🔹 Our final CCC Major Pool launches next week! We will send a separate email - with a CCC story nugget of course - so be on the lookout and see if you can turn $25 into $500 or one of our other 14 prizes ($2,000 total value).

🔹 Congrats to our Comment Contest winner Benny C. who wins a sleeve of LA GOLF balls for his entry. Be sure to vote and comment in the poll below for your shot at a prize next week!

Last week's BadFellas brought a reply from a reader with a family story from another club, another town with known mob ties, and another membership roster with an unusal number of waste management professionals. We almost titled it BadFellas II, but we opted for a different Marty Scorsese title this time around.

This reader heard the story from his father, who belonged to a club in the '80s. And unlike BadFellas, where things went smoothly and nobody got hurt, this one did not end well for the parties involved.

Names changed, as always, to protect the innocent, guilty, and those merely nearby.

We'll call it Mulberry CC. A club roster that, for decades, shared more surnames with the FBI's organized crime watchlist than either side cared to admit.

Wiseguys had been mixing in the membership for years, which had always been a bit of a novelty for the square members of the club. They coexisted without much friction, each side minding its own business. That is, until one Saturday morning in the early '80s.

The first tee time every Saturday was a "connected" foursome. Golf united them, but off the course there were union contracts dividing them. If one of them was to have an "unfortunate accident" there was another member of the group that stood to benefit financially.

Plus, word on the street was someone was talking to the feds.

In that world, you did not freelance a disappearance. You asked permission. Failure to do so was mistake number one, but as you will soon see, it was the first of many.

One member of the foursome was both problems at once. He controlled the contracts everyone else wanted a piece of, and he was, as far as certain people were concerned, talking too much to the wrong people. That made him the target.

The organizer decided it would be the eighth hole. The main highway was separated by 100 feet of woods where a hitman could hide and easily escape. The organizer could not do the job himself, for reasons he summarized as "too fat." So he handed it to his former son-in-law, a cab driver, divorced from the man's daughter but still the father of his grandchild.

That last part got pitched as a perk. Do this, he was told, and you'll see the kid more. There was a small down payment, a weekly wage and the promise of a legitimate job. Folded in at the end was the observation that a man who already knew a hit was coming was in no position to turn one down. It was, if you will, an offer he couldn't refuse.

When the cab driver got cold feet, as any sane person would, the organizer reassured him the job was blessed, approved all the way up the chain, nothing to worry about. This was a lie.

Then came the preparation, which members at Mulberry have been retelling ever since.

They drove out to a rural county next door and test-fired a rifle at a road sign. It did not go through the sign. It dented it. They decided they needed a better gun.

The getaway, for one stretch of the planning, was going to be a bicycle. A twenty-dollar ten-speed bought off a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree, test-ridden exactly once, during which the chain slipped, the shooter wobbled, and the whole idea was quietly retired to a basement.

They switched to running and rehearsed that instead, stopwatch out, timing the sprint through the woods from the eighth fairway to the getaway point.

The shooter wanted a police scanner. He got talked down to a CB radio, which he returned twice for being the wrong kind before everyone gave up and took the refund.

He was outfitted at a discount store, coveralls and a cap and a knapsack, and when the boots ran too expensive he was handed a pair of the organizer's own, several sizes too big. The gloves, provided the morning of, were also too big. It is hard to fit a finger through a trigger guard in gloves that do not fit. Hold onto that.

Saturday came. First tee time, as always. The target rode up in his cart, stepped out, and striped what more than one witness would later agree was an excellent tee shot. It was the finest shot anyone hit on the eighth that morning, and the only one that found what it was aimed at.

As the target approached his second shot, the shooter came out from the trees. He put one round in the target's shoulder. The man went down, hands up, asking him to stop. The shooter fired again anyway, aiming as well as a man can in gloves two sizes too big, missed, and came within an inch of shooting himself in the foot.

He took off, leaving his knapsack behind at the scene, for a rendezvous point where the getaway driver had not yet bothered to arrive.

The target lived. The organizer did not.

The job, it turned out, had never been blessed at all. He had freelanced it, put out a contract on his own authority and told everyone otherwise, and in that business freelancing is the one sin nobody survives the telling of. Botching it was almost beside the point.

A couple of months later he turned up in the back of a Cadillac a few miles down the road, made an example of in the specific and unambiguous fashion the business reserves for exactly that, the kind reserved for men who freelance and lie about it.

The shooter chose witness protection. We can only assume his visitation situation did not improve.

Mulberry, meanwhile, did what clubs do, which is carry on. The same eighth hole that had a man bleeding on it one Saturday hosted a junior clinic the next. A beloved local sports figure kept flying in by helicopter for his annual charity outing, landing on the same grass for another decade. There were Easter egg hunts. There was a swim team. And somewhere underneath all of it sat a piece of institutional memory nobody wrote down, passed instead from a father who was one group back on the seventh, close enough to hear it happen, to a son who has been telling it ever since.

And so, dear readers, if you are ever invited to a club with known mob ties, know that you are most likely safe. But, just in case you are the type of person who talks too much, keep an eye on the treeline and don't go too far into the woods looking for a lost ball. We don't want to lose you as a CCC member!

Would you be one of the 72 "in the know?"

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Absolutely. I know where the bodies are buried (43)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Maybe. I'm friendly with the board but not family (36)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No chance. I voted against the assessment (10)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ I'd find out after. I always find out after (36)

Pretty even spread in the voting last week, but we are happy to see most of you are “in the know.” Also good to see that very few of you voted against the assessment. It seem the CCC readers are an affluent crowd!

Congrats again to Benny C. for his comment, “I know where the bodies are burried because I’m the one who put ‘em there.” Were we afraid to NOT make Jeff the winner? Sorta, so with that in mind, enjoy the sleeve of LA GOLF balls Benny!

Don’t forget to catch up on past stories at ccconfidential.vip - and while you’re at it, tell a friend!

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