Some years back, I had a woman come back to visit who had been a Finnish exchange student with my parents back in the Seventies...she brought her ten year old son with her, and I took her to Boston Garden to see a Bruins game, since the Bruins goalie was from Finland and they were big fans.
After the game, I wanted to take them over to the North End (the Italian section of Boston) for coffee and pastries.
To get there, you have to pass a few blocks of deserted warehouses, lit only by sparsely placed street lights with what seemed to be old fashioned light bulbs in them.
To be fair, it looks like an area out of a Hollywood movie where people are mugged and shot...or worse...the dark empty windows of the giant warehouses staring out at them, the only thing missing to complete the scene was the electric street lights cutting in and out.
Thing was, I had been going into Boston Garden for decades, and it was common knowledge that it was completely safe to walk that gauntlet of darkened warehouses, simply because of all the mafia connections in the North End.
It was well known that no actions of any kind against tourists or people walking over from the Bruins games would be allowed to go unpunished, since they depended on tourism and restaurant business in the North End, and wouldn’t tolerate it.
And everyone knew it.
But, I couldn’t convince them, they were terrified. All they knew about American culture came from Hollywood (even though she knew better since she had spent a year here as a student) but...we didn’t make it for coffee and Italian pastries!