THE FRIARS CLUB – Synopsis by Patrick Coppola
THE FRIARS CLUB
“It was going so right, until it all went wrong.” Mark Friedman – December 22, 1967
The shame my father felt seeing his older brother Maury in handcuffs was too much for him to bear. The news hit me hard, too – the world I had been living in was crashing down on me, and I figured to be in handcuffs soon. My Dad had warned me about his brother many times, but I never listened. You see, even though my uncle used me, he didn’t think he was, and Maurice Friedman was still my hero. As a kid, I never knew for sure what he did. Yeah, I knew he was a big shot who ran casinos in Vegas. I knew he took care of his family. He had gotten my father a damn good job doing promotional work for those casinos and clubs on the strip. “Unk,” as I called him, had taught me every card game there was before I was six and by the time I was ten, craps was second nature to me. They say, there’s a bit of larceny in all of us, but there was a lot
of it in my uncle. Being in Las Vegas for all those years made it second nature to him. He was always looking for an angle and he didn’t like getting beat.
When he picked up the tab at a restaurant, and he always did, he examined the bill like an IRS agent. Anyway, he and a few of his pals from the Friars Club were in hot water… boiling hot. Let’s go back about eighteen months ago and find the day when it all started for me…
June 1966
I had just graduated from Fairfax High with a less than stellar GPA, and not many great memories. That summer looked bleak as well. I had a few friends, wasn’t athletic, never dated – might as well tell you, I had to go to my senior prom with my uncle’s adopted daughter, Barbara, who was three years older than me. School and I never mixed well, but my father who never gave up on me, had me enroll for the upcoming semester at LA City College. He considered me an “underachiever” and told me the only way I’d succeed is with an education. LACC was where kids that couldn’t get into good colleges or didn’t know what they wanted to do went. It was for dummies. But as time rolled on, it turned out I was no dummy. My father was old-school Jewish, and there I was, like on every sunny Saturday morning, cutting the grass, at my house on North
Orange Grove Drive, in our upper middle-class neighborhood.
Looking up, in the distance I saw my uncle, MAURY FRIEDMAN driving toward my house in his baby-blue Cadillac convertible. Every time I saw him brought back the great times I shared with him growing up…