Yeah Joe Tosi was legendary but he didn't hang at Bloomfield, I only met him a couple times. I got into racing later, after I moved to SoCal.

Bloomfield's owner was Mike Wolf, who inherited the bike shop from his father, I think. We almost never spoke, unless he was barking an order. He was not a bikie, didn't seem to like or respect bikies, but he tolerated them because they (we) tended to work for very low wages, due to loving bikes. It paid about the same as picking tobacco, but working conditions were somewhat more pleasant.

He somehow had sewed up practically all the good brands (Raleigh Motobecane Gitane Peugeot and others) before and during the '70s bike boom. During that time, when you could sell bikes as fast as you could get them, he controlled who could get them, for a big part of the state or maybe even beyond. Owners of other bike shops had to do what he said — mostly not undercut his pricing or invade his territory. As a teenager, I was obviously not privy to any of this but I had some inkling that what was going on was not 100% ethical or legal..

After I went off to college in SoCal, I read in the news that he was convicted of rackteering (RICO), basically for price-fixing. Sentenced to whatever you call it when you can't leave your home, then probation. That, plus the end of the bike boom, put a big crimp in his money pipeline, so his shop had to move to a smaller loaction, and it was a shadow of its former self for many years after that until he finally retired and sold the shop. That location is now part of a chain of bike shops, I forget the name. I visited it, but it is very forgettable, mostly e-bikes.