? For one, do you know how many murders were planned in restaurants? Neither do I—because I stopped counting after about a hundred. Crime syndicates have long favored restaurants as planning sites. They’re public, often loud, and the comings and goings are difficult to track. Add to this the fact that restaurants are often used as fronts for everything from money laundering to card skimming, gambling, or even human trafficking, and they become natural hubs of criminal activity. Several crime families made their headquarters in now-infamous eateries, including American giants like the Gallo crew, the Gambinos, and the Chicago Outfit. Some of these restaurants even became attractions, places where outsiders hoped to catch a glimpse of mobsters. There is also a deeper thread here. Restaurants represent comfort, safety, identity. That very symbolism makes them ideal targets for terrorists, regardless of ideology. Political and religious attacks on restaurants go back generations, particularly in occupied territories. And in recent decades, the massive uptick in mass murder—often a form of domestic terrorism—has shifted focus to schools, but some of the most brutal shootings happened in restaurants: the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre in 1984, Luby’s Cafeteria in 1991, and others. Restaurants are vulnerable not only because they are densely populated, but because diners are engrossed in what they are eating and experiencing. This book examines these stories one by one. No two murders are the same, and no two impacts identical. I will explore the individuals involved—victims and perpetrators alike—and trace the social, political, and financial threads that explode outward from these violent events

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