The Runaway Groom
My dad’s escape from the revenge he probably deserved
In 1972, my dad’s groomsmen planned to kidnap him, steal his clothes, and leave him on the Florida Turnpike.
This is the story of his narrow escape.
My father is one of six cousins who participated in what is now a time-honored tradition on his side of the family. Each time one of them got engaged, the others would collaborate to pull various pranks on the wedding day. And because each cousin recruited their new spouse to help implement the next scheme, the gang doubled about once every two years.
Dad first became an accomplice at the tender age of twelve, when the oldest cousin, Walt Jr., got married. The groom’s younger brother Mark enlisted the cousins to find the newlyweds’ getaway car, which was hidden several blocks away from the church. Dad tagged along with his older cousins as they put out a search. Once they found the car, they decorated (totally trashed) it for their beloved cousin and his bride. It was a successful dry run that gave the cousins a taste of what could be done in the future.
Since Connie, the next cousin to get married, had been an accessory to the previous crime, she enlisted her father to hide the getaway car. The cousins couldn’t find their car, but they found the couple’s luggage and took two suitcases. Dad’s uncle, who was not amused, found out about the stolen suitcases a couple of hours before the wedding and called his nephews into his bedroom for an inquisition. Dad told me that his Uncle Walt “told us that we had thirty minutes to return the luggage or he would torture and kill us.”
Their uncle, a wealthy and powerful man, may as well have been the Godfather. They promptly returned the suitcases to their rightful place beside the other luggage. But because Uncle Walt had only said to return the stolen luggage, and they knew that he was unlikely to carry out his threat, they poured rice into every bag before they left. For years, their cousin found rice every time she and her husband used that luggage.
By the time Adam — the next cousin in line — got engaged, the schemes had escalated a tad. The cousins had cut their teeth on the first two weddings, and they decided to get a little more creative.
The first joke was pretty tame. Dad got the groom’s shoes and painted “HELP” (HE on the left shoe, LP on the right) on the bottoms so that, when he knelt at the altar, people would see it and laugh in the middle of the ceremony. Then Dad and his cousin Mark found the getaway car — which happened to be a brand new Cadillac. They had two dead fish with them. They placed under the driver’s seat, in an easy-to-spot location, and they put the other one under the passenger’s seat, making sure to hide it well. After the wedding, the groom found the fish that was under the driver’s seat and threw it away. Then he and his bride drove straight to the Fort Lauderdale Airport and left the Cadillac in long-term parking while they went to the Bahamas for a week.
They didn’t know about the second fish.
It was August.
A year later, it was Cousin Mark’s turn. Since he had supposedly been the mastermind behind most of the other pranks — which had gotten progressively worse with every wedding — his former victims plotted their revenge. By this time, he knew he was a marked man and went to great lengths to escape.
He almost made it.
Mark’s wedding reception was at Uncle Walt’s lakefront house. On the day of the wedding, the guys tried to find Mark’s getaway car so they could either steal it or disable it. It turned out to be about a mile from his father’s house in a neighbor’s garage. It also happened to be a decoy that Mark had used to throw off the scent. After the cousins failed to get into the garage, they headed back to the reception just in time to see Uncle Walt driving off with Mark and his new bride in the back seat of the real getaway car.
Emboldened, Dad and his posse jumped into two cars to hunt them down. Each happened to be a white 1971 Pontiac Firebird. Uncle Walt knew what he was dealing with and drove through some neighbors’ yards to stay ahead of them. The cousins figured out that their uncle was driving them to the local airport. He pulled right up to a private plane that had been waiting for them with the engines running. The gang reached the plane just as the door closed. The cousin who’d had rice dumped in her luggage — who also happened to be Connie, Mark’s sister — threw a bunch of rice at the plane in desperation; it was blown right back on her from the force of the propellers.
The cousins ran into the airport and found out that the flight plan had the newlyweds flying to Daytona Beach, which was only about 25 miles away from their current location. They figured that Mark and his bride were probably going to spend their wedding night at one of the several hotels owned by one Mr. Williams, who was a member of Uncle Walt’s bank board. They immediately headed to Daytona in both Firebirds and broke every speed limit to try to beat that plane.
It turned out that beating the plane wasn’t that difficult. Mark had the pilot fly over Uncle Walt’s house so they could wave at the wedding guests, who were all still partying outside. They made two passes over the house before flying to Daytona, giving his cousins more time to beat them to their hotel.
When the Firebirds reached the intersection in Daytona where the road from the Daytona airport crossed the highway they were on, the newlyweds, who had landed and were now in another car, pulled out in front of them. Mark couldn’t get them off his tail due to heavy traffic, but he eventually was able to run a red light and lose them. Temporarily.
Unfazed, and in faster cars, the cousins decided to go to every one of the five hotels in the chain to try to find out where the bride and groom were staying. Each time they pulled up to one of the hotels, Connie went inside and asked if Mr. and Mrs. Mark Jacobs were staying there. Once they found the right hotel, a pair of them went into the lobby and registered as Mr. and Mrs. Mark Sulivan.
Once they got their hands on the key, they trashed the room so badly that the real Mr. and Mrs. Mark Sullivan had to change rooms upon arrival.
But the cousins weren’t done with them. One of them had obtained a key to the lucky newlyweds’ new apartment and put shrimp in some of the A/C vents so they would be welcomed by a surprise a week or so later. This was probably done by Cousin Adam, the previous groom, as revenge for the fish-in-the-Cadillac joke.
By the way, Dad had told me, Adam had to sell the Caddy shortly after they returned from their honeymoon.
Dad was the last cousin to get married. By the time he got engaged to my mom, he knew that his former associates would come up with an elaborate plan to get him back for all the times he’d plotted against them. For the time being, his life’s goal was to beat them all at their own game.
The race was on.
The first order of business was to do some espionage. He recruited a mole, one of his three made men — the only ones he trusted with his life.
After sniffing around, the mole reported back and the news was not good. Dad’s cousins were planning a heist.
Sometime between the reception and the two-hour journey to the honeymoon suite on Marco Island, they were going to jack the getaway car, steal him, take all of his clothes, and leave him stranded on the Florida Turnpike.
Determined to outfox them, Dad went down to the wedding venue to do some recon, which required him to drive down to Mom’s church in Hollywood, Florida. Once he got down there, he cased out the church and its attached reception hall. He mapped it out and somehow got his hands on a spare set of keys.
His plan was to lock everyone in the room during the reception so that he and his new bride could escape out the back door and get away from his mob of cousins, some of whom were in the wedding party. As an extra precaution, he told Mom that, under no circumstances, could they have the traditional rice-throwing at the end. She wasn’t at all pleased with this unilateral decision, but Dad knew that he’d have seconds to make a run for it, so he held firm.
The wedding day arrived and Dad was on full alert. After a flawless, joke-free ceremony, the wedding party and guests headed to the reception. After the obligatory photos and cake cutting, Mom and Dad left to change out of their wedding clothes — or so people thought.
The bride and groom went right out the back door of the building, locked the doors behind them, and ran toward a waiting getaway car that was driven by one of Dad’s made men — his best friend (who, years later, also became his attorney). Dad’s cousin Mark, who had escaped from the building, was running too, trying to tackle Dad and grab him mid-flight. Suddenly Mom, who was already having trouble keeping up, tripped on a water sprinkler and went sliding across the lawn in her wedding dress. Dad lost a few seconds pulling Mom to her feet, but they somehow beat Mark, jumped into the car, and sped away.
Dad’s best friend was actually driving one of two getaway cars. He drove Dad and his bride to the second car, which Dad had hidden near his new in-laws’ house. It had been tastefully decorated by his sister and her husband. It was probably a nice consolation prize for the bride, who was still not happy about their disappearance act earlier, and was even more pissed about the grass stains on her wedding dress.
I don’t think Dad knew how the people at the reception got out, but by the time they did, he and Mom were already long gone, headed to their secret honeymoon spot on the other side of the state.
He had made it.
Dad did acknowledge that although he’d made some impressive plans to thwart his cousins, it had been by the grace of God that he’d actually been able to escape their grasp.
The mastermind behind the whole operation had been a man named Jack — the husband who still had rice in his luggage.
It was by the grace of God, Dad said, that Jack wasn’t there to carry out the heist that he himself had planned. Dad’s cousin Connie, Jack’s wife, had gone into labor two days before the wedding, so they couldn’t make it down to Hollywood. Thanks to an early arrival of their son Lance, the scheme to take Dad down never unfolded.
Jack, a military man and engineer, was apparently the most determined and sadistic of all of them. He had been planning the ultimate revenge for years, only to be taken out of the equation by a baby.
Dad’s still counting his blessings.
Author’s Note: names have been changed to protect the guilty.