In a mid-Manhattan restaurant not long ago, four Happy Hour customers were served mixed drinks decorated with what they dubbed “green garbage.”
“What’s all this?” they protested to the waiter. He shrugged, “Mafia parsley.”
According to Jimmy Breslin, a columnist for the New York Daily News, steakhouses and other midtown Manhattan restaurants were serving “meals that appeared to be growing lawns.”
The proliferation of “green garbage” in New York restaurants is the result of the mob’s parsley shakedown. Restaurants are required to buy underworld supplied parsley with which to garnish their dishes. It is not enough that they heap the greenery on meats and salads, but they are under pressure to add them to mixed drinks. If confirmed martini drinkers find that parsley alters the lemon-peel tinge to their drinks, they are taken care of. The parsley is put at the side of the glass.
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As the mob jacked up the price of parsley from 5¢ to 40¢ a bunch, some restaurateurs found their parsley bill running even with the cost of a waiter’s salary. Mobsters from East Harlem checked to make sure the restaurants were not stinting in the greening of their customers. In the 1980s some restaurants tried to cut parsley orders by saying business was off.
Since most customers simply pushed the parsley aside, the restaurants tried to recycle the parsley by washing it off and reusing it. True, a check showed the mob the restaurants were not stinting on putting out the parsley, but the suppliers were not fooled. A count of tablecloths and napkins given to mob-connected laundries proved that the restaurants were not ordering enough greenery.
Confronted by such a scientific survey, one steakhouse owner nervously ordered an extra 150 bunches of parsley on the spot.
In recent years, New York diners’ incredible appetite for parsley seems to have spread around the country. At about the same time the mob effectively put down the Great Parsley Rebellion in New York, it moved into Montana to spread the green. The Montana State Crime Control Commission reported investigating some restaurant bombings in Butte (called Apache Indian jobs because, done right, nothing is left but a few flaming timbers and a chimney).
The commission tied the bombings to the parsleyselling activities of New York mobsters. Further investigation revealed that one crime family had taken control of vast acreages in Ventura County, California, where parsley could be cut five times a year, enough eventually for the total greening of America.
