There was one moment in the film when "Chicken Man" Phil Testa shows up. Keeping with the style of the film, it ran a crawler across the screen as the scene ended saying "Phil Testa was blown up on his porch March 15, 1981.
That brought back memories for me. I was living in Philly in the late 70s and tried to organize a bar tour where we were going to his 26 bars, one for every letter of the alphabet (but not in alphabetic order). Start at 1 pm, go to a new bar every half hour. Had 8-10 people say that they would do it. Only two showed up. That didn't stop me, but by the time that 10 pm rolled around, the two that were with me were fading and we were falling behind schedule. I told the two to hang in this one bar while i zipped around the block and hit a couple of others that were on the list. The "V" on the list was a Italian bar/restaurant called Virgilio's. That day I was getting a bartender's signature in each bar that I went to. When I stopped in Virgilio's and asked the bartender to sign, he said "I ain't signin' nothin'". I was about to politely ask him a second time when I remembered that this place was supposedly mob connected, so I slunk away and just let it drop ( still have the sheet with all the bartender's signatures on it with a note next to Virgilio's saying "bartender refused to sign").
Shift to a couple of years later, specifically 1981. By this time my bar tour was starting to gain legs with a couple of dozen people participating. When we got to Virgilio's, there was a sign on the door "Closed due to death in the family". It was the week after Testa was blown up. I had to quickly find another V, so we all grabbed a couple of six-packs and stood around a Vent on 2nd Street and declared it our V. From then on, that vent became our regular stop on the bar tour (the Philly Inq even picked up on that in a little piece they published a a year later - see below, last two paragraphs).
That brought back memories for me. I was living in Philly in the late 70s and tried to organize a bar tour where we were going to his 26 bars, one for every letter of the alphabet (but not in alphabetic order). Start at 1 pm, go to a new bar every half hour. Had 8-10 people say that they would do it. Only two showed up. That didn't stop me, but by the time that 10 pm rolled around, the two that were with me were fading and we were falling behind schedule. I told the two to hang in this one bar while i zipped around the block and hit a couple of others that were on the list. The "V" on the list was a Italian bar/restaurant called Virgilio's. That day I was getting a bartender's signature in each bar that I went to. When I stopped in Virgilio's and asked the bartender to sign, he said "I ain't signin' nothin'". I was about to politely ask him a second time when I remembered that this place was supposedly mob connected, so I slunk away and just let it drop ( still have the sheet with all the bartender's signatures on it with a note next to Virgilio's saying "bartender refused to sign").
Shift to a couple of years later, specifically 1981. By this time my bar tour was starting to gain legs with a couple of dozen people participating. When we got to Virgilio's, there was a sign on the door "Closed due to death in the family". It was the week after Testa was blown up. I had to quickly find another V, so we all grabbed a couple of six-packs and stood around a Vent on 2nd Street and declared it our V. From then on, that vent became our regular stop on the bar tour (the Philly Inq even picked up on that in a little piece they published a a year later - see below, last two paragraphs).
