Bum Farto The Musical

This is a true story about a very, very unlucky man. Or maybe he was lucky… it depends how you look at it. This man is now a legend in his home town of Key West… but frankly, it’s not hard to be a legend when your name is Bum Farto. 

He was born Joseph Farto, the son of Spanish immigrants who opened a restaurant in Key West’s Duval Street. But young Joseph wasn’t interested in the hospitality business; instead, he was a boy who liked to play with fire. The family home was close to the Key West fire station, and Joseph was very drawn to the fire engines and the uniformed men who rode on them. He bummed so many rides on those big shiny vehicles the officers started calling him ‘Bum’ and it stuck. 

By the time the seventies arrived, Bum Farto - who entered the force as a nozzle man - had managed to climb up the ranks to become Chief Bum Farto. He was passionate about fighting fires … and this passion resonated with his devotion to Xango, the orixa of fire in the Santeria religion. Bum was a flamboyant figure about town. He wore red leisure suits, a ton of gold jewelry, and his lime green Ford Galaxy sported a shrine to Xango on the hood. Yeah… he was considered rather eccentric, but there were quite a few odd balls in the Keys around that time. For example, Hunter S. Thompson staged an indoor fireworks exhibition in his motel room. The place had become known for the writers and artists who gravitated there : Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and others. 

Bum married Esther - a woman with Cuban family connections. Esther was proud of her husband’s legitimate achievements as Fire Chief, but others were more impressed by his firehouse-based drug ring plus the fact that he managed to run a well-attended gaming house at the station - dominos downstairs and poker upstairs. 

As still happens to this day, drugs came in through the US border easily from South America, by boat, light aircraft, and in the form of ‘Square Grouper’ … packages of drugs that were dumped overboard when smugglers were spotted by the coastguard. They’d be found at sea or on the shore by fishermen and locals who sold the goods openly on the docks and in the streets. You’d see signs saying: ‘Smoke Your Tuna Here!!’ Well, it was the seventies!

But when President Reagan launched the ‘War  on Drugs’ things got a little tricky for Bum and others down in Key West. And when Florida’s Governor heard that not only were drugs being openly sold on the streets of Key West but that City Officials were involved, he decided he had to take action. He summoned some drug enforcement agents and tasked them with setting up a sting to catch Chief Farto in the act of selling cocaine. It’s not hard to figure out that the Governor thought Bum was a far softer target than the Miami drug lords who were making six figures every week. But this wasn’t as easy as he thought. The agents enlisted help from a well-known heroine addicted and CIA snitch who agreed to introduce the head agent to Bum as his cousin. Knowing Bum’s obsession with gold jewelry, the agents’ plan was to lure him into the trap by dangling an exceptionally ornate ring. 

As predicted, Bum was crazy to get the ring and he immediately started calling around to try to get the required amount of cocaine. A number of other city officials helped him amass a large cache of blow, and after several mishaps - and the grizzly murder of their informant-  the agents managed to catch Bum in the act of making the exchange. 

Next day the local newspaper carried the headline:’Snow in the Firehouse!’ Bum Farto sat before the judge smoking a large cigar, and was found guilty in less than 30 minutes… and here’s where the ‘legend’ begins: Bum mysteriously acquired a large amount of cash, rented a car (his Ford Galaxy had been impounded) and told his wife he was driving to Miami on a quick trip to see a man in Little Havana who could fix all his problems … but he was never seen again! 

The mystery of ‘Where is Bum Farto?’ remains…