Just ask Kevin Pappas, who spent his first 16 years there: Tarpon Springs, Fla., is run by the Greek mafia, aka the Pappas family.
By day, so Pappas claims, these dignified mobsters masquerade as businessmen who just happen to own diamond-studded watches and luxury cars. By night, he says, the family runs the town, owns judges and congressmen, distributes drugs and controls the seaside real estate. Headed by Lucas “Lukie” Pappas, this all-powerful Greek family became the symbol of everything a boy from the wrong side of town admired and respected.
Pappas’ memoir, “Godfather of Night,” is a fast-paced, gritty and often heart-rending story of the years he spent trying to become a part of that “family” — at any cost. But the book’s allegations are already being hotly disputed by the Pappas family, who don’t appreciate being outed and further, don’t seem to know anyone named Kevin Pappas.
Maybe that’s because it wasn’t always his name.
Born Kevin Cunningham, he grew up poor and claims he was singled out for brutal treatment by a father who nursed an inexplicable hatred for him. Even his siblings seemed alien; Kevin’s only ally was his mother, who worked at a Greek restaurant called the Louis Pappas Riverside Cafe. Co-owner Lukie Pappas hired young Kevin to bus tables and sweep up, eventually making him a short-order cook.
The suave and commanding restaurateur became the main focus of Kevin’s dreams for his future. He sized up Lukie’s yacht and stable full of racehorses and fell hopelessly in love. “The Greeks held the world in their hands,” he decided; it would be his world, too.
A small world, as it turned out. In a scene that, like many in the book, merits its own theme music, Pappas, then 17, says he discovered Lukie Pappas was his biological father. Lukie’s steely refusal to confirm the fact set the course of Kevin’s life for the next 20 years, as the angry teenager launched a crusade to prove he was Greek enough, man enough and eventually, criminal enough, to be called his father’s son.
To that end, Cunningham — now calling himself Kevin Lucas Pappas — set his sights on the dangerous world of cocaine trafficking in Atlanta in the 1980s, where his ability to play for big stakes with local and Colombian drug lords gained him a kingpin reputation and a fortune to match.
At the top of his game, Pappas says he owned “Porsches, a Rolls-Royce Corniche, Maseratis,” wore “ropes of gold chains and diamonds in my ears,” and ate “at the most expensive restaurants in Atlanta or New York or Miami seven days a week.” He says he had “cops, judges, court clerks and county commissioners” on his payroll.
Importing more cocaine than he could hide, Pappas says he bought a 25-story high-rise in Marietta just to stash kilos in the dropped ceilings of his unsuspecting tenants.
Most of the details of Pappas’ life of crime — especially his close relationship to dealing cocaine — ring true: “You had a yellow-based petroleum cut, which was what we called the wash cocaine, the bottom of the barrel, the sludge,” he writes. “It’s pasty, it’s sticky, a nasty cut in my opinion but some people loved it.” But little discrepancies throw off the story’s credibility. For instance, Pappas describes Cunningham Sr. as Scottish in the second chapter but refers to him as an Irishman at the end of the book.
Meanwhile, for all the attention he got from the man he called “my real father,” Pappas might as well have kept his given name, stayed in Tarpon Springs and swept Lukie’s floors.
None of Kevin Pappas’ brand of success ever impressed Lukie, who (perhaps wisely, in light of certain developments) rejected all of Pappas’ gifts and overtures in what are easily the most heart-rending scenes in the book. Worship eventually turned to revenge in 1991. About two years into a life sentence at the Atlanta federal penitentiary for cocaine charges, Pappas says he was handed a virtual Get Out of Jail Free card: If he would inform on the Pappas family — including Lukie — the government would reduce his sentence to time served.
“Revenge is very Greek,” Pappas says of his decision to cooperate. “There wasn’t a shade of gray in my answer.” But weeks later, wired, and minutes away from betrayal, he was less sure: “As much as I hated my father and wanted revenge, there was also a part of me that said, ‘This is your blood.’ ”
Pappas, who finally got out of jail in 2000, lives in a suburb of Atlanta. Married, a father of three, he claims to have made an uneasy peace with himself. To see him these days, taking out the garbage and mowing his lawn, he says, you’d almost take him for an average guy, a family man — just like his dad.
Nonfiction
“Godfather of Night: A Greek Mafia Father, a Drug Runner Son, and an Unexpected Shot at Redemption”
By Kevin Pappas
272 pages, Ballantine Books, $25
About the Author
