It was after that failed retirement in the early '80s that Big John bought back the establishment he'd sold before his hiatus from the working life—Herda's Bar & Grill, by then changed into Foxy Girls strip club—and he operated it with the same professional approach he brought to all his other businesses. The club, unmistakable with its jaundiced paint job and pink panther Cadillac sitting out front, opens at 3 in the afternoon, when guys come to sit at the bar and drink, joke, play video poker and chew the fat with Jimmy, the bartender. And it closes at 3 a.m., when the handful of working dancers call it a night, and when, on the early morning of Friday, August 11, the last people to see Big John alive watched him close up the bar and head home.
These days, the folks who gather at the bar in Foxy Girls have to make a conscious effort to keep the levity up, to keep the jokes rolling. It ain't natural anymore. And that's because Big John's death—his brutal homicide, rather—remains in the back of their minds. Especially for Jimmy Nacaraato, a bartender and Big John's best friend of a half-century. It doesn't take long for Big John's name to surface, and when it does—such as when an old friend stops in to pay his respects to Big John; or when a messenger arrives with a bouquet of roses dedicated to Big John's everlasting memory; or when a complete stranger comes in and says, "I heard through the grapevine that Big John died, and I'm sorry"—Jimmy's eyes tear up, and it takes him a minute to allow his heart to descend back to its rightful place.
A man from Michigan, Big John made countless friends during his business and social endeavors in Las Vegas, according to his son, John Jr. He got himself a house just off South Industrial Road (now Dean Martin Drive and Silverado Ranch) and raised his family there, a wife and two boys, and he'd been prepared to stay there many more years when he fell victim to a case of eminent domain at the end of 2005. The government forced him to accept payment for his property and move elsewhere. Which he did, with bitterness and perhaps also a bit of foreboding in his gut, to a new home in the Spanish Oaks gated community on Sahara Avenue, just east of Valley View Boulevard. He shared that home with his wife, Alice, until she died of cancer last May, after 62 years of happy union. And thus, in the early morning of Friday, August 11, when Big John returned without friends to that 2,343-ft. house after another day's work, he must've thought himself to be alone. Yet, the evidence that police would observe after his body was discovered—signs of forced entry in the rear of the house and four gunshot wounds to Big John's body, according to Lt. Lew Roberts of Metro—suggests that at some point during that fatal morning he was not.
Nobody, it seems, knows anything more than Metro, and they've repeated that their ongoing investigation has revealed no suspects. Big John's friends and family have offered police what they know, proclaiming full confidence in the detectives working the case, and his enemies are too scarce to find. In Foxy Girls on Thursday, August 17, an off-duty stripper, sitting arm-to-arm with a bar full of rugged old men who can all spit out stories about their friend Big John on demand, spoke of the three brief articles published on Big John's death: "I'm glad the news has portrayed him just as a business owner, and not the owner of this club here. They didn't drag his name through the mud, as the owner of a titty bar, and that was nice of them."
But the truth is, there's nothing shameful about Foxy Girls. It's chock-full of real people, the kind who cast shadows even in a dark dive like Foxy Girls, just as Big John himself did. And anyway, Big John was straight from the old school. Rugged. Durable. Explicit. "A tough ol' fart," as his younger son, Nick, calls him. He was was a man born in 1922 to a Romanian father and Irish-German mother, and he clinched tight to the values of those times, like sternness and punctuality; he once gave as birthday presents Army strongboxes he retained from his WWII experiences to his two young boys, four years apart in age but so close in birthdays that he celebrated them both at the same time. He included with that gift a resounding oral note: "If you ever have ideas of leaving home, you can pack all your stuff in that box there and never come back." Straight from the old school, Big John was. He treated his friends' words like specks of gold dust and never backed down from people he didn't like, according to 55-year-old John Jr., whose eyes often flood at the thought of his departed father.
And he was a man who stayed old school. When John Jr. was a boy, his dad would have him polish his shoes 20 times over, to teach him the value of sharp-looking shoes; and then, 40 years later, after John Jr. had encountered his dad's lifeless body at 5:30 in the evening of Friday, August 11, he found a whole coffee can of shoe polish in his father's house, as if shiny black shoes still told a man's worth.
Big John had been a man of good health, in both body and spirit. He and John Jr. had visited his wife's resting site earlier this year, and Big John remarked to his son that that place wasn't for him for at least another five or six years. He still worked every day, by and large because he abhorred idleness. In fact, even at Herda's Appliances the mark of his restlessness has been left: There are no seats in which employees can get lazy; they must be up and working at all times, even when there's nothing apparent to do.
"My dad always used to say: ‘You live life to the fullest—every day, every moment,'" says John Jr., his tears irrepressible. "And that's what he did."
On account of that vivaciousness, I—not being God—can say it was probable Big John would've continued to be a friend, father and businessman here in Las Vegas for several more quality years had his life not come to a halt in that sudden and unmentionable moment. And that, to me, is not just a loss worth lamenting, but also an atrocity warranting a degree of rage.