They Finally Got Him: Frank Colacurcio, Pimp, Thug, and His Henchmen Indicted
Jul 3rd, 2009 by admin

Seattle Times archived photo of Frank Colacurcio Sr. (center) in 1958, waiting to be booked on charges of threatening rival jukebox operators. With him are his attorneys, Joseph Moschetto (left) and Thomas Keefe.
I remember hearing about Frank Colacurcio, above center, who is now 92, when I was a small girl in the ’50s and Colacurcio’s buddy, Al Rosellini, was governor of the State of Washington. Way back then, we ordinary citizens knew that Colacurcio was a criminal and sexual predator and that he had friends protecting him in the highest of places. His career as a criminal and sexual predator began in the 40s when he assaulted a 16-year-old girl.

Archived Seattle Times photo of Colacurcio alongside Washington Governor Al Rosellini.
Colacurcio opened the first topless joint in Seattle, the “Twilite Room,” in the 70s. He went on to create a strip joint empire — really a network of brothels — under the umbrella organization “Talents West,” where teenage girls and women would be invited to apply for “waitress” jobs. Women and girls who applied were mostly vulnerable– broke, single moms, women fleeing their batterers, women with substance abuse problems. Colacurcio charged them $130 a shift “rent” to strip and to be prostituted in his clubs. If they missed a shift, were given a bad shift, or for some other reason, they couldn’t pay, this “rent” became a debt they owed Colacurcio. Sometimes struggling dancers would also be offered loans, which added to their accumulating indebtedness to their “employer”. “Managers” would shadow the women, keeping track of how much money they made, paid and owed. Over time, trying to repay this money, the women would end up enslaved, trafficked from club to club between Seattle, cities north of Seattle, California and Alaska and eventually, throughout 10 western states.

I knew some of the women who worked at these places; I knew many who at some time or another considered “applying” to work at Talents West after seeing ads like the one above, which have run in newspapers here for decades. If you’re broke, it sounds like a heck of a deal– $200 a day to “serve beverages”. But that wasn’t the way things ever went down. In Washington, strip joints can’t serve alcohol, so the beverages served are soft drinks. No one is going to make bank serving soft drinks to pervs in strip clubsfor five bucks a pop. So, the pressure would be on for the waitresses to take off their clothes, dance and engage in acts of prostitution in private “VIP” rooms complete with condom machines. Colacurcio and his gang of thugs didn’t want to be directly told about the prostitution; they told the dancers not to tell them, in fact. If they learned about acts of prostitution some other way, they pretended to “discipline” the dancers by shipping them out to some other club in some other city or state, where they would continue, of course, to be prostituted.
…the women at the clubs were exploited by being forced to turn to prostitution to make enough money to pay club management back for exorbitant “rent” fees that were charged for permission to dance in the clubs.
Many dancers have agreed to cooperate in the case in return for immunity from prosecution, Sullivan said.
“All the girls indicated it was almost impossible” to make the “rent” by dancing alone, Sullivan said.
“These men made millions of dollars exploiting these young women in the Seattle and Tacoma areas.”
In fact, Sullivan said, the Colacurcio enterprise may be the largest organized prostitution operation in Western Washington. “I’m not aware of any bigger,” he said.
The women would also be regularly groped and assaulted by Frank Colacurcio and were continually pressured to have sex with him. A few years ago, at age 87, Colacurcio was sentenced to three months on “home monitoring” and fined $2,500 for sexually assaulting a 23-year-old waitress at one of his clubs,only the most recent assault over a lifetime of similar assaults. Colacurcio has served plenty of time behind bars, for sexual assault, racketeering, money laundering and filing false income tax returns, but it’s been nothing but a thing to him, just part of doing business. While he’s been in jail, his son, Frank, Jr., has taken over. When Frank, Sr. got out, he was in charge again.

Seattle Times photo of Colacurcio two years ago.
Last week both Colacurcios and three other men were indicted in Seattle. (Warning, indictment is disturbing and could be triggering.) Law enforcement officials had been able to obtain a court order that allowed them at last to install microphones and recording devices in clubs and Talents West offices, so that they finally were able to gather the evidence they needed to present to a grand jury. The testimony of women and girls over 70 years was never enough to stop this guy. The ongoing prostituting of women over 50 years wasn’t enough either. Repeated instances of Colacurcio assaulting and trafficking in girls and women? Not enough. They only got him now, at 92 years of age — after he and his henchmen have destroyed the lives of hundreds, probably thousands of girls and women. What’s disturbing is, in all of these news reports about Colacurcio, the women remain consistently little more than a footnote. All eyes are on this guy. Sometimes you pick up on an almost-palpable reverence and admiration for him. The lives of the girls and women he harmed just don’t really seem to be all that interesting to most people.
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