Guess what, mango?

What's that?

Will?

All right?

So I have something I need to get off my chest.

But before I do, let me ask you this.

Did you grow up around show biz or Chuck E Cheese?

I think we actually had both in Delaware.

They were both pretty popular for birthdays.

Seriously, you had both?

All right?

Well, we only had Showbiz near us.

And there's only one thing I actually really remember from going to show biz, you know, as like a five or six year old, and it was the Rock of Fire Explosion Band.

Do you remember these guys?

Of course, Mitzi, Mazzarella, Fasceronimo and the Keys.

How can you forget?

Well, I certainly won't ever forget them, nor will I ever forget where I used to stand when I watch them perform.

You know, show Biz had this huge.

Arcade room, but then you'd walk around the corner into this dark room where this weird animatronic band was playing.

And I don't think I've ever been more simultaneously terrified and yet completely mesmerized as I was when I watched the Rock a Fire Explosion perform.

Yeah.

My guess is you weren't alone in that feeling.

Well, so I'd stand in the doorway, and I'd watched them because for some reason I couldn't get enough of these guys.

And you know, as you mentioned, you had Fat s Geronimo, the gorilla and the keys.

He was always arguing with the guy Rolf de Wolf, the you know, the weird Ventrilocus wolf, you remember this.

And then there was Billy Bob who fortunately he was the brown bear that would usually keep the peace among the band.

And then you had that was his name.

He was beach Bear, who always seemed high and he was on the guitar.

And then Duke LaRue, the wannabe astronaut, this idiot mud who always missed his cue on the drums.

Of course you mentioned Mitzi Mozzarella, the cheerleader who shared my love with Michael Jackson songs.

There's one more why I'm not forgetting this embarrassing Who was the other one?

Yeah?

But wasn't there like a drunk bird?

Oh right?

How can I forget Looney Bird, the alcoholic bird who hung out in that barrel of gas a hall.

What a crew.

I know, you look back on it and it's so weird, Like what in the world were they thinking with that band?

I don't know, but I loved them, and I was so scared of them.

And you know, I don't know what it is about dark and weird things that draw us in.

And the thing is, I had no idea there was an even darker and weirder story playing out for Showbiz at the time.

This was near the end of the show Biz versus Chuck e Cheese pizza war, which is such a strange story and it's just one of the stories that's made us ask the question does pizza bring out the worst in people?

So that's what we're gonna be talking about today.

Let's get started.

Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius.

I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mengesh hot Ticketter and on the other side of that soundproof glass is the man with the most angelic voice you've never heard, our brilliant producer, Tristan McNeil.

You ready to talk about pizza Mango?

I am, And I know we've been talking about doing a pizza themed episode for a while now and both of us are huge pizza lovers.

I mean, who's not a pizza lover?

Which is a good point.

But it was wild as we started digging into the research, we just found so many stories about the dark history of pizza, like pizza wars and organized crime, so we decided to focus on those.

We'll take a little break, at least from the dark side to talk to one of our favorite pizza geniuses.

Yeah, that's right.

We'll be talking to Scott Wiener, the founder of Scott's Pizza Tours, and he's actually the world record holder for the largest collection of pizza boxes.

He's super interesting and he knows more about pizza history than anyone I know.

He's definitely a pizza genius.

All right, Well, let's dive into our topic.

And we opened the show by talking about show biz and the fact that I had no idea that by walking into one of these I was unknowingly participating in one of the greatest pizza wars of all time and probably would have made it that much more exciting.

So why don't we start with that one.

Yeah, that's a good one.

I mean, it doesn't get that much juicier than a battle between the creator of Pong and the inventor of Whack a Mole.

No, it definitely doesn't.

All right, Well, why don't you give us some of the background on how both Chuck E.

Cheese and Showbiz got started.

Cheese was first, and in fact the first one opened in San Jose, a couple of years before either of us was born.

This was way back in nineteen seventy seven, and it was actually started by Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari.

He's also the creator of Pong.

He came up with the idea for the restaurant because he was spending so much of his time selling Atari consoles like to arcades.

He thought there might be more money on the other side of the business, on the arcade end, so he dreamed up this idea for what would become Chuck E.

Cheese's Pizza Time Theater.

Well, and I thought it was interesting.

I mean, I think both the animatronic.

Performers and the pizza were part of this concept from the very beginning.

So why don't you talk about those for just a minute.

Yeah, they were, and both were kind of brilliant.

What's more appetizing than an animatronic rat?

Right, Well, I'm not sure why he chose a rat exactly, but it is interesting to hear his thinking on the animatronics.

So he knew parents probably wouldn't be excited to bring their families to a typical arcade.

So he was looking for a way to bring in some entertainment and make it ask much about the environment as it was the arcade games.

Bushnell did a really interesting interview with The Atlantic a few years ago, and in it he says this, the reason for doing the animals was not for the kids.

It was meant to be a headfake for the parents, right.

And so then he also goes on to talk about the pizza and he explains there aren't too many ways to screw it up.

If the dough is good, the cheese is good, and the sauce is good, the pizza is good.

I didn't have any preconceived idea that I knew how to run a restaurant, but I knew simple was better.

Both seems smart, I mean, it makes sense, all right.

So what happens next, Well, Bushnell.

Feels he's onto something and he wants to expand, so he starts looking for investors and enter Bob Brock, who's chairman of the Brock Hotel Corporation and a very successful franchise e of holiday inns.

So the two of them started working together on a deal to rapidly expand the business, and Bushnell's job was really to figure out how to improve the animatronics so these things could be in restaurants all over the country if the rollout went well.

All right, So this is this is around nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine, is that right?

Yeah, And this is actually where the drama starts.

It was right after these big discussions that Brock meets this young inventor, Aaron Fector, who's also the inventor of the Whack a Mole, And in weird timing, in Fector has been working on this animatronic band he called the wolf Pack five, and Brock felt they were much better than what Bushnell was doing.

All right, So Brock gets nervous about this, and he's kind of uncertain, I guess, about the quality of the animatronics in Chuck E Cheese.

Exactly, so much so that he actually decides to cancel his deal with Bushnell, and then he strikes a deal with Vector to make pretty much the same concept, and in nineteen eighty the first show his pizza opened in Kansas City.

That's such a bold move, that's crazy, and you know, it's weird that they just kept the pizza element as well, like they didn't seem to try to make it that much different.

Yeah, but if you think back to the Bushnell quote about why pizza earlier, it's a simple food.

So it made it easier for them to move quickly.

And I guess that's where a rock of fire explosion was born, right from the very beginning there.

And you know, at that time, I had no eye idea was watching such a knockoff act.

But if you look at I mean, they.

Kind of just look shady, right they do.

And I'm guessing it didn't take long for the lawsuits to come after.

That, right, So first Chuck E Cheese suit Showbiz, and then Showbiz filed a countersuit, and it ultimately settled in nineteen eighty two, with Showbiz agreeing to pay Chuck E Cheese a portion of their profits for something like fourteen or fifteen years.

Well, and you know, this is an interesting time to be in this business because we talked about this in our Weird Summer Travel Guide episode.

This was around the time that the video game market experienced a pretty big crash, so it was obviously not good for either of these chains.

Yeah, not at all, And In fact, it hit Chuck E Cheese so hard that Bushnell eventually had to file for bankruptcy.

And you know, after he was forced out of the company, Chuck E Cheese was acquired by Showviz.

So I guess ultimately mister whackamole won the war here.

Yeah, so it's fair to say he won the battle.

But in the end, they both.

Lost the war.

And how is that?

Well, Showviz wasn't exactly thriving, and in their efforts to improve the company.

Per foremance Fector lost out and he left with the Rock and Fire Bend, And so that was the last we saw them in showbiz.

Then in nineteen ninety eight, the whole company rebranded as CEC Entertainment.

Well, and now I see there are more than five hundred Chuck E Cheese locations around the country.

Yeah, it's still a big deal.

It definitely is.

Well, that's such a weird but interesting story.

All right, Well, let's talk about another battle where I found some of the trash talking pretty funny.

That was the result of McDonald's attempt to enter the pizza market, something I didn't really remember, and this was back in the late eighties.

Yeah, it's a good one.

So why don't you take this one?

All right?

Well, just a little bit of background on this one.

And by the way, there's a great mental flaw story on this from Jake Rosen, one of our favorite writers there.

So let's go back to the early nineteen eighties.

McDonald's is an absolute giant, and as Jake pointed out, they owned nearly forty percent of what was then a forty eight billion.

Dollar burger market, so incredible.

Well, and they were looking for ways to keep growing from there, and because they were looking to break into the dinner game and a much big way, and the idea of taking over a meal time was not foreign to them, and they'd done this in the early seventies when they introduced the egg McMuffin.

You know, despite being mocked by critics, the McMuffin was a.

Huge success, a crush.

Well, their customers would have disagreed.

Their customers were really digging them.

Well, I mean, I guess so you're saying they had their eyes on dinner though.

Yeah, you know, they'd conquered lunch and breakfast, and next was figuring out how to get people into their locations at night because for one reason or another, people saw burgers and their other offerings as more of a lunch thing, and that's when they started looking at this rapidly growing pizza market.

And so you look at the late nineteen eighties, they decided it was time to make a move.

So what they do well, It is important to note that, unlike the McMuffin introduction, that this was not going to be an easy transition when it came to the layout of their stores and their kitchen specifically.

And this was honestly something I'd not really thought about.

So first they had to develop this super quick cook oven and it wasn't exactly and so you know, in order to include the oven and other equipment related to it, they had to remodel their restaurants.

And that wasn't actually the only space problem.

Again, something I had not really thought much about until doing our research here.

It was the windows and their drive through.

So think about trying to fit a full pizza through one of those tiny windows.

So in order to serve the pizza, they'd have to go back and expand all of them.

But this didn't stop them from trying, oh not at all, not at all.

I mean, it might have slowed down the rate at which they'd try to do some of their early testing.

But in nineteen eighty nine they began testing in a couple dozen locations in Indiana and Kentucky.

And this is where the trash talking started.

Because I really want to get to the trashoar.

A, right, we'll get to the trash talking.

So enter Pizza Hut.

So you know, they had to be at least a little bit nervous.

I mean, they were the giant in the pizza business, but nobody was bigger than McDonald's, so this was definitely a threat.

And they had to be ready with some good trash talking.

So would they say, Well, if you look.

Back at one of the regional ads, they warned peaeople, don't make a mixed steak to get it.

They were really warning people about that.

And then they started talking about their competition's mic frozen dough.

That's such a low blow.

I kind of like, how whenever you want to make fun of McDonald's to go to is just to add mick in front of anything exactly.

That's why it's so ridiculous.

I mean, I actually, for some reason started thinking about a brainstorming session at the Pizza Hut headquarters where they were just like, all right, what should we put Mick in front of to show.

Those guys who's boss.

It'd be like the one genius.

He just rattles off like, hey, don't make a mixed steak by eating a mcfrozen pizza because it's the mic worst.

And they were all like, that's brilliant.

You don't mess with the hut.

Yeah, that's why they'd hit in the big box.

So you can tell I've thought about this a little little too much.

So was it the trash talking that ultimately can the pizza for them?

Well, I doubt that had that much to do with it, despite how brilliant those micklines were.

But I mean it's not like McDonald's isn't used to some portion of the population mocking their food.

And ultimately there were bigger factors beyond the restructuring of the restaurants that I mentioned earlier.

So think about prep time.

I mean this was a big factor.

Imagine pulling up to a window and ordering a couple burgers for one person and pizza for another.

So they've got the quick burger thing down to a science.

I mean, those suckers are ready in a minute and they're waiting for you at the window right as you pull up.

But a pizza, even if it's quick, even if it only takes five minutes, I mean, that feels like an eternity for people who are used to an almost instant drive through service.

You know.

Plus the rest of their order is just sitting there getting cold as they're waiting on the pizza.

Yeah, you can see why that'd be a problem.

Well, and the other issue was price.

I mean, it's not like pizzas are expensive in the broader food market, but when customers are used to spending a buck or two parade and mmcdonald's, an eight ninety nine item feels expensive.

The psychology of this, you know, the pricing of things.

It's weird, but it's interesting.

Yeah, So how did it all play out?

Well, by the early nineteen nineties, pizzas were being served in I think about a third of their locations, but it just wasn't working, and so they disappeared as quickly as they came.

I mean you might say they were mick history.

I've been practicing.

Yeah, I think I need a little break after that joke.

So why don't we get our pizza genius on the line.

All right, Well, Mago, I know we've been talking about pizza wars, and later on in the episode it's going to get even a little bit darker.

So I thought we should take a break and talk about some of the fun pizza stuff.

We're both huge pizza.

Fans, and there's obviously plenty of reasons to celebrate pizza.

In fact, I think we'll do another episode in the not too distant future about all the fun facts about pizza.

But today we've got.

Scott Wiener on the program.

Scott's an insane pizza connoisseur.

He's the owner of Scott's Pizza Tours.

He also consults on pizza park, writes a column for Pizza Today magazine, sounds qualified all the pizza references.

He judges international.

Pizza competition and holds the Guinness Book record for the largest collection of pizza boxes.

So, Scott, welcome to part time Genius.

Thanks so much for having me.

Hey, so so, one of the first things I heard about you was that you loved pizza so much you decided to turn that into a career.

How do you go about making pizza your career?

And were people skeptical when you told them that's what you were doing.

You know, I had no idea what it was going to be like in the beginning.

I just thought, Hey, wouldn't it be great if I could eat pizza for a living?

You know, I don't know what is it, but I you know, I was like, well, I can't do a book.

Nobody knows who the heck I am, and I don't know much, and I can't write a blog because actually at the time I had no internet where I lived.

And I figured, well, what if we did something live action?

And there's nothing better than live action doing a tour.

So I figured, Oh, take people around the cool pizza rias, show them the ovens, shows them the kitchen, we'll eat pizza.

I'll explain what's going on in the kitchen, and it'll be like a live action food TV show.

And that was that.

Oh that's awesome.

I remember you telling us you kind of have a strict count of how many pizza slices you allow yourself every week because you're such a pizza fanatic, So what do you limit yourself to?

So my limit is fifteen slices per week.

It begins Monday mornings loo one am and Sunday night and you know what, it's really hard to keep to that low of a limit because I'm exposed to somewhere between four and ten pizzeri is every day, and so to you have to say to eight pizzeri is a day.

No, I can't eat the slice right now.

It's really tough.

That's pretty incredible, and you never get sick of it.

I haven't gotten sick of it yet, but I'm always nervous about it.

And that's why I have this limit.

It's just so I don't lose that edge.

I want to stay interested in pizza.

And I'm worried that what if I go overboard one week and you know when you're a kid and you ate too many jelly beans and then he's like candy jelly beans anymore.

I don't want to live that life.

That's pretty great.

So I just moved to Atlanta, and it's not like New York where you can get slices on every block.

And so I was wondering, how do you plan the perfect pizza crawl in a city you don't know.

So if I'm planning a pizza crawl in a city I haven't been to before, I always start by putting up a post on Twitter on Facebook, Hey, anybody have ideas for pizzerias?

And then I sort of I call together a list based on the most suggestions I get.

I cross reference that with recommendations people have given me on my pizza tours, which of course I keep a long spreadsheet about that, and you know, I kind of narrow it down to what days of the week are these pizzerias open, what times are they open?

And I kind of carve out a little route that makes sense.

And I mean, I just got back from a trip to Detroit last week where all I did for three days was hit the pizza scene.

And I mean I hit a ton of pizza a short amount of time, and it couldn't without intensive preparation.

And Detroit's like a hot scene for pizza right now.

Right So, only in the past few years has it really become obvious to everyone outside of Detroit that they've got their own pizza thing going.

You know, if you ask anybody ten years ago, where do you get pizza in America?

They say, well, it's New York and it's Chicago.

And the people who knew a little bit better would say, oh, and New Haven, Connecticut.

But now we're starting to see that all these little regional variations are at least as significant.

And I got to say, having just eaten myself, Detroit definitely has it going on.

I know you've been a judge at the World Pizza Cup, which I have to be honest, isn't something I was that familiar with.

So can you tell our listeners a little about the World Cup?

And also how do you taste, test or judge a pizza?

Wow, there are serious pizza competitions.

I mean there's that Pizza World Cup is in Parma, Italy, and then there's one called the International Pizza Challenge, which is part of the International Pizza Expo in Las AGAs every year.

And judging is tough because, as you can probably imagine, the more slices you eat, the more they start to taste the same.

So you really have to you really have to stay sharp.

Like I always bring some palate cleansers, like an apple, I bring some lemon rind.

I always try to have some bubbly water on hand, coffee beans to you know, clear my nasal passages.

You know, just to give a whiff and kind of reset by all fuctory senses and you know you stay at that and you can have you can sample twenty or thirty slices of one day and still be able to tell the difference.

You know, when you're when you're given a slice of pizza, you have to be given the whole slice, so you can choose your own adventure with how you bite that.

I do.

I always do a bite of the tip and a bite of the lift, so I'm getting a bite of the center of the pie and I'm also getting some of the edge crust.

And after those two bites, you know, if I need to go back for more information and more more reconnaissance, I can choose my own bite for where I go next.

But bite of the tip and a bite of the lip is the best.

Way to start.

I love that.

Start using that phrase a lot.

See what people say, Well, let's talk about this pizza box collection you have.

As we mentioned, you're the world record holder.

So what's your obsession with pizza boxes and and what are some of the smartest design ones you have in your collection?

Well, when I started doing these tours in two thousand and eight, I was so interested in learning as much as I could about every angle of the pizza world because it's subjective.

You like a different pizza than I like, and neither of us is wrong or right, you know.

So I figured, well, let me, let me dive into some of these things that that are that are more objective.

Let's let's look at pizza box part.

And I was fascinated by the fact that we have different generic box designs in different parts of the country and different parts of the world to draw their most mustachio demand a little differently than the others.

So I just thought that that was it was really striking.

And then I started getting more into the technology behind the box, and I found, you know, there's a great box in Italy that's lined with this reflective polyester fabric so that it keeps the pizza hotter on the inside of the box.

It prevents the grease from soaking into the box itself, which would render it unrecyclable in some municipalities.

So it's a cool box.

And then there's one in India that is unbelievable.

It's a breathable box.

It has indirect ventilation that uses the fluting of a corrugated cardboard box set up to the advantage of getting rid of steam while maintaining heat and the inside of the box so cool.

All right, Well, before we play a little quiz, I want to make sure our listeners know about Slice out Hunger.

Can you tell us a little bit about this?

Yeah, Slice Out Hunger is a nonprofit that I started right when I started the pizza to our company, where we do fundraising for hunger relief organizations all around the country, and we do it through the pizza community.

So we have an annual event that happens in New York where we have sixty pizzerias in one location, all serving slices for a buck a pop, and all the money that we raise gets matched by corporate sponsors and then donated to local hunger relief organizations.

We also have these nationwide campaigns where your local pizzeria might have a little sign and then we know that says Slice out Hunger this month with our you know whatever it is our specialty pizza of the months, or we're working on a project coming up for National Pizza Day on February ninth, which we'll have a simultaneous delivery of pizza in every state in the United States to a local hunger relief organization, charity after school program Senior Center, Food Bank, food pantry.

It's going to be crazy.

Wow.

Well, thank you for doing all of that incredible work, and is our way of saying thanks.

We thought we would give you a really horrible quiz.

You don't mind, So what I'm prepared?

All right?

So what's our quiz called today?

Mango?

We're going to play a game called Our Cheesiest Quiz Ever.

Okay, so we're going to give Scott four cheesy statements and he's going to tell us whether they're true or false.

You ready, Scott?

I guess I'm ready.

I got no choice?

All right?

Well, question number one.

When Pizza Hut introduced the Insider Pizza in two thousand, it became the world's largest user of cheese.

Each pie required about one pound of cheese.

Truer false, I'll say true.

Yeah, that's right.

At the time, Pizza Hut was using more than three hundred million pounds of cheese each year and purchasing three percent of all the cheese produced in the US.

All right, one for one.

Number two.

Moose cheese costs about four hundred and twenty dollars per pound because milking of moose takes two hours and must be done in complete silence.

Tru or false.

I love this, but I'm gonna say it's false.

Oh, it's actually true.

Moo.

Yeah, they're notoriously moody and they'll go dry if they're even slightly deserved.

So I didn't think that was true either when I saw this quiz when Mango brought it in this morning, So that one stumped me as well.

All right.

Question number three.

Frankie Easy Cheese Jenkins was a New York City graffiti artist in the nineteen seventies before he patented and sold his idea for putting cheese in an aerosol can.

True or false.

Ooh, this is a tough one.

I feel like I really want it to be true, and it could be, but I'm going to say.

I'm going to say it's too good to be true.

It's false.

Yeah, you're right.

So.

Originally known as Snackmate, the product was invented in nineteen sixty five in a Nibisco lab.

All right, so Scott's two for three.

This is for the big prize here.

Number four.

Wisconsin has started using provolone and mozzarella to d ice roads as a way to keep cost of rock salt down.

True.

Or faults.

Oho, this is another one that feels like it's too good to be true.

But all right, I'm gonna go with my heart on this one, and I'm gonna give you the answer that I want it to be, even though it might not be correct.

I'm gonna say that that is true.

Yeah, absolutely right.

So the cheese Brian is a cheaper and greener way to keep traffic safe and it comes with the added perk of making town smell faintly like mazzarella.

Wow.

Oh, all right, so what Scott won today?

Yeah, so Scott went impressive three or four And in addition to our total admiration, Scott's going to get a copy of The Jetsons the Great Pizza Hunt Book, which is the only book about the Jetsons and pizza with a five star rating on Goodreads.

All right, well, Scott, thanks so much for joining us on Part Time Genius.

Thanks for having me, guys, welcome back to Part Time Genius.

Before the break, we talked about a couple of the pizza wars from the past few decades, first one with Chuck E Cheese and Showbiz, and then the trash talking one between McDonald's and Pizza hut.

But now it's time to tackle a much more serious topic.

We don't get all that serious very often here at Part Time Genius, but this is a fascinating case.

Yeah, I know, we wanted to talk about the Pizza Connection trial, right.

Right, So let me just share a few of the basics and the numbers involved here.

So this was March of nineteen eighty seven, and there were seventeen people found guilty of building a massive international drug ring.

It was all orchestrated by the mafia, and it was managed through this network of neighborhood pizzerias all.

Over the country.

So it started with thirty five defendants, nineteen of them ended up standing trial, and the street value of the heroin they moved was worth an estimated one point sixty five billion dollars.

Wow, which is no small operation.

No, it definitely wasn't.

And it gets more complex from there.

This network was insane.

There were two primary organized crime groups behind this.

You have the Sicilian mafia and then you have the Banano crime family in New York.

And the arrests were not just made in New York and Italy, but in Switzerland, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit.

I mean It's crazy how wide this was.

Yeah, and so I'm guessing a case this complex isn't fast to prosecute and investigate, right, No, not at all.

I mean, there was this series of raids of pizzerias and homes all over the country.

This was one morning in nineteen eighty four, and this happened after four years of an FBI investigation.

Then you have this seventeen month trial.

Seventeen months, I mean, it's one of the longest trials in American history, and it was at the end of that that these seventeen people were found guilty.

I was on grand jury for seven months once.

I remember that forever.

Seventeen months just feels impossible.

Yeah, I can't imagine.

But in this case, it's not just because it took forever.

I mean, you know, think about the jurors.

They were scared for their lives.

It actually ended up being an eleven member jury because one of the was excused after getting these threatening phone calls.

Even the judge admitted to being worried for his safety.

Yeah, and of course they were the only ones who had to fear for their lives.

I remember reading that one of the suspects was found dead in a garbage bag before the trial ended, and another defendant was shot a few times and ended up pleading guilty from his hospital bed.

Yeah.

And there are two really interesting articles in Vice, or rather there was one on the Vice website and it was called how Mafia pizzeria drug fronts inspired one of the most complex criminal trials ever, Yeah, exactly by a guy named John Serico, and another on their Munchie site called The Dark Side of Pie by Nick Rose.

And I would recommend reading both of them.

They were both very interesting.

So it's just so wild that it was called the pizza connection and that it was largely managed through a huge network of pizzerias.

So want to tell our listeners why, Well, you know.

In the article I mentioned by Nick Rose, he interviews a few experts on this connection between organized crime and pizza.

And one of the experts he spoke to was a guy named Antonio Nika, and he's written several books on organized crime and when he was asked why pizzerias, here's what he said.

You can do this with any kind of restaurant, but at the time, it was just easier to buy a pizzeria and it was a great opportunity to make money and sell heroin out of the back door.

He then goes on to say a pizzeria can.

Be a good way to launder money.

At the end of the day.

You can produce fake receipts because it's mostly a cash business.

If you have two hundred clients in a given day, a bookkeeper can punch the receipts so that it says five hundred customers.

And the money that you don't make from selling pizza, you can put in the cash by selling heroin or drugs and pay taxes.

Which is so crazy.

And I guess another advantage of pizza places is their whole delivery network, right, Yeah, that's exactly right.

And so they've got this distribution system that's already in place.

You've got people out delivering pizzas all over the country, you know, so why not have them deliver heroin?

I mean, I know why they shouldn't deliver heroines, So don't answer that.

But that was their line of thinking.

So eventually this pizza connection spanned all over the country.

It even went up into Canada over time, and they built what was essentially a monopoly on heroin there.

And as a side note, I noticed that the US attorney who was prosecuting the cases a name we'd eventually all know.

That's right.

It was none other than future in New York City mayor and presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.

And he was known for being a tough prosecutor.

Yeah, that's right.

So this trial happens, and does it slow down the trafficking of heroin and the connection with Pizza, Well not really.

I mean, just seven years later, famous original raised Pizza in the heart of Manhattan was busted for being this big organizing spot for another major drug ring.

And these bus take an enormous amount of human power and time, and this one specifically, it took three years and more than two hundred agents involved in this thing.

Yeah, it's crazy.

And then fast forward to twenty eleven, John Porcello, known as Johnny Pizza, was arrested in what the FBI reports as the biggest mob raid in its history.

But I mean, if I remember correctly, the actual pizzerias weren't discovered to be a part of the racketeering.

No, But I mean still, I mean, the guy was known as Johnny Pizza.

There's some connection there.

But by the way, I know there's not much funny about these cases, but when the La Times reported on this bust I did enjoy this line.

It said many had nicknames that just read like a Hollywood script.

Lumpy, Johnny, Pizza, the Bull, Baby, Fat Mush, Jello.

And meat Ball among them.

Lumpy and Mush.

I know, I love those.

Well, it's all really strange, and I'd say, while the show biz and McDonald's stories are pretty crazy, they aren't quite as heavy as all this pizza connection stuff.

No agreed, but things are about to get heavier because you know what time it is?

Yeah, backt off time, all right, I'll go first.

So we were talking about the pizza wars in the first half of the show.

Well, the founder of Domino's, Tom Monaghan, he may not have been in many all out wars, but he wasn't a to rough up some of his earliest customers if they tried to skip out on paying.

As he said in his autobiography quote, if someone refused to pay a driver for an order, I didn't call the police.

I just went and demanded the money.

Usually, the culprits were a bunch of college guys who decided to have a party at my expense, and I didn't hesitate to swing a punch to persuade them to pay up.

That's crazy.

So here's a quick one.

Ever wondered where tombstone pizza got its name.

It's because it was first made in a bar that was across the street from the cemetery.

You know, I actually have wondered that, but I've never looked at up.

So that's interesting to know.

All right, Well, I'm not done.

Quoting Domino's founder Tom Onahan, he also said, from time to time, we'd have a rash of pizza thefts from parked vehicles while drivers were busy with customers.

I'd hide in the.

Back of the car, and the next time it went to that neighborhood, I'd wait for them to try it again.

I'd carry a meat tenderizing mallet or a pop bottle as a persuader, and that approach, Yeah, always solved the problem.

It's just the problem.

That's as simple, is that, Okay.

So on a slightly lesson sane note, In the nineteen eighties, Chuck E.

Cheese decided to expand to Australia, but instead decided to be called Charlie Cheese's Pizza playhouse.

And that's because the word chuck is even more strongly associated with throwing up there than it is here.

Wow.

Okay, you know, actually I think I might try to get that term Charlie cheese to catch on for throwing somebody Charlie cheese everywhere.

Okay, all right?

So did you know back in the nineteen sixties there was a US Army intelligence unit that would use fake pizza deliveries to spy on people, namely reporters and politicians.

That's weird.

So want to know who holds the Guinness World Record for the most expensive pizza commercially available.

It's in my old home of New York City at Industry Kitchen.

The pizza, which takes two days to make, includes black squid incto, stilton cheese from the UK, French truffles, two types of caviar foi gras, and of course a twenty four carrot gold leaf.

Wow, it goes for two thousand dollars.

All right, that's ridiculous.

Of all the things we've talked about today, that is the most offensive by far.

So that shouldn't be classified as a pizza at that price.

Actually, maga, have you got me so riled up, I'm gonna have to give you the fact off trophy today.

Well, while while will storms off, I'd like to thank you for listening today, and if you want to share any favorite pizza facts, hit us up at part Time Genius at HowStuffWorks dot com, where find us on Facebook or Twitter, or call our twenty four to seven fact hotline.

It's one eight four four pt Genius.

We'll see you next time.

Thanks again for listening.

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Jason who