The Dead Sea Bar and Grill

The Dead Sea Bar and Grill is about tough guys trying to hide tender hearts and painful pasts who get involved in an elaborate scheme to con Arab and other oil barons during the height of the 1977 oil embargo. ******************* It is 1977. Oil is in short supply, disco is in full bloom, and the New York Yankees are on the verge of winning the World Series after a long drought. Never mind all that. Butch Badovich is a pint-size cab driver turned pimp who has a stable of women nobody wants. They are too fat, too old or too ugly. So Butch gives credit to shut-ins and other losers who are on fixed incomes so they can get serviced by his third-rate escort business. Butch has his office in a booth at the Dead Sea Bar and Grill in New York City where his girlfriend Rosie keeps the books. The bar is a dive in a seedy neighborhood where con men and an assortment of thieves, robbers, street toughs and oddball characters congregate. Initially, the pimp business thrives. But soon Butch's customers miss payments or thumb their noses at paying. The escort service is soon being crushed by debt. Rosie suggests that Butch hire an aging former heavyweight boxer Frankie Finch as a collector and enforcer. Frankie is living in the dank basement of New Jerusalem Church of God's Wondrous Signs and Marvelous Miracles. He is working for a religious con man named Erasmus Jenkins who sold life insurance before got into the business of saving souls for Jesus. Frankie is the church's janitor. His life is bleak. Just when he is about to pull the trigger and commit suicide, Butch comes into the basement and offers Frankie a job as his collector and enforcer. Frankie goes to work for Butch and learns about Butch's dream: make enough money to get out of New York City's freezing cold, move to Arizona and open a fruit stand in the desert. After getting a tip, Butch bets all his pimp business savings at the racetrack on a horse that is a very long shot. The horse wins; Butch collects tens of thousands of dollars. Instead of putting the racetrack winnings in the bank, Butch gets greedy and decides to give it to a con man and former mob accountant Vincent Primello. Primello is fresh out of prison and needs a lot of cash to set up an elaborate con to rip off Arab and other oil barons out of a million dollars. The mob doesn't want anything to do Primello because they fear of FBI will put wiretaps and tails on Primello. Primello convinces Butch to invest his racetrack winnings on the scam. Primello agrees to let Butch and Frankie help him pull off an elaborate con involving oil during the 1977 oil embargo. They enlist the help of a model Jennifer Dayton along with a street-wise,12-year-old shoeshine boy whose mother is a dope addict. Primello's fine-tuned scam looks like it is about to payoff in a big way. However, two crooked and brutal detectives, Fred McDole and his partner Kiki Ramos, have other plans. After poking around, they smell a con and an easy way to make a lot of money