Mid-Atlantic Gateway
I thoroughly enjoyed David Chappell's recent post here remembering the funny moment on Mid-Atlantic Wrestling in 1980 when the mafioso Enforcer Luciano presented Blackjack Mulligan with a dead fish. ("Blackjack Mulligan vs. Enforcer Luciano ... in a FISH match??")
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| Enforcer Luciano with Bob Caudle and David Crockett |
Luciano's intent, of course, was to play off the famous scene in the movie "The Godfather."
Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
I didn't see the first Godfather movies when they first came out in theaters in the 1970s, it wasn't until I was in my twenties in the 1980s that I rented them on VHS and watched them, several years after I had seen the Luciano/Mulligan skit. So when Luciano and Mulligan played out this angle on TV, I had no idea at that time what the fish in the angle meant!
Blackjack played it like he didn't know what it meant either, claiming "Down where I come from it means you've been cat-fishing on a trout line or something."
Video of the Luciano/Mulligan angle on Mid-Atlantic television is not known to exist, but here (as a cultural point of reference!) is the scene in "The Godfather" on which this wrestling angle was based:
So Luciano was clearly sending a message to Blackjack that this is where things were headed. Relive the (somewhat) famous "fish" angle with Enforcer Luciano and Blackjack Mullgian by reading David Chappell's detailed account of it on the Mid-Atlantic Gateway.
Originally published January 19, 2017 on the Mid-Atlantic Gateway.
