What a great band The Dictators were. And while Twisted Sister were always good fun and Dee Snider is a loveable motormouth, their music had none of the street cool and general New York'ness of The Dictators. Still, Mendoza (not to be mistaken with the Nugent/Whitesnake guy) could have had a much worse fate and gone on like Ross the Boss to the loincloth wops of Il Manowarro, si!
And yes, Sandy Pearlman was the connecting factor between BÖC and The Dictators. He tried to turn them into BÖC II when the punk thing hit America which was strangely anticyclical (and failed). What he should have done is sell them as thinking man's Ramones. At the end of the day, The Dictators were too punk to be heavy and too heavy to be punk though they considerably roughened up their sound after the Pearlman produced Manifest Destiny (a great album in my book) for the follow-up Bloodbrothers.
If you search for "The Dictators Search and Destroy" on youtube you get a nice clip of Mendoza playing his Grabber.
