New York: Unions, the Mob, chocolate harlequinade, the girlfriend and the taxi

by philg

I need a place to jot down a few New York stories…

A friend of a friend was preparing a new restaurant. He hired a couple of carpenters to do some woodworking. They were almost done when two huge goons showed up and noted that they weren’t members of the union. If the restaurant owner didn’t have them dismantle the work that had been done so far and hire union replacements, the goons threatened to make life so unpleasant for patrons that the restaurant would go bankrupt. The woodwork was torn out and some union carpenters were hired to redo the work at triple the original cost.

The same restaurant owner shopped around for a cook. He found a guy at a local Italian restaurant with a reputation for patronage by the Mafia. The cook agreed to leave the Italian place and come work at the new restaurant. Shortly thereafter he was found in an alley having been beaten by guys wielding baseball bats. His leg was broken and he was told that he shouldn’t consider changing jobs.

I visited my friend Matthew. His mom had just gotten some dark chocolate drops in the mail. I was eating one and his Labrador Retriever was begging. Matthew’s wife cautioned me not to share even a half drop: “chocolate is poison for dogs.” We all left the apartment. I bought some handmade chocolates at Martine’s on the 6th floor of Bloomingdale’s (59th and Lex). Matthew and I met at the Guggenheim where I absent-mindedly left the b-dale’s bag on a shelf for 15 minutes. When I returned, it was gone and it was never turned into the Lost and Found. Mourning the loss of our gourmet chocolates we found out that while we were all out the Lab had gotten up on a table and consumed an entire 1.5-lb. bag of dark chocolate drops. Perhaps four hours after the consumption, the 60 lb. dog was made to vomit up the offending material and she suffered no symptoms of ill health.

A different friend has a girlfriend who likes to ask him for money to take cabs. His response: “Why would you want to take a taxi when you can ride a $10 billion subway?”

12 thoughts on “New York: Unions, the Mob, chocolate harlequinade, the girlfriend and the taxi”

  1. I too have heard the words of wisdom, “chocolate is poison for dogs”. I’ve never really researched it, but have avoided purposefully giving chocolate to any of my dogs.

    Once, though, one of our Brittanys acquired access to a tray of brownies, and ate some. I don’t recall any bad results whatsoever.

  2. Yeah, watch out for chocolate. I had a beagle-dachshund eat a pound of milk chocolate once, with no obvious ill effect. But a huge old basset of my mom’s got into a box of chocolates and it very nearly killed her — projectile vomiting blood and the works. I conclude that dogs’ reactions to chocolate are not predictable, yet are sometimes dire. Best to disappoint Poochie, methinks.

  3. A quick google search will show you that dark chocolate is three times more toxic than milk chocolate and bakers chocolate three times worse still. A few ounces of bakers chocolate can kill a large dog like my lab.

    Philip didn’t tell the whole story. I have two dogs, a husky and a lab. My mom called poison control and they had her induce vomiting in both dogs and immediately go to the vet. The lab threw up a ton of chocolate (well, maybe a pound) in the cab on the way to the animal hospital on the east side. Once there, they induced vomiting in the husky who was clean (smart? lucky? asleep?). They pumped activated carbon into the lab (she looked like a war refugee). When she threw that up, they convinced me that she had to stay overnight for observation–given that she had eaten it all herself. She was fine thoughout. Her tail never stopped wagging.

    Would she have gotten ill if she had not been induced to vomit (with a combination of hydrogen peroxide and yogurt)? Who knows.

  5. When I was elementary-school aged, our old golden retriever used to hunt for our halloween bags each year. A smart golden retriever is often more resourceful than a human child; she usually managed to get into one of the bags. I suppose it was mostly milk chocolate, mixed with a lot of non-chocolate candy, and she would eat at least a couple pounds of candy. She’d generally spend an evening lying on her side groaning, but recover quickly. She lived a long, healthy life.

  7. Intresting to note – so many comments on the chocolate/Dog discussion – none on the violence in NY !!!!

  8. A number of years back the company that I worked for had an exhibit at a large trade show in the Silicon Valley area. When the show was over and it was time to pack up and move out, the union thugs let us know that unless some of the computer gear was donated to them, it would be days before our stuff was moved out of the exhibit hall. To get us out of there, management allowed some of the equipment to disappear. It really teed me off.

    When I was in college, I worked part time at a local Bradlees department store. To work in the store you were required to joing the union. If I remember correctly there was a $300 dollar initiation fee and weekly dues given in tribute each week there after.

    At one point the union honchos decided that we needed to go out on strike and held a meeting to discuss it at some gangster hall over in Dorchester. The hall was filled with old ladies and teenagers that worked at Bradlees making just over minimum wage, and the union thugs all arrived in their Mercedes and Caddies.

    We were out on strike for some weeks and in the end the union got us a nickel an hour raise.

    I hate unions and always will.

  11. Phil, I know the first story, but a litle diferently. The goons actually ravaged the place, only to be found bound and shot. They didn’t know that the owner of the restaurant was related to one of the families.

  12. The Union story sounds highly suspicious to me. Having been around labor unions my entire life I feel that I know a bit about their methods. And none of them involve “union goons”. Were you by chance just watching Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”?

    Unions today are afraid of their own shadows. Any mention of “goons” or other hard-handed tactics leads promptly to threats of the Rico Act enforcement. And you can bet that management is waiting for any excuse to pounce.

    My guess is that the story was either planted my management (which in case you don’t realize is more corrupt than any Labor Union), or some low-level con artists were posing under the “union” mask.

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