which is somehow the most quintessentially american thing i've read this year. here are some choice excerpts, beginning with the screencapped lede:
Domenic Broccoli, the IHOP kingpin of the Bronx, lives a good life. He drives a nice car, spends time with his six grandkids, and golfs often enough to have a tan for most of the year. He owns a four-bedroom home in Pelham Manor, a house upstate, and IHOPs throughout the borough where he grew up, each of which runs smoothly enough to give Broccoli the time and resources to devote himself, at the age of 66, to the animating force in his life: destroying his enemies. This mission came as a surprise to Broccoli, who had little reason to expect that trying to expand his pancake empire into upstate New York — and to build his grandest IHOP yet — would lead to such conflict. But sometimes that’s what happens when you find a dead body.
this story contains spies:
Broccoli had told me that he had planned to crash the protest with “guns a-blazing” but ultimately thought better of it. “If I go there and then my Bronx comes out, it’s not gonna go well,” he said. His Bronx had come out plenty in his campaign to build the IHOP as part of a Colonial-themed strip mall he was calling Continental Commons. The Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot are a group of history buffs and retiree volunteers, and yet Broccoli claimed he had found it necessary to spend more than a million dollars battling them with archaeologists, lawyers, and the private investigators he hired as “spies” to infiltrate the Friends. As it happened, one of his spies was at the Memorial Day protest holding up a STOP CONTINENTAL COMMONS sign while surreptitiously recording the group in case anything might help the RICO case Broccoli was building.
lying about the etymology of broccoli:
The genealogical tree, he told me, includes the Broccolis of Calabria, who, as Domenic tells the tale, crossed cauliflower with rabe and named a vegetable after themselves — not true, according to broccoli experts — and the Broccolis that control the James Bond franchise. (Despite having never met them, he has a copy of the New York Times obituary for one of the Bond Broccolis on his office wall next to a photo of his graduation from the Culinary Institute of America.)
an FBI agent who is also a complete loser (as his day job suggests:)
Ashworth, who lived a few minutes from the site, is a West Point graduate with the bald head, stocky build, and stolid demeanor of an FBI agent, which is his day job. He isn’t the type to dress up as a Revolutionary War reenactor, nor is he instinctively anti-development. (His biography on the Friends website declared that “former President Ronald Reagan is among his favorite American heroes.”)
and somehow even wilder shit. it's the funniest thing i've read all month. please read it
