If I suddenly go missing after this column is published, please express your concern to any handy local law enforcement authority. Thank you.

Viewing Black Mass, the new movie about the notorious criminal life of James (Whitey) Bulger, stimulated my memory with my brush with the underworld, the one not governed by Pluto. By the way, that’s all that movie stimulated. I thought on the whole it was kind of amateur Scorsese, no real character development, just a series of encyclopedic violences, laced with mind-numbing profanity.

Near the end of the 1960s in Boston, I spent some quality time with one of those listed as a Whitey victim. And yes, I am well aware that Mr. Bulger despises being called Whitey as much as Benjamin Siegel loathed being called Bugsy. But then again, if you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas and funny names. And yes, I apologize here and now for demeaning anyone of the canine persuasion.

As a young journalist living in Somerville I had a roommate whose cousin was a mob-related bookie. The cousin had a nephew, Richie Castucci, who owned a club at the end of Revere Beach called the Ebb Tide. He wanted young folks to come, eat, dance, spend money. He wanted big-name pop music talent as headliners. My roommate had told his cousin that he was living with a rock and roll trivia king, namely me. For a moment in time, you could give me a song and I could tell you the color of the label and what was on the B side. It’s the hand I’ve been dealt. I have a joker in my genome.

Richie invited my roommate and me to dinner at the Ebb Tide where he asked me to come up with a list of acts that I thought would attract young adults. I gave him a couple of dozen names. Soon, the club was featuring the likes of Fats Domino, Martha and the Vandellas, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Bo Diddley. A young crowd filled the place. Even the big bruiser of a bouncer in the pork pie hat was dancing — Joseph Barboza, the hit man who would end up a hit victim in the streets of San Francisco in 1976.

Soon these stars were playing not just the advertised “one week only” but maybe as long as a month. Richie hosted us for another dinner where he explained his amazing good fortune. He had each star researched and then hired those with a taste for gambling, a flirtation with Lady Luck.

“What can I say?” asked Richie. “At the end of a week, we shoot some dice, play some cards, and whatta-ya-know, they’re playing the club for another week!”

The old double-or-nothing ploy. Was it on the up and up? Who knows. All I know is I’m bringing friend after friend to the Ebb Tide for an unbelievable good time week after week. This joker is wild.

Wild but not very wise, considering I’m a journalist. There was writing on the wall, but I never noticed that it was turning slowly into an obituary. Turns out Richie had another club in Revere also doing well. The Squire offered a different music for dancing — tunes that accompany strip-teasing. Word had it Bulger and the Mafia wanted a piece of Richie’s success.

Richie instead decided to become an FBI informant, but he picked the wrong confessor. He talked to the FBI’s John Connolly, who apparently honored his boyhood relationship with Bulger more than he showed loyalty to his agency. Richie Castucci was found later, just as 1976 rolled into an icy 1977, trussed up in a sleeping bag in the trunk of his Cadillac in Revere’s Northgate Shopping Center parking lot with a bullet in his skull.

John Martorano, Bulger’s hit man, took credit for this killing when he recently testified against our former Public Enemy Number One. Mr. Martorano became a prosecution witness because he really didn’t like hearing that Bulger gave information to Connolly. A federal judge ruled last year that the government was liable for Castucci’s death because of the FBI’s negligent handling of Bulger’s activities and awarded the Castucci family $6.25 million. And Connolly was awarded 50 years in prison for aiding, abetting and racketeering.

The Ebb Tide became the Beach Ball — and then just about all of Revere Beach morphed into a high-rise series of what are always called luxury condos. The past went out with the tide.

At the end of the 1970s I heard from a Cambridge club owner who had heard that I had a better than passing knowledge of the rock music scene. He was thinking of moving away from a surfeit of similar songs brought on by the Folk Scare of the Sixties. I fibbed and told him I was moving away from Boston and wished him luck.

I think around this time I stopped being a reporter and became a movie critic.

Arnie Reisman and his wife, Paula Lyons, regularly appear on the weekly NPR comedy quiz show, Says You! He also writes for the Huffington Post.