Frank Mundus has bit the big one. Mundus, a high school dropout who began running his own boat, the Cricket, out of Long Island's Montauk Harbor in 1951, achieved pop-culture immortality when word got out that he was the real-life inspiration for the character of Quint, the low-rent Ahab created by Peter Benchley in his novel Jaws and played by Robert Shaw in the 1975 Steven Spielberg movie that invented the modern concept of the summer blockbuster. Mundus, who had heard the call of the sea while still a teenager, said that his reputation as a shark hunter began as "a joke": he happened to snare a shark while out fishing one day and decided to post a sign advertising "Monster Fishing." His legend grew after he harpooned a shark estimated at seventeen feet in length and a weight of 4500 pounds. This was back in the days when Peter Benchley was among the customers who chartered his boat, though Benchley always denied having had Mundus or any one person in mind when he created Quint. Mundus, a lovably salty self-promoter, was just as quick to insist on the resemblance, saying of Benchley, "If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.” Those knowledgeable in the arcane ways of the deep will tell you that not getting eaten by the fish you're trying to kill is the true test of a master seaman, one that the fictional Quint, for all his sea-chanty airs, flunked spectacularly.
In 1986, more than ten years after the movie came out, Mundus and another fisherman managed to bag a seventeen-foot great white, setting a record for the biggest fish ever caught by rod and reel. More recently, last year the 81-year-old Mundus got into a disagreement with a nine-foot thresher shark while sailing his boat Cricket II and hauled the misguided creature aboard with a gaff. Rumors that the fish's last words were, "Oh shit, you're that guy who they turned into the guy in Jaws, aren't you? Can I get a do-over here?" remain unconfirmed. By that time, Mundus and his second wife, Jeanette, had relocated to Hawaii, though he often returned to Long Island in the summer, when the tourists and other suckers were out in force. Mundus did all this with one arm that had been left withered since a childhood illness, as well as "his safari hat, a diamond-studded gold earring, a jewel-handled dagger with a shark-tooth blade, and the big toe of one foot painted green and the other red, for port and starboard. If Mundus thought that his "Monster Fishing" sign was pretty funny, that was nothing compared to what he saw when he caught up with the movie Jaws: "It was the funniest and the stupidest movie I've ever seen because too many stupid things happened in it. For instance, no shark can pull a boat backwards at a fast speed with a light line and stern cleats that are only held in there by two bolts. And I've never boiled shark jaws. If you do, you'll only end up with a bunch of teeth at the bottom of your bucket because the jaw cartilage melts." Mundus, who died of a heart attack, recently co-wrote, with his wife Jeannette, his own version of his life story, titled Fifty Years a Hooker.