This is quick, and just for fun. Everybody who is intelligent, and is just plain an American have been having a ball watching the Trump scandal Kentucky Derby between the Washington Post and the New York Times. I know that I have. But in a new ARTICLE in the Washington Post today, either the WaPo writers or the Trump people they referred to seem to have missed a little definition based on a popular movie;
“Go to the mattresses,” a line from the film “The Godfather” about turning to tough mercenaries during troubled times, has circulated among Trump’s friends, said two people close to the war room discussions. (italics mine)
The movie “The Godfather” of course took place in New York. I was not born in New York, do not live in New York, and have no desire to reside there, but I grew up in Chicago, and when the families sent a couple of torpedoes to take care of Big Al, they went home in the baggage compartment on the train, so we know a little bit about the Mob.
Obviously slang can vary from place to place, but in Chicago “going to the mattresses” had nothing at all to do with mercenaries. It had to do with gang wars. When two sides got into an argie-bargy, you don’t want to stick to your routine. Therefore, a couple of guys went out to rent empty apartments, and then they brought in a bunch of mattresses for soldiers to sleep on so they weren’t at home while they waited for orders. They were “going to the mattresses” for personal safety. I wanted to make sure that my feeble 60 yo memory wasn’t wrong so I looked it up in the Urban Dictionary;
Going to
war with a rival clan or
family. Used in the
mafia. Its when a mafia family sends someone out to get someone apartments and some mattresses for the soldiers of the family to sleep on while they hide out in saftey, waiting for a call to do something.
Personally, I have found the vast majority of reporting in the WaPo to be spot on in accuracy, so I tend to think that this is a case of them simply quoting the mentioned “Trump friends”, showing once again that Trump and his associates are as brain dead stupid about popular movies and mob terms as they are about everything else.