What “86” Actually Means, According to Etymologists and Mob Bosses

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There’s a scene in Stanley Tucci’s 1996 directorial debut, Big Night, that explains exactly where America is at right now.

Two Italian immigrant brothers, Primo and Secondo, run a failing restaurant on the Jersey Shore. One night, a woman orders a plate of Primo’s seafood risotto — a dish he has labored over all afternoon, building stock from the bones of scallops and shrimp until it tastes like the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The woman asks for a side of spaghetti and meatballs.

Spaghetti and meatballs. As a side. To risotto.

Risotto is not pasta. Risotto is rice. Putting spaghetti next to it is a hate crime against carbohydrates. If you’re not feeling the heartburn, you probably also think “gabagool” is a salad green.

Primo, the older brother, hears the order and goes very still. He goes back to the kitchen. Calmly. Then he detonates.

“She is a philistine,” he hisses. “They are both starch!” His brother, Secondo, has to physically restrain him.

Every Italian knows what will happen next. Primo understands, with the clarity of a man holding a wooden spoon like a weapon, that he must defend his honor, his ancestors’ honor, and the honor of the entire Apennine peninsula. He is the last line of defense for the tired wrists of every Italian grandmother who ever stirred a risotto for forty-five minutes over low heat while her sauce reduced on the back burner. Primo would close the restaurant and apprentice at an Olive Garden before he served that woman her starch-on-starch.

America is having a Primo moment this week.

Here is where we are in the plot curve. A federal grand jury in North Carolina recently indicted James Comey for arranging seashells on a beach in the configuration “86 47” and posting the result to Instagram with the caption “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

This is the entire alleged crime. A man went for a walk. He saw shells. He arranged them. He posted them. He is now facing federal charges for threatening the life of the President.

And it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Comey opened the FBI’s Russia investigation, refused to pledge loyalty to Trump at a private White House dinner, and then wrote a bestseller calling the Trump White House a mafia family. Pure coincidence.

The country has, predictably, divided along the only two axes it knows how to divide along.

The left insists that “86” is restaurant slang meaning “to throw something out,” and that Comey’s seashell arrangement was simply a tasteful coastal call for democratic self-correction via the constitutionally enshrined mechanisms of elections, impeachment, and the 25th Amendment. Surely, anyone reading homicide into a man’s beach photography needs a long lie-down and possibly a hobby.

The right has determined that Comey’s seashells are a coded dog whistle to violent agitators bent on assassinating the president and overthrowing the government. You know…kinda like how the January 6th rioters quietly coordinated their assault on the Capitol via meticulously arranged seashell installations along the Eastern Seaboard.

For the record, the etymology is not actually in dispute. “86” first appears in print in May 1933, in Walter Winchell’s syndicated “On Broadway” column, where a Hollywood soda jerk shared a glossary of fountain code: 13 meant the boss was around, 81 was a glass of water, and “eighty-six means all out of it.” Three years later, Columbia University linguist Harold Bentley confirmed the same etymology in an article titled — and this is real — “Linguistic Concoctions of the Soda Jerker.”

The leading linguistic theory, endorsed by the folks at Merriam-Webster, is that 86 is rhyming slang for nix. That’s it. That’s the etymology. A teenager in a paper hat couldn’t make a malted because they ran out of malt.

I was not going to wade into any of this. Really, I wasn’t. I was going to leave it to the linguists, weep for humanity, and go drink something brown.

And then the President of the United States, at midnight on Truth Social, settled the debate himself:

“‘86’ is a mob term for ‘kill him.’ They say 86 him! 86 47 means ‘kill President Trump.’ James Comey, who is a Dirty Cop, one of the worst, knows this full well! EIGHT MILES OUT, SIX FEET DOWN!”

What in the Gambino sundown hour is he talking about? “Eight miles out, six feet down” is not a mob saying. “Eight miles out, six feet down” is what happens when a man learns about organized crime from a deep-cable rerun of Donnie Brasco with the volume on mute.

Not to mention, only eight miles out? Seriously? Maybe Kash Patel gets that sloppy when he’s in a rush to pick up his girlfriend on his taxpayer-funded private jet, but the mafioso doesn’t half-ass the geography.

No documented mob, criminal, law enforcement, or linguistic source connects “86” to a literal phrase about miles and burial depth. The closest folk etymology is an unsourced 2007 Urban Dictionary entry referring to “80 miles out and 6 feet under.”

Eighty. Eight-zero. Not eight. So Trump got the fake mob saying wrong by 1000%. (I use Trump percentages now.) He shaved seventy-two miles off a hypothetical desert burial because, presumably, it sounded snappier in all caps at midnight.

Not that it matters. The mob has never referred to murder as 86-ing. The mob called it whacking, clipping, icing, hitting, taking care of, or sleeping with the fishes if you have class.

This isn’t even up for debate. The FBI has decades of wiretap transcripts — Donnie Brasco, the Pizza Connection, Sammy the Bull’s entire deposition, every Bonanno family bug ever placed in a Queens social club. None of them uses the term “86” to mean assassination.

Don’t take my word for it. Take Elie Honig’s. Honig is a former federal prosecutor who spent the better part of his career listening to actual mobsters on actual wiretaps — Gambino, Genovese, Bonanno, Lucchese, Colombo, all five families, bosses to soldiers, the entire chain of command. He went on CNN this week and set the record straight:

“Never, ever. Not once did I hear any real-world gangster use the term ‘86’ to refer to a murder or anything, and God knows these guys had colorful lingo, but never that phrase.”

Even republican Senator Thom Tillis — not exactly Comey’s character witness — said this week he searched “to the end of the internet” and could not find a single example of 86 used as a violent threat.

So let me say this with the warmth of a Sicilian aunt who has been waiting all afternoon for you to compliment her gravy:

Donald Trump playacts a mob boss the way my eight-year-old niece playacts Caligula’s horse. The hair is committed. The vocabulary is approximate. The execution is mostly screaming and falling down. This is a man doing a Don Corleone impression filtered through three layers of Mar-a-Lago crystal and a Diet Coke. That blood stain on the Oval Office wall? That’s not from a hit. That’s from one of his ketchup tantrums. (And an insult to every nonna’s marinara.)

Sorry, but Scooby Do clues are not how Italians do business. Did you see how Paulie Cicero sliced the garlic in Goodfellas? A razor blade. So thin it liquefied in the oil. Doing a year for contempt and still running a kitchen with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker.

That is a mob boss. A man with standards. A man with technique. A man who, if he wanted you dead, would not need to spell it out in shells like a divorced woman’s beach-themed Pinterest board. The only time a mob boss is reduced to seashells is if the feds have an ankle bracelet on him and he’s stuck on Sanibel Island.

And let’s not forget that James Comey ran the FBI, and presumably attended briefings on actual organized crime communication. If he were genuinely planning an Instagram-mediated assassination, couldn’t he lean on more authentically wiseguy visuals? He has the connections. He has, presumably, a wife who would have stopped him and said, “Jim, the shells aren’t reading.”

You want a mob message? Well, I am just spitballing…

How about a horse head on a White House gold pillow? A single dead canary on the steps of Mar-a-Lago also works. A black wreath. A Don Corleone–style kiss. A cannoli left where it shouldn’t be. Perhaps a pair of concrete shoes at low tide, captioned “size 47?” Or a fish wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper? (Bonus points if the newspaper is from August 11, 2019.)

Those are messages. Those say: we had time, we had intention, and we want you to think about that. Capisce?

Instead, we get a federal indictment carrying up to ten years in prison because of…seashells. This is not how the Five Families communicate. This is how a recently divorced woman captions her healing journey after drinking a box of wine. (Not a personal reference. Maybe.)

The Department of Justice is supposed to operate independently from the executive branch. It is supposed to exist precisely so that the President cannot wake up one morning, decide he seeks revenge, and have the federal government criminally indict the source of his spite. Twice.

And here is the projection: the only people running an actual mob protection racket out of this story are the ones holding the indictment. This regime has pardoned the January 6 rioters who actually tried to hang the Vice President.

So no, Mr. President. We are not the mob bosses. We are the Sicilian grandchildren watching you cosplay our heritage and getting it embarrassingly, historically wrong.

And what Paulie Cicero would have said about the seashells, leaning over the stove, garlic liquefying in the oil, doing a year for contempt with more grace than this entire mob boss regime has mustered in fifteen months…

“That’s not how we do it, kid.”

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.