Mr. Sousa

The first time I met Mr. Sousa face-to-face was in the windowless back office of one of his laundromats. His cover story, the thing that he put on his tax forms, was that he was a legitimate business owner with a small empire of no-frills coin-operated laundry joints. And that much was true, as far as it went. Of course, it went much further than that.

Still, that was what he was known for, being the face of Val-U-King Laundry. I mean that literally. After he muscled out the owner of his first laundromat some 20 years ago, he plastered a cartoon version of his disembodied head on the side of the building with the caption, "This Man Wants to Clean Your Clothes!" He had more hair back then, but his wide-eyed smile seemed a bit deranged. Sort of like Frankie Valli on crack. When he expanded operations, he put his mug on each new building, even though that style had seemed out of date from the start. I guess mobsters are always trying to recreate some imagined past out of the movies.