Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has always been a big gambler and used to hang out at a Brooklyn social club that was known for its high-stakes poker games, a new book alleges.
“Mob Boss,” the Mafia tell-all by Jerry Capeci and Tom Robbins, tells of a meeting between Schultz and Alfonso “Little Al” D’Arco, the former acting boss of the Luchese crime family.
D’Arco met Schultz in the early 1980s in Canarsie, where Schultz was born and raised, at a mob club owned by Schultz’s friend Bruno Facciola, a Luchese soldier who was murdered in 1990.
“[Schultz’s] business was selling coffee filters. His biggest customer was Macy’s. He had the downstairs store, where they sold the kitchenware. He said he had just come back from the West Coast, from Seattle, because he said there were these guys out there with two little coffee shops who were buying 20 times the amount of filters that Macy’s was using,” D’Arco told the authors.
“So he says, ‘I had to go out there and see what this was all about.’ And he said he went out there and they had these two little stores called Starbucks. And he said him and his . . . men were putting up the money to buy the stores and expand.”
D’Arco was impressed with Schultz’s business sense. “I told him, ‘Good luck with it.’ I should’ve asked if he wanted a partner.”
When the “Mob Boss” writers tried to reach Schultz, a spokeswoman for the caffeine king said he didn’t have time to talk about any visits he might have made to social clubs in the old neighborhood.