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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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One of my coworkers used to live in Boston. He insists that one particular pizza joint was a money laundering operation. Walk in to pick up, see that it looks nothing like your order, take it and leave anyway because the only staff are straight out of a Seagal movie.

It wasn't in Arlington, was it? I recently went to a small local pizza joint there that was completely empty except for the guy behind the counter. Looked like a pretty normal older gentleman, but he seemed very unhappy about me walking in and offering to buy something from him, the 2 slices of pizza I ordered took much longer than I would have expected to prepare, and the pizza wasn't very good, and it made me wonder if some money laundering was going on. Maybe this is an entire genre of pizza joints.

Maybe this is an entire genre of pizza joints.

And now I'm reminded of this Tumblr thread on hole-in-the-wall pizza joints as possible mob fronts. The OP:

kaijuno:

I went to this Sicilian pizza joint yesterday and it’s literally so underground and such a big hole in the wall that their parking lot is wrecked, their front door is bolted up, and you have to enter through the kitchen and walk to the front end past all the ovens and down a narrow ass hallway and then all the tables and chairs are fold ups and the ceiling is all saggy and it looks awful but fuck me it’s been there for 70+ years and makes the best damn thin crust pizza in the city and no one hardly knows about it because it looks like an abandoned building

And perhaps my favorite bit:

wretched-mog:

it’s true, i grew up in nj and you could tell how good the food was by how many insurance frauds the place did. one of my favorite pizza places in my home town staged an arson to collect on insurance money, the owner got caught tho

No idea, but I think this was in the 90s.