Fifteen Tales from a Dead Man’s Chest

The saga of the last great pirate clan of the 20^th century
by J. Russell Pelt

In the mid-1930s, the rescue of his adopted son, and murder of his kidnappers, by a mysterious stranger first led Baltimore police detective Richard Tracy to investigate rumors among the underworld of a faceless man known as The Blank.  At first, it appeared that the Blank aspired to take upon the role of nocturnal, urban vigilante much like The Shadow in New York, but Tracy soon found that his true intentions were far less altruistic.  The Blank’s victims had all been members of a gang which included Frank Redrüm, who’d supposedly died while escaping from prison ten years before.  By this time, the only surviving member the police could find was a heavily bearded, jowly sea captain named “Stud” Bronzen.

Ultimately, the Blank was captured by Detective Pat Patton while he’d been trying to murder Tracy with a decompression chamber aboard Bronzen’s salvage vessel.  He was subsequently unmasked and revealed as Redrüm, his face heavily scarred by a prison guard’s gun blast, which caused his fellow criminals to abandon him years ago¹.  However, this was not before evidence was found aboard Bronzen’s ship which indicated he was using the boat for smuggling.  Jumping over the side during the confusion caused by Redrüm, Bronzen contacted people who’d shown interest in his work and had extended to him opportunities on the West Coast.  Thus, “Stud” Bronzen found himself in California, smuggling in slave laborers from China for the Spider Ring².  However, the Justice Department would enlist Richard Tracy and his brother Gordon in hunting this cartel, and so Bronzen would have a second, fatal encounter with Tracy a few months later.

Before that happened, however, Tracy spent some time searching for Bronzen back on the East Coast, and his inquiries led him to an orphanage.  There, he found newborn twin boys which were apparently Bronzen’s children by a prostitute he’d frequented.  Fearing that they would grow up parentless and become criminals too, Tracy took time making certain they would be adopted as soon as possible.  As such, they were quickly split up, one of the twins adopted by a childless couple who later moved out to the Hawaiian Islands, while the remaining boy was adopted by Police Chief Brandon’s son and his wife.  Presumably, neither of the twins learned that they were adopted, and thus never sought out nor knew of the other’s existence.

The twins inherited platinum blonde hair from their mother, and as a result were often assumed to be much older than they actually were as adults.  Due to this and his rather serious manner, the baby adopted by the Brandons quickly rose through the ranks when he joined the police force in Arizona, and by the early Sixties was already a sheriff³.  The other brother grew up to be Jonas Grumby, and living out by the ocean he unintentionally followed in his father’s footsteps as a man of the sea, although he was far more the archetypal rough-and-tough but jolly sea captain-type due to his upbringing by the Grumbys.  Lying about his age, he served in the Navy during the Korean War.  What rank he attained before quitting the service is unknown, but by the early Sixties he’d opened his own chartered boat service, and was affectionately known to friends, employees, and customers alike as “The Skipper”⁴.

The twins had inherited more than just hair coloring from their biological parents – they also inherited from their father a rather short temper and a habit of using physical intimidation to get their way.  Thankfully, the boys were both reared to make these tendencies less pronounced, or at least to channel them in a more socially accepted manner.  The Grumbys raised Jonas so that he was basically a good-hearted softie, and thus for all his bluster was disinclined to actually resort to force even more so than his brother, whose attributes were directed by the Brandons to make him tough, even harsh at times, but fair.

Their birth mother, incidentally, was a woman named “Queenie” Mahoney, a former Vaudevillian who was the regular moll of a con man, “Shakey” Trembly⁵, and already had a beautiful daughter by him.  (All three of them, incidentally, would go on to have ultimately fatal run-ins with Richard Tracy by the late-1940s.)  This pregnancy occurred while Shakey was serving a short jail term, during which Queenie had a fling with one of Shakey’s “business associates” who helped in smuggling contraband items.  The boys were born shortly before Shakey’s release from jail, and Queenie put them up for adoption to keep her affair a secret.  The man she had an affair with, however, was not “Stud” Bronzen.

Tracy’s inquiries into “Stud” Bronzen had been crossed up with a man who was sometimes mistaken for Bronzen, and was the real father of the twins.  (Ironically, there’s no evidence to suggest “Stud” ever had any children of his own.)  This man, Shakey’s associate, was another brutish sea dog named William Blutarsky, whom Bronzen passingly resembled before he started shaving his head.  Blutarsky was better known as “Barnacle Bill”, and was the son of a gangster, Boris Blutarsky, alias Boris Sirob.  Bill sometimes used his father’s false surname as his own, an alias which mutated further into “Bill Sibob” due to a misprint in a ship’s log at some point.  As this was phonetically similar to “Beelzebub”, a rumor was born that Barnacle Bill was the son of Satan.  However, upon learning his real surname, Horatio Hunkel, a sailor man who was a long-standing enemy of Barnacle Bill, took to calling him “Bluto” instead, a name which stuck to Bill’s consternation⁶.

The precise details of the two sailors’ first meeting and the origin of their enmity are unknown – a musical purports that Hunkel, or “Popeye” as he was better known, had deposed Bluto as the tyrannical mayor of an impoverished island village named Sweet Haven⁷.  Still, the truth may never be known, as the stories publicized by E.C. Segar, Fleischer Studios, and others are too wildly exaggerated to discern details of actual events from them.  However, it is true that central to many of their encounters was Olivia Oyl, a former would-be actress whom carried a mutual on-again/off-again relationship with Hunkel for many years.  The basis of Barnacle Bill’s attempts to court her away was, frankly, just a case of mistaken identity – Bill had at one point learned that his old enemy was the unlikely object of affection by a millionaire’s daughter, which he at first assumed was Olivia.  Actually, the debutante he’d heard of was the beautiful June van Ripple, who was infatuated with Popeye but eventually realized that the blue-collar buccaneer would never settle down, nor was he socially connected enough for her father’s approval.  Bill mistook Olivia for the rich daughter as at the time she’d been enjoying the fruits of one of her brother Castor’s occasional windfalls.  Naturally, Bill realized his mistake after awhile, but ever after continued his attempts to steal away Olivia through fair means or foul, as his vengeance against Popeye was paramount; the possibility of sharing in any more of the Oyl family’s boons was just gravy.  Either way, Bill’s escapades regarding Olivia Oyl have been relentlessly mined for material ever since.

Incidentally, due to a passing resemblance, Barnacle Bill was at times confused with yet another man, a land-dwelling lout named Brutus (a child of Italian immigrants, supposedly), and vice versa.  Brutus also happened to be another enemy of Popeye, which added to the confusion between him and Barnacle Bill⁸.  Successors to Segar have suggested that the two may be related, even twin brothers, which is perhaps a claim inspired by discovering the story of Bill’s twin sons, but more likely an inept attempt to explain the two figures’ similarity⁹.  That they may both be children of Boris Blutarsky is plausible enough, but nothing concrete has appeared to attest.  It’s definite that Boris had at least two more sons that we know of, but more on them later.

To go purely by the cartoon accounts of Horatio Hunkel and his friends, one would assume Barnacle Bill was nothing more than an overgrown neighborhood bully, throwing his weight around while waiting for opportunities to humiliate Popeye or steal Olive to come his way.  These are all villainous intentions surely, but nothing to get him in too deep with the law.  In reality, Bill could easily be as ruthless as his father, who hoped that his son would eventually show the aptitude to take over his crime syndicate for him.  Unfortunately, Bill proved out of his league shortly after taking over one of his father’s earliest and most lucrative ventures...

Little is known about the early life of Boris Blutarsky, alias Boris Sirob.  It is said he was the illegitimate son of a Russian Archduke who’d gone on an extended hunting vacation through America’s wilderness sometime after the end of the Civil War, although most of his knowledge of inner America he derived from early adventure story magazines (i.e., dime novels) and the like.  The Archduke’s holiday came to an abrupt end due to the interference of the Maverick brothers – first by one posing as a tribal elder who wished to die in battle and so, in exchange to a hefty “contribution” to his tribe, allowed himself to be hunted by the Archduke (whose rifle had been secretly loaded with a blank cartridge by Maverick’s partner Joseph, a Hekawi), and then by another who posed as an Indian Affairs agent who wished to arrest the Archduke for the old man’s “murder”, but readily accepted a hefty bribe¹⁰.  After this apparent near-miss, the Archduke fled back to Russia, leaving behind a few of his retinue in his haste, including a maid whom he’d impregnated.  This child was Boris Blutarsky.

Further information on Boris’s forebears is remote – it is not even certain if Blutarsky is his mother’s surname or if he was named after his father, and so his genealogy is a mystery.  During his life, which was extremely long, he occasionally displayed unusual strength and resilience, which many of his children and grandchildren inherited.  It’s possibly that he may be descended from people affected by a meteor strike like the Wold Newton families, although the Star Inn event of 1666 would be more characteristic.

The first definite sighting of Boris was in the Klondike sometime after the Gold Rush of 1897 had started.  By this time he was already operating under different aliases as circumstances demanded, which could mean anything from him being considered an illegal alien, to already having run afoul of the law.  He worked as a prospector named Big Jim McKay, and actually did find a rich gold vein.  His future was secure until he sought shelter in a log cabin, and thus encountered both a quirky lone gold prospector, and a feared trapper named Black Larsen¹¹.  Ultimately, Boris lost the gold vein forever when Larsen tried to kill him by hitting him with a shovel, which only gave him a touch of amnesia, causing him to forget the location of his claim¹².  This experience surely embittered him, driving him further onto a life of crime, and is possibly the reason Boris was obsessed with accumulating wealth in the form of treasure – gold, jewelry, and other material possessions – and not just money.

Boris’s big break finally occurred in 1925 while operating as a rum runner across the Atlantic Ocean.  By then he was calling himself Jacob Black Bruze, the middle name a slight at Larsen while the surname was based on the pronunciation of “Brois”, an early attempt to create an alias by rearranging the letters of his name.  During a run, his schooner was shot up by the Coast Guard and, attempting to flee to Africa, was caught up in a storm.  Drifting, Bruze was carried to the Sargasso Sea, the legendary miles-long seaweed bed which entangled and trapped ships caught by the currents.  There, he discovered a moderate republic which had evolved from the survivors and descendents of those trapped in the Sargasso.  He also found a sizeable criminal element...

With the Sargasso Sea, Bruze quickly saw a brilliant opportunity for piracy unequal in modern times.  The weed bed, he reasoned, was an excellent place to strand ships and pillage them at ease, leaving neither evidence nor witnesses.  In two years, Bruze had organized the rogue Sargasso castaways into a small army which waged war against the republic, finally forcing them out of power.  Somehow developing an automatic cutting system around the hull of a ship to cut away entangling seaweed as it moved, Bruze freed himself from the Sargasso, reconnected with his gang in America, and returned with equipment, including seaplanes fitted with razors along their hulls, so he and his men could leave and return at their leisure.  Bruze and his men tested their new operation on a clipper named the Sea Sylph, and was an unqualified success.

Bruze quickly developed a methodology for trapping wealthy cargo and passenger ships in the Sargasso Sea – destroying radio equipment and compasses, sabotaging the engines, threatening the captain and crew, etc.  Over the next six years, Bruze successfully stranded and looted half a dozen ships, decorating a belt with patches of each ship’s insignia as a trophy.  From each ship, Bruze brought at least half of the loot back to civilization, where he established a new identity as Boris Sirob, a notorious crime-lord whose reputation rivaled the highest Mafioso.  The rest stayed in the Sargasso, most of it stored aboard a derelict battleship, where it was guarded by his rebel army.  Meanwhile, the survivors of the republic and of the ships trapped by Bruze had organized themselves into a resistance which tried to escape the Sargasso Sea and depose Bruze over the next few years¹³.

By 1933, Boris had long ago built up his criminal empire, but wanted to keep the Sargasso operation afloat to have a secondary source of capital, as well as to feed his need for treasure.  As William resembled himself during his prime, Boris pried his son away from the New England area and had him take over the role of Jacob Black Bruze.  This was his test as a worthy successor, but a tendency to act first and think later quickly put Barnacle Bill in over his head controlling this vast operation.  Attempting to impress his father, Bill masterminded a trap which killed over half of the resistance, including the former republic’s president.  In the process, however, he lost the battleship with his father’s hoard to Kina la Forge, the president’s daughter, who’d organized the female castaways into an Amazon-like group.  To make up for this, Bill then targeted a particularly wealthy ocean liner, the Cameronic, which he learned had been laden with a fortune in diamonds and gold bullion while in Egypt.

Boris was informed of this new target for the Sargasso Sea, but also learned that the diamonds had been secured by Dr. James Clarke Wildman, Jr. and his Amazing Five during a prior adventure in the Middle East.  Fearing that William would be out his depth with an experienced adventurer like “Doc Savage”, Boris had him contract Pasha Bey, leader of a local assassins’ guild, to kill one of the Five.  The plan was for Wildman and the rest to stay in Alexandria, searching for the murderer, while William dealt with the Cameronic and the diamonds on board¹⁴.  This plot failed and, although Bill’s men silenced Pasha, Doc and company gained possession of the trophy belt, which forewarned them of trouble for the Cameronic all the same.  Taking command of the operation, Barnacle Bill went through the standard motions for stranding the liner in the Sargasso, but found himself and his men driven off by Doc once they’d arrived.

He persisted in treating the situation as a by-the-numbers stranding and looting, and so things went from bad to worse securing the Cameronic.  Doc allied with Kina, and Bruze lost face with his men when he was unable to beat Doc in single combat¹⁵.  Finally, he was able to take the Cameronic’s passengers hostages, along with the Amazing Five.  Desperate to regain lost ground, Bruze also had the area around the battleship drenched with gasoline from a derelict oil tanker, planning to ignite it and burn all aboard, only to find that Kina’s forces had deserted it.  He and his men then abandoned the gasoline scheme to loot the ship, during which he left with some of the treasure to take back to a barge they’d been using as headquarters.  It was only by this serendipity that Barnacle Bill was able to escape the Sargasso Sea with his life...

While he was away, Wildman returned to the battleship, having overseen Kina and the women’s part in taking over a freighter where Bruze kept the hostages and his seaplanes.  Upon seeing him, one of Bruze’s men tried to shoot him, unmindful of igniting the gas fumes, only to be struck by “Big Sheik”, an Alexandrian who was one of Bruze’s lieutenants.  Unfortunately, the gun went off anyway, and the resultant flames either burned to death those on deck or consumed the oxygen, suffocating the rest on board.  As dark as it was, Doc had mistaken Big Sheik, who was also a big, rotund man, for Bruze and so assumed that he was among the dead.  With his men either dead or captured, Barnacle Bill hid out among the wrecked ships of the Sargasso until Doc could arrange a large-scale rescue by the Navy.  Cutting his hair and donning new clothes, he was then able to sneak off of the Sargasso Sea unsuspected.

Once back in America, he went into hiding lest he suffer his father’s wrath.  As such, there are few reliable reports on Barnacle Bill during this time, although descriptions of an early professional wrestler named “Earthquake” McGoon match him, and it would be the sort of job he’d take to make ends meet¹⁶.  Before too long, he cautiously wandered back up the coast and went back into smuggling and the like, hence his business with Shakey, as well as his children.  There’s plenty of Popeye fiction which shows him serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, as well as setting up shop on a monster-populated island as a self-proclaimed modern Sindbad¹⁷.  As always, the truth behind these chronicles of the sailor man are questionable, although Barnacle Bill was the type to on occasion come out of hiding to make another strike against his old rival despite the danger to himself.

Despite all his efforts to avoid the law during this time, Barnacle Bill nevertheless had a close run in with one of the world’s greatest detectives, during which he nearly died.  When an insurance company put out a large bounty for a white whale which had been sinking ships, Bill quickly secured a whaling vessel and organized a gang, which shanghaied men down by the waterfront to fill out the crew.  However, one of the men they’d taken was actually The Batman in disguise, who not only tried to upseat Bill’s command, but also saved crewmen from encounters with whales.  A pitiless captain, Bill eventually drove his own crewmen to mutiny, abandoning him in a rowboat when their ship came under attack by the white whale, which battered the hull of the ship.  Joining Bill, Batman learned along with him that the whale was actually a modified submarine commanded by Radney, the secretary for the insurance company’s board of executives.  Fortuitously, a Coast Guard cutter which had also been hunting the whale then attacked with depth charges, rupturing the hull and causing the submarine to flood.  Donning a diving outfit, Radney intended to stand by while Bill and the Batman drowned, only to engage in a brief shoot-out with Bill.  With both villains apparently dead, Batman then used the torpedo tubes to escape to the surface, where the cutter rescued him¹⁸.  In reality, Bill was injured but alive, his body mass having taken Radney’s bullets without hitting vital organs, although these injuries plus the cold water caused him to briefly go into shock.  Awakening minutes later, Bill quickly searched the sinking submarine and found a mini-sub which Radney had intended to escape in.  Puzzling out the controls, he was able to ride the mini-sub back to land, assured that the Batman believed him dead.

Recuperating from his wounds, Barnacle Bill apparently spent the remainder of the war years leading a relatively quiet existence as a lowlife sea captain.  As such, he at one point assumed the alias of Barton Bryce, and it was as Bryce that his luck finally ran out.  Shortly after the end of the war, in a publicity stunt to show that international waters were safe again from U-boats and the like, radio magnate Sterling Morris bought and restored an old-fashioned clipper which he intended to have sail down the coast of South America and around Cape Horn.  Unfortunately, seeking a real-life “down-easter”¹⁹ to captain the ship, he hires Barton Bryce, promising him a large bonus if he could get the boat around the Horn on schedule.  As a result, Bryce on numerous occasions endangered the crew by going through stormy weather and pushing the ship’s structural limitations to keep ahead of schedule.  Fortunately, Morris’ star radio reporter Billy Batson also came along to document the excursion, and as both Billy and Captain Marvel kept the clipper safe despite Bryce’s best efforts.

Finally, the clipper had gotten around the Horn, at which point Bryce, not satisfied with his undeserved bonus, threatened Morris with an additional $10,000 fine for “mutinous behavior”.  Already suspicious of Bryce’s credentials, Billy then searched the captain’s quarters and found evidence that Bryce was in reality the infamous Sargasso Ogre, Jacob Black Bruze.  Bryce found him in the midst of this and knocked him out, then had the teenager keel-hauled in hopes that he’d drown.  Fortunately, the shock of hitting the cold water awoke Billy, and he transformed into the Captain before he could go underwater.  He then arrested Bryce before commandeering the clipper for the rest of the voyage²⁰.  Left out to dry by his father, and identified as “Bruze” by Dr. Wildman and several of the Sargasso Sea refugees, William “Barnacle Bill” Blutarsky spent the remainder of his life in prison for multiple charges of piracy, murder, kidnapping, smuggling, and impersonating a naval officer.

Sometime before this occurred, however, Barnacle Bill had produced yet another son (whose mother is unknown) whom he foisted upon cousins in Illinois to raise.  These cousins were descended from relatives whom Boris had helped immigrate to America during the Great War, as Russia again became embroiled in revolution.  (It is unclear if these were maternal or paternal relatives, nor is it known if this was an uncharacteristic display of family loyalty by Boris, or merely an exchange of services in return for payment.)  He did so while using his Bruze alias and so they adopted this as their surname in America, although they later changed it to “Bluze” as they became aware of Boris’s criminal career.  As an adult, John Blutarsky was a drunk and a skirt-chaser, but basically an okay guy just looking for a good time.  He would go on to attend college (from which he and the rest of his fraternity barely evaded flunking out) and ultimately became a United States Senator in the late 1970s.  Apparently, he had some knowledge of his father and his ways, as he assumed “Bluto” as his fraternity name, and donned a pirate’s regalia during a massive prank, during which the Deltas busted up a town parade in revenge against the college dean and a rival frat house²¹.

As for William’s father, Boris had continued his criminal empire without the Sargasso operation, although the loss of his hidden hoard and the foolishness of his son would gnaw at him for years.  This may have been the reason that he pursued the issue with such gusto when he learned of a fortune, purportedly worth billions, in gems acquired by industrialist Oliver Warbucks.  Along with some close lieutenants, Boris personally oversaw attempts to acquire the gems, first by attempting to kidnap Warbucks’ adopted daughter Annie, and later pursuing them when Warbucks went into hiding at a secluded mansion in South America.

It was while in South America, near the Amazon River, that Annie became acquainted with the mysterious Mr. Am, an old mentor of Warbucks who claimed to have existed since the beginning of time.  In reality, Mr. Am was the physical form assumed by a member of the Douwd, a powerful non-corporeal alien race, who’d long ago taken an interest in the evolution and spiritual enlightenment of humanity²².  According to the official account, “Daddy” Warbucks and his bodyguard The Asp were both killed during a raid on his mansion by mercenaries, who were later killed by bombs Boris Sirob had planted on their aircraft just so he wouldn’t have to pay them.  Soon afterwards, Mr. Am resurrected Warbucks and the Asp, and then defeated Boris and his lieutenants by tempting them with a box supposedly filled with more treasure.  The box instead carried “prehistoric gas” which caused their minds to devolve into apes, after which they were allowed to escape into the jungle to live out their lives as ape-men²³.

The truth is a little different – Warbucks and the Asp had been severely wounded and lapsed into comas, but Mr. Am was able to revive them, inducing massive tissue regeneration and firing synaptic activity by infusing them with a small amount of his own life force²⁴.  He then secretly placed among Warbucks’ gems a particularly ornate chest, holding a container of mind-altering gas, which was taken aboard a barge Boris was using to transport his men and the treasure along the Amazon.  Mr. Am and Annie watched from hiding as the barge sailed away, while on board Boris’s lieutenants opened the chest, releasing the gas.  It quickly spread throughout the boat, with only Boris and a few of his men able to jump off and swim to the other side of the river before it could reach them.  Those affected apparently suffered extreme psychotic episodes, making them act like wild apes to Annie’s eyes, before falling unconscious.  Much like the brain surgery performed at Dr. Wildman’s “crime college”, the gas – its main ingredient the nectar of a rare species of lotus – had the effect of wiping away the memories of Boris’s minions, who were gathered up and eventually reeducated as useful citizens by Mr. Am.

Having barely survived his schemes against Warbucks, Boris returned to America only to find himself in disgrace and short of funds.  In order to resume power in gangland, he reinvented himself as a Brooklyn native known as Boss Moxie, a small but powerful mob boss who virtually ruled the down-and-out Suicide Slum area of Metropolis.  Nevertheless, Moxie became most famous in retellings of the adventures of a mystery-man and a small boys’ club²⁵.  Desiring to regain the wealth and power he’d formerly wielded, Moxie was more than willing to on occasion work with spies and fifth columnists during World War II, particularly the mysterious Agent Axis.

Abandoned by his czarist-era father, Boss Moxie felt no particular loyalty to either America or Russia, and cared nothing for the dangers posed to them by the Nazis.  However, upon learning the truth, his mistress felt differently.  The moll, a girl whose last name was Turpin, fled into the night, taking her and Boris’s son with her.  She raised the boy in secret, renaming him Daniel Turpin, although it’s quite possible that he and his mother had some contact with the Newsboys and their mentor, Officer Jim Harper, as Dan joined the NYPD as an adult²⁶.  Tough but focused, Turpin quickly earned the nickname of “Terrible”, wielding the ubiquitous temper of his lineage in handling the toughest of the criminal element, quickly rising to the office of Inspector.  After an encounter where he single-handedly defeated a superhumanl enforcer working for the Inter-gang crime cartel, Turpin was invited to join the Special Crimes Unit, a police task force built to handle paranormal crime²⁷.

The S.C.U. occasionally brought Turpin into conflict with the members of Inter-gang, and as such he unknowingly came into conflict with his half-brother.  Years after Dan’s mother had fled, another of Boss Moxie’s mistresses also bore him a son.  The woman was Sigrid Mannheim, a post-war refugee from Germany who’d gotten Moxie in touch with the Odessa, which turned him a hefty profit by smuggling war criminals out of Europe²⁸.  Worried that this woman would overhear something she shouldn’t and run off with his son too, Moxie insisted that the boy be raised separately from him, claiming that he could not formally claim the child as his own as he had many enemies.  Disbelieving his reasons but wisely choosing not to argue, Sigrid took the boy and gave him the name Bruno Locksley Mannheim²⁹.

Bruno grew up in the tenements of Suicide Slum, but his father showed great interest in him, making certain he finally had a worthy heir.  As a result, Bruno grew up an odd dichotomy – highly intelligent and rather cultured, but also possessed of his father’s temper and aggressive manner.  In many ways, he was the epitome of the garrulousness that typified his family, which was reflected in his appearance:

“Quite possibly there wasn’t an uglier man on God’s earth.  His head was huge and swarthy, and though the body it was perched on seemed as massive and thick as a grizzly’s, the head still appeared oversize.  A lantern jaw, anchored by popping muscles, rose toward undulant earlobes.  Centered between them were dry fleshy lips white against the dark skin; a particularly unpleasant combination.  Above stuck out a thick, pitted nose.  Massive, beetling brows jutted far over a pair of sunken eyes...  The impression the man gave was of enormous brute strength and self-assurance in both mind and body.”³⁰

It was in the mid-Seventies that Bruno was sent on a back-packing trip through Italy, done both as a present for graduating college and as an excuse to get him out of the country while Boss Moxie dealt with both police investigations and the rise of the new Inter-gang syndicate.  Thus, he was obliged to travel using the alias Locke Bullard, inspired by his middle name and an old radio character his father liked, and it was under this name that he became chummy with a trio of other American college grads in Florence.  Unfortunately, a chance meeting with a local nobleman, Count Fosco, and one of the students’ declarations of his opinions on the nature of God and the afterlife resulted in him partaking in a ritual at Count Fosco’s castle to raise the Devil and sell their souls for wealth and power.  Actually, it was all a frighteningly realistic practical joke played by the Count, but none of them knew otherwise³¹.  By an extreme coincidence, all those who fulfilled the “ritual” did go on to wealth and power, although with “Bullard’s” background it was already a given³².  This event was a traumatic one which slept in the back of Bruno’s mind for years to come and, while he was not overtly superstitious, this plus encounters with Superman and other super-heroes over the next several years maintained in Bruno a respect and fear of the paranormal.

Returning to America, Mannheim assumed control of his father’s organization, Boris “Boss Moxie” Blutarsky having finally succumbed to pressure by Inter-gang as well as advanced aging.  With a combination of guile and brute force, Bruno Mannheim was able to regain lost ground and brokered a deal with Inter-gang, merging with the larger organization.  Through his manner and his methods, Mannheim became a strong associate within Inter-gang, becoming more-or-less the “face” of the cartel.  His operations also gained enough attention that many police officials, including Dan Turpin, assumed that he had become the leader of Inter-gang.

During the late Eighties, a series of misfortunes struck Inter-gang, particularly a fiasco surrounding Inter-gang’s funding of the Happyland amusement park, which could be traced back to Mannheim by his ill-advised recruitment of the modern day Toyman, Sidney Schott³³.  Sensing it was time to leave organized crime behind, Mannheim put out feelers for legitimate businesses he could move into without difficulty, and so concentrated on a series of corporations who’d experienced a severe loss of revenue and were ripe for takeover.  As a result, Mannheim came across Drax Industries, a once-leading aerospace company which had been teetering on bankruptcy ever since its former CEO had misappropriated hundreds of millions of dollars worth in equipment, and easily absorbed it after formalizing his own company³⁴.  Unfortunately, due to his publicized activities with Inter-gang, Mannheim resumed his identity of Locke Bullard, an act which brought back old ghosts.  But for that, Mannheim was back on track, as Bullard Aerospace Industries steadily became a profitable company, building and testing missile designs for the military, as well as subcontracting for the space shuttle program.

Going into this industry, Bullard was quickly flustered by how easily NASA controlled all matters pertaining to space flight in America.  Wanting to make more profit, Bullard became involved in the Space Frontier Foundation, a union of private companies supporting legislation to allow commercial pursuits in outer space.  So as not to endanger government contracts he already held, Bullard did not formally join the organization himself, but instead used as a proxy Colonel Antoine “Tex” O’Hara, a bombastic Texan millionaire he’d met through business acquaintance Charles M. Burns.  Because of a hoax perpetrated by the National Reconnaissance Office³⁵, the S.F.F.’s efforts to get a space privatization bill passed by Congress failed, although by then Bullard had found new avenues through black market research for China.

By the end of the century, Bullard was secretly doing work for Red China – like his father, committing treason to get ahead – and received a billion-dollar deal to design a radar-proof missile that would defy America’s anti-missile defense shield.  To make a missile that was successfully resilient to radar, B.A.I.’s scientists concluded that they had to analyze and duplicate the unique violin varnish created by Antonio Stradivari.  In seeking to find and acquire a Stradivarius that wouldn’t be missed, Bullard found himself in possession of the Stormcloud, a legendary Strad which had been stolen and supposedly destroyed by a mad violinist a century ago.  By an extreme coincidence, this violin had originally belonged to the Fosco family, and been hunted for years by the Count, only for Bullard to purchase it just as Fosco had finally found it.  Learning of Bullard’s intentions to destroy it and create a missile system for the Chinese with it, Fosco decided to take advantage of his run-in with Bullard and his friends, the anniversary of which was fast approaching, to steal back the Stormcloud from him.

Using a combination of psychological warfare, illusion, and a concentrated microwave transmitter he’d designed, essentially a primitive heat ray, Count Fosco murdered the surviving members of Bullard’s quartet, making it appear as if the Devil had collected their souls.  These mysterious deaths were investigated by F.B.I. agent Aloysius Pendergast and police officer Vincent d’Agosta, who quickly ran afoul of Bullard and were nearly killed several times.  Returning to Italy, Fosco claimed that he’d been able to wiggle out of his contract by sacrificing irreplaceable artwork in another satanic ritual, tricking Bullard into removing the Stormcloud from his high-security facility in Florence, at which point Fosco stole the Stradivarius and murdered Bullard as well.  The Count’s victory was short-lived, as he soon after apparently murdered Pendergast, prompting d’Agosta to assassinate Fosco with his own heat ray.

With the murder of Bruno Mannheim, the surviving members of Boris Blutarsky’s legacy are few and far between.  Barnacle Bill’s twin sons have both died³⁶, although Dan Turpin and John Blutarsky are still alive, and retired from the police department and the U.S. Senate respectively.  Turpin, as a matter of fact, has a daughter, and is spending his retirement enjoying the company of her and her children³⁷.

In recent years, however, it was discovered that there may still be more descendants of Boris Blutarsky running around – for instance, Silent Bob, a soft-spoken pot dealer in New Jersey, has the actual name of Robert Blutarsky³⁸.  A tendency towards facial hair, as well as being overweight but stronger than one would think, are physical hallmarks of the Blutarskys which Silent Bob shares, but his even-temperedness and philosophical bent suggests that he takes after his mother’s side of the family more so.  Unfortunately, thanks to his “hetero life-mate” – an impulsive, lowbrow stoner named Jay – he nevertheless frequently veers from the straight and narrow all the same.  What this portends for the future of the Blutarskys, and their place in the world, is too early to say.