Why La Cosa Nostra didn't set up shop in San Francisco

Uh, just what exactly is Marlon doing to the poor cat in this picture? Anyway, we have had our share of gangsters in San Francisco history. We even had an Aussie Mob during the Barbary Coast days, The Sydney Ducks, and they used to burn most of The City down on a regular basis.

Yet, even with our extensive history of crime (Dashiell Hammett didn't just pull all those stories out of his hat, you know), the Mafia never really did get a solid hold on the City of Saint Francis.

Retired policeman Kevin J. Mullen said, "Al Capone sent emissaries out to San Francisco in 1931 to case the joint, but decided it was "too tough" a town to crack." That may just be a proud cop talking, but Mullen says it's an easier town to police, given its size and geography, and the transcontinental railroad terminated in Oakland, after all.

That doesn't mean that they passed this area up altogether, because they set up shop across the San Francisco Bay, in Emeryville. Emeryville is now the home of Pixar and freeway traffic...so much freeway traffic.

Hitchcock Versus Barbie?

Basically, what it came down to was years of resentment from all things avian over the that stupid Sing A Song Of Sixpence rhyme (eating them and running them over...literally at every turn, didn't help things along). The blackbirds tried to start an uprising through the poultry industry that was quietly, and swiftly crushed by Colonel Saunders, back in 1957.

Yet all the birds of the world would not stay silent and they waited to strike again, this time in 1963, in the Northern California town of Bodega Bay (a.k.a. "The Bay of Birds"). To commemorate their valiant, but inevitably futile battle, the birds of the world have issued a Barbie in memory of their fallen comrades.