We dive into the legacy of the Spilotro family, sparked by the recent passing of John Spilotro, brother of the infamous Las Vegas mob figure Tony Spilotro. Chuck shares his reflections on how the Outfit has evolved, from its heyday of dominance in gambling, loansharking, and union racketeering to its much smaller—yet still persistent—presence today.

Together, we revisit the Outfit’s historic ties to the Teamsters, the Strawman trials, and the legendary names like Anthony Accardo who shaped Chicago’s mob identity. Chuck solves a mystery and provides the name of the man who killed Sam Giancana.

Chuck also offers personal insights into how mob families navigated the push and pull of blood ties, with some members rising into notoriety while others tried to lead straight lives under the shadow of organized crime.

Our conversation shifts to Chuck’s recent investigative work on the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, exploring the long-standing theories and mob connections that keep the story alive decades later.

This episode blends history, reflection, and storytelling—offering both an inside look at Chicago’s Outfit and a reminder of why these stories still captivate us today. 1:02 The Legacy of John Drummond 4:11 Current Status of the Outfit 7:28 The Last of the Spilotro Family 10:02 Family Dynamics of the Spilotros 13:18 Frank Calabrese’s Las Vegas Fame 13:25 Giancana’s Murder Investigation and who did it 18:18 Surveillance in the Giancana Case 22:03 The Straw Man Trials 25:40 Ken Eto’s Gangland Story 27:52 Investigating Jimmy Hoffa’s Disappearance 31:03 Closing Thoughts with Chuck Goudie

Subscribe to Gangland Wire wherever you get your podcasts, and join us each week as we uncover the stories buried beneath the headlines—and the bodies.

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Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. Good to be back here in the

[0:02] studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective here in Kansas City. And, you know, guys, I have, I was talking with a fan not too long ago from Chicago, I think on the, maybe the Facebook group, and he said, you need to do more Chicago stories. And I had to admit, I hadn’t done that many Chicago stories. I got caught up in New York a lot, It seemed like, and anyhow, we’re back to Chicago and another guy’s mentioned to another guy and we were talking and, and somebody said, I don’t remember who, maybe that original fan said you need to get Chuck Goudie on there. He’s been doing a lot of reporting on the outfit over the years. And I didn’t really know who Chuck was. So I started searching. He did a recent story about the death of the last spilotro brother, John spilotro. So I thought, man, this is, this is it. This is what I got to do. So welcome, Chuck Goudie from Chicago. Well, it’s quite an introduction. Some might call it a eulogy, but thankfully that’s not what he does.

[1:02] Really? Now, I think I told you earlier, you know, last time I interviewed a Chicago newsman, it was John Bulldog Drummond. Bulldog Drummond, I tell you what, he was the dean of Chicago newsmen, television newsmen, when it came to reporting on the mob. There’s no doubt about it. And so I really welcome you, Chuck. You’re kind of the new modern John Drummond. Thanks, Gary, for that. I’m happy to be mentioned in the same sentence or thought with John Drummond. I had the good fortune of working kind of side by side with him, different networks in the 1980s and into the 90s when he was still at it. And he certainly did. He set the stage for mob coverage in Chicago. The outfit, as it’s known here, and John is still up and at him. And the times that I’ve spoken to him recently, we talk about the fact that on TV news in Chicago, I’m kind of the last person standing to keep track of these things. And so it’s a heavy case of documents, as we say, to carry around these days. But there’s still interest in it in Chicago. with not only the history of it, but where things stand in 2025.

[2:20] Yeah, I’ve noticed that on the Facebook groups, and they’re real heavily participated in might be the right word, because a lot of comments, a lot of people know, a lot of family members of mob guys that seem like are participating. It’s true.

[2:37] So you got to be careful what you say if you live up there. Kind of like that here in Kansas City. I kind of have to be careful. We got all these family members around.

[2:45] That is true. Well, I’m always careful. And I do hear from people when I report on the deaths of old timers or even new guys who are trying to run the show these days. People do pay attention to it. That’s for sure. Yeah, they still got something going. What would you say, just to encapsulate what the outfit is today in Chicago?

[3:09] Well, there is a little bit of a range as to what the outfit status is these days, depending on who you talk to. The FBI still contends that the outfit is operating, that there are people who are still in positions of power, and that the street crews are still in place as they were even 50 years ago. Everybody seems to agree that it doesn’t have the numbers that it once did. And I think that that should be evident. Some people think there may be only 10 or 15 day-to-day active members of the Chicago mob these days. But I think most people agree that it’s in the dozens, but certainly no more than 100. And the rackets are the same, similar kinds of things. but not the amount of money trading hands these days. But they still run in the same circles.

[4:07] It’s still the same rackets that we saw decades ago in Chicago. Loan sharking, prostitution, a healthy, illegal gambling business that the outfit oversees, even as gambling largely is legal here and other places these days. Some union racketeering underway still. Um, so the same kinds of things, maybe just not as potent as it once was. Interesting.

[4:36] So speaking of the union racketeering now, let’s go back into history a little bit. You were in Kansas City during the straw man trials when that’s what really, to me, it was the peak of the outfit’s national influence at that point in time. Because they owned the Teamsters and the Teamsters Pension Fund and can make all those loans. So that was quite a time, wasn’t it? Those days of straw man in Kansas City was the heyday, certainly in terms of dollars changing hands and the interconnection between the Kansas City mob, Chicago outfit, Cleveland, to some degree, New York and some organized crime families in the Northeast. And then Las Vegas, obviously, was the linchpin of it all, at least when it came to straw man. Yeah. And that’s when really Tony spilotro, his name rose to the top. It wasn’t before I have a, I listened to a wiretap where Joe Augusto was in Las Vegas is reading a newspaper to Tuffy DeLuna about, uh, that there were, somebody was writing out there and said, uh, spilotro and Aiuppa moving West. And Nick Civella in the background says, oh, God.

[5:54] Well, as you know, there’s a body of thought that Tony spilotro basically engineered his own demise by the way he operated in public. And if he had just kept quiet and not been as public about it, he probably would still be around today. So we’re into the spilotro family. Yeah. The demise of the spilotro family. That’s John spilotro. I’d never heard of him. Tell the guy, and I don’t think most people have, tell us about him a little bit. I had never heard of John spilotro either. I probably saw him on a list of spilotro family members years ago, but he wasn’t a major player. He certainly kept the quietest of all the Spalatros, certainly far more than his brother Tony did.

[6:39] John spilotro lived in Vegas, Uh, apparently went out there with, uh, with the other brothers who landed in Vegas in the late seventies, early eighties. And, uh, and John spilotro kept quiet, although he was thought to be involved in, in a number of the rackets that the spilotro is most notably Tony got involved in, in the early days out there, the hole in the wall gang and other things that we’re familiar with. And so when I heard that John spilotro had died, I thought it was worth a TV news story, certainly here in Chicago. That’s a notorious family, infamous, if you will. And it was interesting to us, and I was to viewers, that this was the last of

[7:25] the spilotro crime family, as we put it. And so that was the story that we did a few weeks ago after hearing John had died. Now, I believe that he ran the gold rush, which was a notorious pawn shop and jewelry place and was a notorious fence for stolen goods from all over the southwest part of the United States. So he had to know something, didn’t he?

[7:52] Absolutely. And I don’t think anybody disputes that. But back then, you knew that it was Tony who was in charge of the family business and the outfit business in Las Vegas. And so he kind of fell in the line and knew his place, I think. I talked to his son shortly after he died, who was an attorney, a very well-considered, well-regarded attorney in Las Vegas, talked about his father’s death. He knows exactly what happened over the years.

[8:26] It’s not a high point, especially for somebody who went to law school, is now a practicing member of the bar and knows how these things work. But it was still his father. And so he and I spoke kind of candidly for a few minutes about this. And it’s always an interesting story to me. And it’s one that I have told over the years. You have members of quote-unquote organized crime families, many of whom were known to the feds, did penitentiary time, were vigorously pursued and prosecuted by the authorities. Nobody more so than the splatros over the years, some of them in any case. But this young man, now a grown adult and a practicing attorney, he grew up surrounded by that, but the sins of his father were not and are not his sins. So it’s always something that’s fascinated me that you have members, honest and upstanding members of the Board of Trade, attorneys, doctors, dentists practicing in all sorts of different professional areas of life who may have had their tuition paid by organized crime money, but that wasn’t their fault either. And they are upstanding members of society, perhaps because of what they saw.

[9:51] Really? Yeah. That’s the Lattro family. They, they are, uh, they, they just say, they say it all from what you said.

[9:58] You know, Tony was, uh, was nothing but a stone mobster. That’s all he ever was. He got a brother who’s a dentist. He’s always been a dentist, real well known, well respected, well liked dentist in Chicago. He’s got michael who was an actor but yet must have dipped his toe into the mob stuff but not like tony did and then you’ve got john who was uh you know he was just around it seemed like he must be in the family dynamics he must have been the lost child or something the mascot but not the black sheep because he he certainly didn’t go clean his life so it’s a it’s a really interesting family and and it’s uh it’s one that uh i would imagine if your name’s spilatro most any place in the united states almost if you would you say it somebody’s gonna say oh or unique into that guy in las vegas well the casino movie certainly uh helped prop up that legacy for sure yeah and and they didn’t use the name spilatro but that character that joe petzi there’s no doubt in anybody’s mind, but that was Tony Splattro. He nailed him.

[11:09] And then, you know, since then, then that Frank Cullotta who worked with them became such a personality and was all over the internet and really kept all that going for quite a while. And so it’s a hell of a story. Still loving to interview a lot.

[11:26] A few times in Las Vegas, we would go out there and do TV with you and i just have this vision of frank collada being escorted down a hotel hallway to our interview and he would have these these security guards that he hired on each side of holding onto his millboat walking him into the room uh he wasn’t witness protection at that point as we all know but he surely liked playing that part yes he did he did and then you end up having a mob tour out there go figure frank calabrese jr he had a mob tour in chicago and he’s out in las vegas as the resident mobster now so he he does a really incredible job with that with that mob presentation i don’t know if you’ve ever seen it but he he i mean he’s the busiest man in show business in vegas these days he does four or five of these things a day yeah and by the end of the day, he’s, he’s exhausted and he does it, he does it five days a week at the mob museum. And then in between, I was just talking to Jeff Schumacher, who’s a program director out there. And he said in between, he like goes around and greets people and talks to them. And I’ve talked to more than one person that’s come back. So, oh yeah, I ran into him. I talked to him and nice guy. Yeah.

[12:46] We were just out there, um, a couple of months ago interviewing him and Schumacher for, um, a story that we worked up on the 50th anniversary of Sam Giancana’s murder. Oh, yeah. And so, um, had, that’s where I, I just saw the, the, the, uh, Frank Calabrese senior or junior rather, uh, presentation and, and people eat it up. That’s for sure. Yeah. And he’s, he’s so personal. He’s, I know him myself, talked to him several times, interviewed him once.

[13:16] And he’s a, he’s really seemed like he just a nice guy. And I think he was just somebody that just caught up in family dynamics that

[13:23] didn’t have a choice in what happened in his life. So, so you mentioned Giancana. If I remember right, you’ve got a pretty good Giancana story yourself. Set out rather here at NBC Chicago to just do a 50th anniversary piece in the month of May. The anniversary happened obviously in June, but we put it on the air in May, set out to do a story about the Giancana killing and what we know 50 years later. And as it turned out along the way, we had former federal prosecutors and FBI agents and documents that showed it really is not an unsolved case.

[14:03] It’s still an open case legally because the person who pulled the trigger is dead. But we did a story that pointed the finger in the eyes of the feds straight at Tony Accardo. And that he was the guy who was allowed into Giancana’s basement apartment that night. And that Tony Accardo personally pulled the trigger on Sam Giancana and then left. And that the feds are satisfied that that case was closed in their own minds with Accardo being the trigger man. The reaction to it in some mob watcher circles here in Chicago, interesting. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I’ve seen those. I have seen those reactions. Now, who was his…

[14:53] His driver that came back that night was blasey was he butch blasey that’s who i had always suspected oh and that’s that’s certainly what the what the word had been with with really no proof um yeah there is proof of the Accardo uh of the Accardo well okay and that’s what one of the things that we put into our reporting is that um you know the the caro home is located um you know a straight shot across a couple of suburbs from where Giancana lived. And the FBI had Accardo under surveillance at the time. And Accardo left shortly before the Giancana murder happened and returned hours afterward. And that’s one of the pieces of evidence that these federal prosecutors is cited. It’s interesting because people in Chicago know of Operation Family Secrets. It was the last big mob murder prosecution here 20 years ago or so. The Fed solved almost 20 gangland hits as part of that prosecution. What we found out is that the Giancotta murder was one of the unstated murders that they also saw.

[16:11] They made a tactical decision in the prosecutor’s office not to throw everything at the jury. And that Giancana’s murder was one of those that they held back on because they didn’t have any defendants connected to it, so they weren’t just going to put it out there for publicity. Yeah, and muddy up the works on their trial. Those federal prosecutors do not like to muddy up the works. I mean, they, they did solve 18 murders and even that was, that was a heavy lift for the jury to sort through all of that in a multi-defendant case. Plus the publicity of something like the Giancana murder would just, it would just go wild. It would have gone crazy in the middle of all that. That’s wild. Well, Anthony Accardo, I’ll be darned. And there’s good solid evidence that he did that. Part of it would be that he was under surveillance and he was missing and then he came back. They must have had like a fixed surveillance on him. They weren’t trying to follow him. They did have a fixed surveillance on his house and it was a couple of miles away. You know, this was at a time when the when the feds and Chicago police spent a lot more money on 24 hour surveillance than they would today.

[17:26] In cases like this, it was more commonplace than not for local intelligence units and the FBI to put people under surveillance if they knew that they were running some organized crime racket. Yeah. And if they knew there was something might happen to that, that, you know, you get some intelligence that some tip to something might happen while you really lock down on them, which brings up the point. And this is a much disputed point. And I’ve gotten arguments with the guys, you know, arguments, not really arguments, but discussions about, well, wasn’t there surveillance on Sam Giancana and everybody claimed that there was, and they were mysteriously pulled off. And, and my claim is, you know, maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t, but if you ever sat on a house where nothing happens, all night long, you might drift off. You might run and get something to eat. You might go buy a pack of smoke. You might go get some coffee and then come back by, or you might just,

[18:17] you know, maybe even go to sleep. So I don’t know. What do you learn about that? It was, uh, it was a Chicago police detail, um, that was assigned to the Gene Kanna, uh, surveillance.

[18:31] And I don’t know that it was as much, they were pulled off by somebody as it was, uh, It was 1030 at night. They had been sitting on the house all day. They saw people coming in, including one of Giancana’s daughters, bringing the infamous sausage and escarole over that Sam was cooking just as he was shot. But it may well have been that those people who the surveillance team saw go in, they left at 1030 or 1045 that night. And so the surveillance team called it a night, figuring that nothing else was going to happen.

[19:10] And from where they were sitting, it’s not real clear whether they would have seen.

[19:16] Uh, Tony Accardo go down the stairs from the driveway into the basement or not. So who knows whether they, they were still there at the time or not. Um, they may have been around the corner having a beer. Yeah. And that happens folks. That happens. I had a young detective that left early and, and the guy, she was watching at a bar. He came out and he was mad at the cleaners next door. And he, he had a Molotov cocktail and he threw it in the cleaner’s windows. And you know we were supposed to be there we were supposed to be there and she just got bored and it took off early which everybody’s done at one time or another i have to admit i have to, and we had a homeless guy down the street that saw let’s go down that’s how we know so it happens folks it happens oh but you know the you know the cops and robbers shows on tv yeah they portray surveillance, you pull up, you wait for 15 seconds and whatever he was supposed to be looking for happened. Well, that doesn’t happen in real life. It does not happen like that. Trust me. It does not happen. I’ve been on too many of them.

[20:24] So, you know, I guess I have, I have one comment about that and kind of my knowledge, knowledge of the mob and reading, look, look at a lot of wiretaps out of Kansas city here that like When Iupa was going to meet with Nick Savella up in Chicago, they were going to meet at Nick Savella’s nephew’s place. A guy named George Schiavola lived north side up there somewhere, kind of close to Wrigley Field, actually.

[20:50] And he was on the phone, and he told him to prepare a table with some antipasto and a lambrusco, I think, certain kind of wine, and get this all set. And these guys, when they’re going to have some kind of a sit-down, They often do have some kind of food like this. It’s like part and parcel of it. When they had a meeting that they brought lots of these guys from Las Vegas, uh, Joe Agosto and, and, uh, uh, the Peckerwood, uh, uh, uh, Carl, Carl, uh, Carl Thomas, when he brought Carl Thomas and Joe Agosto here, why they had one of their wives cooks, but getting meatballs and had it sitting down in this room. And they kept saying, well, Carl, you want some, you want some spaghetti? Meatballs are really good. And he kept saying, no, no, man, I got to meet a guy in San Francisco later tonight. So they’re expecting me out there. And so it’s common for them to have some kind of a meeting to have some food prepared for that so that he was expecting somebody to have come that would be some kind of a mob meeting i would say if you look at the weight that some of these outfit characters walked around with it’s easy to understand how pasta is at every meeting.

[22:04] Really now when you went to strongman trials i’m curious were you did you happen to be in Were you in the courtroom very much? I was in the courtroom every day. Um, that was back in the days when TV news had unlimited budgets and we could go someplace and spend a month working on, on a story, a trial like that. So I was there every day. Did you happen to see Ken Eto testify? I did. I thought that was interesting. I found a, uh, yeah, the picture there, you see the picture there? Yeah. Yeah. that picture they understand they had that picture they showed that to ken ito and then he pointed out how he knew iupa and he knew uh uh joey lombardo and uh jackie serone and what he knew about him in order to uh were you there that day yeah then solano um yeah that.

[22:57] That was quite a day. The Eto story, I mean, there aren’t many Chicago outfit stories that can rival the Ken Eto story and how he survived gangland hits. Oh, man, I know. It hit him in the head several times, didn’t it? And I’ve got his affidavit here, actually. And he says things like how Joey Iupa was a territorial boss for the organized crime family or outfit in Chicago. He had control of Cicero. He said I even asked him to go to St. Louis back in the 60s and teach somebody how to run policy. I was talking to a St. Louis guy here not too long ago. They said, oh, my God, I never knew that before. So, I mean, he really laid it down. The straw man case with iupa showing up every day in a taxi cab and getting out of the cab and having the taxi driver get his walker out of the trunk and iupo would slowly make his way up those front steps um and i mean i think it might have been before they had a ramp even uh at the federal probably was yeah and it was great for the tv cameras because iupa moved so slowly that we ended up every day with three or four minutes of video of him.

[24:21] Seems like he took a swipe at you guys, wasn’t it, and what little bit of video I saw online.

[24:28] He was an ornery guy. That is for certain.

[24:33] Yeah, I tell you what. Oh, Ken Eto, he really, they used him, folks, and you remember, Chuck, they used him to say, yeah, there’s a mafia, and here’s how it works, is what they used him for. Boy, can you imagine being on that task force back then, and you find out that Ken Eto has survived a gangland assassination attempt, and his head’s bandaged up, and he wants to talk to agents. Oh, man. I interviewed that agent, Elaine Smith, who had been, she was one of the agents that kept going and knocking on his door. You know, how agents do, they like go out and knock on their door periodically. And so he said, Hey, I want to talk to Elaine Smith. They called her on vacation. She flew back immediately. He was huge. He was huge.

[25:25] Well, Ken Eto died before he could parlay his story into a windfall for his family. There was an attempt to try to make something of that from a book to Hollywood screenplays.

[25:40] And unfortunately for Eto and his family, he died before that could all be put together. Yeah, I started looking for him when I was doing podcasts. He hadn’t died not too long ago down in Georgia or somewhere. He really slowed down in Georgia, I believe. He had a heck of a story. I thought, boy, that’d be a good interview to get. You’re good.

[26:02] But, yeah, he was, I mean, for those of you that don’t know out there, Ken Ito was a Japanese-American. He did a little bit of time in the camps during World War II and ended up in Chicago and really ended up, describe his position, I’d say, in the outfit as far as their gambling rackets were concerned, Chuck. Well, I think he was considered to be the street boss, Rush Street, mostly near Northside gambling rackets. And he was this fairly quiet, unassuming Asian man.

[26:37] But when he showed up at your doorstep, he let it be known who he was representing. And he was well-connected and trusted by the outfit. And so when he ended up surviving that hit, there was some trepidation in the higher ranks of the Chicago mob because they knew that Ken Ito knew a lot. Yeah. Oh, yeah. As it says here, he’s talking about who Joey Lombardo’s connected to. He said he was just below Cerrone and Iupa in organizational hierarchy. He had performed hits and murders for the organization. You know, he used those kind of words that juries really like to hear in order. He became a made man and that kind of thing. So it was devastating as far as making them into a mafia family. He says, I also knew Angelo LaPietra, known to me as being a vicious and sadistic killer. You know, they had a way with words on that, didn’t they?

[27:44] Angelo LaPietro was not known as the hook for no reason. He had quite a reputation in outfit circles.

[27:53] So, Chuck, what are you working on today? Just wrapped up the Jimmy Hoffa coverage. 1975 was a big year in Gangland, Chicago and America. Of course, it was less than a month or so or the next month after Sam Giancana was killed, the Jimmy Hoffa vanished. And so I went to Detroit, spent a few days and did a couple of interviews with a former FBI head of the task force on Jimmy Hoffa. Also interviewed a couple of reformed Detroit mob figures about what happened to Hoffa.

[28:34] And while it’s not quite as strong as the Giancana evidence, there’s certainly a lot of thinking that the feds know and knew exactly what happened to Hoffa, but everybody involved in it is long dead. And so that case is never going to result in a prosecution either. Yes. Tell me. I believe that people do know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. We know who perpetuated it and how it was done. Yeah, Scott, my friend Scott Bernstein in Detroit has done a thing on this, and he’s got that taco, the last of the taco family, I think, in Detroit that he’s working with. I assume you interviewed him, didn’t you? Novi Taco, or as they pronounce it there, Toco, which I had to be corrected on because in Chicago, we had a guy named Albert Caesar Taco, spelled this way, T-O-C-C-O, but in Detroit, I guess the family has long pronounced it Toco. Okay. All right. I’ve gotten in trouble. I pronounced it Taco because I got in huge trouble one time on the internet because they, well, you don’t know how to pronounce anything. Yeah. Everybody’s got an opinion, right? I mean, you know what they say.

[29:51] Yeah, that’s an interesting story that kind of makes more sense to me. I mean, Dan Moldea, who wrote the book, The Hoffa Wars, and he’s so 100% sure about taking the body back east. I always struggled with that one, taking the body back east. Yeah, but he certainly is convinced, as are some other people, that the body is still in that landfill in New Jersey. Yeah. Oh yeah. No doubt about it. But I think this new evidence that he’s probably was, uh, what was he incinerated or something up in, in, uh, Detroit. There was a gangland Detroit mafia-run sanitation company at the time that the belief is among many federal lawmen from back then that off his body, shortly after he was grabbed from the restaurant parking lot, he was killed and then taken to this disposal plant. And there was nothing left of them in very short order, that there was no cross-country trip and burial in a landfill. But Dan and others, they’re passionate about their beliefs that the body’s still there on the ground. Yes, they are.

[31:04] All right, Chuck Goudie from Chicago. I really appreciate you coming on the show, Chuck. This has been fun. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Anytime. You know, the mob here may be smaller, but there are still stories that come up. So always don’t hesitate to call. Okay, I will. Thanks a lot, Chuck. All right, take care.

[31:25] Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So when you’re out on the streets there and you’re a big F-150, watch out for those little motorcycles when you’re out. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ll help with your drugs and alcohol problem if you’ve got that problem or gambling. If not, you can go to Anthony Ruggiano. know. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his website. If you got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. Just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books. I got my movies. They’re all on Amazon. Just go and I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks guys.

From his turbulent childhood in foster homes and orphanages to his rise as a feared and respected mobster in the Lucchese family, Burke’s story is one of violence, loyalty, and paranoia. Gary traces Burke’s early years of crime, his ties with Henry Hill and Paul Vario, and the meticulous planning of the Lufthansa heist that netted millions—and left a trail of blood in its aftermath.

The episode also covers Burke’s role in gambling and drug rackets, his eventual downfall in the Boston College point-shaving scandal, and his complicated legacy in mob history. Was Jimmy the Gent a loyal operator, or a ruthless killer who trusted no one? Tune in for a gripping exploration of one of organized crime’s most enigmatic figures.

Subscribe to Gangland Wire wherever you get your podcasts, and join us each week as we uncover the stories buried beneath the headlines—and the bodies.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

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0:06 Introduction to Jimmy Burke 1:12 The Rise of Jimmy the Gent 6:19 Jimmy’s Early Life and Influences 10:25 Family Ties and Notorious Names 14:41 Criminal Ventures Begin 17:51 The Notorious Lufthansa Heist 23:57 The Boston College Scandal 30:49 Conclusion and Legacy

[0:00] I had a listener named Paul Blackwood from Edinburgh, Scotland,

[0:04] email me with some great compliments about the show. So thank you, Paul. Hope you’re listening to this.  I will try to remember to send you an email just before I release this one. However, Paul suggested that I do a story that focuses more specifically on Jimmy Burke, also known as Jimmy the Gent. And I looked around, and I agreed with Paul. Burke is mentioned on many podcasts because we all want to discuss the famous Lufthansa. I want to talk about Henry Hill, some of the other mob people in the Lucchese family, but it seems like I wasn’t really finding a show that was just focused on Burke. So, James, Jimmy the Gent, Burke and where he came from and where he went.

[0:43] Oh, and don’t forget to hit me up on Venmo, buy me a cup of coffee once in a while, or maybe go donate on the podcast. I appreciate it. It helps pay the bills and keep me going. Now, Burke may be one of the most famous mob associates of all times, I would say. Oh, there’s some in Chicago. They had a lot of associates in Chicago. But because of, of course, Henry Hill and Robert De Niro playing him,

[1:07] why, he probably would be the most famous mob guy who is not a made man. If Henry Hill had not gone into witness protection, if Henry Hill had not done that book with Nicholas Pelleggi, Wise Guys, or if the famous filmmaker Martin Scorsese hadn’t taken Wise Guys and Pellegi’s book and got Pellegi to help write a script and titled it Goodfellas. And when Robert De Niro took the part of Jimmy the Gent, his place in history was assured, I’ll tell you that, especially in mob history. In my humble opinion, this book and film were arguably the best depictions of day-to-day mob life ever that I’ve ever seen. I thought it was amazing. He did a heck of a job at the casino.

[1:55] And to see the egos of these guys, once they turn, are just amazing. When Lefty Rosenthal heard Robert De Niro was going to play him, he told Pelleggio, oh yeah, I’ll work with you, I’ll work on this. And I’m not sure what brought Henry Hill around, but I got a feeling it was probably the same thing. He found out Ray Liotta was going to play his part in a movie. Really, when these guys like Pelleggio start writing a book about this, They got the huge budget and they pay these guys, you know, no telling how much money, six figures and up. Heck, they paid Frank Galatis $5,000. Just sit down and talk to them the first time for 30, 40 minutes. So when you actually start telling a person’s life story and on the big screen and in the book, why it’s worth a lot of money, it’s life changing money. I got a feeling. Now, the screenwriters in the film Goodfellas changed the name of Jimmy Burke to Jimmy Conway. there was some kickback from the family and they were wanting a piece of the action so they just changed the name.

[2:54] Now, some people have claimed that, of course, this movie came out while Burke was still alive. He was in the penitentiary, and they said that he was so happy to have Robert De Niro play him that he phoned De Niro from the prison to give him a few pointers. And De Niro is pretty well known for this. He reaches out to these guys and meets them and spends a lot of time with them trying to get a feel for their character and what it would be like to be them for a while. Nicholas Pelleggi, they say, denies this, that De Niro and Burke have never spoken. But he said there were men around the set who knew Burke, and Henry Hill would have been one of them, and knew him really well and gave De Niro pointers. I kind of like the story that De Niro got a hold of Burke in a penitentiary and talked to him.

[3:40] Burke was played by Donald Sutherland in another film called The Big Heist. See, everybody wants to talk about Lufthansa. I don’t know how many books there’s been written on that, several. It was a heck of a robbery. We’ll get into that a little bit later. But let’s take a look to see where Jimmy Burke came from. He was born in the Bronx, New York, so he never strayed too far from his birthplace. Like a guy, like if I’d have stayed up in Plattsburgh, Missouri, I’d have never got out of Clinton County. He was the illegitimate son to a woman named Jane Conway, who was a prostitute. He was actually an immigrant from Dublin, Ireland, so he was a real Irishman. He was the son of an immigrant directly from Ireland. The name of his father was never known. You know, the mother may not even known who the father was. At the age of two, the social services in New York City took little Jimmy Conway and put him in the first of many homes and also be in some orphan homes or whatever they, I don’t know if they call them orphan homes anymore. They call them group living situations more than likely. But a large part of his early years was spent in an orphan home ran by the Roman Catholic Church, ran by nuns. They’d say that after she gave him up at age two, he never saw her again.

[4:50] Now, as with many of these throwaway kids, he was in a lot of different places, the institutions, but a lot of different foster homes. You know, these people take in kids, and some of them are good, some of them aren’t so good. They’re just doing it for the money, and some of them take them in for sexual reasons. And so he would suffer physical and sexual abuse in some of these different places. He had a pivotal event that really shaped his life at age 13. He got in an argument with a foster father while driving in a car that the man turned around to smack Burke in the back seat. And we’ve all been there, you know, don’t make me reach back there and whack you. When this guy did this, he crashed the car and he died. The deceased man’s widow blamed Burke and gave him regular beatings until he was actually taken back into social services and placed with another family. The next one, sometime after that, I don’t know if it was the one directly after that, but sometime after that, a family named Burke, which is where he ended up with this name, Burke, took him in as a foster child. And they had a, he would say later that it was a clean, comfortable and safe environment. And he loved those people. He lived out his teenage years on Rockaway Beach, close to Ocean Promenade. You guys that live in New York City and know that, you’ll know exactly where that is. And he never really strayed too far from there either, kind of across the bay just a little bit. He said Burke would never forget their kindness, and for the rest of his life, he would visit these foster parents on special occasions. And when he started making some money, he started leaving large amounts of cash

[6:16] and unmarked envelopes for them periodically.

[6:19] The Burke family had adopted him, so he took the family name and kept it. Some say that he buried part of the 1978 Lufthansa heist, some of the loot that was never found at the Burke house on their property.

[6:32] The majority of the take from that caper has never, ever been found. One of the mysteries of that, kind of like the, not the Lindbergh money, the money from, we had a kidnapping like the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder here in Kansas City. And they paid $600,000 and they only got about half of it back. And half of it ended up with the St. Louis policeman who was working with the St. Louis mob. And some of the money ended up in Chicago later on, but they never found about $300,000 of that $600,000. Jimmy Burke got older, getting up in his upper teens and 20s in 1920.

[7:07] He, of course, his trouble with the law became more serious. Age of 18, actually, in 1949, he got five years in penitentiary for forgery, and he was already working for a Colombo family member named Dominic Remo Sarsani. They had a counterfeit check ring going. I remember working some of these guys. Somebody would steal a check from a business. Somebody would get what we used to call a check protector, And then they would, on that business account, or maybe they would take one check from that business account or get a picture of it and make up a bunch of others. They might even have been totally fake checks or they might have been stolen checks and it would be just a counterfeit signature. Anyhow, when they start, they’d have a whole crew of people and run around and pass these trying to get $500 or $1,000 bucks a whack off each one of them. He got popped with a $3,000 check at the Ozone Park Bank. And after he was arrested I guess the cops knew that this was connected to this Colombo mobster named Remo and they wanted him to talk but he refused to talk and they’d offered him everything you know you take a kid like that at 18 years old and say you know you can walk on this deal dude and he refused and Remo found out about it and he knew that they offered him a free walk on that and.

[8:21] And he was eternally grateful. And actually, when he went into the penitentiary, Remo arranged for his protection with other mob members there and get him introduced into that. He started calling Jimmy Burke, Jimmy the Irish Guinea at the time. Now, if you don’t know what a guinea is, then I feel sorry for you. You got to know what a guinea is. If you don’t know, email me or comment on my Facebook. Say, what is a guinea? As an adult, when Jimmy Burke left the penitentiary, He was really trusted, and he was known as a guy who could get the job done. He was getting big by then. He came out, and he worked as a bricklayer for a while for the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craft Workers. He got some tattoos, of course, you know, and that probably already had some jailhouse tattoos out of the penitentiary. He developed large muscular arms, and he was a bad dude. And he was also kind of a leader. He was known as a natural leader.

[9:15] But on one hand, he was a stone-cold killer, but mostly he was polite and charming. A really good thief is like that. Everyone I ever met that was really a good thief was a polite, charming dude that had the capability to kill somebody. Henry Hill would describe him as a guy that looked like a real fighter with large hands and a broken nose. He’d always say that if a fight broke out, Burke would be all over people in a second. He would be in there, he’d grab somebody’s tie and slam their face down in the bar before the guy even knew they were in a fight. He had kind of a reputation for being wild. He’d whack you, but he was polite on the other hand, so he wouldn’t have that Irish charm more than likely. During this time, he started building up a small crew of trusted thieves, and Henry Hill was one of them. I’m not sure exactly where they met. Probably in the penitentiary. During the 1960s, Jimmy Burke married a woman named Mickey. And then one of the more well-known stories that illustrate Burke’s temperament was about a former boyfriend of Mickey had been bothering her. She complained to Jimmy and on the day that they were married in 1962,

[10:21] the police found this man’s body cut up in a whole bunch of different pieces. They would go on to have two boys. Now, you got to listen to this. You got to hear the names of these boys. Frank James Burke and Jesse James Burke named them after two of the most famous bank robbers, train robbers.

[10:40] In the United States at one time, anyhow I don’t know, they like rank right up there with Robin Hood as being famous thieves they also had a daughter named Catherine who would go on to marry a Bonanno family member named Anthony Indelicato, who was the son of Sonny Reddindelicato, And during the commission trial, the prosecutor would charge this Anthony Indelicato with the murder of Carmine Galente. So Jimmy Burke’s daughter married one of the guys that killed the Carmine, the cigar Galente, the dude they found in that kind of a garden in the back of that, God, what’s the name of that Italian restaurant in Brooklyn with the cigar still in his mouth? One of those local newspaper guys climbed up in a tree and got a really gross graphic shot of Carmine Galente laying there with the cigar. in his mouth. He met Catherine Burke when he was in the penitentiary, and she was visiting another inmate. By the 1970s, a Lucchese family member named Paul Vario, who was a Paul Sorvino character in the Goodfellas movie, he had taken notice of Jimmy Burke and his crew. By this time, he had Henry Hill, who was Ray Liotta, Tommy DeSimone was a Joe Pecci character, and a guy named Angelo Seppe. They used a bar that Jimmy Burke had owned by then called Robert’s Lounge in South Ozone Park in the Queens. So see, he never really went very far from Rockaway Beach. It’s all kind of in the same area down there.

[12:05] This joint was a hangout for them as well as other small-time mobsters, tipsters, people that come up with tips on loads of expensive, a load of calculators going out and it’s going to be in a truck and maybe a drug dealer is known to have a lot of money or some other mark. Bookmakers, loan sharks, and other assorted criminals. Burke was the quintessential mobster because by this time he’s up in his 30s and he’s running a loan shark operation, a bookmaking operation. There’s a high stakes poker game going down the basement of that bar, which of course he gets a piece of that. Everybody kicks in for having a game down there. Plus if he’s got a high stakes game going down there, why he’ll have somebody in that game that’s a real card mechanic and they can get a big whale in there. Somebody we’d call a whale. Like there’s these guys out there that are maybe on some small chain of grocery stores or have been successful with fast food restaurants or something like that. And they got a lot of money. They like to gamble. They like to hang out with these mob guys.

[13:08] It seems like they don’t mind if they get cheated as long as they can be accepted into that world. We had one here in Kansas City that had about three grocery stores. Had another guy that had a big Chevrolet dealership. I mean, those guys got a lot of money.

[13:22] Now, Jimmy Burke knew how to make money, and he was a real earner for Vario. I mean, Paul Vario would have been his kind of boss, his sponsor, if you will, that he always would kick up to Vario. Whenever he had some kind of action, he would kick up. Burke also owned a dress factory in South Ozone Park in the Queens called Moo Moo Vedas. This business helped him launder cash. When he had a lot of cash from some other illegitimate enterprise, he could run it through the dress factory accounts. And this ability to launder cash himself became really more important when he and Henry Hill got in the narcotics business because we all know there’s a ton of money going through the narcotics business. For some of these drug dealers, it’s like doing something with the cash is the hardest thing about the whole business. In 1972, Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill were arrested for beating up a guy named Gaspar Ceseo. This was a Tampa Bay Area gambler who owed a large gambling debt to a friend of theirs, a union boss named Casey Rosado. They were charged with extortion and convicted and got 10 years in the penitentiary and neither talked or was even tempted to talk at that point in time. Both got paroled out after about six years in the joint, so they paid their dues one more time and kept their mouth shut, which gives them even higher status with the mob.

[14:41] Of course, they went right back to their running grounds, There are stomping grounds, South Ozone Park in East New York and Carnese and Howard Beach area.

[14:51] This South Ozone Park borders right on New York City’s JFK Airport. And the other two areas are adjacent to that. They all border this Jamaica Bay, which is right across the street from Rockaway Beach or across the bay from Rockaway Beach. And so this is a really small world that Jimmy Burke, he was kind of like the big duck in this world. I got a feeling outside of being the mob people in that world, he was a big deal down in there. But it was like he lived in a small town. He never really got very far out of there. He did get out to Boston. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit. Their main thing, his crew was robbing trucks delivering goods over the years. And they had informants inside the JFK freight yards and other freight hauling businesses in the area and got to know the truck drivers. I think Henry Hill reported that whenever they stopped a truck driver and actually hijacked the truck at gunpoint, Jimmy Burke always gave the dude a $50 tip. Even though they weren’t really part of the robbery, probably if they’d been part of the robbery and set it up, they probably would have wanted a little more money than $50. But he’d always give them a $50 tip and act real gentlemanly to them. And that’s how he got the nickname Jimmy the Gents, is my understanding is, which has stuck a lot better than being the Irish Guinea. That didn’t seem to stick.

[16:08] This was during the time when Burke and Henry Hill got in the drug business. The Lucchese family, who were their sponsors, Paul Vario was in the Lucchese family, and he sponsored them, and they really banned their members from narcotics trafficking, because, as the usual, because all the government attention on that and draconian sentencing, well, as we used to say, you take a guy 30, 40 years old and give him 50 years in penitentiary and he’s a coke dealer, not like a real hard case many times. He’ll rat out his own mother looking at life, basically, in the penitentiary and being entered into a world that he doesn’t really know. I mean, coke dealers are kind of like white-collar crime people. They’ve never really been in with that down and dirty for the most part. Now, Jimmy the Gent and Henry Hill had, and they could deal with the penitentiary, and they proved they could. But Henry Hill will also prove out that concern was a legitimate concern that the mob had because when he faced this huge, long sentencing for cocaine trafficking, we all know what happened with Henry Hill. Now, the famous Lufthansa heist, we’ve got to talk about that, and we’re going to talk about Jimmy the Gent, happened on December the 11th, 1978. It’s the most famous crime ever in some ways.

[17:19] The Casey family, through Paul Vario, granted him permission to do this because this was actually on Bonanno family territory, shall we say. They claimed the rights to all criminal activity inside the airport. And they also obtained permission from the Gambino family, and they wanted a cut of it, too. So they weren’t taking any chances on stepping on anybody’s toes. I guess they all kind of wanted some rights to anything that came out of JFK.

[17:47] And there was a lot of stuff that came out of JFK over the years. So they did the robbery, and we kind of know that they had some inside help, and they went in there with the guns and they knew the rounds of the guards and the response time and it was really well planned, well set up, had a large crew. Jimmy Burke even took his son along as a crash driver. If somebody started chasing him, he was out there with a vehicle that would run, wouldn’t have an accident if they had to or try to slow down the cops with the crash car. At the end, after the robbery, Paul Barrio sent his son Peter to pick up his end of the take, which in a god it’s my understanding it could have been as much as two to three million dollars because the total take was five to six million dollars.

[18:31] There’s a man with the Bonanno family a capo named Vinny Asaro and he was owed money from the robbery also and I don’t know if he got his or not for sure. Kind of most famously after the robbery went down what we really all know about is Jimmy Burke became more and more paranoid and he kind of wanted to cut people out of their share but one person he didn’t murder was his eldest son Frank James Burke, He’d been on it with it and got a piece of it just for sitting out there in a crash car.

[18:59] And as you know, the film depicts Henry Hill not even going on this robbery, and his book didn’t ever claim to go on it. Now, Jimmy Burke’s son, Frank James Burke, will be murdered a few years later in May in 1987. Cops responded to a shooting in Brooklyn, and they found Frank James Burke’s body with multiple gunshot wounds.

[19:18] They said shortly after this, a drug dealer named Toito Ortiz got arrested and convicted of this murder. I guess if I remember right, he had some cocaine and he’d cut it way down so it really wasn’t anything left to it. He was just trying to hustle this other, probably Puerto Rican drug dealer and thought he could get away with it. I guess he got, he found out you better be careful. You mess with the bull, you get the horn sometimes. I don’t know this Ortiz guy or Otiz or anything about him, but I got a feeling he wasn’t anybody to mess with. Palvario was never charged with the Lufthansa heist, but he ends up in the penitentiary for another racketeering charge.

[19:55] Three people in that deal, Henry Hill and two JFK airport employees, go into witness protection. That was at Lewis Werner and Peter Grunewald. It sounded like it was a German boon group working there. Anyhow, like I said, I’m not going to really go into the details of the heist other than they had the inside information. They took as much as $5 million in cash and jewelry. Some of the other people that got killed was one of the more famous ones, And he was killed, like, by Tommy DeSimone or the Petchy character just seven days after the heist because he screwed up. This Parnell Stacks Edwards is a black dude. He was supposed to get rid of the van in New Jersey’s scrapyard. But he got high instead and just dumped it off somewhere. This Martin Krugman was part of planning on this. And he kept harassing Burke for his money. That was depicted in the movie. And this happened back in December, January the 6th, 1979, less than a month after the heist.

[20:50] Tommy DeSimone kills him. Body was never found. DeSimone will get killed himself. He was identified by one of the guards for some reason because of his well-polished shoes. You know, he was a dude that polished, was a shoeshine boy when he was a kid, and that famous murderer of, what’s his name, Billy Batts, a famous murderer that was in the movie where they killed a dude in the joint because Tommy DeSimone, he was teasing him about how he used to be a shoeshine boy.

[21:17] And they killed a dude just for that. That was a hell of an acting job, Betsy did. That deal where he acts like he’s mad at Ray Liotta at Henry Hill where he said, well, you know, you think I’m funny? How funny how? And you could just see Liotta did a heck of a job of acting too. You just see Liotta’s face change. And we all know that feeling. We’re having fun. All of a sudden, we realize somebody’s mad at us. And all of a sudden, you get this little look of fear and questioning like, wait a minute, what’s going on here? and they’ll go across your face and then they’ll see it and then they’ll get it back. I had a guy in the police department do that to me one time. He really got me. He was a great big dude.

[21:55] He walked up behind me and he was like he was madder now. And he looked out at me and he just had this like rage on his face. He said, Gary, I’m going, and like I said, he was a big dude and he was one bad dude. And I know he saw the look of fear on my face. I was sitting down and he was standing up also. And then he starts laughing because he knew he got me so that was a good one the next one was lewis caforo he’s the one that bought the pink cadillac right afterwards with the with some of the loot that he’s got his hands on and he was found dead in his cadillac later that year in march with his wife i depicted that in the movie joe manry was one of the guys that went in carrying guns, and he brought some heat down by talking about this, and it got back to Burke, so he was found dead in his car along with a friend of his. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and probably they figured he knew all about it, and he may have talked too. You know, actually, I think he went on the thing. He would think he was another one of the robbers, so the mistress of Paul Vario, Teresa Ferrara.

[23:03] Actually, I didn’t have any role in it, but she went missing and they found her body several months later during this time so i don’t know if it’s associated with it or not exactly paolo licastri who was a gambino soldier and he was one of the kind of observers one of the crew they speculate that burke just didn’t want to give him the gambino share the loot so he ended up being found dead.

[23:31] Angelo Seppi, who was one of the original Burke crew members, he was identified as one of the robbers, bought a bunch of stuff after the robbery. The Gambinos killed him a few years later. He never got charged with it and probably was unrelated to the robbery. 1982, Jimmy Burke will be convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

[23:54] Now, this conviction was not for the Lufthansa heist. It was for his involvement in the 1978-79 Boston College basketball point shaving scandal. Henry Hill was part of that scam, and he testified against Burke. He also testified against Burke about a 1979 murder of a drug dealer named Richard Eaton. And Burke will end up, because of Henry Hill, he’ll end up getting about 20 years in the penitentiary. And when he’s much older, it’s going to be hard to do 20 years because it’d be crimes of violence.

[24:27] But that Boston point shaving scandal, I thought, well, I’ve heard of that. I don’t really know anything about it. I guess it’s in Henry Hill’s books. I looked it up. This was a scheme back in Boston, where Boston College is. It was conceived by a guy named Rocco Perla and his brother Anthony, who were bookies and gamblers. They lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They recruited a high school friend of theirs named Rick Kuhn who was entering his senior year at Boston College and then was a great basketball player. The name of their team is the Eagles. Kuhn, after they approached Kuhn, he agreed to try to hold a score within the point spread or go outside the point spread, it’s easier to hold it within the published point spread on certain games. So, for example, then the first time if Boston College was an eight-point favorite, they’d give him $25 if the Boston College Eagles won by less than eight points and they put all their money down on the other team. Always get that mixed up. So I’m not going to keep trying to go into what that means. You guys that are gamblers understand the point system. Somebody gives you points and what you got to do to win and lose, I’ll leave that for you to figure out. You know better than I do.

[25:42] Once Rocco and Tony Perla got this deal set up with Kuhn and felt like they had an edge, they set up a betting syndicate to get a lot more money to go down. And that’s where they ended up getting directed to Henry Hill somehow. But they did. They were trying to connect with the mob. And he was a guy that they got sent to because he was with the Lucchese family. He took him to Burke because Henry Hill isn’t going to do something like this on his own. And Burke’s got kind of got the money and access to more money. And so Jimmy Burke agreed to front the money to pay off the players each week and he would set up a string of bookies to take this different action from different people and got people that would keep their mouths shut because once people got onto this, it’s going to start screwing up the point spread and everybody’s going to try to figure it out and want a piece of this action.

[26:32] Henry Hill and Burke, a guy who had to get the approval of the KZ family campo, Paul Vario, so there’s some other people that know about it that are greedy and want to make more money and more money. Vario and Burke told Henry Hill that he was going to be the point of contact with the Boston gamblers and the players up there, the Perla brothers, Rocco and Anthony Perla, so he had to fly out to Boston many times. When they were debriefing Henry Hill, they were looking at his record, but they’re looking at what he’d been doing over the past several months, and they saw that he had been to Boston a bunch of times, and that’s when he started laying this out for them. They didn’t even know about it. Nobody knew about it. If he hadn’t opened his mouth, nobody had ever known about it. And the first game was Providence against Boston College, and the Boston won by 19 points, but the line was 6 points. So Henry Hill, I guess Jimmy Burke was kind of fit to be tied over that, and he told Henry Hill to tell his dude in Coon he couldn’t play basketball with broken hands. The next game they tried was Boston College playing Harvard. Boston was favored by 12 points, and they won by a 3-point margin. So…

[27:41] Jimmy Burke’s happy again. They all won money, got their money back, and then some. So next one was against UCLA. At that time, especially, it was a huge basketball powerhouse, and Boston was an underdog by 15 points, so they lost by 22 points, and the syndicate won again. After that one loss, that first one, they got Rick Coon and said, you got to recruit somebody else, and he got into a guy named Ernie Cobb, who’s a leading scorer on the team, but never really was proven if Cobb agreed to participate.

[28:13] Later on that season, players let him down again. They lost a lot of money on a game. Hill would later say that Burke was so mad he kicked out the screen of his television set and wanted Hill to go do something to these players, but he just never got around to it, and they just got out of the scheme. They realized it wasn’t any kind of a foolproof deal, and I always wondered about that. I know you hear about that every once in the wild. People are always trying to do it, but it’s hard to do to totally fix an athletic event like that. There’s a podcast out there with a referee named Tim Monahy or something like that. He was an NBA referee.

[28:51] In that podcast, I interviewed him a lot and a lot of other people that are around that world and FBI agents that worked that case on him. He got caught helping the mob shave points. But referees, as he explained with referees, you know, you can call fouls or not call fouls. You can maybe call a really bad call and get the coach or the guy that you want thrown out of the game, possibly. The referees can really control a game. This guy said that the FBI agent they interviewed in that podcast, he said that the mob loves basketball because there’s a lot fewer people that you got to get some kind of an edge with to know about. Maybe you just got intelligence information on them that somebody’s girlfriend left them or somebody gets drunk every night before a game or certain nights before a game or referees have, you know, they get something on a referee and the referee, they can’t really save points.

[29:50] It’s referees. There’s only three referees and there’s only 10 players. So it’s not so many people as football. And football and basketball are the only things that’s really a whole lot of action on. Baseball would really be hard to manipulate, I’d think, although we do have the Black Sox scandal. There’s so many people involved that it would be hard to do. Well, after Henry Hill broke down on that scheme, of course, he had to make a deal that he wouldn’t be prosecuted for it. But also, one of the main reasons he did it, this guy didn’t do anything unless he got real something out of it. Because if he just hadn’t said anything about it, it would never come to light, more than likely. He had a state narcotics charge in Massachusetts, so he told the agents that you got to get that dropped too, and they did.

[30:31] Jimmy Burke got 12 years on that particular case. They did a RICO thing on it, and they got one of the Boston bookies that they were using and one of the players, and I don’t think it was Rick Kuhn. He had recruited another player or two before it was over, and they collaborated. Henry Hill’s testimony. So that’s kind of the deal on Jimmy the Jim Burke.

[30:50] We all know he died of cancer a few years ago. is no longer to be feared, and he doesn’t really leave a bunch of brothers and people out there that were loyal to him. Well, that sucker was loyal to the mob. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles, so when you’re out on the streets there and you’re a big F-150, watch out for those little motorcycles when you’re out. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ll help with your drugs and alcohol problem if you got that problem or gambling. If not, you can go to Anthony Ruggiano. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his website. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. Just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books. I got my movies. They’re all on Amazon. Just go and I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks guys.

Robert Webster outlines the rise of the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky, noting its glamorous past hosting Las Vegas–worthy shows—and its lasting link with organized crime in Northern Kentucky.

The 1977 Fire and Its Devastation On May 28, 1977, the club was engulfed in flames, ultimately claiming 165 lives—making it one of the deadliest nightclub fires in U.S. history.

Safety Failures and Code Violations Webster discusses staggering oversights: overcrowding far beyond legal capacity, lack of marked or accessible exits, absence of sprinklers or alarms, unsafe wiring, poor construction, and inadequate regulatory enforcement—true firetrap conditions.

Unraveling the “Untold” Story What truly sets Webster’s work apart is his examination of the controversial claim that mafia operatives may have deliberately set the fire in retaliation for the owner’s refusal to cooperate—a theory supported by previously unreleased documents, crew testimonies, and survivor accounts.

Investigative and Legal Aftermath The episode highlights the State’s formal review of the arson allegations, which concluded they lacked “proof,” being largely speculative. Meanwhile, Webster’s book earned him a 2013 Kentucky History Award for its contribution to the record.

Click here to get this fascinating account of this devastating fire in The Beverly Hills Supper Club – The Untold Story Behind Kentucky’s Worst Tragedy.

Subscribe to Gangland Wire wherever you get your podcasts, and join us each week as we uncover the stories buried beneath the headlines—and the bodies.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

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To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

Gary Jenkins: [00:00:00] well hey, all you wire tapper’s. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have a, a little bit different sort of a story. It’s it’s part mob and, and part fire protection and a huge fire that was you know, it really hit the headlines all over the United States back in the seventies. It’s Bob Webster, Bob really appreciate you coming on the show. I appreciate the invitation. Looking forward to it now, Bob, you got, you got a pretty good accent. You, you got about as good an accent as I do. We’re a little bit different speaking, aren’t we? Little bit a little bit different. My New York fans and my Chicago fans I bet. And my Southern fans you know, you got that, we got that kind of Midwest twang, I guess, if you will. Exactly. Kentucky and I’m from Missouri and you know, Bob, my, my first relatives came, of course, from Virginia first, then to Kentucky, and then onto Missouri. It’s the, okay. It was the immigrant path back there in the 18 hundreds, and I got a ton of them that some of ’em are still down there actually from they came here in the [00:01:00] 1860s, just before the Civil War. They came to Missouri, but okay, but deep roots there in Kentucky. Oh, guys, the, the book is inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club, the untold story behind Kentucky’s Worst Tragedy, and it happened in May 28th, 1977 as the Supper Club right along the Ohio River. And Bob is from that area and he does a lot of local history down there. And Bob, you’ve got other books out there, correct? I do, I’m working on number eight right now. Beverly Hills is certainly the most popular, but I’ve written books on other local history topics. I also have sort of a textbook out that’s covers the, just a generalization of of history of Northern Kentucky came out about four years ago and just finished a historical fiction book. I, a lot of my, counterparts kind of teased me for writing a partly fiction book, but it’s based on a true story. So I can get by with it, but certainly almost everything that I write is nonfiction, just the facts. Yeah. And this is totally [00:02:00] nonfiction, correct? Oh, absolutely. I looked at it well, researched, searched, and everything’s documented. There’s end notes for every chapter. It’s, yeah, I could tell. So yeah, and I understand that right in historical fiction because. Can, you can make it more of an entertaining read, and you can tie things together that nobody knows, with a little literary or poetic license, if you will. And it does make it a little more entertaining to read sometimes. Yeah. Broaden out your audience somewhat, which we’re always trying to broaden our audience, aren’t we? Yeah. Like I said, it’s based on a true story here locally, one of the neighboring counties, it’s interesting that I’ve had several people contact me and say, I, I know what you’re really talking about. I know this, I know the real story you’re talking about. We don’t wanna be sued. They know the truth part of everything, now, what is that historical fiction about? Is it a Kentucky crime? It’s actually a murder mystery based on my own family. You know, I mentioned off camera that my first book was a family history [00:03:00] project, about 700 pages. So it was well in depth, but, you start researching things and almost every family runs into something that they were, not aware of. I ran into a murder. The more I read in the newspaper, I’m like, this doesn’t sound like it really happened this way. This, this something else must be going on. So I did some research and said, this would make a really interesting book. I’d have to change some names and some facts and things. But it’s called Ellison Station and it’s based on a little town in Grant County. And it’s gone over real well. Oh, well. Great, great. Well, let’s get back to the book at hand and back to the Mafia. ’cause the mafia had a big part in getting this started or organized crime. Out of I believe it was Cleveland, or was it Cincinnati? Oh, the yeah, the actually Newport, Kentucky right on the, we’re right across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio. Okay. They have some. Gambling and illegal activity that dates all the way back before [00:04:00] 1800. But the Volted Act with illegal alcohol peach, mit, Jimmy Brink, buck Brady, some of the well-known names here locally started the bootlegging operation. But, that’s when the mafia really moved into the area. Originally from Detroit, they were part of the little Jewish Navy. But Frank Milano I, I pronounce it mo Delete, D-A-L-I-T-Z. Came down and, and he formed what they called the Cleveland four. So it was Mo and Sam Tucker and Morris Kleinman and Lou Rothko. And the early 1930s, mid 1930s, they moved in, pretty much, took over Newport took over part of Cincinnati, some of the other areas as well. But they really took over northern Kentucky, and the police and everyone down in Frankfort didn’t seem to pay any attention to what was going on way up here in northern Kentucky. They just consider us part of Cincinnati, I suppose. But they moved in and basically torched a lot of [00:05:00] the owners of the clubs back then with the same philosophy either. Sell us your club and we’ll keep you on as a manager and pay you a little bit of a, a stippen or we’re you’re gonna be outta business. And most of ’em most of the club owners took heed and, and sold their clubs. But there were a couple of people Glen Schmidt or Peach mit who owned the Glen Hotel in Newport said, no, he’s not gonna be bought out. They burned him out too. Mm-hmm. But he moved out of town just a few miles to what, what is now Southgate, Kentucky. And he reopened what was the king castle. It was it had been vacant for a few years, but he figured he, he’d let the mob have Newport and he was gonna open up his club there in Southgate. But on February 3rd, 1936, the mob burned his place down again. And it would’ve gone unnoticed like all the other fires that had been going on for the last four or five [00:06:00] years. But there was a little 5-year-old girl who was the niece of the caretaker of the property, and she was killed in that fire. So there was an investigation and several of the mobsters went to jail Masterson, who was probably the mastermind, we think. Got away scot free. But bottom line is he was able to rebuild the club there. He renamed it the Beverly Hills Club, then it became the Beverly Hills Country Club. Mm-hmm. This is before the summer club era. But the mob didn’t give up. They they moved in started harassing customers. They robbed the payroll a couple of times. They also performed what was called ding Doning. I don’t know if. If you’ve heard of that. But they would send four or five of their henchmen into the lobby of this Glen hotel, and they would just urinate on the floor. They would do that every day. And he finally said, okay, I give up. And he sold the place to the mob. So by 1940 [00:07:00] 1938 to 1942, there were over 30. Illegal gambling casinos in northern Kentucky, all operated by the Cleveland syndicate. Yeah, that’s mo d was, he, he was quite a mover and shaker. It’s kind of interesting. He ends up being a a sterling citizen giving back to charity and everything out in Las Vegas. But yeah, those four guys you mentioned, those four Jewish guys, that Jewish cabal, if you will. Maybe not the best word, but, but cartel that started that they’re gonna end up starting Las Vegas basically, but they absolutely right here in this Beverly Hills Country Club, if I remember right. Yeah, they absolutely. Is that what you would call carpet joint back then? Is that what you call a carpet joint back then? Yeah, we had two of those, but that was the first of what, what we called the carpet joints. Yeah. Okay. All the other places in Newport were sawdust floors. You could get buzzed in by the bartender to go into a back room or an upstairs parlor or downstairs. It was not wide open. But the Beverly [00:08:00] Hills Club was the first one that, I mean, you could just walk right in the door. Everyone knew it was there, everyone knew it was illegal. There were two state governors that were there for opening night for the illegal gambling casino. But, chandeliers. I mean, it was, it was the place to be back then. And I mean, we’re talking high notch entertainment. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Marilyn Monroe, the Andrews sisters. I mean, those were people that were frequent stars on the showroom floor there back in the back in the day. Yeah. Right. If you do a little research on Mo, you find out that he takes all of his illegal money that he got from Northern Kentucky and. And went out there and, and you’re right. Became you know, the, the great citizen donating money to, I think he opened a hospital and, and whatever else. I don’t know. Yeah. But I mean, he, you know, they built a shrine for him out there, I suppose. Yeah. He’s a, he’s a hell of a story just to himself, and I’ve never really looked, looked into that story in great depth, but I [00:09:00] should do that. He’s a hell of a story himself. But back to the Beverly Hills Club and, and now, who was a clientele, were they coming mainly out of. Cleveland, I guess, but also Chicago and Kansas City and all, all around the Midwest. A little bit like hot Springs. It reminds me of Hot Springs. Yeah, mostly not really good entertainment. Were, were right around this area. They did bring quite a bit down from Cleveland and Indianapolis. We’re about an hour and a half away from there. Columbus Lexington, Kentucky. So the Cincinnati area, it was a strong hub. They had a very successful airport by that time, so people could fly in. But most of the clientele were right in the greater Cincinnati area. Okay. But interesting. I mean, it was the only place like this in the, the whole, well, you would have to go to Chicago or New York to see anything like this. By the fifties, they had a little bit of stuff like this going on in hot springs, a little higher class entertainment. But this was the big one from what I’ve read about it, it was best place and it was [00:10:00] just other reasoning for that as well. Some of the, most of the clubs down in the city of Newport were kind of shady. Based on my research you couldn’t win at, at any of the games if you were lucky enough. They were all fixed. Really, if you were lucky, lucky enough to win some money, soon as you got outside, you’d get roughed up and robbed by, you know, one of the, one of the henchmen of the club. Of course, you couldn’t go to the police. They were being paid off. But at the Beverly Hills Club the games were not fixed. You could actually win some money. The food was, was top-notch. The, like I said, the entertainment, you didn’t have this kind of entertainment down in Newport. So it was a different clientele. It was coat and tie and fancy dresses or you weren’t, were not gonna get in. Mm. Interesting. Yeah, I know Sam Connor tried to start something called the Vene Villa, I believe was the name of it. That was just exactly what you’re describing. Then he had a big Quonset hu out back for the gambling. So this is a kind of a common thing around the United States is Yeah, having that club with high-end dining [00:11:00] and gambling somewhere connected to it, and the mob guys all got into it. I had an expert on here once that said. These guys that that started Vegas Delits and those other three guys you’ve mentioned which I never remember their names, but other people who went out to run the casinos at Vegas when it first got started, they all. Earned their chops or they learned the game and how to run the gaming business and this kind of a club like this. And that was the next step out Up was absolutely out in Las Vegas. So this was really the beginning of Las Vegas as we come to know it. Yeah, it was absolutely something like this. Interesting. So now we go on up into the fifties and sixties when Mo de sold out, I believe. And he, yeah, he sold out and, by the old late fifties we had some, some old we’ll call ’em groups of do-gooders that wanted to move in and, and get all the prostitution and the gambling and, and everything out of Newport. Yeah. We [00:12:00] locally here, call it the Ratterman fiasco. There was a, George Derman was well known in the area played football. Decided he was gonna run for office in Newport and he vowed that he could not be bribed by the, the mafia. And I mean, he would’ve, he certainly was going to win. But Charles Lester, who was the mob’s attorney, and Tito Zi, who was I guess wanted to take over when Mo and everyone was, was outta here, he wanted to be the next big kingpin. Called Ratterman with the plan. They, they said, oh, we’re, we’re gonna come clean. We wanna meet with you and have dinner, and we’ll talk about how we can, we can straighten this stuff out and get all the, this, this crime and corruption out of Newport. And, and I guess he, maybe he fell for it, but of course he showed up and they had drugged his drink. And he wakes up in bed with one of the known prostitute call girls or showgirls from one of the clubs. And of course, the police just happened to be there with cameras. Yeah. So he’s all over the morning paper all over. [00:13:00] Yeah. Over the country. You know, he said, he had been drugged. And of course the simple drug test proved that. So the, the mob didn’t work out very well. Several people were arrested, including police officers and judges. Most of those were acquitted. There wasn’t enough, wasn’t enough evidence to convict them, but, but several of the mobsters went. It went to prison for that. But that really turned around Newport. I think at that time a lot of people thought that the gambling left completely and then some of the other corruption, but of course it didn’t. The New York syndicate the Dedo family moved into the area as well. They were specializing at that time in the adult theaters and peep shows and things of that nature. Newport was overrun with those. I mean, there were several in town that you could visit there. The Cinemax would’ve been the most popular, the longest living one. But that’s sort of where the turnaround came. And 1969 Richard Schilling [00:14:00] Sr. Purchased the old Beverly Hills Club for 400,000. He had already owned. The lookout house which was another high end show place restaurant. No gambling at that time when he bought it, but he was very successful in that and decided to buy the Beverly Hills. He renamed it the Beverly Hills Sub Club two, $2 million in renovations. Mm-hmm. But the mob still didn’t give up. They, propositioned him the same way as it’s always been. You know, we’re gonna buy the club. We’ll keep you on as manager. He said, no. In June 21st, 1970 it burned the ground. The renovations hadn’t been done yet. It’s funny, the, the electric had been turned off during this renovation time. But the local authorities although they called it arson the state police said that the fire was the cause was undeterminable. Well, they found large gasoline cans in the rubble. Yeah. There were four separate fires in separate, in separate areas of the [00:15:00] club. But the state police Yeah, said they couldn’t figure that out. So he was basically threatened to not open the club again, but he did. It became known as the showplace of the nation. But in the seventies the, the mob was still here. I researched 45 different car bombings. There were 60 unsolved murders, 40 arson or suspicious fires in nightclubs. They were still here and they were still doing the same thing that they had always been doing, and that is running these successful clubs and taking all the profits. Interesting. That brings us up to May 28th, 1977. Wow. So May 28th, 1977, the club’s still going, and it’s a big show that night. Who was the headliner that night? That was John Davidson. Ah blue-eyed, blonde-haired singer. All the women wanted to go see. Yeah. He, he was the headliner. He had been there the night before. He was there for two nights. But he packed the place. [00:16:00] So they were, they were still getting in. They continued to get in national entertainment in little Oh, absolutely. Northern Kentucky, you know, out in the boonies like that, usually don’t get that kind of entertainment. We’re lucky to get it here in Kansas City anymore, it seemed like. Yeah, they I, I don’t have a list in my head right now, but yeah, they. Certainly top notch the, the comedians that you would see on tv, the singers Uhhuh movie stars. John Davison at that time was the, not only good singer, he was host of a, a couple of different TV shows. Oh yeah. He was that’s incredible. I think was the name of the, the, the one show that he was hosting. Mm-hmm. But yeah, they were packing ’em in every, every weekend for sure. But, what happened? What happened that night at that time? Go ahead. What happened that night then? Well, the we know now that there were, were rumors before the night that something might happen. But that particular morning one of the bus boys showed up and, and found people working [00:17:00] on ladders. In one of the, the showrooms, the smallest showroom called the Zebra Room. He was supposed to be setting up tables and chairs in there. He asked them what they were doing. They said they were working on the air conditioning, so he went and set up chairs in some other room. But came back and they were still working on that. They basically yelled at him and he, but he finally got in there, was able to set some things up for a small wedding reception that would be going on there. There were gonna be about 2,500 people in the building that night, including staff. There were several things going on. There was a dinner party for some doctors and their wives in one area bar mitzvah in another area. There were four different weddings going on that night. The AAA from Dayton, Ohio had come down. There was a senior citizens group from Aston, Kentucky and Huntington, West Virginia, which is about four hours, three, three or four hours away. They brought two Greyhound buses full of people, the place was packed for sure. Yeah. And about oh, I guess it was about 10 minutes till nine that [00:18:00] evening people started complaining that the, the building was hot and they. Didn’t see smoke, didn’t see fire until about nine o’clock when two of the waitresses walked into that zebra room, which was now vacant. That little wedding party had already finished up and left. They saw smoke lingering at the ceiling and immediately told the owners and the fire department was called, and they started evacuating the building right away. What is upsetting is, the later research, there were 12 different people that drove up the driveway that night before, anywhere from six 30 to nine, and saw smoke coming out of the roof of the building and didn’t say anything to anybody. They just thought it was from the, from a chimney or from the kitchen or what have you. But they saw smoke you know, two hours beforehand and no one told the, the club staff or any, anyone obviously would’ve changed things completely. But really fire finally broke outta that room about nine [00:19:00] 15. And it was absolutely a disaster, that’s for sure. What had it been going there above like a drop ceiling or up between the floors up in there and really, you know, spread out above everything. Yeah. What we know now is that the, the fire started in the basement and it was. Traveled up through a void space all the way through the first floor into the ceiling of the second floor. Okay. And started burning down into the walls. So yeah, it started we think shortly after 6:00 PM So it wasn’t until nine a little after nine, that the fire and smoke actually made the, made it itself visible to the club staff and patrons. It had been burning for about three hours inside the walls and ceilings. Wow. So when it burst loose, it burst fast, huh? Oh, it didn’t take long. There were two different retired firefighters that were on the scene there just as guests. And they could [00:20:00] tell how quickly the fire spread through parts of that building that it obviously had been burning for quite some time. When it, it, it. I found that extra oxygen that it needed to mm-hmm. To really take off. And the main room was full, I assume, at this point in time. Yeah. The cabaret room was built to hold a thousand. We think that there was 1051 people in the room. So it was crowded by legal aspects. It wasn’t grossly overcrowded. That’s what is in the history books, that it was grossly overcrowded. Yeah. But it certainly was crowded. There were tables and chairs set up in some of the aisles. It was certainly hard to move around in there. But there was say a busboy that was notified pretty quickly that there was a small fire on the other side of the building. And he decided, he tells me, seems like it took several minutes, but it only took about a minute for him to decide, Hey, do I, do I get up on this stage? [00:21:00] Make an announcement. I’m gonna get fired if there’s not really a fire. He didn’t see a fire, he didn’t see smoke or anything. So, you know, there’s a room full of people that just ordered their drinks. That’s where the, the club makes all their money is with the alcohol. If he clears out this room, yeah, this 16-year-old bus boy is going to get fired. \ But after just, you know, a minute, he, he decides, well, that that’s what I’m gonna do. So he gets on the stage and he says, ladies and gentlemen, I can have your attention. There’s a small fire on the other side of the building. We want you to leave immediately. There’s an exit there. And he points to the left, an exit there to the right. You can also exit through the doors that you came through. And then he jumps from the stage. On stage was the comedy duo of Teeter and McDonald. They ventriloquist comedians. And unfortunately, about one third of the people thought he was part of the show. Oh, for whatever reason, they paid no attention to him whatsoever. They, later told authorities.[00:22:00] Yeah. The, another third of the people didn’t pay any attention to him at all. They had just sat down, they just ordered their drinks, they’re talking with their friends and family. They had no idea that he even jumped up on the stage. Only about one third of that 1000 people immediately gathered their belongings and started exiting the room. Of course they made it out without any complication whatsoever. Mm-hmm. So the fact that 169 people were killed out of that 1000 in that room, and of course there were over a thousand other people in the building. It’s pretty remarkable. But, but still there a lot of lives lost just because they didn’t heed that morning. What, what, what was the total loss of life in that 1 69? Oh, that was, that was the total loss was a 1 69. Okay. And yeah, now you’re, you’ll read in various places that the number 1 65, but that’s inaccurate. It was decided very early after the fire that unborn fetuses would be. Counted in the death toll. I see. The [00:23:00] memorial that we have now here in northern Kentucky has a stone for all the victims. And it, it’s 1 69 is what it should be accurately. Ah, interesting. So what was the aftermath of that? The big investigation was there? Well, did heads roll or what happened that day? Yeah, the aftermath was, was quite interesting. If you were living in this area at that time you were pretty upset at the owners because the, it was, it was determined very quickly that several of the doors had been changed and locked that there was at least a 20 minute delay in notifying the, the authorities about the fire. There was no sprinkler system. The investigation within the first six months determined first of all, that there was, there’s no sprinkler system that was required by law at that point in time. It was not grandfathered into the, the previous construction. The associated press was actually notified at two minutes before nine, and we know that the fire department was called at at [00:24:00] four minutes before nine, so there was no delay in notifying the authorities. The only door that was chained and locked was one that had been remodeled. You couldn’t find it from the inside anyway, and to get to that door, you would’ve had to walk through the fire to get the door so no one died as a result of locked exit doors or anything like that. So it’s interesting, I think that if someone would’ve told a reporter outside that they heard a bomb go off, they would’ve just preprinted that too. They would, there doesn’t seem to be any. True research and determining what to print in the newspaper. At one point it, it said that there were over five times the number of people in the cabaret room that was, should have been in there. Well, we’ve had architects tell us that you, you couldn’t fit 5,000 people in that room if you took out all the chairs and tables. But that’s what they, they printed. It was so, so overcrowded. So, there was a grand jury investigation that was put in because they were actually considering charging having murder [00:25:00] charges, going against the owner for all that he did not do to prevent this. And I think most of the public here was dumbfounded when they determined that there was no lack of communication with the authorities. There was no delay, there was no overcrowding that the, the club staff did a remarkable job getting most of the people out in a timely manner so that, that kind of failed. But, it haunted some of the employees that saw some of the suspicious activity. I only brought up one thing right. As far as those workers Dave Brock was the, the busboy. He went to the owners about six months after the fire and he said, has anyone ever talked to those workers that were in the zebra room? And Mr. Shin said, what? What do you mean? And Dave told ’em, but they, well, they told me they were working on the air conditioning and. Mr. Shilling said, Dave, they, they’ve burned us down. There’s no air conditioning units in the ze room. It’s just duct work. There’s nothing that they would’ve been working on. We got our hands on the [00:26:00] records. There were, there was no maintenance work that was scheduled for that week at all. So that’s, they were, you know, should not two, two minutes. That should not have been there. Yeah. We also heard from another waitress that came early Saturday morning that, that same Saturday morning and she thought it was strange that the, there were four or five people doing detailed cleaning. They were wiping and cleaning the walls of the long hallway that goes from the front of the room from the front of the building down to the cabaret room, the main showroom. She said they don’t usually do detailed cleaning on a Saturday morning. They would do that on a, on a weekday morning. Well, we now know that they were likely wiping some type of et cetera on those walls because one of the firefighters that was there just as a patron was in that hallway when the fire broke out of the small zebra room. He told authorities at that time, there’s no way that that fire raced down that hallway the way it [00:27:00] did unless it had been accelerated. He was a 20 year fire captain. He knew what he was talking about. They didn’t investigate that whatsoever. The club receptionist told authorities that that very morning there was an explosion down in the basement. The same workers that had been there all week long saying that they were working on the electric and the air conditioning. Again, there was no work scheduled according to the owners that week. We now believe that the fire was set. We have certain evidence that shows that the basement. Although the governor and the immediate investigation said that the basement wasn’t damaged or touched by fire, we have photographs of fire, patterns in the basement. We can see where there was an explosion in one of the air conditioning units that we feel had been set with timers. The fire marshals division, by the way. The governor of Kentucky at that time sent them back to Frankfurt, said that they were not needed. I’ll repeat that. The fire [00:28:00] marshals division that came up to investigate the governor sent them back to Frankfurt and said that the state police would handle the investigation. Before they were sent back to Frankfurt, they in their report said that the basement would be their, their main area of focus. Mm-hmm. They had already found timers in the rubble. But some were set on am and some were set on pm it’s our belief that the fire was set and it was supposed to start at six o’clock Sunday morning. Yeah. That’s how they always do it. Every bar fire we’ve ever had. Four o’clock, five o’clock Sunday morning. Same here Newport I mentioned earlier that the, the dozens of, of club fires that we had in Newport, they were always Yeah. Sunday. So that’s interesting. That’s that’s what we think. In my investigation, we even determined. In my opinion, the two people that actually set the fire I named them in the book they were not very good at what they did. Obviously the a m [00:29:00] pm timers. Mm-hmm. But several months after the Beverly Hills fire, they were hired to torch a warehouse in Covington for the insurance money for the owner. And they set the fire and went outside. Stood around to, to watch and watch and watch, and nothing happened. So one of ’em went over and opened the front door and the place exploded. And they found their bodies down the street. But they just were not very good at what they did. Man. Talk about We don’t think license. We thought there was, there’s, there’s no way that the the mob intended to kill 169 people. They, we, we feel it was, it was most likely set to go off Sunday morning. Interesting. Well, I’ll tell you what, Bob Webster, this has been great. That’s a heck of a story, guys. There’s a lot more juicy details in that book. I highly recommend you get it. Inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club, the untold story behind Kentucky’s worst tragedy happened in May 28th, 1977, practically on the banks of the Ohio River in an area that is long noted for [00:30:00] lawlessness all along that Ohio River on the Southern Bank. It’s a long been noted for lawlessness and mob activity and, and all other kinds of criminal activity. So Bob, I really appreciate you coming on the show and telling the guys all about your book. Absolutely. Now, Bob, you got a website, don’t you? What’s your website? Website is very, very simple. My name is Bob and I’m an author. The website is bob the author.com. Alright, great guys. I’ll have a link to that website down below. You can see all about Bob and a lot more about the fire and his research and other books that he’s got.

Stone Wallace’s obsession with the mob began at age seven with a library book on the 1920s. It lit a fire that would eventually lead Wallace to explore the violent glamour of the underworld in both fiction and nonfiction.

Stone Wallace shares how he created the fictional studio boss Sam Bast, modeled after several real-life moguls, and how mob-connected actors like George Raft blurred the lines between movie star and made man. From behind-the-scenes extortion to real-life gangland enforcers like Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, this episode connects the dots between celluloid dreams and street-level muscle.

Stone Wallace’s Amazon author page.

]]> In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with writer and mob historian Stone Wallace—a man whose path has crossed acting, broadcasting, boxing, and a lifelong fascination with organized crime. The focus of today’s conversation is Stone Wallace’s latest book, Hollywood and the Chicago Boys, which uncovers how the Chicago Outfit quietly moved in on Hollywood in the 1930s. With Prohibition fading, figures like Frank Nitti and Tony Accardo shifted their sights to new rackets in film unions, projection booths, and studio lots.

Stone Wallace’s obsession with the mob began at age seven with a library book on the 1920s. It lit a fire that would eventually lead Wallace to explore the violent glamour of the underworld in both fiction and nonfiction.

Stone Wallace shares how he created the fictional studio boss Sam Bast, modeled after several real-life moguls, and how mob-connected actors like George Raft blurred the lines between movie star and made man. From behind-the-scenes extortion to real-life gangland enforcers like Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, this episode connects the dots between celluloid dreams and street-level muscle.

Stone Wallace’s Amazon author page.

]]> 0:28:23 false Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with writer and mob historian Stone Wallace—a man whose path has crossed acting, broadcasting, boxing, and a lifelong fascination with organized crime. In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with writer and mob historian Stone Wallace—a man whose path has crossed acting, broadcasting, boxing, and a lifelong fascination with organized crime. The focus of today’s conversation is Stone Wallace’s latest book, Hollywood and the Chicago Boys, which uncovers how the Chicago Outfit quietly moved in on Hollywood in the 1930s. With Prohibition fading, figures like Frank Nitti and Tony Accardo shifted their sights to new rackets in film unions, projection booths, and studio lots. Stone Wallace's obsession with the mob began at age seven with a library book on the 1920s. It lit a fire that would eventually lead Wallace to explore the violent glamour of the underworld in both fiction and nonfiction. Stone Wallace shares how he created the fictional studio boss Sam Bast, modeled after several real-life moguls, and how mob-connected actors like George Raft blurred the lines between movie star and made man. From behind-the-scenes extortion to real-life gangland enforcers like Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, this episode connects the dots between celluloid dreams and street-level muscle. Stone Wallace's Amazon author page. Highlights: Why Frank Nitti saw Hollywood as the Outfit’s next goldmine The real mob ties of actor George Raft The creation of Sam Bast, a fictional composite of Hollywood studio heads Extortion in the projectionist booths and labor unions Mobster myths vs. brutal realities—how fiction reflects fact Featured Book: Hollywood and the Chicago Boys by Stone Wallace — a hardboiled blend of true crime and noir fiction Notable Names Discussed: Frank Nitti, Tony Accardo, George Raft, Jack McGurn, Sam Giancana Quote of the Episode: “Hollywood wasn’t just glitz and cameras. It was a new racket—and the Outfit wanted in.” 0:02 Introduction to the Underworld 1:25 Early Fascination with the Mob 2:29 Hollywood and the Chicago Boys 5:34 The Allure of George Raft 7:22 Researching the Mob's Hollywood Infiltration 12:05 The Role of Unions in the Mob 14:51 Tony Accardo: The Complex Character 17:05 The Impact of the Mob on Society 23:04 Writing Westerns and a Modern Sheriff 25:43 Upcoming Films and Future Projects Subscribe to Gangland Wire wherever you get your podcasts, and join us each week as we uncover the stories buried beneath the headlines—and the bodies. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to "buy me a cup of coffee" To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. https://blubrry.com/kc_crime/147540256/tommy-greco-genovese-enforcer/ https://ganglandwire.com/?p=10799 Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Mon, 11 Aug 2025 05:00:15 -0400 In this episode, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence detective, Gary Jenkins, interviews Gary Clemente, who offers profound insights drawn from his father’s legacy as a pioneering FBI agent in the fight against organized crime. Gary recounts his father’s pivotal role during the 1957 Appalachian mob conclave, detailing his unique rapport with notorious figures like Carlo Gambino and the psychological dynamics of engaging with mobsters such as Tommy Greco. We explore the complexities of mob family structures across the U.S. and how Peter Clemente’s fluency in Sicilian and understanding of criminal culture enriched FBI operations. Gary shares stories from his father’s extensive writings, promising future revelations about their historical battle against organized crime and the impact of these narratives on American history. 0:07 Introduction to Gary Clemente 2:45 Peter Clemente’s Unique FBI Career 8:32 Encounter with Tommy Greco 12:50 The Threats of the Mafia 17:04 Respect Among Mobsters 24:00 The Mafia’s Structure and Connections 29:48 Stolen Goods and Local Crime 32:47 Nicola Gentile’s Memoirs 35:13 Hoover and the FBI’s Golden Era

Get Gary Clement’s book: Untold Mafia Tales From the FBI’s Top Hoodlum Squad

Subscribe to Gangland Wire wherever you get your podcasts, and join us each week as we uncover the stories buried beneath the headlines—and the bodies.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

Transcript [0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland [0:07]Introduction to Gary Clemente [0:02]Wire. I have a guest who has been on before, Gary Clemente. Now, Gary Clemente’s dad was Peter Clemente, and he was one of the first members of the Top Hoodlum Squad in New York City and the first Sicilian FBI agent, I believe, that was assigned to the FBI anyhow. So, Gary, welcome. Thank you for having me back, Gary. Appreciate it. Long time no see. Yeah, really. Now, we talked about his investigation of Carlo Gambino before, and he was all over Carlo Gambino, and the Gambino squad even went down to Florida and ran some wires on him or hidden microphone down in Florida. Done. It was a pretty interesting story. So tell the guys a little bit, remind us a little bit about your father and what he was so unusual in that way. He was from Sicily, I believe, and spoke Sicilian, but was also attached to the Top Hoodlum Squad. So tell us about him. Exactly. Well, again, thanks for having me on, Gary. It’s an honor to be on your program. You You’ve got a lot of great information. You’ve got a lot of mob guys on there. You’re killing it on this program. No pun intended. Thank you. We like to kill it. [1:24]Kill it, but not really kill it. Yeah, really. I can’t do the crime. I can’t do the time. You know what Beretta said. If you can’t do the crime, don’t do the time. Well, I can’t do the time, so I don’t really physically kill it. But anyhow, thank you. Well, my pop was Peter C. Clemente, and he was a special agent with the FBI from 1950 to 1976. And in the early part of his career, he was doing security background checks to see if people were trying to get positions in the federal government that were very sensitive and whether they were members of the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party. So then 1957 comes around and they have the Appalachian mob conclave with all the top mobsters that were there that got together. Many of the big shots were there. Gambino was there, Genovese, Profaci, all the big shots were there. There were about 60 or so of them. And when that happened, when that got revealed, my father heard about it. The FBI started to put together a top hoodlum program. And every city would have its own top hoodlum squad. My father was in the New York office at that time. He wanted to be part of the New York. [2:45]Peter Clemente’s Unique FBI Career [2:46]Top hoodlum squad so he put him for transfer into that squad because he said look i speak sicilian i wasn’t born in sicily my parents were born there my grandparents were born there but i speak the language and i could deal with these people well i was very attractive to the bureau at that time because they did not have that many sicilian speaking yeah fbi agents so he became a part of the top of the squad, and proceeded to investigate all of these mobsters. Some of the first things he did was he did the first ever summary reports about people like Carlo Gambino and even Meyer Lansky. Meyer Lansky was not a part of the mafia, technically speaking, but he was a big associate. He helped to make a lot of money for them. So he did the first government summaries for them. Eventually, my father became the first one ever to do a face-to-face interview with Carlo Gambino on the streets of Brooklyn, New York. [3:49]Spoke with him face-to-face because he wanted to hear his voice, wanted to get the tenor and spirit of his voice. If they ever wiretapped him, my father would be able to identify his voice as the culprit, the one behind the crimes possibly being committed. After that in 1957 in 1962 my father became part of a wiretapping event that was the first ever time that carlo gambino had ever been wiretapped and this was a pretty monumental at the golden gate hotel slash motel in miami beach florida now picture this on one side of the room is Carlo Gambino in his suite, along with his wife Kate. [4:35]And people like Tommy Palmer, who was really known as Tommy Greco, and Jimmy Palmisano. Two of his lieutenants that used to come and visit him in that suite. For six weeks, he was there. Now, on the other side of that wall, that suite was none other than somebody with a white reel-to-reel a tape recorder along with a partner listening in on the conversations and, of Gambino through the wiretap that they put in the A block. And Gambino’s man happened to be my father along with his partner, listening to his conversations and recording all of that. [5:18]And as I mentioned, Tommy Greco, a.k.a. Tommy Palmer, was one of the trusted lieutenants that Gambino used to consort with at that suite at that time. and my father used to listen in on those conversations. [5:37]Yeah, this Tommy Greco or Tommy Palmer, your father, he must have been a guy that was on the streets. He got out of his car, as we say. We used to have guys, some of them just stayed in their car. Some guys would get out in their cars and get on the streets and talk to these people and get close to them. And your dad must have been one of those guys because he had a little run-in with Tommy Greco. [6:00]Tommy Greco became the only mobster that ever threatened uh peter clemente to his face and so you want to talk about that a little bit you got a whole chapter in your book here uh untold mafia tales from the fbi top hoodlum squad you got a whole chapter on old tommy palmer and this situation tommy palmer guys you may or may not know him he’s not exactly a household name and in the mob business but he was a he had been under lucky Luciano prior to ended up working under, uh, Carlo Gambino. And he was, uh, he was an old school guy that went way back to the Lonzas. He, he operated out of the Lonza restaurant, may have heard of Sox Lonza. He was in that family. Sox Lonza was a guy that ran the Fulton street fish market for the mob. And he was also the guy that, uh, the, uh, Navy went to when Lucky Luciano said he’d get people to help the Navy during World War II. These Lonzas, they were real instrumental in giving information about any possible saboteurs or Nazi spies during World War II. [7:10]Tommy Palmer, Tommy Greco, he is a guy that was a witness to a lot of history back in those days. Tell us about Tommy Palmer and your father. Well, Tommy was a trusted lieutenant, as I said, with Gambino, and he was one of the individuals that visited a lot. With Gambino when he was at the Golden Gate Motel and the wiretaps were on. I don’t believe my father ever told Tommy that he was on the other side of the wall wiretapping him and was privy to his conversation with Gambino. I don’t believe that my father ever said that to him. He never told me whether he did or not. I don’t think that he did. [7:54]But years later, after my father was transferred from the New York FBI office down to the Miami office. He was still investigating organized crime as part of the Six Squad, they called it. And my father used to drive by Tommy’s place at the Taramina Cooperative Apartments in the Hallandale, Hollywood area to visit in on him to see what he’s up to, to see if he’s dead or alive. Yeah. [8:32]Encounter with Tommy Greco [8:27]Because you didn’t know half the time. Somebody could just think he’s up and disappear. And if he’s one of your subjects, you need to keep up on all of this. So every once in a while, he would visit Tommy, but not in a very social way. Tommy never liked it. He was always bothered by it, very annoyed by it. When my father would come by and see me, you probably know that too, Gary. You investigated the people. You would visit them, keep up on them. They didn’t want to see you. They weren’t very happy about it. [8:57]So one day my father went to see him knocks on his door Tommy opens it up Tommy’s upset about this and he winds up pointing a finger, You know, my father like this. And he was really, and then he shook his head. And he said, these are the words he said that my father wrote down. He said, Clemente, if I’m the bad guy they say I am, did you ever stop to think I might get so pissed off at you that I might do to you what I’m supposed to have done to others? I’m older than you, and I’m sick, and I could croak any day now. I have less to lose. [9:43]Well, that is not a very nice thing to say to somebody. They’re very socially. My father knew that that was a veiled threat. My father studied his face to see how serious he was. He said he didn’t blink. He didn’t turn away his eyes at all. He was serious. My father knew that he had to come back at him. He says, he told Tommy, he says, Tommy, the thought came to my mind that you and some of your Amici friends might be so foolish. Because I know Carlo Gambino told his guys that it was slow season on FBI agents. Anyone who hits an agent would get whacked. Carlo even said it would start a war with the FBI that Costa Nostra was sure to lose. Yeah. So my father told him, he said, look, Tommy, you’ve got to remember that. [10:45]During the war, while you guys were stealing meat and gas ration coupons, people my age and the other agents that eventually became agents, we were overseas killing enemy soldiers wholesale while you were doing this selfishly on your own. And you think that you’ve got me reined in by the laws? You can’t rely on getting people by hitting agents because I don’t fit the FBI mold 100%. I’m Sicilian, Tommy, like you on both sides. Oh, man. And my mother, he said, my mother told me when she learned I was investigating USOBs, If anything happened to me, she wouldn’t stop with the guy who did it, but would kill the products of his seed. All of them. Old school, man. That’s the Sicilian in her talking. That’s my grandmother talking. And she’s an original gangster. That’s what you call the original OG. OG, yes. Yeah, that’s not bad. That is a vendetta of vendettas there when your grandma says that. [12:04]My grandmother, my grandmother, my father’s mother, was not part of the mafia in any way. They were honest, God-fearing people. They were subject to the crimes of the so-called men of dishonor. They call themselves men of honor, but they were really men of dishonor. So my father’s family, they were honest people. So my father told him, he says, look, I’m not counting on my mother to do what I can do myself, but I’ve got to take what you’re saying and… As a veiled threat. And I have to think about taking a preemptive strike at you first. My motto is shoot first and ask questions later. Wow. [12:50]The Threats of the Mafia [12:50]So Gary, you want to know what he said after that? [12:55]Tommy says, if you have any intention of killing me, you had better do it here and now. Because if I leave here convinced that you mean to have me killed, I will look for the soonest opportunity to put your lights out. [13:12]Now, why did he say that? He said that because the FBI, Hoover, the Bureau taught their agents that you must, if you get yourself into a situation like this, you must dominate the situation. You must get a handle on it. You must not think that you’re weaker than they are. Because if they believe that, they will smother you. And I think you understand that, Gary. You even get to get a lot of people like that yourself. That’s the streets, man. That is the streets. Whether you’re a uniformed policeman out there or a detective or whatever, that’s the streets. And once they sense any kind of weakness, sometimes they’ll take kindness for weakness. And once they sense any kind of weakness, they will not stop. They will not stop until they dominate and they push you clear aside so you got to come back even if it’s pure bluff even if you’re getting you know you’re in the middle of a crowd or something and you’re going to get hurt bad before any help gets there you cannot back down you’ve got to keep it up and keep it going so that’s the only thing I respect is power, Exactly, exactly. Now, these mafia guys of that era. [14:28]Gary, you know that all these guys, in order to get made as a mobster for the FBI, you had to kill somebody after orders. That was part of the if you want to call it an initiation yeah you had to that’s that’s really the way morally speaking that you bring somebody down to your your immoral level so that you’re all in the same cesspool together and you can’t really can’t really say well you i’m better than you are because i did not kill anybody well you did so tommy was one of these people and and many Many of these people have killed more than one individual. They’ve killed many. I don’t know how many of the Tommy killed, but he certainly made his bones by killing someone to become a part of the mafia. And my father understood that. [15:19]So the other thing about my dad that was really great, he was a tough agent, but he was fair. And he would talk to these guys by giving them respect, not talking down to them. Because Italians, in general, we understand respect. If you show me respect, I’ll show you respect. Even whether it’s mobsters or people in the mafia. Give me respect, I’ll show you respect. That’s what my father did. Now, there were other agents that were not of Sicilian descent who were Anglicized, but they didn’t quite understand this. And they felt that they needed to talk down to these people in order to assert themselves. But my father completely understood that. So that’s why he was able to speak with Gambino the way they did on the street for a while. Now, I will tell you that after my father said all that. [16:23]This is what Tommy said in return to after what my father said to him, I will come after you. So Tommy said, look, your mother sounds like my mother. God rest her soul. She used similar words when I was having a problem with a guy, a partner of mine. I didn’t say I was going to do anything to you. I said, suppose. Suppose is pure speculation. Hey, look, I like you, Clement. Even though you’re a pest and you cramped my style around here, it was no different with you in New York when I knew you back then. No, I take that back. You were worse. [17:04]Respect Among Mobsters [17:05]But do you think you you think i like you coming around on me and seeing all my neighbors talk you know talk having me talk to you look i’m not a young punk anymore you know i’m just i’m just a gambler i’m not here to bother anybody just look let’s both back off the call of truce okay. [17:29]Yeah he backed him down but he let him save face too he backed him down but he let him save face, which is important it’s really important he gave he gave him respect yeah he gave him respect now no why did he why so my father says look i will i was i will stand down i would tell my troops to stand out but we’re not going to stack our guns now you have to you have to understand. [17:59]Another reason why my father came down so hard on him is because you don’t know individually what these people are thinking sure gambino may have told all of them if you whack an fbi agent you’re going to get whacked yourself yeah that may be but a lot of these people these are psychopaths killers and thieves okay they’re not exactly normal individuals they could have a screw noose or two and you say something to them or you visit them at the wrong time and they they snap and they put out a contract on you yeah or they they may take out a weapon themselves but more likely they’ll put a put a put a contract out on you and campino even in his later years he was subject to doing that. He had a nephew of his that had been kidnapped and murdered, And he found the individual that did that, put out a contract on this particular person and have them whacked. Oh, yeah. I remember that deal. That was Gotti took. That’s how Gotti made his bones. That’s where Gotti made his was a guy named McBratney. I think John McBratney was an Irish guy that was kidnapping these Italian gangsters and holding them for ransom. and they killed Gambino’s nephew and Gotti’s the one that did that, him and that Angelo Ruggiano. [19:27]That’s true. That’s very true. Now, there’s another reason, Garrett, why Greco, Tommy Palmer, had done this. My father said, well, maybe he’s getting older now. He’s sick. He says, I told him. He says, look, you need to take care of your sugar diabetes, get your blood pressure in there and your blood worked up. You know, don’t, I don’t want you to, you know, we may not like each other, but that doesn’t mean I wish death on you. So we told him to take care of himself. And he figured the reason why maybe he spouted off like he did, because my father had visited him many times before then. This wasn’t the first time. Maybe it’s because he’s getting old, he’s getting depressed, and this is his last shootout, so to speak. [20:18]Yeah, really, it could be. It’s interesting. You know, those mob. You can tell the other guys, yeah, this agent came by and I popped off him. I can’t get the hell out of here. I’m going to do something. I’m going to pop him, you know, and he ran off. You know, that’d be a nice story for him. You know, these mob threats are really interesting. I learned this back when I was a young policeman. [20:39]I overheard a mob guy talking to another guy. And, and he was, it was just kind of like normal conversation. [20:48]So, you know, I kind of remember as much of it, as much of it as I could. I knew that he, the Bob guy wanted something out of this guy and, and he was, he was not a mob. The other guy was not a mob guy. He was a peckerwood as they call us here in Kansas City. He makes not Italian as a peckerwood. So I go back and I, and I talked to kind of the career main FBI agent. And I tell him, I relate this conversation. And he said, well, now tell me exactly what he said. He said, because these guys, they won’t give you, they won’t do a direct threat. It’s all in how they say things many times rather than what they say. And so I had to repeat it exactly and try to give him some impression of how it was said, because that’s what they’ll do. They’ll, uh, there’s a, yeah, I got a wiretap. That way you can’t come back with their exact words on them. It’s this indirect stuff. I got a wiretap where this guy, uh, Joey Lombardo was talking to this Morris Schenker who’s a lawyer from St. Louis, but he was, he was Hoffa’s lawyer and, and he owed, they felt like he owed a guy named Alan Dorfman up in Chicago, who was Chicago’s mob guy in the teamsters owed him a kickback on a casino loan. And he, He won’t pay it. And Lombardo gets on the phone, and he says something to the effect of, well, he said, you say you’re 72. [22:16]You know, he said, you know, you want to see 73, don’t you? And then he later said, you know, he said, what are you going to do? You could put one guy in jail. You know, me, you could put me in jail. You could put one guy, but I’m just one guy. And then just dropped it at that, you know. And, you know, what he was saying was, you know, if you don’t pay this loan, you ain’t living to 73. and if you want to, you know, you can go complain about it, but maybe you can put me in jail, but there’s a whole lot more guys behind me. But he didn’t have to say all that. He just had to say, you know, I’m one guy. You can put me in jail. Go ahead and just stop there. It’s just, it’s amazing how they couch these things where you can’t say directly that they’re threatening to kill you, but you know what they mean. [23:00]Exactly. Well, that’s why they have all these buffers, you know, Gambino and the rest of the Profaci, all these bosses, they had all these buffers. And everything had to be approved. You could just go out willy-nilly and kill somebody just because you felt like it. If you were a street soldate, a soldier, you couldn’t just kill somebody. You had to get permission. And if you didn’t get permission and you killed somebody, they would kill you. Because, look, back then they wanted to keep things quiet as much as they could. They didn’t want a lot of press. They didn’t want a lot of publicity. And Gotti was the antithesis of all of that. He was the one who ruined everything for them because he was too out in the open. He wasn’t like Gambino who died peacefully in his bed at the age of 76 without creating a lot of ruckus. So that’s an important part of how the mafia operated. [24:00]The Mafia’s Structure and Connections [24:01]They dealt, as you know, Gary, you know, the mafia would not have been as successful as they were if they did not have the cooperation from a lot of local groups. [24:12]Uh, police forces. Yeah. And I’m sure you, uh, you, you understand that full, full well too, but listen, I’ve got to ask you a question. You know, every, um, uh, the, the, the mob will call themselves in code. They’ll call themselves the organization or they’ll call themselves the outfit or they’ll call themselves Alex King. And it depends on the area. In Kansas City, what did the mob call themselves? Did they call themselves the outfit or the organization? What did they call themselves? You know, it’s kind of a little known thing. They called themselves the clique. [24:47]And people that were close around them called them the clique. And I learned this. I was talking to an old guy who was an associate, long-time associate. And he was talking about how he, he, he wanted to start the first Taco Bell franchise in Kansas City. He said, man, he said, if I’d have got the money for that, he said, I would have made a fortune, but I couldn’t get it. I couldn’t get anybody to loan me any money. And he said, I even went to the click and they wouldn’t loan me any money. And I said, the click, he said, you know, you know, the guys, you know, you know what I mean? I said, oh, okay. So since then, I’ve seen that in an old, uh, I think it was an old, uh, it was a transcript of an old hidden microphone. One of those ones that the bureau used to put in without any kind of, uh, of, uh, court orders or anything, you know, like they did back in the fifties and sixties. And they were talking about the click. So, but it never really gained any traction outside the mob, but within the mob, they were the click and they sometimes, uh, the FBI started calling the outfit here. So I heard that a lot. And I think it’s because they were so close to Chicago, but within themselves, it was a click. Really? Interesting. Now, I do not recall how many. [26:03]How many guys you had in the in the kansas city family how many did they have there never was a lot probably uh you know let’s go on up into the 60s and 70s there was probably 10 to 15. [26:18]Probably 12 i’m talking of the 12 mate actual maid guys and they were older guys that came out of the 30 40s and 50s that were still alive and and so that that was all there was they had a lot associates they had a lot of crews out there working you know like one guy willie camisano he had he had several crews out there working of professional thieves that if they needed something done and they brought everything to his fences and he and he and he had several fences around you like had one guy did nothing but uh record albums had had one guy that did nothing but uh like stuff you would steal out of a store like a pharmacy or a grocery store or something that you know, the small items that were high dollar razor blades and film and all that kind of stuff. And there’s another guy that dealt in clothes only. And so that’s kind of how it was broken down. Right. Right. Well, it’s not surprising that you have maybe, uh, maybe less than a couple of dozen, because when you, when you think about it, Carlo Gambino was the most powerful mob boss, not just in the United States, but in the entire world. [27:24]And he had over 200 individuals. And you said, you said, well, 200, that doesn’t sound like a lot. But if you add up, my father estimated himself that if you added up all of the families in the United States that existed, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Kansas City, Buffalo, New Orleans, all of these families, Philadelphia, if you added up all of them, the maid members, if you added up all of the associates, all of the associates that they dealt with, and the people that the associates dealt with directly, you probably had, he estimated, 88,000 individuals across the entire country that were thieving and stealing billions and billions of dollars in the United States at that time when the mafia existed from its golden years of the 50s all the way to the end of the 80s. Yeah. So that was a lot of people. [28:31]Another thing that people don’t realize is, of course, you compare Kansas City to New York. Like we have twelve hundred policemen and they have forty thousand policemen in New York City. So that’s you kind of see the difference in what’s going on between these two cities. But they also had so many other. Connections, you know, that you wouldn’t call them associates. They were not even criminals for the most part. They were just people that everybody knew out in the community that liked them. You know, everybody likes to have something that fell off a truck. Everybody likes to gamble. Everybody likes to drink and things like that. And especially the gambling area and the buying stolen property. And you had all these people out here that then if they could get hold of them, they needed something, you know, they could get something done. I talked about having connections all over the United States as a podcaster here with all you guys that write mob books and everything and other mobsters and policemen. Well, these guys have these spiderwebs of connections of hundreds and hundreds of people that they can be friendly to them and they can get something from or can get some kind of help. So it’s a fascinating, fascinating topic. [29:48]Stolen Goods and Local Crime [29:48]Exactly, exactly. Exactly. Everybody’s touching that pie a little bit. They want a little piece of the edge. [29:57]A shipment of truckload of razor blades. I can go buy some razor blades for about half the price that it cost me down at CBS. I mean, why not? I mean, why would I? Here’s a good story. I was a sergeant over the general assignment unit, they called it. So we had check forgeries and frauds and credit card fraud. And one was a shoplifting squad. We had like a couple of detectives assigned to handle follow-ups on shoplifts. Or if you get a professional shoplift in a shoplifter in that on their second, third conviction, you then file felony charges on them, even if it didn’t rise to the level of money that the property is worth, you can still file felonies on it. So these guys would handle that. One time, this young guy came in, he’s kind of a new detective. He came back into the unit and he said, Sarge, he said, man, he said, there’s this place down the city market and they’ve got perfume, they’ve got razor blades, they’ve got toothpaste, They’ve got all that stuff. It’s half the price I have to pay at the drugstore. And there’s another old-time detective sitting there. We look at each other. And the guy’s name was Cosgrove. Joe Cosgrove said, Vince, do you know anything about that place down there? Well, no, but it’s cheap. [31:20]I said, Vince, don’t go down there anymore. That stuff’s all stolen. It’s all stolen by boosters. and then that guy buys it from them and then sells it. Oh, I never thought about that. I was like, come on, dude. What do you think? It’s one of those places you go down and you want to buy, but you don’t want to know where it came from. Exactly. [31:41]It wasn’t made in China. Yes. That is why it’s so cheap. Hey, Gary, I have to ask you, you know, you’re there in Kansas City. You worked in Kansas City. You’re part of the law enforcement department. Uh background of kansas city were you aware of of the uh one of the one of the original gangsters of the mafia nicola gentile were you aware of him i i’ve read about him yeah well he did he did head up the kansas city uh uh mafia family yeah for a while i believe it was back in the might have been the 20s could have been the 30s but he also they also had him head up uh interim uh the cleveland and detroit families as well too if memory serves me but i know it was definitely kansas city and he talked about that and my father was [32:47]Nicola Gentile’s Memoirs [32:38]the first one ever to do the translation of Nicola Gentile’s memoirs. Ah, interesting. And this was a fascinating story. There’s something else we could talk about for another hour. Yeah. But his memoirs, you don’t write these things down if you’re in the mafia. Yeah, really. [33:02]And he wrote it down. I saw the papers, and my father brought the papers and tape recordings. Yeah. of him to my to his mother to my grandparents who spoke very fluent Sicilian and they helped my father translate the wording of Nicola Gentile exposing the mafia and what they were doing now he was he was the Joe Vellacci of his time before Joe Vellacci ever happened yeah and he did head up the Kansas City, outfit at one time. I guess I didn’t realize that. Did that end up becoming a book or getting printed or anything? Or is that just like in the FBI archives or something? It was released in the news. [33:58]It did get out to the news. I have to look some of that up. You will find a couple of news stories about it and the FBI knowing about all of this. But my dad was the one who translated his memoirs. And I have his, I’m looking around, I’ve got those memoirs with me. My father left those papers behind for me. Oh, interesting. It’s fascinating. He was a guy, if I remember right, this local FBI agent used to work with a lot, Bill Owsey, wrote a book called Open City, and he really deals with, he goes into that in depth. And I remember Gentile, he was a kind of a guy that seemed like they sent around to help organize different families in the early days, and he moved on after the family got organized and he would move on because he didn’t stay in Kansas City. It sounded like he organized Cleveland and that other one. Right, right. You might say he was like the original doge. [35:05]Coming in and getting things organized and run more efficiently. [35:13]Hoover and the FBI’s Golden Era [35:10]Got everything organized, cut the fat in the waste, and then he moved down to a different city. Yeah he was uh and uh after writing these memoirs you think he would get clipped he would get killed he did he did not get killed he wound up uh escaping escaping if you want to call it that leaving for sicily yeah and uh they they uh they never laid a finger on him so that’s that’s very very extraordinary yeah that is that is that’s a heck of a heck of a story there we’ll have to maybe do a show on that i have to i have to look up a little more about him let’s let’s talk about that and we’ll do that in the future the ages of the fbi my father included. [35:52]Had a love-hate relationship with J. Edgar Hoover. He was an amazing individual. He was the general patent of his era. You know, the Blackjack Pershing. People would be these outgoing, off-the-wall personalities, and Hoover was like that. But I’ve got some inside stories about Hoover that people have not heard before that I will be sharing. Okay, good. So stay tuned. All right. Gary Clemente, I look forward to your next book. And guys, you got this book here, Untold Mafia Tales from the FBI Top Hoodlum Squad. [36:43]Peter C. Clemente was one of the first members and the first definitely Sicilian member of the Top Hoodlum Squad. His son, Gary Clemente, we’ve got Gary with us here, wrote this book, and he’s got several more things coming from his father’s writings. And almost like he didn’t really leave a memoir exactly, but he left a memoir in a lot of different writings is what I hear you say. And you’re utilizing that to tell the stories. I’ve got a stack of papers, you know, that high. Oh, by the way, the book is available on Amazon. [37:19]Okay. Guys, I’ll have links to the book down in the show notes, whether you’re on YouTube or the other or not. All right, Gary, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. You’re welcome. Thank you for having me, Gary. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles, so when you’re out on the streets there in your big F-150, Watch out for those little motorcycles when you’re out. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ll help with your drugs and alcohol problem. If you’ve got that problem or gambling, if not, you can go to Anthony Ruggiano. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his website. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. Just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books, I got my movies, they’re all on Amazon, just going. I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks, guys.

From the mobbed-up docks of Bayonne to the smoke-filled offices of Queens Borough Hall, we follow the story of Irwin “The Fat Man” Schiff, a civilian fixer with deep Mafia and political ties. Schiff played both sides—until the feds flipped him. And when Manna found out, it sealed Schiff’s fate.

Bobby Manna’s Rise: From the 1950s onward, Manna ran the Genovese family’s New Jersey rackets—extortion, labor corruption, and construction scams. He was quiet, feared, and always in the background—until FBI bugs in Casella’s Restaurant picked up murder plots against Irwin Schiff and even John Gotti.

Irwin Schiff’s Double Life: A Jewish outsider in an Italian world, Schiff was the ultimate connector—tying mobsters, politicians, and union bosses together in backroom deals and rigged bids. But when he became a government informant, he became a marked man.

The Hit: On August 28, 1987, Schiff was gunned down in a Manhattan restaurant. Three bullets in under ten seconds—“clean, no mistakes,” just like Manna ordered. The killing shocked the city and became the linchpin in a massive RICO case.

The Fall of Manna: In 1989, Manna was convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison. He died a frail old man after being granted compassionate release in 2025—but his downfall was sealed decades earlier, the moment the FBI pressed “record.”

Highlights of the Episode: 0:06 Introduction to Bobby Manna 1:56 The Rise of a Crime Boss 7:06 The Role of Irwin Schiff 12:24 Corruption in Construction 15:42 Fallout from Political Scandals 19:23 Betrayal and Consequences 24:22 The End of an Era Subscribe to Gangland Wire wherever you get your podcasts, and join us each week as we uncover the stories buried beneath the headlines—and the bodies.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

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To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. XXXX

[0:00] Hey guys, welcome back to Gangland Wire. This is your host, Gary Jenkins,

[0:03] retired Kansas City Police Detective Intelligence Unit. And today we’re going to dive into a deadly game of wiretaps, whispers, and betrayals and murder. This is the story of Louis Bobby Manna and really what brought him down. He was the feared consigliere of the Genovese crime family. And the one that was going to bring him down was the murder of Irwin, the fat man Schiff. He was a civilian fixer whose mouth got him killed. Now, from the mobbed-up docks in Bayonne to the backroom deals in Queensborough Hall, we’ll trace how power was wielded in silence until the tapes started talking. And once they did, they were going to bring down one of the Mafia’s most secretive tacticians, that’s Bobby Manna. Bobby Manna once held one of the most powerful positions in the American Mafia in the 70s and 80s. He was the consigliere of the Genovese crime family when Gigante was in charge. He was the third in command. He also ran all the family’s New Jersey operations, I mean, with some brutal efficiency. And he knew all the underworld’s most feared players in the New York City area and that whole area.

[1:13] And his influence stretched not only from the piers of Bayonne and the docks and the shipping industry, but also the political corridors of New York’s construction rackets, which as you guys know, we all know the New York construction industry was the playpen of the mob. It was the bank of the mob. I mean, they made so much money. I think they made more money out of the construction business than they did out of gambling, which is, that’s hard to believe, but they really made a lot of money out of that construction off the labor unions and the contracts and kickbacks and the concrete club, and they got a piece of every window that was sold to the New York City housing projects.

[1:56] And, you know, Bobby Manna, by the time he turns 95, he’s in prison. He’s frail and riddled with disease. And he was finally granted compassionate release from the federal joint just a couple of months ago. He served 36 years of an 80-year sentence. And that 80-year sentence was for murder, conspiracy, and racketeering. Let’s go back a little bit on Bobby Manna. His criminal career stretched back to the 1950s where he started as a longshoreman, of course. and he and his associates were arrested for assaulting a man that was trying to recruit for a rival union. So union racketeering, you know, stealing from the docks, all that kind of stuff that a young mobster in the 50s, you know, this is on the waterfront for real here. I mean, his street violence was his entry in a Genovese family, and you know anything about the Genovese family, one of the most violent families, I think, of all the five families.

[2:48] They ruled a big chunk of New York and all of northern New Jersey there. Of course, he ascended through the ranks the usual ways and, you know, made his bones. And eventually he’ll become the consigliere. He oversaw, as I said before, all the Jersey wing’s activities, loan shark extortion, gambling, murder, theft from their docks. He was born and raised in Hoboken. He became a close associate with Vincent the Chin Gigante early in his mob career. He’ll rent an apartment in Greenwich Village just to be close to Gigante’s headquarters at the Triangle Social Club, and that’s where Gigante lived. That’s the streets that he walked around on acting like he was, you know, crazy. Surveillance reports noted that when Tony Salerno was supposedly the boss, he would be seen talking to Tony Salerno and Gigante together as they walked around the streets. He was a brother-in-law of a Genovese crime family mob associate, Gerald Durazzo.

[3:45] According to the New Jersey District Court, Bobby Manna’s crimes date back to 1952. He actually, he really ran his personal criminal operations out of an Italian restaurant in El Bucan called Casellas. It was at 615 First Street. He was kind of the lead man for the Genovese family. They had discussions with the Gambino crime family on how to divide that area equitably. And later on, you’ll see that he does not like the.

[4:17] Bobby Manna personally did not like the fact that John Gotti killed Paul Castellano without any approval by the commission. But also he’s going to be worried about Gotti and if Gotti’s going to try to move more into New Jersey and take something away from him after they had it all worked out between the Genovese’s and the Gambino’s. Now, one murder that he was responsible for kind of has a really long backstory to it. Gigante will assign this to him. It’ll come out that a guy named Erwin, the fat man Schiff, was probably an informant of the FBI, probably a top-ish line informant. He was a notorious political fixer. So let’s take a look at Schiff’s history with the New York mob and the construction industry all throughout the 50s and 60s and 70s. There’s an early surveillance memo with the NYPD Gambling Task Force.

[5:16] Subject Schiff, seen with known gambler Moe the Lip Seltzer and an Italian mail letter ID to Salvatore DiStefano. He was a Lucchese associate. Conversations indicate involvement in bookmaking, collection work, and payoff routes. Now, you got to see that Schiff, he’s connected to all the families in some manner over his lifespan. His real foothold from the mafia was not through any kind of violence, but through the construction and the garbage industry. because we know the mob also has their tentacles in the mob, I mean, in the garbage industry in New York City area. In the early 1960s, he began working with local trucking and sanitation firms that held contracts with the city and with those unions, and particularly the Teamsters Local 282. These firms were already under the influence of the Genovese-Lucchese families, and Schiff proved himself useful. He facilitated kickbacks. He helped rig bids. He bribed building inspectors, looked the other way. He had these really good contacts in the city bureaucracy, and he had good contact with other Brooklyn Jews from some of these neighborhoods, and these were all invaluable to help the mob get control of municipal construction. It’s a 1968 wiretap in a restaurant in Sheepshead Bay. Lucchese Captain says, you got that union prick off our back? Sheff says, he’s off. He’s got a brother-in-law in the Department of Buildings. He don’t want to make waves.

[6:45] Lucchese Captain says, You’re worth your weight in veal cutlets. You know that? That’s kind of interesting to say to a fat man, but they thought that was pretty funny. Well, the fat man became a trusted civilian go-between for all these mob guys, the kind of guy that could talk to mob captains in the morning, joining board members in the afternoon, and other politicians in the evening.

[7:03] He’ll arrange political contributions and those kinds of things. He arranged no-show jobs for mob associates, mob members. He brokered sweetheart deals with trucking companies and on trucking routes. He made sure that unions stayed a friendly union on major building site. You know, you don’t want an unfriendly union. You want a friendly union. He didn’t carry a gun, but when he walked into a restaurant, the wise guys pulled out a chair for him. He once was asked about carrying a gun. He said, I don’t carry a gun. He said, other guys carry guns for me.

[7:35] By the early 70s, he’d solidified himself as the most important civilian figure within New York City’s web of organized crime, particularly in the construction and waste hauling industries. He could bridge the criminal underworld and municipal bureaucracies, which made him invaluable to the Genovese and Lucchese families and the Gambino family. He was connected to all of them. I never heard that same thing about the Bonanno family. Maybe they didn’t do much in construction. They mainly did narcotics, if I remember right. You know, New York City, it’s a city where construction is as much about having the right connections as it is about engineering and pouring concrete and all the technical things, building the actual techniques of building the building. It’s about connections. He was a skilled fixer. He worked closely with contractors, building officials, union leaders. As I said before, the team was Local 282. All these contracts were highly lucrative. He also made sure that the demolition permits fell in the right hands.

[8:34] There’s a 1971 surveillance memo of the NYPD Organized Crime Task Force. Subject Schiff is seen frequently at meetings with Gambino associates Salvatore DiSavano and Thomas Tommy Bellotti. Their conversations indicate involvement in a variety of illicit business dealings, including bookmaking, loan sharking, and operations tied to the Gambino family. His greatest asset was his vast network. He knew all the mobsters. He knew all the zoning officers, all the city inspectors, all the union reps, all the lawyers, and everybody owed him a favor. And he owed them favors at times. He traded favors. I mean, that’s how it works. There’s a wiretap in 1973 with Teamster’s official. Schiff says, you want your truckers to keep rolling smoothly. We get those right permits and union stays in line, no problem. Teamster’s official said, I don’t know, Irwin. The city’s breathing down our necks. Schiff says, I’m the one who’ll make them blink. I’ve got connections in the mayor’s office. Don’t forget that. He wasn’t flashy. He didn’t flaunt his wealth. He stayed behind the scenes. He used conversations, quiet influence, you know, no violence, as I said before.

[9:41] Wiretap in 1974 Midtown Social Club. A Lucchese soldier says, you think that fat prick shifts legit? The Genovese Capo reply. A Genovese Capo replies, you ain’t one of us. He’s better than half our guys, though. He gets things done. Lucchese. Well, maybe he don’t have the muscle to back it up, the Genovese capo says. He don’t need the muscle. He’s got something more important, connections. Another 1974 wiretap in a private club at Midtown Genovese soldier. That fat bastard Schiff, he ain’t one of us, but he’s like he is. Some capo responds to him. It gets more done than half the button men I know. He’s a fucking bridge. By the late 1970s, he had woven himself into the very fabric of New York construction and waste hauling racket. FBI investigators would later call him a human Rolodex that mobbed up contractors, union reps, building department officials, crep lawyers. He wasn’t flashy. He didn’t travel around. He didn’t flaunt it. He just had a list of favors owed him.

[10:44] 1977 wiretap. Capo, you want to build in Brooklyn? You talk to Irwin. He’ll make it like the fireman never even saw it. My associate says, that fat prick, I thought he was a Jew. Capo says, he is, but he eats with us. 1979. field report, subject shift maintains regular contact with Genovese, Lucchese, and Colombo intermediaries. Subject shift maintains regular contact with Genovese, Lucchese, and Colombo intermediaries. He’s believed to broker illicit municipal contracts, no known violent history, but widely respected inside criminal infrastructure.

[11:20] He never forgot who he was or where the power really sat. He knew whose toes to step on and whose toes not to step on. He knew who to bribe. He knew who not to try to bribe. He was really slick behind the scenes the whole time. But he was also on the FBI’s radar, and they recognized what he was, a fixer, Lincoln mob bosses, and a really valuable guy. They didn’t realize how valuable until he actually flipped. He’s going to flip later on. And, you know, put the IRS after him, and, you know, once they put the IRS on you, you’re screwed. If you’re doing anything wrong at all, if you’re dealing any kind of bunch of kickbacks and bribes and all that, the IRS is going to get you. He’s facing potential federal charges, and he starts quietly, very quietly cooperating with the FBI around 1982.

[12:12] He provided a lot of information on corruption involving Local 282 of the teamsters, all the kickback schemes tied to the construction of the Jacob Javits Center.

[12:21] There’s a lot of bribery through the Queensborough President’s Office. There was a particular president of the Queensborough named Donald Maynes that was totally corrupt at the time, and he had connections all over the city, too. FBI will describe him in 1983 as a credible source, active in target operations. I’ll tell you, this guy lived dangerously. He rubbed elbows with mob captains while he was feeding intel to the government. His influence in the New York construction industry was not just confined to job sites or, you know, like concrete contractors, building contractors. It extended deeply into the corridors of political power. And his most critical relationship in this network was this Donald Maynes, a longtime Queens political boss who had become the Queensborough president.

[13:12] Means was a really skilled operator dealing with local government, and particularly when it came to zoning permits, which are, that’s invaluable. The zoning can just kill you. And projects, development projects, new developments and all that, because they need all kinds of, have all kinds of regulation, need all kinds of help. You know, as borough president, he had significant control over a lot of public land use, gave him a lot of leverage in the city where real estate is power. You know, in New York City, real estate is power. Asked Donald Trump. That was his thing. He wanted to get into Manhattan because that’s where the power is in real estate. Schiff found that Maines was a perfect partner in his world of concrete, steel, and mob-connected unions. He could guarantee labor peace, expedite permits, and move money all while insulating himself with political cover. Of course, their arrangement was mutually beneficial. Maines offered protection from regulators and bureaucratic green lights. Schiff delivered cash, political contributions, control, quiet, no union problems, all those kinds of things. Whenever the developers or union bosses needed something done in Queens, whether it’s a permanent rezoning or a strategic delay, Schiff was a man to call. He could smooth over issues with all the inspectors, handle any troublesome union leaders, make inconvenient delays disappear.

[14:34] It was just a little bit of money passed. All that efficiency just took a little corruption. It was just the cost of doing business.

[14:43] 1977, there was a federal wiretap came in from the Queensborough office that really kind of set it all. They got Irwin Schiff on this telephone. He said, we’ve got a couple of union guys down here who need a favor. They’re looking for permits to start a few new projects on the east side. It’ll grease some wheels and make things smooth. Some other voice said, well, you’re always in the middle, Erwin. You’re sure you’re not going to get burned? Chef says, nah, I got mains backing us. He’ll push it through. Just make sure the inspectors get their cut.

[15:15] It wasn’t idle bragging. Schiff wasn’t really operating back in the shadows. He was totally embedded in the system. And the line between organized crime and municipal government was non-existent, really. It was blurred. This relationship really worked. A project moved. Unions cooperated. And political donations flowed quietly in all directions. By the 1980s, pressure began to mount. Investigative reporters and federal agents were closing in on city hall corruption.

[15:43] 1986, Maine’s world collapse and scandal after scandal with a wave of bribery investigations implicating him in kickback schemes involving parking meters, cable television contracts, and construction contracts. Over the next few weeks, a torrent of corruption allegations poured in. You know, once it’s kind of like once something comes out, then somebody else says, oh, we got this going on over here. And then it just, the blocks just start falling. The core of the scandal really centered around the New York City Parking Violations Bureau. In 1978, Mainz had appointed a guy named Jeffrey Lidenour as deputy director of the Parking Violations Bureau, which steered contracts to companies that paid bribes to both men. So Mainz, Lidenour, and Bronx. By 1982, Mainz, Lidenour, and a Bronx Democratic Party boss named Stanley Friedman held shares in CitySource. That’s a firm that secures city contracts for handheld ticketing devices. You ever seen those handheld ticketing devices? They go around, you get your ticket, they just click your license number in and it prints out a ticket and put it on the windshield wiper and it sends all the computer information into a central computer.

[16:57] They found out Mainz was taking bribes from another company, collecting on tickets, overdue tickets, and that owner became a cooperating witness. And in January 23rd, 1986, there was a columnist named Jimmy Breslin. You may have heard of him. He wrote a famous book called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight about one of the Columbo Wars with Joey Gallo. Anyhow, he published a story that quoted the owner of another company who claimed to have paid Mainz $36,000 in bribes. So investigators expanded their probe into this other company and then looked at cable TV franchises, other zoning variances, and no-bid contracts. Mainz will resign just a month later in February.

[17:39] He’ll kind of withdraw from public view, and I have growing exposure about his longtime alliance with Irwin Schiff. Now, Schiff, if you remember earlier in wiretaps, it reassured people that now I got Mainz backing us. Just make sure the inspectors get their cut. But Mainz is gone. So Schiff’s not, he’s losing a lot of power here too. You know, Mainz, a couple years later, he’s on to tell kind of an interesting story. He’s on his phone with his psychiatrist and his wife’s on the upstairs extension. I don’t know what that’s all about, but I guess that’s how they do it in New York. Said the psychiatrist briefly stepped away. mains couldn’t take it anymore he walked in the kitchen opened up the door pulled out an eight inch long kitchen knife and drove it into his chest his wife and daughter heard them collapse and fall and they ran down into the kitchen and pulled a knife out of his heart called 9-1-1 but he was dead a lot of reports that he shot himself but they believe that he stabbed himself in the heart with a knife i mean go figure i never heard of that before you know after his death i tell you the investigations really took off then. They knew there was a lot more to be uncovered here. They must have had a lot to hide.

[18:51] Schiff, all his protections, political protections gone. Federal prosecutors are paying a lot more closer attention to him. He’s informed of the FBI. This life that he’s been leading starts to crack. Some court filings and press leaks expose his role as an informant. And, of course, the Genovese family is, you know, he’s their guy. You know, Bobby Manna, he’s really close to Irwin Schiff, and, you know, they don’t know for sure, but it looks like he’s been informant.

[19:24] 1982 FBI briefing says Schiff has established a rapport with top-ranking figures in the Genovese family and is believed to facilitate major money laundering schemes involving both the construction industry and the illegal gambling operations. He’s considered an integral asset to the family’s financial operations. Well you know that’s and they start using an informant about that time and that’s what they’re using him for.

[19:52] He keeps providing information to the FBI, and he’s also working with the Genovese family. They didn’t question his loyalty for quite a while, but eventually they’re going to start questioning his loyalty, and things are going to come out. 1985, there’s a hidden FBI microphone at Casella’s Restaurant in Hoboken. It’s a Genovese stronghold. It’s where Bobby Manna really operates out of. He’s talking about Schiff. Manus says, he talks to the suits, meaning the FBI, and then breaks bread with us. That’s not loyalty. Casella, the guy that owns the restaurant, says, he’s not even Italian. Who’s going to cry? Manus says, that fat bastard’s a problem. He talks too much. Casella says, you want it done? Manus says, make it clean. No mistakes. You know, during these conversations, they refer to Schiff as CC for construction coordinator. That’s a company that Schiff was affiliated with.

[20:47] Casella later on will say, I’ll bring it up in a meeting. We’ll discuss it. Unidentified voice. You want to hit him? Other voice says, we’ll do him good at night. Probably 1986, latter part of 86, 87. They’re monitoring. They notice that Manna and his associates are discussing Schiff’s movements, which means they’re plotting his murder. A guy named DeSiccio says, Schiff was at Bravo last night with some blonde. I was with a blonde. Maybe she’s wired too. Another voice says, we know the exit. We just walk in and bang. FBI keeps telling him, you know, you’re going to have to do something. They’re after you, and I’ve seen this before. One Friday afternoon, Irwin Schiff arrived at a lunch at a familiar east side restaurant, dressed in his usual gray suit and fedora is really dapper. Sits down, opens a menu. About 10, 15 minutes later, 1, 12 p.m., a man enters the side door, just walks directly up to Schiff and fired three rounds at close range. .38 revolver hit him in the neck, chest, and head. He slumps forward onto his plate. Gunman calmly walks out. The murder’s over.

[21:55] The diners are just like stunned, and that’s the way to do it. You just walk in, shoot somebody, and walk out. NYPD will remark, well, this wasn’t random. This wasn’t a random shooting. This was some kind of a message. A couple days later, another conversation was recorded at Casellas. Daniello. Place was jammed. All the people ran out. Bobby picked this kid out. Casella, stone killer.

[22:19] This was a strategic, surgical, and symbolic act. You know, there was a guy, an associate, that had crossed the line, and the mob responded with what we’d say lethal clarity. Schiff’s killing will become central to the federal government’s racketeering case against Bobby Manna with these wiretaps where he’s discussing this. They also were discussing killing John Gotti and his brother Gene Gotti at this same time, and the same at Casellas. Manna was so enraged by Gotti’s unsanxioned 1985 murder of Paul Castellano and he wanted to retaliate, but he also wanted to neutralize any threats from the new Gambino boss, John Gotti, if you remember. They had some kind of mutual territory, mutual things going side by side down in New Jersey.

[23:13] 1989, using these tapes as evidence and some other people that turned government-convicted Manna of conspiring to murder Schiff, conspiring to murder John Gotti and Gene Gotti. And they also claimed, but it was never confirmed, and I couldn’t find any real evidence they had, but some informants claimed that Manna had discussed potential hits on the judge, Mary Ann Trump-Berry, Donald Trump’s, President Trump’s sister, and U.S. Attorney Samuel Aliotto, now on the Supreme Court, and Michael Chertoff, who was the actual prosecutor on the scene. Manor ended up getting an 80-year sentence from Judge Barry at several appeals claiming that a lot of misinterpreted conversation at the government withheld witness, but everything stood. One of the most damning pieces of evidence, they said, was Manor’s directive regarding Gene Gotti. Make it clean, no mistakes.

[24:12] These tapes didn’t just convict Bobby Manna, they exposed a rip between the old school Genovese leaders and the rising flashiness of the gaudy regime.

[24:23] Manna was a traditionalist, and he viewed this as a betrayal. Despite any legal challenge that he had, Manna stayed in prison until 2025, just this last month, and at age 95, he got a compassionate release. Supposedly under house arrest in Bayonne, New Jersey. You know, if you think about it, all those families of the people silenced by man’s orders and the consequences still echo. That bullet ended Schiff’s life. Those cold calculating words captured at Casellas. Still in the official record, it’s a lasting reminder of a time, kind of a long gone time when the mafia would reach out and kill anybody who ever betrayed them. Doesn’t seem like they do that so much anymore. All these guys out here doing podcast and living out in the open of some here in Kansas City. I mean, it’s like, I don’t know. Yeah.

[25:15] It’s just different than it once was. You know, murder somebody just for revenge is not worth it. You know, you just either got to do your own thing, keep your mouth shut, and somebody testifies, you know, they testify.

[25:27] So that’s the story of Bobby Manna and the case that brought him down. You know, Vincent Gigante, he went down about this time. They really brought down that whole Genovese family. I mean, can you imagine that from the most powerful, most dangerous, most feared mafia outfit in the country to basically nothing today, it seems like, or not very much. Anyhow, thanks a lot, guys. I appreciate y’all tuning in. Don’t forget to like and subscribe if you’re on YouTube. Remember, I like to ride motorcycles, so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. If you have a problem with PTSD, you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website, get that hotline number, PTSD. You know, lots of times you have problems of drugs or alcohol. Anthony Ruggiano has a hotline number on one of his, on his YouTube channel or his website. One, he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. If I have problems with gambling, there’s 1-800-BETS-OFF in Missouri or other, every other state will have some, if you have gambling, they’ll have some kind of a hotline number. I got a lot of stuff for sale. I always want to sell something. If you want to get a copy of one of my books, you know, You can go on my website or you can go to Amazon.com. Just Google my name and Mafia books and Mafia documentaries. Got a couple of documentaries out there. You can rent them streaming. Anyhow, thanks a lot, guys. I probably sold it up. Thanks a lot, guys.

[26:56] And tell your friends about us, remember?

Gary takes listeners deep into the shadowy world of Nick Civella, the shrewd Kansas City mob boss whose knack for high-stakes financial deals made him a pivotal figure long after his rise to power in 1957. Discover how Civella leveraged massive loans — including the notorious $62 million from the Teamsters Pension Fund — to help finance Las Vegas casinos like the Stardust, creating opportunities for mobsters like Lefty Rosenthal to skim untold millions from the gaming floors.

The episode traces how shifting interest rates and lax lending regulations cracked open the door for organized crime to exploit savings and loan institutions. Gary details how local mobsters compromised bank employees, funneled unsecured loans, and left behind a trail of financial ruin that reverberated far beyond Kansas City. You’ll hear gripping accounts of banks like Shawnee State Bank and Indian Springs State Bank, where insiders turned a blind eye — or worse — to the mob’s schemes.

Listeners also meet Anthony Russo, a criminal attorney with deep ties to mob-run banking ventures, and Farhad Azima, a businessman whose name appears in allegations linking financial crime to covert government operations. These tangled connections paint a vivid picture of how the lines between legitimate business, organized crime, and shadowy politics can blur.

Through vivid stories and insider knowledge, Gary breaks down how these Kansas City schemes mirrored the nationwide savings and loan crisis that ultimately cost taxpayers billions. From questionable loans backed by worthless assets to the fallout that reshaped the Teamsters Union and federal oversight, this episode reveals how deep the mob’s influence ran — and how fragile the American financial system can be when corruption goes unchecked.

Tune in for a fascinating blend of true crime, history, and financial intrigue that exposes how power, money, and organized crime colluded behind the scenes to leave a lasting mark on American society.

]]> In this eye-opening episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins pulls back the curtain on a lesser-known chapter of American crime history — how the Kansas City mob capitalized on the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to fuel its criminal empire.

Gary takes listeners deep into the shadowy world of Nick Civella, the shrewd Kansas City mob boss whose knack for high-stakes financial deals made him a pivotal figure long after his rise to power in 1957. Discover how Civella leveraged massive loans — including the notorious $62 million from the Teamsters Pension Fund — to help finance Las Vegas casinos like the Stardust, creating opportunities for mobsters like Lefty Rosenthal to skim untold millions from the gaming floors.

The episode traces how shifting interest rates and lax lending regulations cracked open the door for organized crime to exploit savings and loan institutions. Gary details how local mobsters compromised bank employees, funneled unsecured loans, and left behind a trail of financial ruin that reverberated far beyond Kansas City. You’ll hear gripping accounts of banks like Shawnee State Bank and Indian Springs State Bank, where insiders turned a blind eye — or worse — to the mob’s schemes.

Listeners also meet Anthony Russo, a criminal attorney with deep ties to mob-run banking ventures, and Farhad Azima, a businessman whose name appears in allegations linking financial crime to covert government operations. These tangled connections paint a vivid picture of how the lines between legitimate business, organized crime, and shadowy politics can blur.

Through vivid stories and insider knowledge, Gary breaks down how these Kansas City schemes mirrored the nationwide savings and loan crisis that ultimately cost taxpayers billions. From questionable loans backed by worthless assets to the fallout that reshaped the Teamsters Union and federal oversight, this episode reveals how deep the mob’s influence ran — and how fragile the American financial system can be when corruption goes unchecked.

Tune in for a fascinating blend of true crime, history, and financial intrigue that exposes how power, money, and organized crime colluded behind the scenes to leave a lasting mark on American society.

]]> 0:36:49 false Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective In this eye-opening episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins pulls back the curtain on a lesser-known chapter of American crime history — how the Kansas City mob capitalized on the savings and loan c... In this eye-opening episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins pulls back the curtain on a lesser-known chapter of American crime history — how the Kansas City mob capitalized on the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to fuel its criminal empire. Gary takes listeners deep into the shadowy world of Nick Civella, the shrewd Kansas City mob boss whose knack for high-stakes financial deals made him a pivotal figure long after his rise to power in 1957. Discover how Civella leveraged massive loans — including the notorious $62 million from the Teamsters Pension Fund — to help finance Las Vegas casinos like the Stardust, creating opportunities for mobsters like Lefty Rosenthal to skim untold millions from the gaming floors. The episode traces how shifting interest rates and lax lending regulations cracked open the door for organized crime to exploit savings and loan institutions. Gary details how local mobsters compromised bank employees, funneled unsecured loans, and left behind a trail of financial ruin that reverberated far beyond Kansas City. You’ll hear gripping accounts of banks like Shawnee State Bank and Indian Springs State Bank, where insiders turned a blind eye — or worse — to the mob’s schemes. Listeners also meet Anthony Russo, a criminal attorney with deep ties to mob-run banking ventures, and Farhad Azima, a businessman whose name appears in allegations linking financial crime to covert government operations. These tangled connections paint a vivid picture of how the lines between legitimate business, organized crime, and shadowy politics can blur. Through vivid stories and insider knowledge, Gary breaks down how these Kansas City schemes mirrored the nationwide savings and loan crisis that ultimately cost taxpayers billions. From questionable loans backed by worthless assets to the fallout that reshaped the Teamsters Union and federal oversight, this episode reveals how deep the mob’s influence ran — and how fragile the American financial system can be when corruption goes unchecked. Tune in for a fascinating blend of true crime, history, and financial intrigue that exposes how power, money, and organized crime colluded behind the scenes to leave a lasting mark on American society. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app. Subscribe to Gangland Wire for more stories straight from the front lines of organized crime. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to "buy me a cup of coffee" To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. Chapters 0:04 Introduction to Kansas City Mob https://blubrry.com/kc_crime/146851047/the-man-who-ended-allie-boy-persicos-run/ https://ganglandwire.com/?p=10771 Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Mon, 21 Jul 2025 05:00:04 -0400 Gary and Mike also explore the uneasy dance between lawmen and mobsters—a world where unexpected moments of mutual respect could coexist with threats of violence. Mike shares stories of face-to-face encounters with figures like Rusty Rastelli of the Bonanno Family, offering rare insights into how respect, fear, and human decency sometimes blurred the lines between hunter and hunted.

The episode dives even deeper into the chase for Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico of the Colombo Family. Mike recounts the painstaking hours of investigation, the calculated street-level work, and the tension that came with tracking a fugitive deeply embedded in a culture of secrecy and retribution. His personal stories illuminate how local knowledge and personal relationships can make or break a case. This conversation crosses borders, too. Mike recalls his work in Sicily, where American and Italian law enforcement collaborated to disrupt crime syndicates that spanned the Atlantic. From tense raids to split-second tactical decisions, these stories reveal the global scope of the mob and the relentless pursuit of those who hunt them.

Throughout the episode, Mike doesn’t shy away from the psychological cost of the job, navigating threats from criminal networks while maintaining unbreakable bonds with fellow officers. He reflects on these life-changing experiences in his book, Adapt and Overcome, which he describes as part memoir, part raw look at the human side of life on the front lines of America’s war against organized crime.

For true crime fans, mob history buffs, or anyone fascinated by the delicate balance of law enforcement in high-risk territory, this episode is packed with vivid stories and personal reflections that remind us what it truly takes to track—and confront—the mob.

]]> Gary and Mike also explore the uneasy dance between lawmen and mobsters—a world where unexpected moments of mutual respect could coexist with threats of violence. Mike shares stories of face-to-face encounters with figures like Rusty Rastelli of the Bonanno Family, offering rare insights into how respect, fear, and human decency sometimes blurred the lines between hunter and hunted.

The episode dives even deeper into the chase for Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico of the Colombo Family. Mike recounts the painstaking hours of investigation, the calculated street-level work, and the tension that came with tracking a fugitive deeply embedded in a culture of secrecy and retribution. His personal stories illuminate how local knowledge and personal relationships can make or break a case.
This conversation crosses borders, too. Mike recalls his work in Sicily, where American and Italian law enforcement collaborated to disrupt crime syndicates that spanned the Atlantic. From tense raids to split-second tactical decisions, these stories reveal the global scope of the mob and the relentless pursuit of those who hunt them.

Throughout the episode, Mike doesn’t shy away from the psychological cost of the job, navigating threats from criminal networks while maintaining unbreakable bonds with fellow officers. He reflects on these life-changing experiences in his book, Adapt and Overcome, which he describes as part memoir, part raw look at the human side of life on the front lines of America’s war against organized crime.

For true crime fans, mob history buffs, or anyone fascinated by the delicate balance of law enforcement in high-risk territory, this episode is packed with vivid stories and personal reflections that remind us what it truly takes to track—and confront—the mob.

]]> 0:48:54 false Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Gary and Mike also explore the uneasy dance between lawmen and mobsters—a world where unexpected moments of mutual respect could coexist with threats of violence. Mike shares stories of face-to-face encounters with figures like Rusty Rastelli of the Bo... Gary and Mike also explore the uneasy dance between lawmen and mobsters—a world where unexpected moments of mutual respect could coexist with threats of violence. Mike shares stories of face-to-face encounters with figures like Rusty Rastelli of the Bonanno Family, offering rare insights into how respect, fear, and human decency sometimes blurred the lines between hunter and hunted. The episode dives even deeper into the chase for Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico of the Colombo Family. Mike recounts the painstaking hours of investigation, the calculated street-level work, and the tension that came with tracking a fugitive deeply embedded in a culture of secrecy and retribution. His personal stories illuminate how local knowledge and personal relationships can make or break a case. This conversation crosses borders, too. Mike recalls his work in Sicily, where American and Italian law enforcement collaborated to disrupt crime syndicates that spanned the Atlantic. From tense raids to split-second tactical decisions, these stories reveal the global scope of the mob and the relentless pursuit of those who hunt them. Throughout the episode, Mike doesn’t shy away from the psychological cost of the job, navigating threats from criminal networks while maintaining unbreakable bonds with fellow officers. He reflects on these life-changing experiences in his book, Adapt and Overcome, which he describes as part memoir, part raw look at the human side of life on the front lines of America’s war against organized crime. For true crime fans, mob history buffs, or anyone fascinated by the delicate balance of law enforcement in high-risk territory, this episode is packed with vivid stories and personal reflections that remind us what it truly takes to track—and confront—the mob. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app. Pick up Mike’s book: Adapt and Overcome Subscribe to Gangland Wire for more stories straight from the front lines of organized crime. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to "buy me a cup of coffee" To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. [0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It's good to be back here [0:02] in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. And we're going to, you know, we talk about the mafia a lot, and we're going to learn a lot more about the mob, especially the New York City mob with a retired U.S. https://blubrry.com/kc_crime/146959416/a-mafia-counterfeit-ring/ https://ganglandwire.com/?p=10777 Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Wed, 16 Jul 2025 05:00:46 -0400 Hey Wiretappers, listen to my short bonus episode. I’m looking for mob fans to read the first half of a memoir about my life, which is partly about being a cop and mostly about the Civella Spero War. Email me at ganglandwire@gmail.com and I’ll send you a pdf to read. It’s about 22,000 words. Once it’s done, I’ll send you a copy

This week, we journey back to the early 1900s—a time when the first wave of Sicilian immigrants brought more than just dreams of opportunity to America. They also brought with them an age-old criminal code that would lay the foundation for the American Mafia as we know it.

Our story begins with the Mustache Petes—those old-world mafiosi who preyed on their own immigrant communities through intimidation, extortion, and a cunning knack for organized crime. One of their earliest rackets? Counterfeiting.

]]> Hey Wiretappers, listen to my short bonus episode. I’m looking for mob fans to read the first half of a memoir about my life, which is partly about being a cop and mostly about the Civella Spero War. Email me at ganglandwire@gmail.com and I’ll send you a pdf to read. It’s about 22,000 words. Once it’s done, I’ll send you a copy

This week, we journey back to the early 1900s—a time when the first wave of Sicilian immigrants brought more than just dreams of opportunity to America. They also brought with them an age-old criminal code that would lay the foundation for the American Mafia as we know it.

Our story begins with the Mustache Petes—those old-world mafiosi who preyed on their own immigrant communities through intimidation, extortion, and a cunning knack for organized crime. One of their earliest rackets? Counterfeiting.

]]> 0:13:34 false Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Hey Wiretappers, listen to my short bonus episode. I'm looking for mob fans to read the first half of a memoir about my life, which is partly about being a cop and mostly about the Civella Spero War. Email me at ganglandwire@gmail. Hey Wiretappers, listen to my short bonus episode. I'm looking for mob fans to read the first half of a memoir about my life, which is partly about being a cop and mostly about the Civella Spero War. Email me at ganglandwire@gmail.com and I'll send you a pdf to read. It's about 22,000 words. Once it's done, I'll send you a copy This week, we journey back to the early 1900s—a time when the first wave of Sicilian immigrants brought more than just dreams of opportunity to America. They also brought with them an age-old criminal code that would lay the foundation for the American Mafia as we know it. Our story begins with the Mustache Petes—those old-world mafiosi who preyed on their own immigrant communities through intimidation, extortion, and a cunning knack for organized crime. One of their earliest rackets? Counterfeiting. A Nationwide Web of Fake Money In 1901, the Secret Service—then the only federal law enforcement agency with a national reach—uncovered a brand-new counterfeit $5 bill in circulation. This was no small operation. The National Iron Bank of Morristown, New Jersey, had unknowingly unleashed a run worth $250,000—millions in today’s money. Agents quickly linked the phony bills to a sophisticated, coast-to-coast counterfeit ring run by Sicilian gang leaders like Ignacio “Lupo the Wolf” Lupo and Giuseppe Morello. These men were more than petty crooks—they were the original godfathers of organized crime in New York City. Violence and Betrayal in the Shadows As the Secret Service tracked counterfeiters from Yonkers to Pittsburgh to San Francisco, they met ruthless opposition. Notorious mobsters like Vito Catone didn’t hesitate to attack federal agents. One desperate fugitive even tried to escape by lunging at agents with a knife, fleeing through a rail yard, and getting knocked down by bricks thrown from a moving train. Law enforcement, often under-armed and outnumbered, were up against killers willing to silence anyone in their way. The Barrel Murder This bloody saga culminated in one of the earliest and most chilling mob murders on record: the infamous Barrel Murder of 1903. When a New York City woman stumbled upon a barrel with a nearly decapitated body inside, investigators connected the corpse to the Morello gang’s counterfeiting operation. The victim, Benedetto Madonia, had apparently been lured to New York to help secure legal fees for his jailed brother-in-law, Giuseppe DiPrimo—only to be betrayed and butchered by the very men he’d come to help. Secret Service Stings and Underworld Justice The Secret Service made arrests and even staged elaborate stings, using marked bills and informants to infiltrate the gang. But corruption, fear, and an underdeveloped justice system left many ringleaders untouched. One killer, Tomasso “Petto the Ox,” was freed despite damning evidence, only to be gunned down years later in a revenge hit that many believe was ordered by DiPrimo himself after his release from prison. A Blueprint for the Mafia to Come These early black handers and Mustache Petes were rough drafts of the organized syndicates that would soon flourish under Prohibition. Counterfeiting required a clear chain of command, trusted lieutenants, and loyal foot soldiers—known back then as “queer pushers” who spread the fake bills far and wide. In many ways, it was a proving ground for the hierarchy that would one day run America’s underworld. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to "buy me a cup of coffee" https://blubrry.com/kc_crime/146848399/the-murder-of-teddy-deegan-and-the-fbi/ https://ganglandwire.com/?p=10761 Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Mon, 14 Jul 2025 05:00:30 -0400 In this gripping episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins unravels one of the most damning scandals in FBI history—a chilling story of corruption, betrayal, and a sanctioned murder that would stain the Bureau’s legacy for decades. Gary examines the sinister role played by FBI agent H. Paul Rico in the 1965 murder of Teddy Deegan. You’ll hear how, back in October 1964, Rico learned Deegan had been marked for a mob hit—yet the Bureau did nothing. Why? Because the killers were protected informants.

Gary breaks down how the FBI built its case on the false testimony of mob informant Joe Barboza. Instead of stopping the murder plot, the Bureau sat on exculpatory evidence and let Barboza’s lies send Louis Greco, Henry Tamaleo, Peter Limone, and Joe Salvati to prison—two of them to death row.

The FBI’s Informant Obsession: The Bureau’s relentless protection of violent informants like Barboza and Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi reveals how an obsession with “winning” overshadowed basic justice. The Justice Department’s own admission in 2000 that they knew the real killers exposes just how far the corruption ran.

From Cover-Up to Vindication: Follow the twisted timeline of the Deegan murder, the courtroom betrayals, and the decades-long fight to clear the names of the wrongfully convicted. Gary explores the human cost of a system that chose loyalty to informants over the truth.

Why This Story Matters: This episode forces listeners to confront a haunting truth: when law enforcement trades integrity for convenience, innocent lives pay the price. Gary challenges you to rethink the myth of the Bureau’s infallibility—and to remember the names of the men who spent their lives behind bars for a crime they didn’t commit.

Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, good to be back here in the studio. This is Gary Jenkins, former Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, and I just heard something in that interview I just did with Detective Mike Huff from Tulsa that I had never heard before.

[0:18] I mean, I’ve heard a lot of corruption things, but this one, it just went beyond the pale, especially there at the end where he said that this H. Paul Rico asked him about his kids and how old his kids were. That was like, you know, and I, you know, I talked with that guy long enough to know that he wasn’t lying. You know, he wasn’t making that up. That was, it was just beyond the pale, if you ask me. But today’s episode is going to be a little bit more about H. Paul Rico and a dark chapter in the FBI history. Now, this is before John Connolly and the Whitey Bulger cover-up and all that. H. Paul Rico was the agent that really broke in Connolly, I think, and taught him the ropes. He was a slick FBI agent that had all the informants, that always had the inside track on everything, knew where the deals were. And so let’s talk a little more about this one incident that we glossed over in that interview with Mike Huff about the murder of the Roger Wheeler down in Tulsa at the golf course, the Southern Hills Golf Tournament.

[1:30] And it was all over control of Jai alai, all the money that came out of Jai alai. This thing, it just, it was a web of deceit that reached into the highest levels of federal law enforcement, as you could tell from what Mr. Huff was saying.

[1:44] And so I’m going to tell you the story of the Edward Teddy Deegan murder. This is the FBI’s legacy of shame. I read one article about this, and that’s what they call this, the legacy of shame.

[1:56] So let’s go back to October 1964, the year I graduated from high school, actually. Boston FBI agent H. Paul Rico wrote a memo. He’s got an informant whispering that Teddy Deegan, a known hoodlum in Chelsea, Massachusetts, is marked for death. There’s a contract out on him. It’s not just street talk, not just bullshit that he heard somewhere. This came from real solid mob insider informants. A few months later, another memo makes it all the way to J. Edgar Hoover himself. March 10th, 1965, it says that Vincent Jimmy the Bear Flemmy, who is Steve Flemmy, Stevie the Rifleman Flemmy’s brother, I believe, and a guy named Joe Barbosa, have asked New England mob boss Raymond Patriarca for a green light to kill Teddy Deegan. And the word is they’ve already had one dry run on it. So what did the FBI do with this information? You know, they did nothing with it. They did absolutely nothing. They didn’t warn Teddy Deegan, which I know FBI agents, and I know they’ve gotten information like this, and that’s the rule is you go warn the person. And usually it’ll be another guy involved in a lot of shenanigans that then they’ll try to bring him in with that warning. I know we had one in Kansas City. They went to him, and he could have come in. He could have talked. He wouldn’t talk, and like about two weeks later, he was dead. But you at least have to warn him, and it’s an option or it’s an opportunity for you to make a pitch to him.

[3:24] Later on, they talked about in another memo that identified, this Jimmy the Bear Flemmi as a murderer of seven men, including Teddy Deegan. But it also said that from all indications, Jimmy the Bear is going to continue to commit murder. But this informant’s potential outweighs the risk. It’s crazy. And, you know, they said that in this Teddy Deegan, they claimed that Flemmy and Barboza and a couple other guys were behind it. And one of them set the trap, lured Deegan into a fake break-in, then shot him in the back of the head. And then a couple others finished up the job, but Flemme and especially Joe Barbosa, Joe the animal Barbosa, were highly placed FBI informants at the time. Really valuable assets. Two years later, 1968, four men, Louis Greco, Henry Tamaleo, Peter Limone, and Joe Salvati are convicted based on the testimony

[4:25] of Joe Barbosa, who set up this murder, they’re convicted for this murder. And the FBI knew that Louis Greco was in Miami at the time of the murder. They even had the witnesses. They had proof that he wasn’t even in town at that time.

[4:39] But, you know, and of course, they didn’t reveal that, you know, that’s exculpatory information that you can get your conviction turned around and at least get another trial on it. Now that you’ve got that information that the U.S. Attorney withheld from you, the FBI, whoever the law enforcement was that withheld from you. H. Paul Rico was overheard bragging at a mob party how easy it was to convict the four pigeons. They called them the four pigeons. They said it was funny. And one of them, Greco, who wasn’t even in town at the time, got the death penalty. Now think about that one. There’s a federal agent laughing about sending an innocent man to the death chamber. It’s crazy. So over the next four years, you know, these guys are frantically trying to get the death sentences overturned, and they get them commuted to life after the Supreme Court hurt the case. Actually, it’s after Supreme Court’s ruling in Furman v. Georgia.

[5:35] Tamaleo will die in prison in 1985 at 84. He was the oldest inmate in Massachusetts. Greco died in 95, had colon cancer, and a broken Hart. His son, Lewis Jr., drank Drano and took his own life a couple years later. Meanwhile, the FBI was doing everything they could to keep the truth buried. They even funneled false information to Governor Dukakis at the time, blocking any.

[6:03] Opportunity for a commutation because they’d asked the governor for a commutation. They had, you know, these different pieces of evidence that proved they didn’t do it. And the FBI fought it like crazy. Yeah, like they fought Mike Huff from looking into this whole Roger Wheeler

[6:19] case any further than what he was able to do. Finally, in 2000, the Department of Justice uncovered secret FBI files that proved what many people had suspected over the years, that the FBI knew who really killed Deegan, and they had let four innocent men rot in prison just to protect informants. 2001, court will vacate the convictions of Salvati and Peter Lamone. Peter Lamone had spent over 33 years behind bars, but he was a young man when he went in, and he was 66 when he walked out a free man. Of course, they filed lawsuits, $300 million in claims for wrongful imprisonment, malicious prosecutions, and civil rights violations. And the judge that heard this ruled the state prosecution was procured by the FBI and nurtured by both federal agents and state officers who knew the charges were bogus. So we would have had the state of Massachusetts on the hook as well as the federal government. Congress got involved. They published a 2003 House report that said it was the greatest failure in FBI history.

[7:20] Agents had suborned purgatory, protected murderers, and sent innocent men to prison, all in the name of protecting an informant. And that Joe Barboza, I mean, he was a deep-throat informant, but he was a loose cannon. I mean, you can’t protect those loose cannons. In 2004, a Massachusetts judge posthumously cleared Greco. He was already dead. The lawyer for the family probably said this best. This was an innocent man who was framed, and the most amazing part is the government knew it. That same year, the family of Teddy Deegan, the man who was murdered, the victim in this, sued the government, too. Turned out, during that trial, it came out that Teddy Deegan had actually been warned by Peter Lamone that these people were out to kill him, not by the FBI, but…

[8:05] Still didn’t do anything. This wasn’t just a one-time error. This was, it turns out, this was a pattern of practice, a policy of many agents in the organized crime squad in that Boston office. So just remember, the next time someone says the FBI always gets their man, remember this story. They sacrificed four men just to protect a really bullshit loose cannon informant. And if you go back and listen to my story on Joe Barbosa, you’ll find that’s how much of a loose cannon he was. The protectors became part of the corruption at the time. So that’s it for today’s episode of Gangland Wire. If you like what you heard, subscribe, leave a review, share it with a friend. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. You’ll find a hotline for help there. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, Anthony Ruggiano down in Florida is a drug and alcohol counselor. He has a hotline on his website.

[9:02] You know, I’ve noticed that Ruggiano has been coming up to New York quite a little bit. It’s pretty interesting. You know, he testified against people, but now he’s like out floating around as free as a breeze, like a whole lot of these other guys got podcasts and everything. If you have a problem with gambling in Missouri, I know we have a 1-800 bets off. I don’t think that’s a national thing. I think every state will have their own, but casinos all have to publish that and they put money into it and, you know, provide treatment facilities or treatment opportunities for, they provide treatment opportunities for people that have problem with gambling. And as I’ve said many times before, gambling is like the worst thing, the most insidious thing. If you get a problem with gambling, next thing you know, you’re in with loan sharks and next thing you know, the mob’s got your business.

[9:47] And that’s, you know, that’s kind of an old school thing. It probably doesn’t happen so much anymore, but you know, you can’t lose a lot of stuff if you get involved with gambling and you can’t handle it. So until next time, be sure and like and subscribe.

[10:00] Tell your friends about it. As I said before, we need more listeners, more listeners, more listeners. I’ve got books and movies for sale. Go on to Amazon, just Google my name and Mafia, and you’ll find all the books I’ve got for sale. I don’t need to run all that down. And remember, when the FBI says, hi, where were the government? We’re here to help you. Well, take a second look at that. See, just make sure you know how much they’re trying to help. I’m not saying I got a lot of FBI agents, friends. You know, I’ve interviewed a lot of FBI agents. There’s 99.9% of all FBI agents and probably 95% of all law enforcement or local and state law enforcement are

[10:39] all strictly on the up and up. You know, I say that’s a little less with local and state because we don’t have quite the same background checking options that the FBI does. Have a little lower standards because, you know, it’s harder. We don’t pay as much money. Majority of the people are good guys and they’re straight up. If they’re honest as they possibly, you know, can be. Sometimes you shade a little thing or two in order to make a case. You just don’t ever lie about somebody. You don’t ever lie on paper. You may sit somebody down to interview them and pretend like you know more than what you really know in order to get them to talk to you. But that’s, you know, that’s one thing. But actually putting something on paper that’s going to damage somebody and actually give them a case, you know, just that’s not, that ain’t good, folks. That ain’t good. So thanks a lot, guys.

What started as a local homicide case quickly unraveled into a national organized crime conspiracy involving Florida Jai Alai gambling, the Winter Hill Gang, and notorious Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger. Huff shares how he uncovered links to FBI corruption, the Dixie Mafia, and hitman John Martorano, who eventually confessed to the killing.

Huff also opens up about working with Roger Wheeler’s son, David, the emotional toll of the investigation, and how their joint efforts finally exposed the truth. His book Killing My Father reveals even more about this decades-long fight for justice. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have another former cop, a retired copper from not too far away from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he has a heck of a story. He’s written a book about it, but it’s a heck of a story. Down in Tulsa, Oklahoma, they’ve got a mob murderer. Well, now, mob murders don’t just go down every day in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it’s a really interesting story that ties clear back to to the highlight business down in florida to the winter hill gang in uh boston massachusetts uh to whitey bulger really and and a hit man named john moderano and to a one of the infamous corrupt fbi agents out of boston you know they seem to have had a problem in the boston fbi for a period of years there and a couple three of their guys end up going to jail uh over probably being a little bit overly uh that they forgot where the line was it looks to me like but anyhow it was uh it’s a retired detective mike huff welcome mike, Well, hey, welcome to U2. Thank you for doing this. All right, Mike. Now, tell us a little bit about your career. You know, how did you come up through the ranks in Tulsa PD? Well, I started in January of 1975.

[1:20] I got promoted to a detective in 1980. I didn’t much like it. It wasn’t enough action. I had a good career on the street. But I like my supervisor a lot. So I stuck with this being a detective.

[1:39] In May of 81, May 27th, you know, I just got to work. I was checking on a guy that I had shot three weeks earlier who was in intensive care. We’re just sitting there and we’re talking about we’re going to eat supper. And I was on the phone with the hospital. Checking on this guy’s condition, and police radio came on and said, we need all the homicide detectives to head out to Southern Hills Country Club on a shooting. I guess 5-0s that night, you know, we hit it out there, and, you know, Southern Hills, even at that time, before a lot of all the major golf tournaments they’ve since had, was a very, well, it was the kind of place that I wasn’t familiar with.

[2:34] Everybody with money was part of that country club, and I wasn’t one of that crowd. There’s a middle-aged man swamped over in a seated car. He’d been shot between the eyes. It was a little bit foreign to me. You know, I’d been a homicide detective for a year and had been to a good bunch of homicides, but most of them were, you know, street murders or domestics, things like that. And so I knew this one was going to be a bit different, but I didn’t know how different this was going to be. I think I was 25 at the time. My supervisor told me this was going to be my being in charge of the scene. So we started making assignments. Very little evidence of the scene. There were four live rounds laying right outside the opened doorway of Mr. Wheeler’s Cadillac. You know, that was pretty puzzling. This one’s right near one of the…

[3:40] Really nice swimming pools out there, and we found a few witnesses. People had seen this car. It looked out of place. I don’t know why anybody hadn’t had somebody check it out. A couple guys sitting in the car. Mike, tell us a little bit about how did you figure out who this guy was? He was pretty well-known in Tulsa, and that’s a pretty well-known country club guy. Just for your information, the Southern Hills Country Club is a primo, premier golf course here in the Midwest. And it’s nothing but high-end, rich oil people in Tulsa, I believe, mainly went to that. And so tell us about how you figured out who this victim was. He had a nice car. Well, the people were abuzz and said, you know,

[4:31] you don’t know who this guy is. He owns a telex corporation. Well, that didn’t mean a whole lot to me, other than they said, you know, he employs thousands of people. You know, this was a time that was before Google or the Internet or cell phones or anything. I think I had a police radio, and I don’t even think pagers were invented yet.

[5:02] Communication was tough. You know, the word started trickling in of who he was. I guess we were probably out at the scene for six or seven hours and documenting it and getting our pictures and all that kind of scene work. We went back to the station, detective area, we called it the bullpen. The bullpen was filled with brass, people they’d called in and whatever. The word was there was going to be a 13-man task force formed on this deal, and they started breaking that out. Boy, for some reason, I sure thought I wanted to be on it. And I got the word to the sergeant that there is a scene in the book that we wrote. This sergeant, Roy Hunt, was a legend. He had solved murders for decades. I really liked him. He liked me. He pulled me to the side and he said, hey, if you get involved in this, it’s probably going to change your life. And he said, you’ve got a pretty good career down here. So, you know, this is probably going to screw it up, you know, if it doesn’t kill you. I mean, I was so young, green, that I said, oh, man, I don’t want to do this. He said, all right, let’s drink to it. So he pulled out a bottle of whiskey and a couple of shot glasses from his desk. The good old days.

[6:29] And so we need a, We had a drink about it. You know, I wasn’t the only guy involved. I mean, involved in that task force. After about a couple weeks, the lead started dwindling. It boiled down to me and a really good fellow named Dick Bishop. We got assigned a case. You know, it was a good learning experience for me. I had Dick Bishop. I had my sergeant. You know, we were, for some reason, 1981, that was a big homicide year for Tulsa. We had close to 80 homicides. I was working around the clock. You know, I mean, I’d pick up a grounder here or there on top of this.

[7:11] And so we stayed busy, but we got a call from the state police in Massachusetts. And they said, hey, I need to be up here. Actually, Dick and Sergeant Walter Hunt went to Boston. I didn’t make that trip. But I just worked another homicide. Let me ask you a question here. At this point in time, I know a red ball like that, a hot case like that, where the phones light up at first with all kinds of bad leads and crazy leads, and everybody’s running down all these leads. But you mentioned that there was a car in the lot that somebody mentioned was suspicious. Was that, had you figured out that was the car that had been occupied by whoever killed Roger Wheeler? Yes, sir. It was the late 70s, probably a 79 or 80, four-door, LTD, four-door. Two guys with beards were in the car and they were And somebody got a partial tag. That partial tag, I mean, we had conflicting information about even the partial tag.

[8:22] I mean, we had a couple of witnesses with different partial tag numbers.

[8:27] These guys were pros. They had stole the tag off a similar car. It was a huge dead end, but it took so much effort to follow that lead. This was a time, well, you know, it was just tell times. You couldn’t sit down in front of the computer and do anything because there weren’t computers. You know, that was a lead that we worked on. We also got a lead very early on that put us on to the Dixie Mafia, and those were some bad guys. The main guy, or the guy that was suggested as a shooter, resembled a composite drawing. We had an artist do a composite, and they were great composites. But somebody said, hey, that looks like Pat Early, Dixie Mafia guy. And he was the kind of guy that he would travel to do violence, got involved in labor disputes, things of that nature. And he lived down in southern Oklahoma. The other guy was believed to be a bondsman in Oklahoma City. We took off on that lead and I spent close to.

[9:55] A couple months off and on three or four days a week in Oklahoma City we did surveillance on these guys we’re trying to catch them up short doing something they were also dealing some, or smuggling some pretty good quantities of drugs we worked on that for with the state narcotics unit for months until we finally got them dirty with a pretty good load of drugs.

[10:29] That’s interesting, Mike, how you start in a murder investigation, and I’ve seen this happen here. You start in a murder investigation, and all of a sudden, you know, somebody, something else comes in that may have something to do with it and may not, but then you get sidetracked onto that, then it looks good. And you stay on that for a while and then you have to come back. When you go to Boston, you have very little leads. You’ve got this car and this composites and a bunch of other dead ends that weren’t that. Did you have anything at that point in time that led you to believe that this reached outside of Oklahoma City or in that area? No, we had nothing. I mean, we had just a few phone calls. Other people knew more about our case and how it hooked to Boston than we did. There was no way to research it.

[11:26] What about Roger Wheeler? What about Roger Wheeler? Did you know about his connection to the High Lie down in Florida at that point in time? He was a big businessman, but he had invested in this world highlight business in Florida.

[11:41] When we started looking at this thing, of course, the brass was making decisions. Of course, that never helps out when you’re a detective trying to find the truth and the brass stick who knows in it. But the brass sat down with the FBI. They said, hey, this Dixie Mafia lead looks pretty good. And we’re going to follow that lead. We know about Wheeler and this parimutuel gambling business.

[12:21] Highline, which if people don’t know what that is, if they ever watched the first of Miami Vice, there was a spot in the trailer on that. And it was filmed at World Highlight down in Miami, and these guys have these big baskets hooked to their arms, and they’re on a court with a granite wall, and they catch this ball with this basket, and then with the weight or force of their entire body, they hurl this very hard ball called a palata up against this wall. And they’re basically playing handball and you know the crowd sits behind the screen there’s huge amounts of money bet on that too.

[13:15] Yes, there was a lot of money. Roger Wheeler had taken some of his money that he’d made in these other businesses and bought this whole High Lie organization, World High Lie, which ran the games. And then also, were they involved in the parimutuel betting on that and the gambling on that? Yes. World High Lie had five, they call them frontons. They’re about the size of a pretty good-sized indoor arena. And there are four of them in Florida, and there was one in Hartford, Connecticut. We stuck our nose into it and started looking at it. And the brass says, hey, we made a deal with the FBI. The FBI is going to handle all the potential organized crime leads. And you guys stick on this stuff local. Or nearly local. Didn’t like it at all. You know, I was a 25-year-old kid. Yeah, what are you going to do? Now, you had a call from the Massachusetts Highway Patrol. I interrupted you back then. And this is going to start leading you outside of Tulsa back to Florida and to Boston. So what was that about?

[14:34] Yeah, we went up there, and they told us about this Irish mob. It’s a loose-knit organized crime group. They said, here’s some guys to take a look at. Because I was coordinating a deal where we were…

[14:56] Going through boxes and boxes of paper records from every hotel in Tulsa, looking for something that stood out, maybe a tag number or an out-of-state reference to where somebody came from that we would follow up on those leads. They gave us some names for us to look for also, like somebody used their true name, checking into a hotel where they’re doing a mob hit. But I did what I was told. I was buried in boxes of paper when I wasn’t down in Oklahoma City chasing these drug dealers. You know, this Pat Earley, he worked for a guy that bought bad debt markers from, oh, I think it was Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. And he’d go out and break legs and stuff.

[16:05] Here we had two different angles, or actually even more than that, because Mr. Wheeler was a complicated man and was involved in a lot of businesses. There was a lot of stuff going on. I was like a kid in a toy store with all these things. You know, here I’m chasing the drug smuggler. Here I’m chasing the guy. And let me tell this about Pat Early and this Dixie Mafia. And the Dixie Mafia were responsible for shooting up Buford Pusser and killing Buford Pusser’s wife.

[16:43] Buford Pusser was the McNary County, Tennessee sheriff that they made a movie of. Called walking tall yeah and so they shot him up killed his wife i mean there was just so many crimes that that we were coming across that uh i can speak for myself we lacked focus because there’s so much stuff going on uh i still wanted uh i was still a little bit upset about the fbi was going to handle the highlight angle, but checking for airplanes. This guy that Pat Earley worked for, he owned a company that specialized in outfitting airplanes for international drug smuggling. And, I mean, you couldn’t spit without hitting some other motive.

[17:41] You know how that goes. You just get in the crowd. How did you get your focus back, and how did you end up on this highlight connection? Was that because of the FBI or because of the Boston-Massachusetts Highway Patrol? How did you get back to that? Well, we got involved with the state police in Boston a little bit. We didn’t know how we could do this. Boston was, you know, they said, well, we’ll check and see. And if anything comes up, we’ll tell you. Well, then we got hooked up with the Connecticut State Police.

[18:20] Who were overseeing the investigations on Highline in Connecticut, where Wheeler owned a facility. So I was still just on the fringes of Highline. And then in the fall, I believe it was, of 81, Dick and I are sitting at our desk one evening. Somebody barges into the detective vision, told the receptionist that, hey, I want to see the detective who’s working my dad’s murder case. My name’s David Wheeler. They called me back there and said, this irate guy wants to talk to you. So I did that. I brought him back to the bullpen. We sat down. I’ve been waiting for you to come talk to me, but all that’s been coming out of the woodwork is FBI agents. I said, well, we were told that the FBI would handle you as their source of information. They haven’t really said very much about it. We have meetings with them, but nothing really comes out. I think World High got my dad killed, and I think a retired FBI agent was involved in it. And I’ve told the FBI that.

[19:39] And they won’t listen to me. So here I am. My psychiatrist told me to come talk to you. Now this Wheeler, his son, he helped you write that book. He had some input

[19:52] into that book, correct? Oh, he had a lot of input into this book. So in that book, you’re going to have the personal side. You’re going to have the law enforcement side of the murder of Roger Wheeler. Yes. Okay. We found, as we started dealing with him, that Mr. Wheeler was just a busy millionaire businessman, self-made businessman. You know, he might have had his flaws, but he wasn’t a crook. He had legitimate businesses. He just had made so much money on a pipeline business that he had a big, big amount of money that he could invest. And so he had gone to somebody that he had dealt with before, the Bank of Boston, and said, Hey, find me something to invest in that I’d make money and just bring me whatever it is. And I’ll take a look at it. They offered him a casino. They offered Hi-Li. So he started looking at this, and he had sent his son, David.

[21:07] Down to look at these businesses and put together some sort of computer program. David did, and it came back that Highline had the most potential to make money, and the tax incentives were there in that business. So his dad said, I’m going to buy this one. That was in the late 70s. What had happened, the business was run by a guy from Boston, a CPA. It turned out that he hired several retired FBI agents, one of them was a fellow by the name of Paul Rico, to allegedly keep the business clean from organized crime. Paul Rico was a legendary FBI agent that had developed many mob informants while they were trying to stamp out the Italian mob. And so as he was nearing retirement, he had moved to Florida for his last year or two, was hired by World High Line before Mr. Wheeler owned it. and that was something that attracted Mr. Wheeler. He felt safe with these FBI agents working there. And then immediately it started not.

[22:35] Making the money that they thought it should make. It was a real, real problem. Then it turns out that a runner, a world highlight, a guy named John Callahan, a Connecticut State Police figured out that he was hooked up with the Winter Hill game in Boston. He had to resign, and he was replaced by his business partner, a guy named Dick Donovan, another CPA.

[23:04] Wheeler was stuck with this guy because as a part of the Bank of Boston and proving that loan, they said, we want Donovan to stay on as president. By early 1981, things were just not looking good in the business. He was arguing a lot with Donovan. David Wheeler had planned to fire Donovan and Paul Rico, and that was just relayed from Wheeler to his son just a couple weeks before the murder.

[23:39] Now, Mike, this Paul Rico, I was looking up a little bit about him. By the time he retired or maybe shortly after, it came out that he was involved with an informant named Joe the Animal of Barboza who had done a murder of a guy named Teddy Deegan.

[23:57] But Rico wanted a guy named Peter Lamone and three other members of the Italian La Cosa Nostra mob to go to jail for this Teddy Deegan, and Rico stood back and allowed Barboza to perjure himself and let these guys go down. Now, in the end, they’ll end up getting released from prison when it all comes out several years later and get like a, I don’t know, a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the FBI and the Department of Justice because of that case. So he was, you know, he had a history and plus Boston FBI, you know, that’s the place where John Connolly, the FBI agent who came along after RICO.

[24:41] Uh, uh, was, was there, we say Rico like Rico law, but H Paul Rico and John Conley was a kind of a junior agent that then moved in and had all these informants and the Irish mob continued going after, going after the Italian mob. And then he ends up going to prison behind all that. So that was, uh, I tell you that Boston FBI was a, uh, was a snake’s nest. Uh, it was not good at all. And so Rico is now working in the Winter Hill Gang, who he’s been protecting and using his informants over the years to get the Italian mob. They’re they’re siphoning money out of that. They’re what are they embezzling money out of the High Line, World High Line? For the sake of the charge, we proved that they were just trying to take control.

[25:32] World High Life, so they could really get the money. We just hadn’t figured out how the money was coming out at that time. That was a big hang-up on filing charges. I mean, this thing, we’re fast-forwarding ahead close to 20 years until we get to this point. But, you know, we suspected Rico was involved. May of 1982, a couple of guys get gunned down in Boston. One of them’s named Brian Halloran. The other was Michael Donahue, who was just giving Halloran a ride. And Donahue’s dad was sergeant on the Boston Police Department.

[26:12] We didn’t hear about it. Nobody told us about this.

[26:16] Until finally, a reporter called the police department and said, hey, you guys need to know this. That’s how we learned about it. And that’s how we dove into the Boston angle at this time. Wait a minute. Remind me, how did that murder in Boston connect to the Hi-Li and Roger Wheeler? Right. Well, I found out after a couple months, Brian Halloran had gone to the FBI and said, hey, I got offered this hit out in Tulsa. I got thinking about it, and I decided I didn’t want to do it. It was a hit for Paul Rico. He wanted Wheeler dead. John Callahan, the former president of World High Line, wanted Wheeler dead. He declined the hit. They gave him $20,000, said get your mouth shut. And he got jammed up in another murder in January of 1982 in Boston. And that was his ticket was the Wheeler murder. An FBI agent might have been the guy behind it. So the FBI never told us that. By this time, we had figured out, of course, the FBI was screwing us over every day. And, you know, we learned that from David Wheeler back in the fall of 81.

[27:44] And the police department told me, he said, get to know this guy, figure out if he’s crazy or what, because he had a passion. His dad was dead, murdered, and the FBI wouldn’t listen to him. And so he turned to us, and the police department turned to me, and I was the rookie detective closer to David Wheeler’s age. Dick Bishop was older and had no patience, as we all get.

[28:18] But I’ve got to say, Dick was a great guy. We came back after meeting with Wheeler for days, and we met with the brass, the chief, and everybody else said, hey, the FBI’s screwing us. We got to get into this ourselves because the FBI is hiding this stuff from us. Within a couple months, Halloran got over. We went to Boston. You know, we met with all these state police and stuff up there, and they were doing their best to help us as much as they could. But this was a rat’s nest of corruption and disputes between agencies. The FBI hated everybody. Everybody else hated the FBI. Nobody could trust anybody. They were trying to do wiretaps. They were getting burned on wiretaps, you know, against these Winter Hill monsters. So they said, I don’t know how you’re going to solve this. So I said, well, let’s just go to what they called a strike force prosecutor that handled his section, handled all the organized crime prosecutions, federal prosecutions in New England. They said, well, he’s got to be involved in this deal with Howard.

[29:39] He’d be the guy. I said, well, let’s go. Let’s go talk to him. And little did I know that in Boston, you could drink a couple beers sometimes. A shift and get by with it they didn’t have that problem so we had a couple beers at lunchtime.

[29:55] And we went over to the federal courthouse and said hey we’re here to to meet with a fellow by the name of jeremiah o’sullivan who was the strike force the head uh strike force prosecutor department of justice so it went in there we were getting stonewalled by him taking notes like crazy, throwing stuff at him, saying we had information that the corruption had infiltrated into the FBI in Boston. John Conley, like he said, this guy was around during Rico’s time. He said, well, Rico was connected with the Winnerville game. Well, we know what that means when you’re a cop. You know, if somebody says they’re connected to something else, That means they’re part of them. And he said, you know, Rico liked to carouse and gamble and play cards to these mobsters when he was on the job. So I’m hearing this. I mean, I’m a young kid. At this point in time, I didn’t know how to, even that people fix tickets occasionally.

[31:02] And I’m hearing them talk about carousing with mobsters and stuff. And I said, well, I just want to know who made the decision to cut Brian Howard loose and not tell us about it. He said, well, that was my decision. By this time, I was just getting pissed. I said, well, that was a bad decision. He’s dead. It’s our case. Who gave you the right to make a decision about our case? It just went downhill from there. Myself and a couple other detectives, wonderful reports, which quoted him verbatim. Which later came back to bite him as we both were testifying before Congress. My reports caught him in a lie. He both got charged with lying to Congress. He tried to turn the tables on me, and a good police report’s the only thing that saved me. So for the young cops out there, making a good police report is paramount to what you do when you’re trying to prove a murder. So I told him, I said, well, we’re up here and we’re going to find John Callahan, the former president of World Highline. I said, we’re going to make him snitch. I have no idea why I said it that way.

[32:19] And everybody else was looking at me like, what the hell are you saying? I can imagine. I mean, I had no business to open my mouth in that meeting as a young guy. So we were looking for Callahan up in Boston. Went everywhere. Had a drink. About every bar we went to, we had a drink for about three days, which I’m sorry I’m saying that. You know, I just followed the crowd. We stayed there for a week or so. We headed back to Tulsa. So I walked in my door and I am walking in my door with my suitcase in my hand and the phone was ringing. So I answered him and somebody said, hey, is this Detective Mycuff? Yes, sir. He said, are you looking for John Callahan? I said, I just came in the door from looking and we’ve been up in Boston looking for him for about a week. And he goes, well, I’ve got him. I said, well, great. Where are you? He said, I’m at the Miami International Airport. He had introduced himself as a detective from the Metro, dead police, John Parmenter. And he said, I’m at the airport.

[33:35] I got him in the trunk of his car, and he’s got a dime on his chest. And he was all shot up, and he’s dead. Oh, wow. The first thing that came to my mind is, you know, I just told the head of the strike force, this high-level Department of Justice prosecutor, that we were going to make him a snitch. And less than a week later, he’s dead in the trunk of a car in Miami. I mean, I just, it just about knocked me over. I felt like I was potentially responsible for his death. I didn’t like the feeling at all. And as a 25-year-old kid, 26, this was just too much for me to process. So I immediately went down to the station, met with the chief and all the brass. Dick Bishop, obviously.

[34:27] He’d come from home, too, because we’d just got home. So I said, hey, we got a problem. They said, it sounds like you need to be in Miami. So we started putting together a trip to Miami, met the detective that was down there. When I got that phone call, I believe on August 3, 1982, when they said Callahan was dead, I said, well, let me talk to the detective that’s going to work the case. They said, well, he’s on his way to Boston. Can you get a message to him? I was thinking, get a hold of him at a hotel or whatever. They said, well, he’s not going to be at a hotel. He’s made arrangements to stay at an FBI agent’s house that’s working on his case up there in Boston. I said, oh, my God, he cannot stay at an FBI agent’s house. They’re in this up to their eyeballs. Turned out, made a handwritten note, laid it on his desk, knowing he’s probably not going to be back for a week. And that’s where that note stayed until he had spent a week with the FBI up there you know he was a great guy Shelton Merritt we called him Grits.

[35:37] So I met him down in Miami and, He’s just shaking his head, and I’m shaking my head. Everybody’s shaking their head. We’re not, we have no clue what we’re going to do. At this point in time, the brass of all these agencies had just pretty much given us carte blanche and said, go do what you need to do. And Dick, being a lot wiser than I was, said, well, they just set us up for failure, and And so we’re going to wind up getting screwed on this deal because they’re not going to take any blame for anything that goes wrong. And without a doubt, something’s going to go wrong. And boy, was that true. We dug into this. We got everybody to come out to Tulsa and have a meeting. We arranged an informal task force amongst Miami, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Connecticut State Police, and the Massachusetts State Police. We were just shaking our heads trying to figure out what to do.

[36:42] Spending taxpayers’ money like it was going out of style. Everybody’s flying around here and there. We kind of put the logistics together, who was going to investigate what, who we were going to target, try to get some information out of. Within a couple months after that, the FBI gave us a call, and they’re dealing with David Wheeler and saying, oh, this isn’t going to be connected to the FBI. We’re going to drop this case. And then the next thing you know, we would do something, and they would come back into the case because they were trying to figure out what we were doing.

[37:21] And so they decided they wanted to bring all the detectives together from all these states to Oklahoma. They said they wanted to have an information-sharing meeting. They put us up in Nice’s Hotel, put everybody else up in Nice’s Hotel in Tulsa. I mean, the food and the liquor slowed for about three days. We were just trying to avoid the FBI, talk with all these guys in this little informal task force. And so finally, on the last day of this meeting, which was held at the federal courthouse here in Tulsa, a guy from FBI headquarters, and he was a very high-level guy named Sean McLean, stood up and said, we have to know everything incriminating that you have on Paul Rico. By this time, if we’d had rocks or bottles or something, they would have been thrown at him. And we said, we got nothing to tell you because we can’t trust you. He said, well, here’s the deal. Paul Rico…

[38:37] Came out of retirement, and did a favor for the FBI. He went undercover to a corrupt federal judge by the name of L.C. Hastings, and we’re going to arrest him, L.C. Hastings. We have to turn everything that you have over in discovery.

[39:01] To whoever Hastings’ lawyer is going to be. So, I mean, that disbanded that meeting as quick as it could. Well, I said, we’ve got nothing to say to you. People left. I mean, people were going to a phone trying to get their airline reservations changed, go get a suitcase. I mean, it was just, it looked like a bunch of guys running from a stolen car after a pursuit.

[39:31] I mean, these guys just ran out of there. great analogy it turns out that he did arrest alcee hastings and he was acquitted he later became a u.s senator in florida yeah so i mean uh the the high level stuff that that we were dealing with it just put a stain on what’s going on i mean there was no way i mean i was i was looking at all this stuff and i said there is no way that i am smart enough even being this room, I probably need to go back to patrol. Mike, at this point in time, I mean, you’re almost like stymied. That was ingenious on their part. Now, if I see a conspiracy theory here, I could see that Rico knew people were after him and he wanted to know what you knew and you weren’t speaking to the FBI so he could volunteer to go work a case on a corrupt judge and then have to know everything you got on him for discovery i mean that’s they could potentially had got court orders from a judge in that criminal trial to say you know bring it to tulsa and all the other different.

[40:45] Jurisdictions and say you have to give us that and you had to give us then he would have known so it’s uh i don’t know that’s a conspiracy theory that maybe it’s a leap too far it’s pretty sophisticated, but I think it’s possible, don’t you? Oh, yes, sir, Gary.

[41:03] My head was spinning. I can imagine. I went to my dad March 14th, 1983. I went to my dad and I said, I think I got to step back, maybe volunteer to go back to a police car because I’m in way over my head. My dad said, no, there’s no way you can step back because you are in way over your head and you can’t run from this. You know, he said, you’re right in the middle of a cesspool of corruption. You can’t.

[41:36] You can’t do this. You can’t walk away from it. Well, that was the last time I talked to my dad because the next afternoon he was taking a nap and he got a heart attack in his sleep. That is something I detail in this book, along with many other things. But, you know, when we were writing the book, I talked about that story. And not until then did I really soak in that my dad’s funeral was on St. Patrick’s Day and I was right in the middle of all this Irish corruption, Irish mob. A friend of mine just said, hey, that was a sign you were just too stupid to realize it. You know, I believe he’s right. From that point on, I never thought about leaving this case. Of course, a few years later, this case caused me a little bit of a divorce.

[42:37] And I needed to make a little bit more money, so I promoted to sergeant, but I had made a deal with the brass. When I made sergeant that I’d have to go back to patrol for a little bit to learn how to be a sergeant, They’d bring them back in to run the homicide squad when it all worked out. Can’t give away everything that’s in the book. I know there’s a lot more that’s going to happen to get to Paul Rico, and you end up getting to him. And so, guys, you’ve got to get this book. Now, I have one last question here about this George Monterano, who eventually will admit to this murder. And eventually it comes out that this murder does tie back to the Winter Hill gang, And the guy that did it admitted to it and is out there today running around free. Yeah, it’s John Mariano. Boy, there are so many stories, just like you said, Jerry, so many stories in this book.

[43:38] It’s just so hard to share this trivia that comes through here. In 1995, I had learned that some young state policemen who started working a loan sharking case came up with enough to charge Whitey Bulger with some racketeering. So I heard about that, and I said, well, I’m going to make it. I took 60 pounds of reports. I mean, I made, I just stood in front of a copy machine for a couple days. And I had reports that were Boston Intel guys from back in the 70s that they had to purge. And so they were no longer in, but I didn’t have to purge them. I didn’t know them.

[44:38] So I took all these reports up there. I had a suitcase with a roller attachment to it. I rolled in these reports to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to a guy named Fred Wyshack. I’m from Tulsa, and I’m working this case, and I just want you to know that you’re getting ready to step into knee-deep corruption. So I got these reports that I’d like to share with you because you’re going to come across my case in it. So it turns out that, you know, we started working with them a little bit back in the late 80s. I had a call from some TV people. And they said, hey, we’re from a TV show. Joe, we’d like to put you on our pilot show, our very first one, and it’s called Unsolved Mysteries. We’d like to feature your case. You know, that was a time when there were just, you know, three major networks.

[45:47] There wasn’t a reality show. There weren’t all these crime shows, podcasts, anything. We went up and down the ladder on that. Roger Wheeler’s widow tried to block us from doing that. chief made a good decision and said, we’re going to do it. So in that, I learned of John Margarano. It even went back to some information back when our first trip to Boston in 1981.

[46:14] So Margarano had a felony warrant out for a horse race fixing conspiracy that they had worked up on him in the late 70s. So, um, I showed his picture on this Unsolved Mysteries and, uh.

[46:37] That was probably 86 or 87. Years later, in 1995.

[46:44] After this thing started unraveling up in Boston, somebody’s watching a rerun of Unsolved Mysteries, a fellow down in South Florida. And he sees me show this picture of Marano. And he said, hey, he don’t go by that name, but that guy is a loan shark. And I’ve paid some money to him. That’s how Marano’s arrest came about, off of that guy calling in and saying that. I wish he had called me, but he had called the state police. That’s how Marano got arrested. Once he gets arrested, I go visit him down in Latuna, Texas. He was staying in what they called the Veloce Suites. It was a suite of rooms where Joe Vellacci lived out his life when he became a witness against the mob. I guess they used this suite for the most important witnesses that they have need protection for and whatever. But, I mean, Margarano had his own small little kitchen. He had access to a toll-free phone, and he had private access to the rooftop exercise area. It was something. It was better than the first apartment I lived in.

[48:09] So, you know, me and Marno kind of hit it off. He told me, he said, you know, Unsolved Mysteries came out in the late 80s. He said, I was in Hawaii on vacation watching TV and I saw you come on holding up my picture.

[48:26] And he said, I knew right then and there, he said, I’ve been worried about this murder, but I knew right then and there we were going to meet someday. You know, it was interesting.

[48:38] Marano, I mean, I talked to him, you know, multiple times, but the first time I talked to him, I spent three days with him. He had a story that went for decades, you know, his involvement in organized crime, how he got involved in organized crime. As we were working through this, we brought him out to Tulsa, but yes, Marshall’s dead.

[49:02] And we had a small army put together. Me and him were in the car. I said, you know, this is 20 years almost after this happened. And I said, tell me what you can remember. He said, well, let’s go out there to that country club. As we’re going, you know, he’s saying, turn left here up at this light. And it’s right up here on the right. And as you pull in, there’s a garden shack that nobody was at the day it happened. And here’s where we parked. I mean, and what I did was I just went through, and every sentence or word that he said that would prove that this guy was the guy, every bit of corroboration, I totaled him up. There were 167 points of corroboration that only the killer would know. So, you know, then we went past the Wheeler’s house and he goes, yeah, I didn’t like this one right here because their circle drive kind of comes out onto a busier street. I didn’t want to get jammed up, you know, sitting there waiting to get out in traffic. And, oh, here was this parking space at Telex. It had its name on it.

[50:28] And sure enough, it did at the time. and he goes, oh, and there’s a Catholic school across the street and I didn’t like this one because I’m Catholic and I didn’t want to do it right in front of a Catholic school. I mean, just stuff like that. Yeah. That really showed me, I mean, by this time I’m kind of a decent investigator. So I’m seeing the level of a report that I was doing And comparing it to a level of a report that, say, the FBI or some other agency was doing, they were just pounding square pegs into round holes on their cases, and we were intricate with facts and details. I mean, that was…

[51:17] Something I really recognized at the time. Did Monterano, did he then give up Rico? Yes, he did give up Rico. And he gave up Stevie, the rifleman, Flemmie. He told us that Joe McDonald was the driver. And I tell you, if you ever watch that movie, Bullet, Joe McDonald became close to a movie maker. And the movie maker was making a mob movie. And so he wanted somebody to tell him what it was like to be in the mob, so McDonald told him. Eventually, that guy made a movie called Bullet. And in that big chase scene in Bullet, Joe McDonald was the passenger in the car being chased by Steve McQueen in the movie. He was the actor. The car getting chased, he was the guy with the shotgun. That was Joe McDonald. I’ll be darned. So what happened to him? Did he go down behind him? Well, he died in 1982. Okay.

[52:19] He, uh, he got caught coming back from, uh, Florida on, uh, Amtrak. Uh, he got caught, somebody snitched him off on the way, but he got caught in New York and he had a machine gun in a suitcase. Case, me and Dick Bishop, we had our bags packed and getting ready to head out the door to the airport. And I got a call from the cops up in New York City, and they said, you can stay at home because he ain’t talking to anybody.

[52:52] And we asked him if he would talk to you guys, and he said, I’m especially not going to talk to those guys.

[52:58] So he was a getaway driver on the Wheeler case. So Margot Long gave up Rico, gave up Flemmie. Finally, we got Flemmie to talk. Crob-ranked the Rico story.

[53:14] And we decided we had enough to arrest Rico. It took me forever to get the DA in Tulsa to file a charge. A little side issue that’s in the book, I had, over the years, had heard that there was a guy in Boston that actually put the guns on a bus. And Marano and McDonald picked up the guns at a bus station in downtown Tulsa to use. So I tried for several years to get that guy to talk to me. And he had a lawyer, and I talked to a lawyer every couple months and me the same answer. So finally, the last time that I tried, I said, hey, tell that guy. And this guy was a very huge Irish supporter. He had been arrested for smuggling guns to the IRA in Ireland.

[54:19] And he’s something. And there’s a bit about him in the book. I said, hey, tell Pat that my great-great-granddad came from Ireland through Boston and made his way out this way to Kansas before he slipped down into Indian territory. Just tell him that my great-great-granddad’s buried in the Indian cemetery about 20 miles from my house. And he came over from Dublin. and within an hour.

[54:54] Literally he said hey as soon as you can get out here he’ll talk to you what we did it’s myself and my partner at that time we got the chief to make a phone call we got sworn in as u.s marshals so we headed out to that that was the final piece that we needed to get the da to file a charge we had a deal with da that he was going to keep this under wraps nobody was going to know about it until we got there and got in place to arrest Paul Rico. We went out there, got with the Marshal’s Task Force out. We all went to Rico’s Miami Beach condominium about six in the morning. We just confirmed that the warrant was active, which is all good. So I beat on the door. And over the years, I had kind of gone toe-to-toe with Rico at least half a dozen times. So I’m beating on his door at 6 in the morning. He said, who is it? I said, hey, it’s Sergeant Mike Uffman Toss Place. I heard his wife say, what do you need? We’ve talked to you enough times.

[56:06] And I said, well, you need to open the door. So I opened the door. I got a warrant for first-degree murder. He got under arrest for the murder of Roger Wheeler. And he kind of stumbled back to the chair, fell down. and he was in his boxer shorts and stuff. I said, you need to go in your bedroom. We’ll take you in there and put some clothes on because you’re going to jail. I told his wife, I said, does he have some medicine he needs to take with him? He goes, yeah, he’s diabetic. And so she got a handful of pill bottles, put them in a sack. I said, well, if he’s diabetic, he might need to eat something for breakfast because you might not get some at the jail. And his wife said, hey, put your World Highlight cashmere sweater on. They’ll get a kick out of that. And I said, well, we’re going to get a kick out of it. But this is no joke. This is a big deal that’s happening here. You need to realize that.

[57:09] So we took him to Dade County jail. We go in there, and that smells like a third-world country in there. I mean, you know, it’s a big city jail. Yeah. We’re standing in line waiting to get booked in. There is some sort of foreigner standing right in front of us, and he had a goiter on his neck about the size of a cantaloupe, and it was leaking pus. Oh, my gosh. And he smelled terrible, like he hadn’t had a bath for weeks.

[57:41] Rico turned around and looked at him. I mean, he said, are you really doing this to me? And I said, well, you kind of did it to yourself. As soon as we get you up to the front of the line, we’ll be through with you. And I’ll see you back in Tulsa. Kind of ends up sad for H. Paul Rico. He will eventually die while in custody, I guess, after he got to – he had bad health problems at the time, and he’ll eventually die in custody when he gets down to Tulsa, if I read this right. But I’m filling out the booking sheet in a room at Dade County Homicide Squad on Rico. I’m just asking questions, high weight, all that kind of stuff, and he kind of sneers at me. How old are your kids? And it stopped me in with tracks. And I looked up at him and I said, what the F did you say? And he said, how old are your effing kids? And I said, look, old man, I don’t have a problem.

[58:47] Hitting you or choking you out because you’re not going to threaten my kids. So that was the end of the band.

[58:55] Interesting. Interesting comment by him. I tell you what, I just talked about this in a show not too long ago, those kind of a veiled threats that mob guys do that you can’t really say it’s a threat by the words alone. Yes, sir. You would have to know the context, the relationship between the two people talking. and you have to know a whole lot more than the threat in that. How old are your kids? You know, we had a guy here in Kansas City that just read off the names and ages of a guy’s kids.

[59:26] You know, he can say, well, that’s all I’m doing, just reading off the guy’s, you know, names of his kids and their ages. You know, I didn’t mean anything by it. I mean, that is so mob. That is the epitome of the veiled mob threat, their skillful mob threat. Interesting. All right. Well, I guess I got it across to Rico that I wasn’t happy with him because he wound up crapping in his pants in that interview room. Yeah, it’s a sad end for him and his family, but you play, you got to pay is what I find. run an all-volunteer co-gaze task force for sheriff’s office. And I tell you, when you walk up to somebody 20 years after they did something and you’re able to arrest them, it’s better than having a foot chase running down a serial killer. I mean, it’s for something they thought they got away with decades before.

[1:00:26] You know, and those families, they sure appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. And guys, let me tell you something. There’s, I didn’t think there’s anything better than getting into foot chase and catching the guy and putting the cuffs on him, but that’s probably is better.

[1:00:43] Yes, sir. It’s fun. All right. Mike Huff, former Tulsa PD. And what’s the name of the book, Mike? Remind me again.

[1:00:51] Killing My Father. And it’s the inside story of the biggest FBI corruption scandal in history. And it’s by the son, Mike Wheeler, the son of the man who was killed. Yeah, David Wheeler Me and a guy A published author by the name of Larry Yadin He has written about 14 books We met him as he got in touch with us While he was writing a dual biography On Mr. Wheeler and Whitey Bulger Who both grew up in Boston On different sides of town At the same time I didn’t know that, yes that’s a good book too it’s called One Murder Too Many because out of all the murders that Bulger did, and all the crimes this was the one that brought him down it was one murder too many for him.

[1:01:57] Mike Huff, Mike thanks so much for coming on the show, I really appreciate it, well thank you for having me well guys that’s been quite a story hadn’t it I tell you what, there’s nothing like hearing the real nuts and bolts, the background of a good long homicide investigation. There are so many little bits and pieces that have to come together. And a guy, the detective has to have this great memory in order to when you get somebody that’s confessing or you think might have done it. They start giving you details about that crime scene that nobody else could know. That’s when you know you got the right guy. So so this has been a great show and a really great guest. So check that book out. And don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the streets, driving your big F-150s and your vans and all those kinds of things.

[1:02:47] If you have a problem with PTSD and you were in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ve got a hotline number. And if you haven’t been in the service and you’ve got any problems with drugs or alcohol or PTSD, get hold of help with Anthony Ruggiano. You know, he’s a former Gambino guy in recovery now. He’s a drug and alcohol counselor. And on his website, he’s got a YouTube channel. He’s got a hotline number too. Maybe you can go into treatment with Anthony Ruggiano. That would be cool.

[1:03:16] Uh, you know, I’ve always got things to sell. Uh, you know, we’ve been selling Mike’s book for a while. You know, I’ve got my book, uh, leaving Vegas, how FBI wiretaps in and mom domination of Las Vegas casinos. I’ve got my books that are from my podcast shows, uh, windy city mafia, the Chicago outfit and big apple mafia stories from the five families. I’ve got a whole bunch of stories from my old podcast shows and those books. And, and, uh, you know, you can rent my DVDs on Amazon. So just go to Amazon and, and run my name, Gary Jenkins and mafia. And you’ll find all the stuff I got to sale. So, so thanks a lot, guys. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and be sure and, uh, like, and subscribe and, and tell your friends about us, you know, make, uh, uh, share this on your social media. A lot of people like this podcast, I know. And, and, uh, give us more listeners that we like more listeners. Thanks guys.

We start with the murky legend: that Gotti made his bones by taking out McBratney, earning Carlo Gambino’s favor. But like many mob stories, the truth is far more layered. I examine the wave of underworld kidnappings gripping New York in the early ’70s, led by Eddie Maloney and his gang, who impersonated cops to abduct mobsters for ransom. Caught in that chaos was Jimmy McBratney—an Irish tough guy with a soft side, a devoted father who hoped to leave the life behind.

Through Maloney’s own words, I draw a portrait of McBratney as more than a casualty of mob politics. We explore his role in the kidnapping racket, the deadly fallout from a botched grab, and the inevitable spiral toward vengeance that would seal his fate.

This episode also delves into the mysterious death of Manny Gambino, nephew of the boss, and how his murder—whether linked to McBratney or not—helped fuel a narrative that demanded retribution. Was Gotti the hand of that justice? Or was the story reshaped later to burnish his legend?

We follow the footsteps of NYPD Detective Raymond Taylor and the team that tracked Gotti down. Their investigation, pieced together from reluctant witnesses and underworld whispers, ultimately cracked open the case—and helped launch the myth of the “Teflon Don.”

In the end, this story is more than just a mob hit. It’s a study in blurred lines—between law and lore, loyalty and survival. Through wiretaps, memoirs, and police reports, I unravel a tale that speaks to the human cost of life in the shadows—and the power of a story to outlive the truth. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

Transcript [0:00] Well, hey guys, welcome back to the show. This is Gary Jenkins,

[0:02] retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. Well, I have a story about John Gotti and how he made his bones with the murder of Jimmy McBratney and that whole backstory behind that. It seems like with most mob stuff, there’s two or three different stories about it. You know, we just have to go with people’s memories, but yet mob guys will throw out different stories and, you know, in order to maybe throw the cops off or the agents off. And so you never really know exactly, but you just have to go to the sources of each of these stories and work it back from there. So I’m going to tell you these different stories, and you let me know what you think happened here. You know, the story is he made his bones by killing this Jimmy McBratney and got the respect of Carlo Gambino, which, you know, is mob lore now. Now, in the early 1970s, there was a series of kidnappings of New York City wise guys. and there’s a book out there called tough guy the true story of crazy Eddie Maloney and this book Maloney.

[1:05] Discusses in detail some of these kidnappings that he and his gang were involved with and Jimmy McBratney was part of this gang. The two men had met when they were incarcerated at Greenhaven State Prison in New York and they became close friends.

[1:20] Maloney in the book describes McBratney as a devoted family man who stood six foot three, weighed 250 pounds, who was a weightlifter and he claimed that McBratney could bench press 400 pounds. Maloney said that Jimmy McBratney was locked up for armed robbery, said he was quiet, a listener and a learner. Pretty soon they were talking about doing things together whenever they got out. He also said that the guy knew a lot about guns, wanted to collect guns. Really, his heart was in his home life, his family life. He wasn’t a guy that went out and played around. He loved his wife and two children. They had a house on Staten Island, and he wanted to save up enough to own a nightclub. And he said that actually McBratney was kind of prudish that whenever the talk in the yard at the prison was about women in a sexual manner, it upset him. He said his wife visited him regularly and wrote a letter every day. So he was a real family man. Now, after they were both released in October 1972, Maloney and Bratney became part of a kidnapping ring that they said. Now, Maloney claims was a brainchild of two other brothers. There were wise guys from the Gambino crime family, Filippo and Ronnie Miano. They only wanted 10% of the ransoms.

[2:36] And Filippo told Maloney that his real motive for these kidnappings was revenge. He said, the guys I’m setting you up, fuck me around and my people around on many business deals in the past. And I want to see those greedy fucks suffer. That sounds like something somebody like that would say. I mean, He’s got the lingo down, right, doesn’t he? They were convinced that these kidnapping mobsters could be pulled off without the victim’s family or anybody notifying the cops.

[3:03] They believed they could get as much as $100,000 for each wise guy they snatched. Now, it’s pretty dangerous snatching wise guys in New York City, but they’re not going to the cops, but they’re going to send out their own little detectives. They knew if they did get caught, the punishment would be, may probably torture, maybe more than just a bullet in the head, probably torture, and then the bullet in the head. Now, their little kidnapping gang was Maloney and McBratney, a guy named Tommy Genovese, who was a distant relative of Vito Genovese, a guy named Warren Chief Sherman and Richie Chasen. They’d get home addresses from these Miano brothers, and they had a two-team approach. Now, this is how Maloney reported this in his book. The first team would pretend to be police officers and use stolen badges and kidnap the wise guy from his home and then hold him in another location. The second team would then make the arrangements and pick up the ransom money. Now, the first kidnapping was of a Gambino capo named Frankie the Wop. Now, that escapade went off without a hitch, and the gang got away with $150,000.

[4:08] Now, over the next couple of months, they did three more successful kidnappings. They were going along pretty good. The next one after that, their luck changed. Now, McBratney actually planned this one, and they were going to grab a Gambino loan shark. They’d gotten a name and address from the Miano brothers, and they only knew him as Junior. They didn’t know any other name on him, at least Maloney didn’t know any other name on him. So they went by Junior’s house. They found him, stuck a gun in his stomach, put him in a car. When he got in the car, the victim put up a fight and Maloney hit him over the head a couple of times and then shoved him in the back seat. There’s a couple of kids that saw that scuffle around the car and followed them for a little bit and got the license number and turned it over to one of the kid’s uncles who happened to have some mob connections. So now this is in Gambino territory and they have lost a guy and now they’ve got the license number of the car that was used.

[5:08] They traced the car to a friend of maloney’s that’s where they were holding junior in this junior now the gambino guys you know acted just like cops they went to the once they found out who’d done it they went to the guy’s mother started asking questions about what was going on and where he might be when they found out about this mcbratney went into a panic and he realized that they probably had his name as well as maloney’s and the sherman’s they got 21 000 for Junior, and they were going to return the victim. Well, Sherman was supposed to tape Junior’s eyes over before covering those sunglasses. Well, he didn’t get it done right. Maloney claims that after driving a few blocks, McBratney became enraged because he realized Junior’s eyes weren’t taped over very good. Jammed on the brakes, Junior jumped out of the backseat. He knew the shit was about to hit the fan. He jumped out of the backseat, started running for his life. McBratney jumped out and started shooting at him. Sherman jumped out of the car and retreated to another car, to Maloney’s car, who had been following along and they were going to take off. Sherman was pretty sure McBratney would kill him if he ever saw him again for chickening out like that. And Maloney, in his book, readily confirmed that fact. Maloney never would identify this junior as Carlo Gambino’s nephew or say this was that same one. But after this kidnapping, Maloney and his little gang got together, except for Sherman, and Maloney said that he told McBratney that he ought to leave town.

[6:34] McBratney declined to leave town. He said, I’m just going to keep a machine gun in my car all the time.

[6:39] Well, about this time, Maloney was sent back to prison on a parole violation, and he was actually at a bar one night during this time, and he saw two guys talking to the bartender who were actually looking for him. The bartender knew him and played dumb, and he would later identify these two guys, what he described as stone killers, as John Gotti and Angelo Ruggiero were looking for him. Maloney also stated in his book about McBratney, he said, well, after he heard he’d been killed, he said, McBratney’s death saddened me as nothing else in my life ever had. He’s been a good friend. He wasn’t a hardened hoodlum like some of us. He always intended to get out of the life, and I believe he would have as soon as he got his nest egged by that bar. Also felt bad for Jimmy’s wife. She’d been as loyal to him as he was to her. On a personal level, Jimmy would have risked his life for me and I for him, and a person doesn’t make friends like that very often. He did confess in his book that in an effort to get a pass from the underworld for his own kidnapping capers, because he’d kidnapped some other made guys, he laid the weight of everything on McBratney. He sent word out that it was McBratney did this, McBratney did that.

[7:46] It didn’t matter to Jimmy anymore because he was dead. In his book, Maloney never mentions the kidnapping and killing of Manny Gambino. So now what really happened to Manny Gambino? There’s a totally different story out there, and it’s based on a couple of good sources.

[8:00] Depending on whether you believe in FBI agents or not, who may have been a little bit shady, I don’t think he was not as shady as the guy that came along behind him, DeVecchio. But in the book, Rick Agent, former agent Anthony Villano, talked in detail about this kidnapping. He claimed he was tipped off that Manny Gambino, the son of Carlos’ brother Joseph, had been kidnapped. And, you know, possibly and probably his source on this was the infamous FBI informant Greg Scarpa, because he had first talked to Bellano before DeVecchio actually revived him as an informant. If you want to learn more about that, go back to my show on DeVecchio and Scarpa. Bellano claimed that the first attempt by the family to deliver a ransom payment after Manny Gambino had been kidnapped failed because they went to the wrong restaurant to make the drop. Bellano claims that during this time he tried to help the family and at first they didn’t want anything to do with him, But later on, he said that an attorney for the Gambino family called him up and asked him to get involved. Blano reported the kidnappers asked for $200,000, and the Gambino family claimed they could only come up with $50,000.

[9:11] Now, I figured that Joe Gambino’s side of the family was probably the divorce side, more than likely, or another thing is $200,000 in cash would raise a lot of attention from law enforcement, just knowing that they had that money, so they claimed they only had $50,000. I got new ransom instructions, and Tommy Gambino, man, his brother, was told where to drive to pick up the next set of instructions, kind of one of those TV things, you know, go here, answer this pay phone, you got five minutes to get there, there’ll be instructions under the bench, some crap like that. Now, Volano then inserted himself into it, along with another business partner. The guy wasn’t a made guy, but he’s a business partner of Tommy Gambino, You know, and they took the money, and Blano got on the floor of the car that was delivering the ransom. The first stop was a telephone booth, 82nd Madison Avenue in Manhattan. From there, he got instructions to go across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey and wait at a well-lit gas station on the Palisades Parkway next to a set of payphones. At the payphones, they called with instructions to drop the money over a metal railing about a mile down the road. Somebody’s been watching TV here looking at old movies. A drop was made before the agent’s tailing Villano could get in a position to see the drop. But they did pick up the license number of a van that was seen nearby. I had this happen myself.

[10:34] It was a ransom of an art object, and it picked up a license number of a little Volkswagen bug prowling around the area. And they never did pick up the money. But then when we traced down that license, we found a guy that had stolen his art object. He was trying to ransom back. So they went back to the Gambino home and they were disappointed when Manny was not returned by the promised hour. They’d paid the ransom, dumped it over the railing. They’d gotten away. The kidnappers had gotten away with the ransom money, but Manny was not to be seen. And he was not to be seen again. Bellino kept investigating, investigating.

[11:10] And then as he got into this, he found out even more. He found out that Manny had fallen in love with a blonde girl and he wanted to leave his family for this girl, his Gomar. And she wouldn’t have anything more to do with him unless he left his wife and went full time with her. Well, you know, he went to some older Gambino family members and they said, you know, Manny, you can’t do that. You got to grow up, man. You got to forget that blonde. Well, in his circles, you know, in those circles, it’s okay to have a blonde mistress and go out on Friday night and go out to the girls’ wives on Saturday night, I think, is the deal out of Goodfellas. But it’s really bad for them. It’s not, you’re not really trustworthy if you leave your wife or your girlfriend. And particularly if you’re a nephew of Carlo Gambino, not good at all. Vlano also found out that Manny had some financial problems and probably because he was trying to maintain two households. I knew a guy that did this once. He had a lot of money. But, you know, there’s guys out there, and maybe some of you guys listening are. There’s guys out there that will maintain two complete separate households, one for their mistress, pay all the bills, give them spending money, and one for the family. He was really heavily involved in the Gambino family loan sharking operations, and he had a lot of money on the streets. Now, this story claims that one of the individuals who invested a lot of money in Manny to put on the streets was a gambler named Robert Sinter.

[12:36] Had rented the van if you remember the van that picked up the ransom had been rented to a Robert Sinter and, I don’t know why they didn’t put that all together before, but they didn’t. Villano then gets Sinner in, and he claims in his book, Brick Agent, it took five interviews with Sinner over a period of months until we finally reconstructed the entire venture. The snatch began as a hoax. Manny Gambino worked out the scenario with the debtor, Sinner, a friend of Sinner’s, and two others. Midway through the plot, Gambino’s accomplices began to have their doubts. They could see that if things went sour, Manny Gambino would give them up and either go to the law or go to some of his Cosa Nostra friends and give them up and lay the blame on them and say, I didn’t have anything to do with it. They were kidnapping me, and they’re going to end up with a bullet in their head. Robert Sinter ended this dispute in Gambino’s car with a bullet to the back of Manny’s head. They found Manny Gambino’s car at the Newark airport, and Milano reports that they found him buried, and his body had already had rigor mortis set in before they buried him, and he was found buried in the sitting position like he’d been sitting in a car for a long time. This was at a dump that they used for bodies periodically around the Earl Naval Ammunition Depot.

[14:06] Robert Senter was arrested and charged with the murder And in June 1973, he pled guilty to manslaughter And was sentenced to 15 years in prison During this entire detailed account of the incident, The kidnapping of Manny Gambino Jimmy McBratney’s name was never mentioned at all So was McBratney involved in the death of Manny Gambino? Organized crime expert, maybe some of you guys know He’s very well thought of, Jerry Capetche He said in his book, Mob Star McBratney was not part of the Gambino kidnap scheme. Some people may have believed it. He was a large, ruddy man that belonged to another gang. That gang crossed many ethnic lines, and they had kidnapped a Staten Island loan shark, got $21,000, but some neighborhood kids saw that snatch and passed along a license plate number to neighborhood family members. So see, that kind of goes back to that original story.

[14:58] McBratney was probably identified as a member of the kidnapping team of Manny Gambino only because he had done other kidnappings with these guys, these Irish guys, Maloney and them. The Gambinos believed that story, and they had him murdered based on that information. Now, McBratney was obviously not an innocent law-abiding citizen. He’d done armed robberies and kidnappings and had illegal weapons and been popped for all those things. If he’d even been better, that…

[15:27] Last Staten Island loan shark that they kidnapped, you know, would have been killed, but, you know, he didn’t kill him, and the guy didn’t really rat him out for that.

[15:35] But he sure as heck did not kidnap and murder the nephew of Carlo Gambino. This fabled notion that Gotti won the favor of the almighty Carlo Gambino by taking vengeance on the hood that killed his nephew is just one more piece of mob lore, but, you know, it sounds pretty good, and Gotti probably went along with that it was easy to just say, yeah, he’s the guy that did it. They didn’t have to take it to court and prove it in court. But let’s look at the NYPD investigation into the identification of Gotti and Rosario as part of the team that murdered McBratney. Did that go wrong in some way? Now, the main detective on that was a detective, Raymond Taylor. He was a pretty well-known detective. He was in the Crimes Against Persons squad, worked out of the 122nd Precinct on Staten Island. He responded to a homicide inside Snoopy’s Bar on Castleton Avenue in the New Brighton section of 120th Precinct. Squad commander Tom Quinn and other detectives responded.

[16:38] The uniformed cops had done a really good job of the crime scene and kept all the witnesses in there, anybody who hadn’t got away right after the shooting went down. Because usually everybody bails out of a bar, especially that kind of a bar whenever there’s a shooting, a fight, or anything. Nobody wants to get involved with that shit. When Taylor and the other Homicide Squad guys got there, they saw the victim was lying face up on the barroom floor. He had gunshot wounds to his head.

[17:02] As the witnesses were separated and interviewed, they examined the body and found out who the guy was. They found a car registration and some keys to a car. They went outside, found the car, and guess what? They found a machine gun in the trunk of the car. They knew right then this wasn’t your garden variety, just an argument turned into a homicide. They reconstructed the crime, and Raymond Taylor is a really well-known detective and a good detective. And he knew a lot of the organized crime families in New York and knew this was probably a mob hit. They started questioning of other witnesses, and that indicated it was an organized crime hit, just the way the guys had, three men had entered the bar and pretended to be police officers and tried to take him in custody, which is a really common thing that these mob guys do, is flash a badge on somebody and get them under their control, get them outside, get them in a car, get them in a quiet place. So remember that, guys. somebody flash a badge on you. Don’t let them take you anywhere until you’re sure they are who they say they are. He resisted because he was a big man and he resisted and they just went and popped him in the head several times right there. By then they identified the victim was a hoodlum named James McBratney.

[18:11] And they claim there was somebody told them that he was one of the guys responsible for kidnapping the nephew of Carlo Gambino and had gotten a hundred thousand dollar ransom. Now, you know, that word was out there on the streets and the Gambinos wanted to believe it. Now, the witnesses in the bar, they wouldn’t identify any of the three men that came in at Canvinson Neighborhood.

[18:33] But like many cases, a break came from an information provided by just a patrol cop from the neighborhood. Raymond Taylor got a call from a street policeman.

[18:45] He said he had got a tip on the murder in Staten Island, and he came up with some names. And Taylor brought the mugshots of Gotti, Angelo Rosario, and a guy named Ralph Galeone, or Ralphie Wiggs. And the informant that the cop had set him up with identified them as those were the guys that did it. He said that they had presented fake police badges. He even described the scene that Angelo was on the left, Galliano was on the right, and John Gotti was behind him. Said Galliano had a gun, Angelo Ruggiero had a pair of handcuffs. And as they began pulling McBrattney up and away from the bar, and they said, you’re under arrest. You’ve been this route before. Don’t give us any trouble.

[19:25] Another patron tried to intervene and galliano fired a couple of shots brattney really started struggling then and then galliano fired three times at close range killing mcbratney so gotti didn’t even kill him now gotti gotti i think was kind of in charge of this little hit team but but he and the one that actually dropped the hammer on him they arrested ralphie wiggs right away and the second suspect andy and the second suspect angelo rosario was arrested in his bed at gunpoint, you make those early morning raids catch these guys while they’re still in bed. John Gotti heard that this was happening. He went on the lam after they were arraigned in court and they got out on bail. Right after that, Ralphie Wiggs is killed. I think maybe they didn’t trust him to hold the water. I got a feeling. Had a wanted card out describing John Gotti and with his name and everything and all the law enforcement agents had it. And the FBI learned that where Gotti was and notified the NYPD.

[20:21] So they all got together in a little team of FBI agents and Raymond Taylor and went to where they knew Gotti was going to be. They arrested him and Gotti knew Raymond Taylor. And they said, hey, Taylor, what’s this shit? The FBI took Gotti to federal court first because they had like a warrant on him for fleeing the jurisdiction. And then they gave him to Detective Taylor in the NYPD. Then he ended up facing state charges in Staten Island criminal court. Now, Gotti and Ruggiero hire Roy Cohen and he got him a pretty sweet deal.

[20:51] They only served a few years on it. This arrest was unique because it was the Teflon Don’s first official hit, first official anything here that anybody really knows much about him other than some kid stuff. Berlino was using Gregory Scarpa, and he probably had other good informants, and he was really involved in trying to get the people who got away with the money. And, you know, that whole story about Manny Gambino wanting to run away with his mistress and needing money and get out of the family. It just, I don’t know, it’s kind of far-fetched, but on one hand, but on the other hand, it kind of rigs true. And then Jerry Capiche, a guy that you can trust.

[21:33] Claimed that McBratney had nothing to do with the Gambino kidnapping and McBratney was involved in kidnapping of other gangsters for ransom at that time. So that’s the story.

[21:46] It’s a little bit confusing, a little bit complicated. I hope I was able to make sense of it for you guys. Thanks a lot, guys.

His first book, Shots in the Dark, tells the harrowing tale of Rocco Anthony Balliro, a Boston mob associate whose desperate and poorly planned rescue mission turned into a deadly shootout. Believing he was storming into danger to help a friend, Rocco unknowingly walked into an ambush set by Boston police. When the smoke cleared, the cost was unimaginable—his girlfriend and her young son lay dead. Zimmerman takes us behind the headlines, exposing the chaos, confusion, and heartbreak of that fateful night.

Zimmerman’s second book, Chasson’s Run: The Prison Break That Captivated America and the Love Story That Fueled It, shifts focus to one of Boston’s most violent and manipulative criminals. This is the story of a man so dangerous, yet so persuasive, that he convinced a woman to help him escape from the infamous Walpole State Prison. It’s a tale of charm, obsession, and reckless loyalty—set against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic prison breaks in U.S. history.

Join us as Daniel Zimmerman unpacks these explosive stories and reflects on the twisted loyalties, romantic delusions, and violent consequences that define Boston’s mob lore.

Click here to see Dan’s books on Amazon. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly.

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transcript [0:00] Hey, welcome all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have today Daniel Zimmerman, a little bit different sort of a story. Now, he has another book a lot of you guys might be a little more interested in. We’re going to talk about that just a little bit. But the main book we’re going to look at is Chasson’s Run. I think I pronounced that right, Daniel. It’s actually Chasson. Chasson’s Run. Chasing somebody, which kind of fits the picture here. I think it’s a story that, well, Daniel Zimmerman, welcome. I really appreciate you coming on. Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me for this talk. Yeah. Now, Daniel, tell the guys a little bit about yourself. So tell the guys a little bit about your story. Well, oddly enough, I am a newspaper writer, but not the type you would think. I’ve been writing for over 25 years now, actually, a column or columns for local newspapers. And I cover, of all things, high school sports. I go out to area high schools. I watch the games. I take notes, take interviews, grab comments from players

[1:00] and coaches, go home and write it. And a couple of days later, it’s in the newspaper. Is that in the Boston area? Yes. Great Boston area. 25 years I’ve been doing it. You know, it’s funny you say that because I did a library presentation for my first book. And one of the questions in the audience from a woman was, how do I translate writing high school sports into writing mob books? Yeah. And I told her, you know, there’s two aspects of both. You have to, number one, be able to research, find out information.

[1:29] Keep track of information, and be able to do an interview with your subjects. And in this case, it would be athletes and coaches. On the book writing side, you’re reaching out to suspects and police officers and so forth. So there’s a technique and there’s a skill you learn in both. And I think they translate well into each other. You’re really both just trying, in both situations, you’re trying to get people to tell you a story and give you some interesting little sound bites in both stories. Trust me. Trust me. I get that a lot. As far outside of the newspaper writing, my full-time work over the last five decades has been the first part of my life I worked as an EMT, emergency medical technician, for a private ambulance service, but it happened to be a private ambulance service located within a 15, 20-minute range of two of the most notorious prisons in Massachusetts, MCI Walpole and MCI Norfolk. And the company that I worked for as an EMT, was tasked with transporting inmates to the hospital for a wide assortment, whether it be illness or injuries, stab wounds, you name it. We were the ambulance service that handled that. The second half of my life, I transitioned from being an EMT to working for a major utility, a gas company. And I was a supervisor who would oversee crews that would repair gas leaks in the street. So pretty dangerous work.

[2:49] And it’s kind of funny. I mentioned library talks. Another audience member had said to me, she said, so let me get this straight. You were an EMT going in and out of prisons on a regular basis. And then you switched to dealing with potentially explosive gas leaks and interview mob guys to write a book.

[3:09] You know, how do you sleep at night? Sleep better. Sleep better that way. Get your adrenaline out during the day. So there’s another book, Shots in the Dark, The Saga of Rocco Ballero. Okay, good. Tell the guys a little bit about that, then we’ll get into this book. Well, Rocco was a small time, I describe him as a petty criminal. He was part of a mafia family out of the north end of Boston. His family, the Balleros, worked directly under the main family, the major family in the Boston area, and that was the Anjulos. The Anjulos, in turn, answered Patriaca, who was out of Providence, Rhode Island. So that was the tear. Rocco’s family was two down from the top. And Rocco was at the time that this story took place, only in his early 20s, early to mid-20s. And again, just coming up in the business, so to speak. The same business that his five brothers and father were all involved with all through their lives. Unfortunately, he got swept up into a double murder that he was framed for. Two people perished, a 21-year-old woman and a two-year-old toddler killed in a crossfire.

[4:16] And they were my aunt and my cousin.

[4:18] That’s how I knew the story. It was 1962. I was a toddler myself. I was only two years old, so I don’t have direct memory of the incident. But obviously, I grew up, family members would tell me. And then when I got to a point where I was writing on a regular basis, I decided that I was going to tell the story. And I spent a year researching it, making sure that I had the material to do what I wanted to do. And then I reached out to Rocco. He was incarcerated at MCI Norfolk at the time.

[4:46] And more or less, I wrote a letter and asked him if I could come see him. And he couldn’t get me there fast enough. He wanted the story told. Yep. And so I went to visit him at the prison. And a few years later, you have the book written and done. And Rocco’s story is told. Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to see it happen. He died from cancer while still behind bars. I spent two years… Twice a week visiting with him at MCI Norfolk. I would go in on a Tuesday night and again on Saturday morning, and I would do these comprehensive interviews, more discussions, but I drew a lot of information from that. As time went on, Rocco and I became, I guess you could say we became friends. He introduced me to family members on the outside, provided me with documents, a stack of documents. He would mail me something every week. He introduced me to certain police officers, attorneys that were involved in his case. His brother and I became almost best of friends. We were having regular dinners. He would eat with his wife and me with my wife. We would go out to a local Italian restaurant and have a nice meal. He would tell me things, but then he would also, if there’s something sensitive, he would say, you can’t share this until I’m dead.

[5:58] And as it so happened, he passed away and I was able to share some of the things that he told me. Oh, sounds to me like spending that much time with these guys. I certainly did. Actually, there were questions being asked. I was being followed. My phone, I know, was tapped for a while. It was an early time when I first started to go out and visit with these people and have meals with them. My wife would ask me, she says, you’re not going to go work for these guys, are you?

[6:23] I would joke and I’d say, yeah, maybe as a driver or something. You’re right. I did meet a lot of interesting characters. I met people that folks would just not sit down to have a meal with them and not, you know, tremble the whole time. I got very comfortable with these folks. One of my best experiences, and I like to share this during my library talks, is that Billy Bolero, Rocco’s older brother, had said to me one day, he says, Dan, I’ve got a surprise for you. And I said, well, what is it? And he says, well, if I tell you, it’s not going to be an infinite surprise. We went to an Italian restaurant in Boston, right near the Mass General Hospital. And we sat in there and we’re waiting for my surprise, having a quick meal. Needless to say, I’d done a lot of research for the book. So I knew what everybody looked like. I saw a gangster. I knew who he was and what his story was. Walking in the front door was a man with a bodyguard that had to be nine feet tall. I said to Billy, do you know who that guy is? and he says yeah of course i know who he is stand up he’s here for you his name was peter limone and peter was the head of the new england mafia for two years. So here i am sitting sharing a dinner with peter lamone former head of the. I’m saying to myself what the hell am i doing here, i’m sitting at a table with a real gangster and you know who am i i’m dan zimmerman from a little town in massachusetts It’s, you know, I write high school sports.

[7:52] So it was very interesting. And it really a joy to meet this guy and others along the way. You know, the one thing you don’t want to hear from a guy in the mob is if you ever need anything, just look me up. Don’t ever take anything or even take a favor or anything because it’s always out there. Yep, you’re right. You’re right. So, yeah, it was interesting. You know, it was stressful at times, obviously. I can’t say I was ever scared. I was always more enthusiastic about the fact that I was getting an opportunity to meet and talk with some of these folks and ask questions. Mr. Lamone, once I got comfortable, I was asking him questions about Rocco that ended up in the book. And, you know, he was very willing to share what he had to say. He had spent 33 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. And he basically said to me when I would ask him a question, he says, why do I care what you write? He says, they’re not going to send me back. You know, I’ve already given him enough of my time. So he was one of those guys that, that, that FBI agent. Yes. You borne some perjury on, wasn’t he? Yeah. Yeah. He was one of the, I knew that name, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t put it together. Now I remember it was one of those guys that. He was one of the four, four of them were framed for a murder. A kid named Teddy Deegan was killed in the Boston area, framed up the FBI frame. These four gentlemen.

[9:13] Protect an informant that they had in their wheelhouse um the informant was the guy who actually did the murder guy named animal joe animal barboza barboza yeah barboza did the killing but he was working with the fbi and they didn’t want to lose him to prison and so they set up these four guys including peter limone i remember they actually filed the lawsuit against the federal government and the fbi and won they wanted 100 mil two of them died in prison they didn’t get to see the money. The other two were elderly by the time they got out. Their families obviously got a piece of that, and I’m sure they’re living well as a result. Yeah, that’s what we call generational wealth. Yes, exactly. The next generation is going to get use of that, and maybe the next one after that, if people are smart, that’s interesting. I didn’t realize about the lawsuit and being that big. Yeah, actually, towards the end of the den, Mr. Limone had said to me, he says, so Dan, let me ask you a question. He says, when this book is published, are you going to have book signings and events? I said, yeah, I’ll do that. Definitely. He says, good. He says, I’m coming to your first one. Make sure I get an invite. And he says, I want to be first in line, not your wife, not your family, not your friends, me, Mr. Lamont. He says, but I just won $25 million. So I’m going to buy a bunch of copies.

[10:29] I know about that book sales. That’s a good sign there. That’s a good deal. Yeah, it was a good deal. He’s not still alive, is he? No. He passed away from cancer. Bill Lamone, Rocco’s brother, Billy Valero, Rocco himself. There was a window of about three years where they all passed away in their late 70s. It was kind of sad.

[10:48] I made some good friends, and I lost them all at the same time. All right. That’s a great start for our show today, guys. As you all know, we’re going to talk about Daniel’s most recent book, Chasson’s Run. And so the prison break that captivated America and the love story that fueled it. Now, we know about the one up at Dannemore. It seems like this thing where a woman helps a guy break out of the penitentiary and goes on the run with him is an oft-told tale. This is another one of them. So tell us about this. How’d you get onto this? As I see, Escape from Walpole, was this something that happened when you were working around there? Yeah, as a matter of fact, so, you know, people ask me with Rocco’s book, I mean, Shots in the Dark, the first book, my connection. Obviously, my connection with the two victims in the shootings were my aunt and my cousin. So I get the same question on the second book and not quite as strong a connection, but there was one. As I mentioned, I worked as an EMT for the private ambulance service that handled prison transports of these inmates. And come Labor Day weekend, 1982, I was scheduled to work that weekend shift.

[11:52] And I had a girlfriend of a couple of years and she and I talked about running off for the weekend, the long weekend visit. We wanted to visit Montreal was our destination. So I reached out to one of my coworkers at the ambulance company and I asked him, I said, would you mind doing a swap? Can you work for me? And he agreed. It was a holiday weekend. Labor Day weekend is the last weekend of the summer season. Everybody tries to go away before the colder weather sets in up here in New England. He agreed. So off to Montreal, I go and come back to work Tuesday morning. And this gentleman’s name is Bobby. I walk in the office, ready to go to work again. And Bobby comes over to me and he puts a hand on my neck as if he’s strangling me. And he says, Zimmerman, I am never working for you again. And I said, Bobby, what happened? What is it? What happened? He says, because of you and me working for you, I had a gun held on me. I should be dead right now.

[12:46] He was one of the two EMTs that transported Leroy to the hospital. The other one was a gentleman named Paul, Paul Kilroy. He’s in the book. So the two of them were the EMS team that handled Leroy’s transport from Walpole prison to the Norwood hospital, which is where a lot of strange things took place. It should have actually been me. And years later, about seven years later, 1989, America’s Most Wanted, that TV show that everybody’s aware of, did a feature on Chasen. He had been gone so long and the FBI was kind of losing track of him and not having any evidence or leads coming in to be able to find him. America’s Most Wanted did a feature on him in 1988. The first year didn’t turn up any good leads. A lot of people watch the show, obviously, but no leads. But the next year they rebroadcast it. The funny story behind that is the America’s Most Wanted producers came to the office where I worked. And when they wanted to do the recreation of the escape, they wanted to hire an ambulance and two EMTs to act as the actors. And go through the whole process, start to finish, and film it all. And when they came to the office, the office manager looked at me, and, you know, I’m in uniform. I’m ready to go do calls. He says, hey, Zimmerman, why don’t you be one of the EMTs? You missed it the first time. You might as well do it the second time.

[14:10] So, you know, it’s funny. I said to him, you know, to be honest, I really don’t want to associate myself with a criminal like Leroy Jason. Give it to somebody else. and he said all right suit yourself turns out the two emts that were hired ended up getting substantial royalty checks now killer and i was left out in the cold oh man yeah yeah one of them one of them knew i had turned down the job and came over to me with this check kind of held it up in front of my face so that really was my connection to what took place working for the company, being aware of the people who were involved directly. And in later years, when I decided to write the book and I started to do the research and do interviews, I took them both out for a quick meal and we sat down. And even though I knew the mechanics and I knew the locations very well, because I’d been there so many times myself, I wanted that firsthand view. So I sat down with both the EMTs. And they were very good about sharing the experience with me. Even years later, in the escape of that degree, you don’t forget. Even four decades or five decades later, you don’t forget. That’s what we call a peak experience in your life. And when it’s a peak experience, you usually remember a lot of details. I’ve had a lot of peak experiences.

[15:32] Those death-defying moments. Tell us about Leroy Chase. This is a bad, bad, bad. And you went all the way back into his early history. I mean, I’m looking at this stuff, you know, he starts off in reformatory and, you know, going to the different facilities that young men go to as they start in that criminal world. So tell us a little bit about Leroy Chasen. Well, I mean, his rap sheet, he started as an eight-year-old, nine-year-old breaking into houses. He grew up in a town up in western Maine, the town of Rumford, which is known for rivers and mountains and woodmills. Really not much else. But his father, because of the size of the family, there were so many children. There were actually two sets of twins. Leroy was on the lower end. He was one of the younger kids. In fact, when he was born, one of his brothers was already 20 years old. The father decided to move to Massachusetts to find more and better work to feed his family. Lee, Leroy came along with him and the rest of the clan that was still living at home. And he started breaking into houses. He started setting fires. He had a knack for lighting cars and garages on fire and things like that. He wasn’t very good at getting away with things either. The police were always knocking on his door, putting handcuffs on him in some form or another. He ended up in the Massachusetts Reform School system.

[16:58] Seven buildings scattered throughout the state, all catering to young children up to the age of 17. And they were just terrible places. My first book, Rocco had spent some time in one, and he shared some of the experiences of the inner workings of the Massachusetts reform school system. And it wasn’t very pleasant for the kids. A lot of violence, a lot of mistreatment. Well, you know, what typically happened, and I’m not saying that’s the reason behind it, but these schools were run by husband and wife couples.

[17:28] So the husband would be hired by the state, he’d be a live-in caretaker, and the wife would go along because they had housing for them. And the wife would contribute to the punishment of the children and so forth. So, you know, Leroy would, because of the treatment and because of how difficult it was in these places, he would escape. It’s where he learned his early years on how to get out of these places. And he was always escaping, but then he was always being brought back. The police in the areas, one of the most notorious one was in a town called Westboro, and the police would actually pick up these kids and not want to bring them back because they knew what was going on in these places and just felt so bad for these kids. They didn’t want to bring them back, but they really had no choice. They couldn’t bring them home. There was nowhere else for them to go. There was one story about one of the reform schools. A police officer was returning a runaway, heard screaming from inside the building. And hesitated bringing back the kid that he had with him. He just said it was just horrible. They decided that in the 70s, the new administrations, the new people came in, decided to shut down the system. And they did. They succeeded by the late 70s in shutting down the reform schools. But by then, Leroy had graduated. He graduated to the grown-up facilities. Yeah.

[18:46] And the reason that the crime that he committed that basically put him behind real bars and a real prison, this was MCI Concord, was he fired a gun at some kids that were hanging out in front of his apartment. He had an apartment in the town of Somerville, and he shot a gun out the window and actually hit a girl in the face. She was wounded, scarred for life, and Leroy went off to prison at MCI Concord. Did his time, short time, because he was still young and the system was forgiving. They worked hard to get out and they let them out. And he, from that point, went on to his first armed robbery.

[19:26] He robbed a pharmacy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they captured him there. It was armed robbery. He had a gun with him. He actually took a police officer hostage for a while. In the basement, he had tried to escape through the basement. The police officer went down into the basement and Leroy grabbed him, held the gun to his head, and actually to the back of his neck,

[19:44] the cop negotiated his release saying, if you let me go, you’ll live. If you don’t, you’ll die. My friends upstairs will not let you leave here alive. Leroy wasn’t suicidal by any means that he did what he had to do to get out of that situation and back to prison. He went this time to the big house, to Walpole. Walpole. So yeah, Walpole was one of the most difficult prisons to be in, to be incarcerated in, and obviously to escape from. 18-foot walls topped with electric barbed wire. Just a lot of corrections officers, a lot of turrets and guard shacks along the wall. In fact, on the cover of the book, there’s a picture of one of them that I happened to take for the cover. And you just weren’t getting out of this place, not in the conventional means.

[20:34] And it was just a terrible prison. They had a block in Walpole. It was called Ten Block. It was pretty famous. Obviously, all the inmates knew it, but people on the outside had been made aware of it through newspaper articles and hearsay and other stories. And Ten Block was reserved for the worst of the worst. These criminals that were held in those cells were so violent that they couldn’t even mix with each other. To get them there 23 hours a day in the cell, one hour to the outside, they actually had individual cages that would feed at the back of their cell with an extra door. And they would open those doors. The inmate would come out into this cage of wire top to bottom. And that’s where they’d get their fresh air and exercise time. You know, in certain days when we were going in with the inmate to pick up an inmate, you had to drive from the front gate. They called it the trap. You drove from that point to the back of the prison where the infirmary was, and you drove by the 10-block cages, and sometimes they were out. And the stuff they would say to you, they would yell things at you. They had pretend shotguns that would shoot at you.

[21:41] Just nasty people. Needless to say, Mr. Chasen spent some substantial time in the worst block in the prison. I was reading through your book. I know he was not a model prisoner either. He did some things, a lot of assaults, a lot of them on corrections offices. There was one time where he was acting out of sorts during a family visit, and after the family visit, one of the protocol is that they do a strip search to make sure that family members haven’t transferred any contraband to the prisoner. And he refused to disrobe so they could do their strip search. And he basically took down four corrections officers who tried to force him. He hurt two of them. That was just his way. That’s how he resolved things. He tried to bribe corrections officers. He threw things in their faces when they would deliver things to his cell just not a very nice guy but then he would turn around you know i guess you could say if he had a heart i noticed in his record i counted, dozens of blood donations he gave yeah and i’m like why is this guy giving so much blood and then i come find out they earn points towards parole so that’s why every chance he could donate blood they would add to his it would speed up his parole and eventually he did get paroled after the Yanmaraburi. He was sent away for 7 or 15 years. He didn’t do nearly that bunch. And was eventually released in 1977.

[23:05] Early that summer, he was out. In Massachusetts, there’s kind of the well-known story of Dukakis and letting Willie Horton out on a furlough. Yes. He would be the kind of guy that would be like Willie Horton out on a furlough. In my first book, Rocco was out of that furlough program. Yes, he was. He applied for the furlough. It was a new program for him at his stage. And they awarded it to him. And so he was actually going out on the weekends, leaving the prison. And going into the city, into Boston, to spend time with his family members. And he would go back, and he stuck to it. He returned every time. The program was under threat. A lot of people were pushing to have it ended. They just didn’t want some of these inmates being released, even for a minute, never mind a whole weekend or more. So as a result, Rocco Bolero got upset about that, and he escaped.

[24:02] He left. Yeah, he was on a work detail, working one of the farms at a prison. And he had it arranged so that one of his friends would pick him up. And he ended up in San Francisco and he was there for about three months before they tracked him down and brought him back. Chasen did apply for furloughs, but he just never really got to the point where

[24:20] they felt comfortable letting him out even for a few minutes. That furlough program, there’s a lot of politicians from the 70s in Massachusetts that say that cost Mike Dukakis the presidential. Remember it. President Bush actually put up billboards advertising Dukakis’ softness on crime because he let out Willie Horton. Willie Horton was a vicious murderer. He ended up in prison for killing a 17-year-old gas station attendant, stabbed him over 17 times, stuffed him in a trash can, and off to prison, Mr. Horton goes. Well, Dukakis’ program, he gets out. He runs off into Maryland and rapes a woman and beats her husband pretty badly.

[25:04] And so he gets arrested in Maryland for that crime. And the Massachusetts authorities said, well, we want our guy back. We want Horton back in our prison system. And the people in Maryland said, no way. You let him out once. We’re not going to send him back so you can let him out again. To this day, he’s still incarcerated. and they never let him come back to Massachusetts. That’s interesting. I didn’t know we were going there when I asked that question about that. That’s an interesting story. And George Bush, the first George Bush. I remember those ads. They really crucified him on that Willie Orton story. Yes, they did. The other reason I remember it. Yep, and it was a good reason too because that furlough program was ridiculous. They should never have done something like that. Not with some of these guys. It was designed for the lesser criminals. They never wanted murderers to be let out for a weekend. But the politicians in the state tend to bleeding hearts, and they decided to, they went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, yeah, you got to make it fair. All inmates are eligible. And so the murderers started getting out, too, and that caused problems.

[26:06] Obvious problems. Interesting. Getting back to Leroy. Now, he gets out later on in midlife before he goes back in this final time. Well, what crime put him back in this final time? I have to assume he just continued to do robberies, little robberies and stuff all along. He never was a master criminal. Yeah, he wasn’t really a master criminal. He did things enough to survive and feed his drug habit. He murdered a kid in Quincy, if you’re familiar with Quincy, Massachusetts. The story behind the murder was he had a friend in prison at MCI Concord.

[26:40] His name was Mark Bray, B-R-A-Y. And Chasen were good friends. Chasen was getting out on parole, legitimate release that summer of 77. And Bray had escaped. And he was on the run. He wanted some money that was owed to him on a drug deal. They met. And he says, there’s a guy in Quincy that owes me some cash. He didn’t give me the drugs he prompts me in jail and i want my money and chasing agreed to go get it for him so he gets a ride down to quincy and he goes to a park pageant field is the name of the park and there’s a group of kids there they basically meet there every night they have a few beers and they chit chat they talk to each other and nothing crazy on their 20s, and he approaches the gentleman that owes the money to his friend and demands the money or drugs. And the other guy, his name is Kevin, he had basically stopped doing drugs, stopped distributing drugs. He wasn’t involved anymore. And he really wasn’t going to respond the way Mr. Chasen wanted him to. So Leroy knocked him to the ground, punched him really hard in the face, knocked him down.

[27:51] Kevin Rousset’s friends saw this happen and they all come running to his aid. And a couple of them jumped on Leroy Chasen, who produced a knife and stabbed two of them and then threatened the rest of them before he was taken out of the park by the friend that brought him there. One of the people that he stabbed, Paul Melody, was 20. He perished. And the other guy, he was wounded in the kidneys, but they did surgery and he recovered fully. A side note on Mr. Melody, the victim, his dad was a Boston police officer, just retired. So Leroy left, and then he went on the run with Mark Bray and a third gentleman. They made a stop in Somerville where his apartment was to get some clothing because his clothing was covered with blood and a couple of guns that he had stashed in the apartment.

[28:41] He lived there with his girlfriend. Her name was Linnell. After they took off to go on their run, trying to get out of Massachusetts, more or less, the police stormed that apartment. State police, Somerville police, a lot of police. They questioned Linnell, her roommate. And the third wheel that had been with Leroy, who decided not to go with Leroy, he decided to stay and face the music, more or less. He wasn’t involved in the murder in any way. He’d stolen a car and just some minor stuff. So he decided to stay and face the cops while Leroy and Mark Bray basically took off and they were gone. And they kind of lingered around the city a little while, spent the night in Rhode Island while they kind of planned what they were going to do. Jason’s thought was they would go to Montreal, Canada, and hide there. Mark Bray wanted to go to Florida. He felt it was warmer.

[29:32] And he had friends there. They didn’t get to either one of them. And after about a week on the run, they decided to rob a store in Maine, an antique store that they had heard had some very expensive clocks that they could sell. They could fence for cash to feed their escape. And so at that store, they were apprehended by a couple of Maine cops. You know, people always say you can get away with stuff in Maine, but these guys weren’t having it. One was a former New York City police detective and the other was a local cop. It was pretty well seasoned. And they set up a bit of a sting at the antique store and arrested all three of them. The third one was Kathleen McDonald, Leroy’s wife. They had met her in Boston. It was an arranged meeting. She had met Leroy in prison. And they got married in prison chapel.

[30:28] And so she was meeting with him, and she was going to run with him. She went with them on the robbery of the antique store. And she was going to basically go home from there, and they were going to run off to Canada. But she was apprehended with the two suspects, and she became one herself. She had a very interesting story. She was a married woman from Weymouth, Massachusetts, which is very close to Quincy. She and her husband had six children. And she unfortunately turned to drugs, a lot of drinking, and they ended up getting a divorce. He took custody of the kids, and she went off with Mr. Jason. She met him as a pen pal. Leroy was looking for money to conduct an appeal. His lawyer told him he needed $500. So he put an ad in a Boston newspaper that he wanted 500 people to send him $1 each.

[31:25] Kathleen saw the ad. She sent him $1 and a greeting card, and the rest is history. They began writing to each other. She started to visit him at the prison and they fell in love and she orchestrated his escape.

[31:40] All right. Interesting. We won’t roll into the whole escape because you got to leave the guys something that they want. But tell us just kind of an overview of how did she get in? I mean, she was on the outside, I assume. Yeah. You mentioned that she had some EMTs that were held at gunpoint that night. So just kind of a quick little brush over on how this got started. Well, she was a pretty intelligent woman. Between the two of them, they figured that the only way really to escape from Walpole prison, only one other guy had done it previously. He was a very very thin man of maybe 110 pounds and he hid in the wheel weld of the preacher’s car.

[32:20] Of a station wagon there’s an old you know it was in the 70s so you know those cars how big they were and all the side decided the interior body the the plastic off climbed in there pull it back on and off the the priest drove and when he got outside he jumped out of the car and he captured him in about two days they figured out where he was going so the really the only way to get out of walpole prison other than parole is to escape on the outside yeah so instead of the inside there’s no way getting out of that place from the inside i saw enough of it over the years to realize you know because you think of those things as you’re in the prison you know if i were in here how could i get out and just just really absolutely impossible rocco in my first book rocco and i had a discussion about escapes. And Rocco and a group of other men actually tried to dig a tunnel out of there. Yes, they do make license plates at Walpole Prison. They made them in the foundry. Everybody driving in Massachusetts, the license plate on the back of their car back in the 70s and 80s was made at Walpole Prison.

[33:27] That’s not just a myth. They also made other items for sale in the little craft shop in the visiting area. And they made things out of metal and people would buy them. That’s how they fed their canteens so they could buy things in the prison. So yeah, they dug a tunnel and halfway across the yard underneath, they actually ran into a brick wall. And I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase. When they built MCI Walpole and MCI Norfolk, it was a very secretive construction project.

[33:54] People who built it were sworn to secrecy. And what they had done is they built that wall from the surface, the dirt surface, down all the way around the interior of the prison. So that if anybody tried to dig a tunnel towards the actual main wall, there was no way getting past that. So needless to say, the only way to get out of the Walpole prison was to escape from the outside. So Leroy and Kathleen figured out a way to get him out so that they could execute an escape. And the way they did that was Leroy got hold of a ballpoint pen and stabbed himself in the abdomen three times and Kathleen had some nursing experience she at one time had her nurse’s aid license so she had a little bit of knowledge and she knew that if he stabbed himself in the abdomen number one it would bleed a lot and look worse than it really was and number two one of the The protocol at MCI Walpole or all prisons in Massachusetts was if an inmate left the facility, he had to have a belly chain. So it was a chain that would wrap around your belly all the way around the back to the front. And then you would be handcuffed to that in addition to leg irons. So you were pretty secure leaving the leaving the prison.

[35:08] And she figured, and he was correct, that because of where the wounds were, they wouldn’t put a chain on him in that area and handcuff him to the chain. So all he had was the leg irons, and those could be dealt with. He still had mobility. He had his hands free. He had his hands free so he could take hold of a gun that was smuggled in by his wife. That’s a heck of a story, Daniel. This is great. You got to get this book. It really is a fascinating story. They become like Bonnie and Clyde on the run out there also. One of the state police officers who was interviewed at the time of the escape called him the Bonnie and Clyde of Massachusetts.

[35:46] That’s such a common story as a woman helps a man escape from prison, go on the run, and then they hide out somewhere and eventually they get caught. But it’s such a common story. You look at the subtitle on the book and it tells you that these two fell in love and she was willing to risk everything to be with him and to be with him on the outside of prison. And so they executed this escape, and they were gone for seven years until a gentleman named John Walsh on America’s Most Walsh.

[36:16] Yeah, he came along, and he ruined Leroy Chasen’s day.

[36:22] Leroy Chasen, he’s not still alive, is he? No. As a result of that television show, the FBI got enough tips to locate him. He and his wife were living in downtown Denver. The FBI got enough tips to figure out where he was. And I’ll leave the rest to the reader as to what took place. You know, it also begs the question, is a guy like this has spent his entire life in and out of penitentiaries and was out. He was just doing drugs and doing robberies and crimes. Yeah. But he’s able to now spend seven years and not encounter the police. As a matter of fact, he and his wife were working while they were on the run. They made stops in New Hampshire, Chicago, Seattle, Kansas City, Las Vegas, until they finally reached Denver. And along the way, they would have stops in these cities, these locations, living in motels. And he was working at Mom and Pop Cafe as a dishwasher. And she was a nurse’s aide by trade, and she would find jobs in that respect. And so they managed to earn enough money to stay on their feet. There were some crimes committed along the way, but they were described later on after it was all said and done as Teflon criminals because they always got away. The police would often let them go.

[37:46] They had no idea who they had. They had false names. Oh, yeah.

[37:53] When they did, they had an accomplice. Yeah. Oh, did they? When you get somebody in and you check your prints and, you know, their record locally and there’s nothing. Well, unless, you know, unless it’s really something, you may just release them

[38:07] on a recognizance or a city charge in a small bond or they go pay a bond. Yeah. You know, you got a $5,000 bond. You go pay a bond for that $1,000. bucks and and you know and walk i mean they actually had an account on a bar room and one of their hideouts where a gentleman was stabbed and that would trigger a lot more than a slap on the hand yeah but the other gentleman was also a criminal and didn’t want to reveal that to the police so he didn’t press charges yeah and the police let mr chason walk away he spent a couple days behind bars and off he went all right teflon the teflon everything just rolled off then, yep chasen chasen chasen i’ve got how’s it i’ll read all it is it chasen’s run the prison break the captivated america and the love story that fueled it so guys i have links to that book down below i also have link to shots in the dark the saga of rocco bolero you’ll be interested in both these books, guys.

[39:10] Thanks a lot, Daniel. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. Thank you. Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you for this opportunity. Okay. All right. You go ahead and just leave. I’ll be in touch. When I get ready to put this up, when I put it up, I’ll send you links. It’s both the audio and the YouTube video. So I’ll put it up. Okay. I appreciate it. Thanks very much, Gary. I visit Boston every once in a while. I have to look you up one of these times. I live down in Hingham. Okay. Yeah. I’m familiar with that. I’ll be there a couple of times a year, not for very long, but I’ll try to look you up. All right. Thanks a lot. Hangum is right next to Weymouth where some of this, I’m Quincy with it. A lot of this took place. So yeah, look me up. I’ll take you to lunch in the North End. I’ll give you a nice Italian meal. You know, I want to go up there. I did a story on Jello and the FBI investigation of putting that hidden microphone in the social club down there. It’s a hell of a story. I want to go down there, see the North End. I’ve got, I’ll give you a great tour. I’ll show you all the sites. All right, buddy. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.

[40:10] Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So when you’re out on the streets there and you’re a big F-150, watch out for those little motorcycles when you’re out. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ll help with your drugs and alcohol problem. If you’ve got that problem or gambling, if not, you can go to Anthony Ruggiano. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his website. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. Just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books. I got my movies. They’re all on Amazon. Just go. And I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks, guys.

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Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, it’s good to be back here in studio on Gangland Wire. I have a man today who has a career somewhat similar to mine. He was with the Rhode Island State Police Intelligence Unit, Anthony Passare. Anthony, welcome. Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Love to talk about this stuff with you. Yeah, this has got to be fun, guys. It’s going to be fun. I always like having these ex-intelligence unit mob cops on here because we have so much in common. It’s like, you know, it’s like we work together almost, but yet in different parts of the country. Now, Anthony is writing some books right now. He’s turned a lot of his old experiences into fictional books with a fictional detective, but it’s all based on real events. We’ll talk about those books a little bit more later on. Anthony, you served, you were a college dean or a college professor, and you became a chief of police, and now you’re writing novels. So tell the guys a little bit about your basic history.

[0:59] Sure. I joined the state police when I was 22 years old, very young, obviously, like we all were. And I joined the state police and I was lucky enough to be stationed in the intelligence unit, work with some excellent individuals. As you know, no one does anything alone in law enforcement. It’s always, you need the support of your fellow officers, prosecutors, and that sort of thing. So I was with the state police for 24 years because at the time they had a 25-year mandatory retirement. So you had to leave. So at 24, I was lucky enough to get a job as the assistant dean of the School of Justice Studies at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. I was there for six years. At the end of my sixth year, I was dean of the School of Justice Studies, which gave out undergraduate degrees in criminal justice, master’s degree. And we also had a justice system training research institute where we brought a lot of offices in for in-service training.

[2:02] But I was anxious to get back into law school. I loved the parents. I loved the students. The administration was good to me. But dealing with college professors is a whole different animal. And nothing against them. But that wasn’t my culture. My culture was our culture. And as you know, it’s different. And a lot of it has to do with respect. And I didn’t feel that where I was working. So I was lucky enough. I applied and became chief of police in Middletown, Rhode Island. Which is just north of Newport, Rhode Island, which is a tourist attraction. There’s a Navy base here. And I served for chief for 14 years. And I retired at the end of my 14th year. And I spent four years practicing law and actually prosecuting cases, misdemeaned cases for the town.

[2:54] At the end of that sixth year, the town came back to me and asked me if I would come back as chief, which is really unusual to happen, at least in Rhode Island. But the chief that was hired after me decided to move on, so I went back. And I did that for two years, and I just retired in December. And I mention all of that because it provided me with the materials for the books I wrote, but it also gave me the best experiences I could ever have. I mean, I grew up in a tenement house in Providence. since we were probably poor, but we didn’t know it. But I say to officers all the time.

[3:36] You’re in a unique position. You will be talking to captains of industry, rich people, poor people. You’re going to be exposed to something. I’ve met presidents, I’ve met senators, and what chance would I have other than being a member of the law enforcement? So I grew up in an Italian neighborhood, so I took that, my upbringing, along with the fact that while I was under state police, we had three witnesses in protective custody. We were with them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and we made a lot of cases. And eventually, one of the cases we convicted a maiden member of organized crime for first-degree murder, which is highly unusual, as you know, to get. But the witnesses help us put a case together.

[4:25] So when that case finished, I said, there’s a story here. You know, there’s a story here. And I wasn’t interested in doing true fiction and reading transcripts and doing all that hard research. I wasn’t interested in it.

[4:39] I fictionalized my upbringing and these three people, but the framework is a real case. And so I did that and I published that, self-published it, and it did really well. That was your first book then. What was the title of that? It’s called They Always Win. They always win, and it’s part of the Gino Peterson series. The book that you have is the second book. I’m working on the third book. It’s going to be a three-book series, and we’ll close out Gino’s chapter then. So I wrote that book, but then I got the Middletown job, and it was just so difficult to write. And so I put it off until before I retired. I put the second one together,

[5:26] and that was published in November of last year. As you know, your best writing, I think, comes from real experiences, things that you’ve gone through in my career.

[5:39] I was able to be on a task force with the FBI for two years, a money laundering case with wiretaps, buggings. It was just fascinating because as you know, the feds have all the resources in the world once they decide something. So this was a multimillion dollar money laundering scheme. And basically the gentleman was for like one, two, three percent of the total figures that he had to launder. He got back. He would take the cash at his business. It would come in 55 gallon drums.

[6:20] Wow. Was this part of the patriarchal family then out of Providence? It was a maid guy connected to that. What was his name? So the person that ran the coin shop, it was called Sokosha coin with Steven Sokosha. He wasn’t a maiden member or a mobster, but he was protected by the underboss of the family.

[6:45] I remember once we were listening to him and he called the underboss and he said, Hey, so-and-so another maid guy keeps coming in here. You know what it’s like when they see somebody making a lot of money. Could be anything. Stealing cars. Could be breaking into houses. They want a piece of it. And they’re just very, you know, they’ll convince you that you need their protection. And they do offer that protection. So someone was trying to get into Stephen’s separation. And the mate, the other boss said to him, I’ll make a call. Don’t worry about it. So they were associated with the crime family in that they were protected. I mean, were they kicking something upstairs to the boss? I have to imagine they did. But it was just a fascinating operation. I’ve always said to myself, this gentleman was so talented. If he had put his efforts into running a business, he’d probably be running a Fortune 500 business. But instead, he wanted to do this. Yeah. So now, how did that work? You mentioned they’re bringing in barrels with money in it. Have you had a coin shop? What was the techniques of how it worked? Sure.

[7:53] So it was a precious metal coin place. And so what would happen is the cartel would ship to him 55 gallon drums and they would be weighted with beads or something like that and then filled with cash. And so what he would do is he would give.

[8:13] $9,999 to what he referred to as Smurfs. These are people that work for him. They would go to the bank and exchange the cash for a money order or a bank check made out to Sakocha Coin or whatever company he was using. He cashes, puts the checks in his account, sends that account overseas. It bounces like Britain, the islands, Caribbean islands, and then to Bogota. And it was a continuous cycle. Interesting. So this was a Colombian cartel that somehow made this connection with this guy. Absolutely. Did you ever figure out how they made that initial connection? Or is that sometimes those things are not important in the end anyhow, but I’m always curious. Yeah, I’m not exactly sure. I just imagine that someone maybe in the mob who had a connection to the drug cartels. And so it wasn’t Secosia was like an associate if you will of the Providence family obviously because he could make a call to the underboss. Remember what the underboss’s name was? I believe it was Nicky Bianco at the time Oh Bianco yeah I remember that name Okay so Bianco then protected him. He didn’t do that for free No doubt about that they were getting a piece of this money laundering.

[9:39] Thing whatever it was and it was what was interesting too is that the cartels would call him and sometimes he would have to outbid other money laundress oh really wow yeah it was interesting like it wasn’t he was just wasn’t given the money of the job so he’d say okay if they’re gonna do it for seven percent i’ll do it for six or i’ll do it for five because he was doing such volume that he was going to make a ton of money. Yeah. But yeah, he had to bid for that, whatever that, you know, whether it was 2 million or a million, whatever they wanted laundered, he would have to bid by giving them a percentage that he would take off the top while it’s, you know, circling the globe before it goes back.

[10:21] And so he had all these Smurfs lined up and these were just other, you know, these professional, semi-professional criminals that he knew from him. He was probably been buying stolen property from a lot of different people, storing coin sets and and burglary stuff who had a lot of criminal contacts so you guys then did you had you started identifying these guys who they were and maybe follow them to watch them do the snakes checks and all that wow that was quite enough that was a helping operation wasn’t it it was unbelievable you know the feds were involved uh irs was involved.

[11:00] Because the reason they got tipped off was that, so there’s a cash reporting requirement, anything over $10,000. So they thought they were being smart by going in with just like a dollar under. But they kept going to the same banks over and over again. And one of the banks alerted the IRS saying, there’s something wrong here. And so IRS, you know, they turned the case over to the FBI. So we had FBI, we had state troopers, we had IRS agents. We had anybody you would want from the federal government. And we worked it for two years, but it was an incredible case, you know. It was an incredible case. Did you ever have to sit on any of those wiretaps and listen? My guys, when I worked as a sergeant, I came back in later as a sergeant, we would loan guys out to sit on those wiretaps. They hated it. They hated it. There’s nothing more boring than sitting on a wire all day long. I know. I know. And then, you know, I don’t know if most people know, you have to minimize, which means if you’re listening to a conversation and it turns personal, you have to shut the machine off. And then, okay, when do I go back in to see if it went back to – it is boring. It is boring. Yeah, yeah, interesting. I had to volunteer for Saturdays because I knew there wouldn’t be much.

[12:20] I would catch up on all my paperwork because Saturdays, not much. And we’d say, when do you want to work on Saturdays? I said, no, I can get a lot of money.

[12:36] But it was a lot more fun to go out and follow those Smurfs around and how they were working and all that. That would be a lot more fun. Yeah, it was. It was. The surveillance were really, you know, like you said, the fun part of it. Yeah, that was a hell of a case. Now, your intelligence unit, I would like to compare intelligence units.

[12:55] We, of course, we paid attention to the local mob, picked up their tag numbers and just followed them around to try to see what businesses they were frequent in and maybe who their girlfriends were and what bars they had a piece of the action in and that kind of a thing. And on the other hand, we also had some guys that if there was, like we had an operation on the Ku Klux Klan one time. And so did you guys have those two operations going or were you just strictly criminal in your intelligence unit?

[13:24] Well, we did gather intelligence. Maybe if I explain this, it’ll make more sense. So within the Rhode Island State Police, obviously, we had the detective division. And Rhode Island, the state police have statewide jurisdiction. Not like a lot of highway patrols out in the West. So anyway, so we would have an auto theft squad. We would have a drug squad. And we would have this intelligence unit, which of all the detective divisions, so to speak, We were the only ones that weren’t required to, our bosses were not required to report to the detective commander. We reported directly to the colonel. Same way here. The commander of the intelligence reports directly to the chief of police. Same way. Yeah. So it was that kind of structure. Yeah. And so there was about six to eight of us. We had a lieutenant who ran it. We had a sergeant and then the rest were the worker bees, you know. And as you know, it’s just long hours. It’s like following somebody and next thing you know, you’re in New York City.

[14:32] It’s just the way it is, you know? But it was the camaraderie amongst the detectives to work together. I mean, we were together more than we were with our families. Of course, we were young at that time. So, you know, this was our lives, you know? Yeah. Oh, yeah. But it was quite an experience. Now, did you go into Federal Hill and try to run any surveillances? I bet that was a booger of a place to run a surveillance, try to watch anybody or follow anybody around and in and out of. It was difficult because it’s one strip. Yeah. And, you know, they hang out on the corner. And they would wave to us. We’d wave to them. And occasionally we’d stop and talk to them. They were respectful, very respectful, I have to say. I never worried about getting hurt by the mob. Organized crime because as you know we were the cost of doing business for them yeah yeah caught them fair and square right if you caught them fair and square they understood yeah but we would and.

[15:36] I recall like someone would come down from maine who was connected was probably paying raymond so we we would follow him and try to get information on him gather that intelligence pass it over to Maine. We did a lot of that. We did a lot of investigations. I recall doing one where Raymond Patriarca Sr. Owned a place called Coin-O-Matic vending machines.

[16:04] So we got a tip that the cigarettes that he was putting in his machines, and of course, when he sent someone in to stop into your restaurant or store and say, we’re going to put a machine here, you’ve got a machine. We want that machine. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So what was happening is there was one salesman of his that would drive down to North Carolina, South Carolina, buy a whole bunch of cigarettes, come back to Rhode Island.

[16:41] Literally, Gary, they had a printing press that printed the Rhode Island state tax stamp. So it might’ve been 17 cents, 18 cents a pack, but it went in his pocket, not in the state’s pocket. Right. Yeah. And so we arrested him. And of course we tried to get him to cooperate. And he said, yeah, listen, no way. I’m going to end up in the back of a trunk if I talk to you guys. Yeah.

[17:10] Yeah. But that’s just like the kind of scams they will run. Yeah. I think what’s going on now is they’ve returned to these basics. That have always made the money and have been under the radar. And I think that’s why, I mean, they’re devastated as far as Rhode Island is concerned with their presence in the crime, but they’re still making money. They’re still out there. Yeah. What we see here is one thing is payday loan places and title loan places and buy here, pay here, car dealerships, because you can charge a huge amount of interest. And, you know, and of course there, I know a guy that’s kind of a reformed mobster that did that. And he’s told me a little bit about it and believe me, he did not, when he wanted to collect on a car loan, he did not use the regular rules of collect loan collection.

[18:04] He liked to use like some pepper spray in a nightclub. Power of persuasion was not anything you worried about, right? Right, right. He did not follow the uniform. Commercial code. Commercial code on collection. Myself, I practiced law for several years after I left the police department. And I sued a lot of these car dealers. And I asked one of my clients, it wasn’t any names I’d ever heard of. And I said, what do you think about this car lab? What was your feel there? He said, well, they feel like the mafia.

[18:41] But of course, once I got involved and filed a suit, you know, there wasn’t any more threats or intimidation or anything. And so I didn’t really get onto that until later on, I became friendly with this guy who had done that and was a mob associate. He told me all the ins and outs. I thought, well, darn. There’s probably a lot more clients for me out there. I couldn’t, there’s car dealers, but they’re afraid, you know, they’re more afraid of them, especially to file a lawsuit against them. They were, they were not going to do it. Anybody would. So anyway, it’s an interesting little crime story. Now, in your books, tell us about some of the real life crimes and related to this book back in the game that you did. So can you tell a bit about what old Gene O. Peterson got into and some of the real-life crimes and how you put them in the book? I think guys will really find that interesting because, guys, I was going through this book, and there’s a lot of stuff that sounded real

[19:39] familiar to me, although it was said in the context of this book. So tell us about that. So back in the game, the way the first book ends is that one of the protected witnesses, Richard Moon Diario, is put in the witness protection program.

[19:56] Gino is trying to work his way back into detectives because he got tossed out in the first book. So now they’re both trying to come back and regain the power. Moon decides he’s in witness protection, and you know this, Gary. Guys hardly are able to do that. I mean, they put him in a nine-to-five job working in a warehouse. They’ve never done that their whole life. They can’t do it. They can’t do it. No, they can’t do it. Yeah. So he decides to come back and try to get back in the mob. And Gino, who’s trying to get back in the intelligence unit, back in detectors. So along the way, we see Moon commit a lot of crimes, identity theft, anything. He steals cars. He gets involved with a hooker, ends up beating up her pimp, setting him up for a crime. And Gino, at the same time, realizes, I’ve got to make arrests to get noticed. So one of the things that is part of my experience is, so Gino stops a car on the highway and it’s typical of a trafficker. You know, it’s usually a lease car and it’s not leased to them. It’s from an out of state place. It’s usually one operator. So it had linear markings of drug trafficking.

[21:16] So at the time we were able to do a consent to search and I don’t, I don’t understand, but almost all of them would consent to the search and sign. And so we found three kilos in the trunk of the car. So we arrested him. And so that became part of the story in the book.

[21:38] And then because, you know, not every character, all characters need to have a flaw, even our heroes. So in this book, Gino has a flaw of he gets hooked on pain pills. And we talk about that struggle. And a couple of people have called me and they said, that was really brave of you to talk about your addiction. And I said, well. It wasn’t your addiction. It was somebody else’s addiction. So I’m a really good writer. Oh, you don’t get the point of fiction. Not to say that doesn’t happen to cops. I worked with a guy once that I know he was, you know, he ended up having, he ended up having to leave early under suspicious circumstances. But there’s no doubt in my mind, he had a bad back and he started on those pain pills. And, and, and you could tell, man, he’d be angry as hell. And then all of a sudden he’d leave and he’d come back and he’d be like a different guy. Yeah. I thought, that’s interesting.

[22:43] Anyhow, go ahead. No, I was just going to say your point’s well taken because we come from a culture where you didn’t say you had a problem. No. You had, it was suck it up, buddy. Suck it up. Yeah. And so what did cops do? They self-medicated either with drink or pills or they got involved in gambling. And so we see at least now there’s some shift towards understanding that office wellness is important, you know? Yeah. And I hope it changes, but you know, there’s.

[23:17] Cops have a lot of demons, and it’s hard for some of them to rid themselves of the demons. And it’s still a really macho culture in which you do not admit any kind of anomaly that might be construed as a weakness about yourself. I understand that. Yeah. When I, at Middletown Police, like many other departments, we set up, you know, you could call a place for counseling, and I never knew about it. We also found what was successful is peer counselors. Yeah. offenses that you can go to. But yeah, the mental health of police officers is really something that we need to pay attention to. Yeah, really. Yeah. All right. We digress a little bit now. I’m sorry. That’s all right.

[23:59] It’s interesting. I think it’s interesting. And so is there any other crimes that you remember, you know, kind of like they were in the news at one time, maybe that you incorporated into this? Sure. In the first book, They Always Win, I talk about the killing of Richard Dickey Calley. Who was a maid member of organized crime.

[24:18] So what we learned from the three witnesses was that Bobo was an up-and-comer. He wasn’t a maid guy yet. And he had this crew, a small crew of three or four people, Frank Montalucci, a protective custody witness, Billy Furley, and Moon DiOrio. And so they told us basically that there was always friction between Callie the maid guy and Marapisi, the associate who was on the cusp of being a maid guy. And so what brought it to a head was that Dickie Cowley’s brother came into Maripisi’s social club on Federal Hill. Bobo treated him with disrespect because he wanted free drinks because his brother was a maid guy. But anyway, it gets back to Cowley and Cowley decides he needs to talk to the underboss, Nicky Bianco, about.

[25:14] Bobo. So they have a meeting, and according to the protective witnesses, Dickie Calley says, you need to put a chain on this guy. Pull him back like he’s a bulldog. So whatever arrangements were made, they parted ways. A couple of weeks later, St. Patrick’s Day in 1976.

[25:38] Calley walks into the social club like two o’clock in the morning, like into the lion’s lair, Doesn’t have any bodyguard or anything like that. And he’s dressed in like a St. Patrick’s Day outfit. Check green suit, green tie, green pants. Today, this isn’t Whitey’s Boulder’s place. Yeah, I know, I know. Come on. I guess everybody’s Irish on that day. And so he goes into the bar. And Bobo’s a little bit shocked. I mean, there’s people in the bar. And Dickie Cowley’s there now. Probably there to taunt him and say, Here I am, you know, I’m a tough guy, whatever. So he sits at the bar, and Bobo sees this as his opportunity. Because unbeknownst to the three witnesses, they found out later that he was given permission to take out Dickie Calley by the underboss or whoever. And so he says to Frank Montalucci, Bobo, go get the gun. So Matalucci goes out to a Cadillac that they use pops a trunk gets a 38.

[26:48] Hands you know surreptitiously hands it to Bobo and Bobo pours Dickie Callie a shot and puts it on the bar and he said this is a sign of respect this is on the house, I hope that you know bygones can be bygones, Dickie takes the drink Bobo comes from around the bar, puts his hand on his shoulder, and shoots him six times in the back. Oh, wow. Yeah. And he flops on the floor. And there were people there. There were some accounting guys playing cards. One of Bobo’s cousins was passed out on a couch. They all scatter, obviously. Yeah. And so now Dickie Callie is lying on the ground. He’s dead.

[27:41] Bobo says, bring the car around. They get Dickie’s Cadillac, pop the trunk, and they throw him in the back of the trunk. And although he’s dying or dead, Bobo comes out with a big butcher knife and stabs him like seven times. He said, wait a minute. He’s not leaving yet. And he just stabs the shit out of him. Then he has Mattelucci and Billy Furley drive up to Rehoboth near an old gulf cross and bury him there.

[28:15] Now, normally, they wouldn’t find the body for years. There was a really sharp patrolman in Rehoboth who went on to be police chief. Dan Skelly, his name was. So he’s patrolling. And the area where they dumped the body had been a place where stolen cars had been left. Sometimes people would park there. And so Dan, driving back and forth, and snow’s coming down. And one time when he passes, he sees tire marks and he said, ah, maybe it’s a stolen car. I’m going to go check it out. He drives down maybe a quarter of a mile, doesn’t see anything, decides to turn around with the cruiser, but the cruiser gets stuck. He’s like trying to make a U-turn, a 360 turn and he gets stuck. So he pops the trunk. He’s going to get something to try to get the tires moving. And he sees a trickle of blood in the snow. And so being the shop guy that he is, he calls it in and he follows the trail and then there’s snow-covered ground, but then there’s an indentation of the snow. Ah, it sunk a little. It sunk down, right. So Dan gets his, like a tire iron, hits it, and it goes right down.

[29:39] So he calls out the troops and they’d dig up Dickie Cowley’s body.

[29:45] But from 1976 to probably 83, nobody came forward. They couldn’t solve it. And what happens is Mundi Orio is sitting in prison in Walpole for a crime he didn’t commit.

[30:05] He was accused of beating up a labor union official in Fall River at Bobo’s behest, him and Frank Modellucci. Well, Moon didn’t go. That was actually another guy, Albie, Albie Foccarelli, who went with him to beat this guy up. But Modellucci, being the Einstein that he was, he drove his own car up there. Someone got the plate. They’re going to pinch him, and the province police say, well, who does he hang around with? Who’s his main guy? Diorio. So they picked them both up. The union guy supposedly identifies both of them. Thank you. And now they’re going on trial, and they’re able to do a plea bargain if they want. Now, Moon’s in his 50s, and he was willing to do like four, five years on a plea. But Matalucci insisted they go to trial, that the lawyers could beat it. And Bobo said, that’s what you’re going to do, because he’s got to do it. So they go through the trial. They’re both found guilty, and he gets like a 15 to 20-year sentence. And so he sits in his cell for two years saying, I’m going to die here. I’m going to die here. So he calls the state police and says, I have information about the Dickie Cowley murder, but you got to get me out of prison. So that’s when he got out of prison. That’s when we started the investigation.

[31:29] Interesting. Yeah. So, so now that’s all real. And you put that all fictionalized into your book. Okay. All right.

[31:41] See, guys, guys, this book is going to suck you in just like I was for that entire story. So this book is, you know, when you base these, you have to fictionalize things sometimes to make it work. Because real life is not as clean as you can then make it work and make it flow a lot smoother and fill in some things that you don’t really know. And nobody will ever know in order to make it make more sense. Otherwise, many times it’s hard to make sense out of some of these mob stories because there’s so much you’ll never know. Nobody will ever know. So, well, that’s a great story, man. You had me pulled in, Anthony.

[32:28] The most amazing thing is Muntiario was so smart. That he had learned, he wasn’t a part of the murder. He wasn’t even there. But he learned so much from them talking about it that he was able to sort of fool us into thinking that he was there. And so it was only until we put pressure on the other two and they said, he wasn’t there. It was me. And so we got the rest of the case. And so he got himself out of jail. Yeah. By taking the facts. And I remember one interesting thing is, so right after the murder, it’s a couple of weeks, and they’re in the social club, and Bobo says to them, from now on, you have to treat me differently. And they said, what do you mean? Well, when we go out, like go to a restaurant or something, there’s no more ass grabbing. You can’t punch me in the arm or swear at me. And so they figured, okay, he’s made. He’s a made guy now, so we have to treat him differently. It’s kind of like getting promoted to captain on the police department.

[33:42] Yeah, but when you’re a captain, nobody listens to you. But you don’t call them by your little pet names and joke around with them and punch them in the arm. Anyhow, go ahead. I’m sorry. I just popped in my head. No, it was kind of an ingenious move, you know, to get a wonder. And that’s why the second book dovetails into him. They can’t use him as a witness because he lied to them. So they bring him to the grand jury. He does his mea culpa. And then they put him in the witness protection. Second book, he’s in witness protection. He’s in Falls Church, Virginia. And this is another true story. So he’s leaving his apartment after working overnight, and he goes to this coffee shop every day, goes to the coffee shop. He sees this young kid, probably 9, 10 years old, talk to his dad, and then head to the men’s room. Then he sees this creepy guy follow him into the men’s room.

[34:48] So he said, this is not right. Something’s going on. Yeah. So he goes into the men’s room and he hears a little kid say, no, no, I can do this myself. And the guy said, no, let me just help you, you know, and I’ll hold it so you don’t spray it all. And so Moon literally grabs him, tells the kid to screw and he beats the shit out of him and he sticks his head in the toilet and keeps flushing it and flushing it and flushing it. And then he walks out and the manager’s like running because of the commotion and manages, is everything all right? He goes, no, no, there’s some shit you need to clean up in the bathroom. And he walks away, you know? So that to me was Moon demonstrating that he had the violence within him to get back into the mob.

[35:44] And it’s kind of like a heroic thing what he did but the point i was trying to make was here’s a guy that is struggling he can’t do the job on night watchman in virginia, he’s trying to make up his mind like 70 30 i’ll go back and try to get back in because that could be a death sentence death sentence yeah i mean i talk about a lot about that in the second book, him trying to get back with the new boss. But it demonstrates to me that.

[36:17] Most of these people are psychopath, psychopath, psychopaths. And, and Bobo Marapisi was kind of like that, where he would, all of a sudden you just snap. Yeah. And they said they could see it in his eyes. So he was the kind of guy that could kill someone, bury him. And this happened. And then go into a restaurant and have veal and peas. Like it was nothing. That’s mob guys. I mean, everyone I’ve met with rare exception have just been charming as hell, you know. But yet you know what they’re capable of, on the other hand. You know, Henry Hill talks about in Goodfellas, that famous scene where they kill this guy, they put him in the trunk, and then they stop off at Joe Petsy’s house and have spaghetti with his mom and then go back in, and then the guy’s beaten on the trunk, and they, like, stab the shit out of him. I mean, it’s, you know, you’re telling the same stories. I mean, cause that’s, these guys are out of the same mold. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s a great scene where they’re looking at the painting. And she goes, look at that. One dog’s looking one way. One dog’s looking. And now he’s just fishing.

[37:31] Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

[37:36] Anthony Passare. This has been great. This is a couple of really great books. I’ll have links to his author’s page. so you can go find these books at Amazon. I really appreciate you coming on the show, Anthony. This has been fun. And if I get back to Rhode Island one of these days, I’ve got relatives in Boston. I get some extra time. I’m going to give you a call and we’ll go have lunch or something. Love to show you. I’ve gotten to know a guy on Block Island, too. He’s kind of an erstwhile screenwriter. I met him through a friend of mine here in Kansas City. And I went to Block Island once and met him. I just was back visiting my in-laws, and he’s going to write a screenplay for me. He’s never really sold one, but he’s written a bunch of them. So we’ll see how that works. We’ll go out and put the muscle on. We’ll put a little heat in them.

[38:24] And there’s a lot of, I’ve done these mob tours all around the country, and I used to do them on my motorcycle. Now I might be doing them in a car. Got too old to do that, but I wouldn’t mind maybe hitting some spots there in Rhode Island And, you know, just take my camera and my telephone and use a camera and a mic and just talk about what was going on. This is where Raymond Patriarch’s place was. Maybe we could do something like that, too. Let me show you all that. They actually do have a mob tour that stops. Oh, do they? Yeah. And, of course, because it’s an Italian neighborhood, they stop at about eight restaurants. Oh, yeah. And they go to the next crime scene. Yeah. They go to Raymond’s old business. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I’d love to host you, and I hope we get a chance to do this again. All right. Great. All right. Anthony, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Thank you, Gary. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

[39:16] Well, guys, that was a lot of fun. I really like Anthony. I do want to get back there to Rhode Island and do that mob tour of Federal Hill and have coffee or have some Italian food with him. It sounds like it’d be a lot of fun. We have such similar backgrounds. There’s a lot more similarities of our backgrounds we can go into in that intelligence business. There’s a lot of stuff you don’t really want to talk about on the air. And it wasn’t really germane to what we were doing.

[39:43] So anyhow, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. Although I tell you guys, I’m, I’m, I’m getting old. I don’t, I’m not taking any more motorcycle trips and, and I’m going to put them up for sale. Uh, but I do like motorcycles. I’ll always like motorcycles. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ve got a hotline number and drugs or alcohol. You know, Anthony Ruggiano has a hotline number and on his website, reformedgangsters.com, I think. And he has a YouTube page. He’s doing a lot of stuff right now. So I’m sure you can figure out. He’s an alcohol counselor, drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. Boy, if you need treatment, why, that would be cool. Go down to Florida and have him as your treatment guy. If you have a problem with gambling, go to Missouri, 1-800-BETS-OFF. Other states, every state that has gambling will have some kind of a hotline or website or something where you can find some help for your gambling. As I’ve said before, these gambling addicts, those are the guys that the mob just victimizes is shit out of, and Anthony and I talked about that a little bit, you know, bust out your business or beat you up or whatever, threaten your family. There’s just, you know, no good. It’s not a good deal. If you can’t control that gambling, why, you better figure out something else to do.

[40:58] Because anytime you’re in sports gambling, particularly the mob is, you know, the mob is somehow connected to it. You know, not directly, maybe not with your straight bookie, but somehow they’re connected to it.

[41:13] Now, I’ve got stuff for sale. I’ll have a link to Anthony’s author page. I’ll have a link to my author page. I’ve got several books. I’m working on a book now that I’m going to kind of fictionalize, but based on the, Savella-Spero Wars of the 1970s, which I was right in the middle of, so I’ll use a lot of my experiences, but I will make up some names and probably use some fiction to gloss over to connect some sequences and make a little more sense. I think that’s all I got to sell. be sure and like and subscribe if you’re on youtube and subscribe if you’re on the apple app or the podcast app give me a review and and one one last thing i mentioned this before i don’t have many reviews on my new york book on amazon so if you’ve read that thing particularly i like where it says verified purchaser or at least read some pages on your kindle app why go in there and give me a review i like get some more reviews on there so that’s all asking i’ve got to do and help support the podcast. I really appreciate all you guys just by listening each week that that’s sometimes that’s just supporting up. Thanks a lot guys.

Dave opens up about the realities of prison life, shattering the myth of so-called “white-collar prisons.” He recalls how he started off flying under the radar, eventually becoming the go-to jailhouse lawyer who helped fellow inmates with their legal battles. His insider knowledge of the prison legal system offers rare insights into the inner workings of federal institutions and the complex struggles inmates face daily.

The heart of this episode centers on Dave’s six-year friendship with Jerry Scalise, a former Chicago Outfit member and mastermind behind high-profile heists—including the infamous Graff Jewelry store robbery in London. Dave paints a surprising portrait of Scalise, describing him as intelligent, generous, and deeply respected behind bars. Despite Jerry’s criminal history, his actions inside prison—mentoring others, offering legal guidance, and preparing inmates for life after release—reveal a more nuanced, human side of the mobster.

We also revisit some of Jerry’s most notorious exploits, including the legendary Marlboro Diamond heist. The fate of that diamond still remains a mystery, and Dave offers a few tongue-in-cheek theories of where it might be hiding today.

Beyond the stories of crime and camaraderie, Dave speaks candidly about the psychological toll of long-term incarceration and the steep challenges of reentering society—especially in a post-pandemic world. His reflections reveal a broken system where few resources exist to support real rehabilitation, leaving many former inmates at risk of falling back into old patterns.

This episode offers more than just mob tales and prison anecdotes—it’s a raw, thought-provoking look at crime, punishment, and the long road to redemption. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. You know, this is retired Kansas City Police Detective, Intelligence Unit Detective, I should add that, Gary Jenkins. A lot of y’all already know me, and if you don’t, that’s who I am. And I have a man here on the Zoom call that Dave Grosky, that Dave spent time with Jerry Scalise. He got a hold of me through LinkedIn, and he said, hey, I was in the penitentiary with Jerry Scalise, and he’s a good guy. And I said, yeah, I’d love to tell his story. I said, can you get him to get on my show? Well, they can’t get him to get on my show because I know Jerry’s out and he’s somewhere. I don’t know where he is. I think he’s in Chicago, but I don’t know. And his old rap partner, Art Rachel’s out. And Dave has met both those guys and other mob guys because he was in penitentiary with several of them. So Dave, welcome. I really appreciate you responding on the LinkedIn. Well, Gary, it’s a pleasure. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I, uh, I was, uh, in several federal prisons for almost 11 years. I began at FCI Loretto in 2008 and there, there were some Gambinos and a variety of mob guys. I never really got to know them there. Well, I was, you know, I was new to prison, so I was really keeping quiet.

[1:13] Just, uh, you know, really pretty much out of the gate. Cause I’m a lawyer by background. I was doing a lot of legal work, helping people. once people found out I was a lawyer, I was busy within two weeks, you know, busy until I left almost 11 years later, almost on a daily basis.

[1:28] You said, how long did you spend? How long were you? Almost 11 years. It was a 14 year. I did have RDAP with the, uh.

[1:36] RDAP program. So one year came off, but, you know, almost 11 years. And that was like a white collar crime. It was a white collar crime. A lot of people don’t realize, by the way, on these white collar crimes, you know, because I was in three different federal prisons, FCI Loretto, Morgantown, and Milan in Michigan. Each of those prisons had about a 1,500 man population. I would say 15 or 20 white collar people in each of those prisons. I mean, you know, I would have friends visit me and they’d say, wait a minute, I thought this is a white-collar prison. No, there’s no such thing as a white-collar. But anyway, people, yeah, the misconceptions of prison abound, you know, but, um, no, I met some, you know, I was mentioning to you before we started, what kind of the funny thing, when you watch Goodfellas, of course, you know, they’re eating, they’re eating great at prison. But guess what? The best cooks were these guys. And I ate with them quite often, particularly.

[2:27] But Jerry’s- They really have a connection to the commissary so they could get some, have a guy that Like Ray Liotta did, a Henry Hill character, run and go get South Valley. That does actually exist at Otisville in New York. That’s a true story. I mean, they’re able, and they bring food in. Not so much in my experience, but they just know how to work. You know, they just know how to prepare the food better. And, you know, of course, they’ve got runners who are, you know, they’re bringing the right foods out from what the warden and the staff is eating. They’re getting better quality. So, no, I ate pretty well with these guys. And, uh, you know, I did a lot of legal work. One of the guys in particular would call me as concierge. I got a kick in particular, though, I became very friendly with Jerry Scalise

[3:11] at FCI Milan, my last six years in federal prison. And he’s, he’s a very interesting guy and a very, very good guy and a very good guy to go, really good person. And then I can tell you, uh, he was very helpful to me, but he was, he, he was, and it continues to be very helpful to a number of people when they come out.

[3:30] And, you know, he’s in his 80s now, but he’s in unbelievable shape, you know, physical, you know, shape and health. And I talk to him all the time.

[3:38] And, you know, we just have great talks about the prison system and everything, really. I mean, I just, he, but you would never know of his background and the things he might have been involved with, you know, from, you know, my discussions with him. So, you know, he’s a private guy, too. And I don’t, I don’t know that. And I brought up the idea of him doing podcasts. And he could do a lot of them. I mean, Michael Mann, Los Angeles, a director, a very famous movie director. He’s a close friend of his. And they’ve worked on movies and films and different things together. Now, he taught a very interesting course at Milan, by the way, on how to write a screenplay. He was very, very skilled.

[4:18] Guys got a lot out of that course, and he enjoyed it very much. But go ahead. Let me fill in here exactly for people that don’t know who Jerry Scalise is. Jerry Scalise was from Chicago. He was a Chicago outfit. He was, I think he was part of the wild bunch at one time, which was a bunch of killers running around doing some hits with Harry Aleman and, and different people like that, uh, shall the cell. And I can’t remember all their names, but he was a career criminal with the Chicago outfit. Well-trusted guy helped with some murders. There’s no doubt about that. And, but he was also a very good professional criminal and a thief. And he worked with a guy named Art Rachel and they called him the brain. They called him the monk and the brain.

[5:03] Jerry was the monk because supposedly when he was young, his family wanted to go be a priest or something. I don’t know if that’s the real story. Maybe Dave could tell us, but they worked together and their most famous crime.

[5:17] Most famous crime, most well-known crime, maybe in Chicago almost, didn’t happen in Chicago. These two guys flew to London and went to a really high-end jewelry store called Graff Jewelry Store and scooped up a bunch of diamonds. They, like, pretended like, I think they had a hand grenade or something looked like a hand grenade and a gun, and they scooped up a bunch of diamonds. One of them was called the Marlboro Diamond, which was, I don’t know, 40 or 50 carat diamond, which also had some kind of a story that had been owned by Lady Churchill at one time, but it was called the Marlboro Diamond. And they escaped, but they had… Rented a car and their own name and somebody was walking by as they walked out of the store and knew something was amiss and he got the tag number off the rental car and they traced it back to the airport and and found the flight that they were on and the fbi was waiting for him when they got back to chicago but the marlboro diamond and the rest of the swag was not there he stopped and mailed it somewhere and it’s never been found so maybe jerry knows where the marlboro diamond is Jerry, now that’s, that’s, uh, Jerry’s police. Now, Dave, can you tell us where the Marlboro diamond is? I wish I knew. I certainly can use it myself.

[6:40] But you know, those are questions, you know, of course I never asked them, but, uh, some of our most fascinating private conversations over the years though, related to his time spent in prisons in England, uh, because a completely different world where he told me that, you know, he lived in what was really a renovated home with a beautiful kitchen and.

[7:02] The guards and the police would have, you know, play cards and have dinner with them almost nightly. He and his guys, his group. So, I mean, it’s just a very different world than what it is here.

[7:11] And he would always draw those distinctions to me.

[7:14] But I always found it fascinating with him and then some others, but mainly him, someone who’s done 30 to 40 years in prison, different stints, just their life experiences. I mean, it was almost like I was interviewing him when we would talk, but it was just fascinating, you know, but he’s such a good guy. And again, I want to emphasize a very bright guy and I could have done. And I remember one of the judges in one of his earlier federal cases said, and I’ll never forget this. I read some of the sentencing transcripts said, you know, what a waste, which I don’t believe I don’t looking at that, but what he really meant was, and I don’t know that they say this too often, maybe with the mob guys, maybe they do but this judge saw him as having so much potential to do so much yeah and uh in terms of his capabilities talents and you know i just thought it was an interesting comment by the judge like his screenwriting course that’s kind of that’s interesting because i know he got to know michael mann when they filmed the movie thief and was a divisor on that i’m sure there was there was one other outfit guy cover lower level not quite so skilled guy who was uh who had an actual So speaking part in it, went on to do a police story out in Las Vegas with the former Chicago policeman, Dennis Frena. Now, did he talk about that, those relationships? Did he continue? Not really. Not really. No, no. I have to tell you, he was very private in that sense.

[8:36] Very private. I mean, he talked about everything, but not those things.

[8:41] If that makes sense. Yeah. Did he talk about maybe doing a screenplay about his life when he got. Oh, a hundred percent, a hundred percent all the time, uh, that there was a lot of interest in that. And I think he could, and it’s interesting because once he, and he released about the time I did about six years ago now. Yeah. And since then, though, you know, he talks to me about all different projects he’s involved in these, and he’s a very involved guy. I remember in prison, by the way, he would have newspapers stacked like this. And he would always be writing different articles and editorials and a very, very intellectually active and curious guy.

[9:18] And he, um, he’s talked about that a lot, but, and yet I don’t see it has happened yet. So I think he might have reservations about doing it, you know, in some ways, but I mean, that’s a guess because maybe he doesn’t want to be public with everything. I don’t know. Maybe I, cause he is a private person. I have great respect for that in him.

[9:38] So, yeah, but he’s, he’s just a great friend. He’s a good, very good friend. He’ll help you in any way you can. He’s helped me in many different ways, you know, and he just had great conversations with him on a regular basis. And we still talk all the time now. Now, were there other Chicago outfit guys in the same kind of general area where you guys were in prison? There were, there were. I became friendly with Michael Spano, who I ended up taking over his job uh you know you know his day job at the prison uh at myland that was fci myland in michigan and then vic plesia uh or plesia i believe is how he pronounces it these were two you know these were two you know guys from chicago maybe not of the stature i’m not sure but you know maybe not of jerry’s ilk in the sense of being well known but but but spano was He was involved with the Maltese case.

[10:30] It was a large criminal case at the time involving bribes and other things of government officials. Lauren Maltese, I think it was her name. Yeah, I remember the case. She was a politician, and he was involved in some fashion. It was a big story at the time. But these two guys were very good guys. And I would break bread with them. We’d eat meals and just talk. But they never really talked about their days, you know, mob things. I mean, that was just, it was not really a focus.

[11:04] And I didn’t probe, you know, whatever they wanted to talk about was fine with me. But really nice guys, though. I mean, I really enjoyed my time with them. And, you know, I’m a Jewish guy. They’re Italian guys. So we have a lot in common with our personalities, I think, too. It meshed well. But Jerry was really the closest relationship, I would say, I had with these guys. And it continues today. I just talked to him within a week. In the last week, I talked to him. One of the things about him is he helps a lot of guys who are coming out who need help. You know, need a car, need a, you know, he connects them with people, housing. He’s just very, I mean, the people he cared about, I’m saying. But he’s very helpful in that way. He wants to be, so. Yeah, I’ve seen that here in Kansas City. I have a friend that got out. He did about 12 years himself, and we’ve become friends after he got out. And I watched him do the same thing. He’s always a guy got out after a 25 year bit for murder here in the state system. But he was he was Italian. These are all Italian guys. And he was Italian when he got out and he found he found two different jobs for him because the first job didn’t work out and and got him lined up with a car. And and he’s always counseling about, you know, now don’t you know, he’s really watching out because he sees him get involved with a guy that he shouldn’t get involved with. that he’ll go warn him off, say, you know, stay away from that guy and stay over here. So that’s, that’s interesting how these guys help each other out.

[12:31] Yeah. And I, and I, uh, one, one of the things that I, um, uh, I was working with Jerry with, uh, from time to time, he would bring me individuals who needed help on criminal appeals or any type of legal matter. And that’s what I was doing in prison. I still do. I still do a lot of, uh, uh, helping of federal inmates primarily on post-conviction appeal work. And I do so very reasonably. The money’s not really the focus at all for me because I have a full-time job. I do this in my free time, try to be helpful, compassionate release motions and these type of things. So if any of your viewers know of anyone who needs help, I’d be happy to be of assistance. Okay, all right. You could share my information with them. I’ll put a, is there some kind of a link? Do you have a website or anything? I can put a link down in the show notes or? Yeah, I’ll provide. I’ll just have them. They can just get a hold of me too, and I can hook them up with you. Yeah, if they know of anyone who’s in a federal prison situation and they still have some time left and they want to try to file some type of motion to lessen that amount of time in prison, I’d like to be helpful. So what kind of job did Jerry have when he was in prison? It seemed like he’s the kind of guy that works his way around where he’s going to be in some kind of a management position.

[13:44] No, he was just teaching the courses. That was it. Teaching okay yeah otherwise he had what they call a no-show job yeah yeah so he stayed connected inside uh he the uh he was it was well thought out well respected he never talked he very humble very humble guy humble guy very humble humble man yeah yeah very capable guy and uh and like i say i mean it’s very intelligent let’s say of all the gentlemen i met.

[14:14] Uh, in those, you know, almost 11 years, by far, Jerry was the most interesting. I also met Art, by the way. I think I mentioned to you, I met Art. Yeah, you did. I happened to be at the halfway house with Art. So. What kind of a guy was he? He, was he that smart? He was very, very quiet, actually. Yeah. Very quiet at that stage. You know, I mean, he was probably 77, 77 at that point. Yeah. You know, that, I’m always curious that last crime that he did. Part of it was robbing the armored car, but the other one that they caught him, set him up on, was he was going to break in, do a home invasion robbery, if you will, of Angelo LaPietra, one of his old boss’s house, because he thought that his widow would have a whole lot of jewels and stuff somewhere hidden in the house. Now, I tell you what, I’ve always tried to figure that one out. I think LaPietre must have stiffed him on something years before.

[15:21] You’re thinking something must have happened. Something had to happen. I’m sure he didn’t talk about that. He would never talk about that kind of business with you.

[15:30] But what would be your speculation on that? Did he ever even intimate anything about that? I mean, it was such an out-of-bounds, over-the-top crime that he did. Right. No, never a word, but I think your logic and how you’re thinking it through makes sense. But no, no. These guys, I mean, they wouldn’t bring up any of those things. I mean, certainly not with me, but I mean, we just had regular conversations about what’s happening today and just life in general. I mean, we really didn’t talk about the past. Yeah. Could you tell those mob connections, those, you know, that it’s almost like we’re both from the same small town or something, those mob connections between these guys? Well, let me say this to you. I will say this, and this is where I had the most, the highest regard. I think art would fall into that category, too. But one of the themes that I saw in prison with the mob guys were they carried themselves a certain way and they all hung out together, et cetera. But Jerry was different. Jerry was on his own. Jerry was his own guy. He didn’t hang out with anybody. But I had total respect for that. Because really, he was the biggest of all of them. These mob guys were very oftentimes narrow and minded, in my view, on who they would approve of who people talked to. Let me say that. And Jerry’s attitude was, I don’t give a damn. I’ll talk to what you want to talk to.

[16:58] And I don’t care. And, you know, I just had a lot of respect for him, you know, in that regard, you know, he didn’t, he didn’t play by the general prison rules or I got to do what these mob guys are telling me, you know, I mean, it just, he was his own man. And I always, I had great respect for him in that regard. Guys from other families from New York, for example. Yeah, there were. They hang together in Chicago. And he, he was, and by the way, those guys, they all knew Jerry. Yeah. Jerry, Jerry. No, Jerry was very respectful still of them, but he didn’t hang out with them, really. But he did have a lot of friends, but they were not those guys. So it was interesting. Yeah, it is. My friend was in, and he said the New York mob guys always acted like they were a little bit better than anybody, any of the other mob guys. A hundred percent. That’s absolutely true. They thought they were a different kind of mob guy. Yeah. No, I think that’s well said. Yeah. You know, because there was a whole group of Chicago guys and there were the New York guys and the New York guys kind of frowned on the Chicago guys a little bit thinking, oh, you’re from a small town type of thing. Yeah. I met some Philly guys too at Loretto, Philadelphia. Oh, really? I mean, you learn a lot about life in prison. I’m not thrilled I was there, but I mean, it does give you a perspective on life you could never possibly have otherwise. That’s for sure.

[18:16] No question. Give us, what would be an example of that that then has worked for you in your life on the outside? I just think, and I don’t know if this is the right term, but I just think I, when I look at the average person now who’s never gone through a lot of what I’ve gone through. Yeah. I just think that they, in a sense, they lived a sheltered, I don’t want to say naive. Yeah. But you’ve lived such a more sheltered life than what was my life beforehand, let’s say. Mm-hmm. Just living in the North shore of Chicago with all my Jewish contingent of friends. I really didn’t live. And in a strange way, being in prison all those years and what I saw and what I went through, I saw everything. I mean, I saw a full range of life. I mean, I was with people from Africa. I was with people from everywhere. I mean, that, and you, you know, and I spent a lot of time talking to these people and it just gives you a perspective and a certain understanding of life in such a different way than what I had lived, which was just such a more narrow, confined life. It’s not to say I’m glad I went through it, but I, there is a positive to it. As much as there’s a, it was the worst part of your, in time of your life, there were also positives.

[19:31] Because I had a long sentence, but I mean, when I’m spending time with a guy like Jerry, mine was nothing. Yeah. You know, so I mean, he’s some, I spent time with he and some other guys who, I mean, they were spending 25 to 40 years in prison throughout their life. Yeah. I can’t even imagine. You know, so I just, you know, so mine seemed like a pittance, which puts you in a different mindset then.

[19:55] You know what, there’s a common theme that you’ll hear from guys who’ve done a lot of time and it’s the, at the most annoying thing is to listen to the guys who do a year or two and are complaining, you know, life is over and, and what are we supposed to think when we have decades, you know?

[20:11] But the guys who have decades were the tougher mentally, were the tougher mentally prepared guys in many ways. So he’s not, he’s not working anywhere now. He’s a little bit long. Yeah, I’m not going to disclose where he lives just because that’s a personal thing. Yeah, I understand. No, no. I mean, he’s not on a regular basis. He’s still the similar, very involved person with a lot of different projects, but work per se, like on a regular basis, no. I would like to see him. I’d like to see the story of his life, him and Art. I think that would be a heck of a… Well, maybe I’ll try to set him up with a call with you off the record. A heck of a buddy movie. I don’t call with him. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. That would be a heck of a buddy movie, those two guys, and the Marlboro Diamond. And then, you know, a little postscript, you know, when they come back out and then they get caught in this other thing. They called him the, I can’t remember the headline, it’s something about the senior citizen. Gang or something like that.

[21:15] I mean, you just, you can’t make that stuff up that Jerry Scalise did in his life. You cannot make that up. No, it would make, it would make a great movie and, uh, certainly a book. He’s talked about a book as well, but no, it’s his, his life story is fascinating. It would be a fascinating read and watch. That’s for sure. I’m sure he’s probably, he’s got connections with Michael Mann. He’d have plenty of people that, uh, would join in and really write it with him because there’s, That’s the way most of those guys write books is they, you know, scribble out their story, but then you have the professional writer that’ll come in and actually do it. Exactly. But anyway, so no, I really appreciated the time spent with you. And, you know, I don’t know that I have much else to say unless you’re interested in hearing more about my life, but it’s kind of boring compared to Jerry’s. Well, tell me about your transition out and then we’ll end this. I’m curious about that. Been challenging in many ways i talk about that quite often because uh when you’ve done over a decade in prison it does it does have an impact i mean most of us who’ve done that kind of time you know we’re to various extents um mentally impacted by psychologically impacted by that.

[22:28] Because it’s such a different life it’s such a regimented life where you’re doing the same things in a controlled environment for so long um that the term institutionalization is very real how that impacts people differs from person to person as you can imagine yeah i i speak to it in a sense of feeling out of sorts oftentimes it’s not a good feeling but yet i’m not unhappy it’s just that um, It’s been challenging for me, but, uh, you know, I, I, I was very fortunate to, uh, secure very good employment, which, uh, you know, I’m doing very well now with that. And just being with your family, you know, is everything after coming out of this and that’s the support I had. So that’s still there. And, um, I lost my father, uh, very early on, uh, my first year, but everybody else is healthy and doing well. And my daughter recently got married. I was able to walk down the aisle with her, which is interesting. So, I mean, it’s just, you have to look at the positives. I also had a serious case of cancer in prison, which was a difficult time to get it, but I got through it. And so, yeah, you count your blessings also, of course. Wow. Which I do. Yeah. Well, the old stoic philosophy, you know, control what you can and let the rest go. And that’s how people survive situations like that, whether you were a prisoner of war or whether you’re a prisoner of your own devices in a way.

[23:58] And when you first come out, that’s just got to be overwhelming. It was, really was. And in that time, cell phones and computers, the world changed so much that how does one adapt to those changes? Well, and then when I came out, COVID just started, too. Oh, wow. Yeah. You know, I got out and, you know, was able to move into private housing in October. And, you know, two months later, COVID begins. So then everybody’s locked up. Yeah, there you are, locked up again. All the other type of lockup, right? So that was mentally draining just in terms of, boy, here we go again, in a sense, you know, so.

[24:41] Plus, there was such an element of fear. those early days of COVID just didn’t know what was going to happen. I mean, I remember walking out and walking up the street and going across a really, really busy street and you could shoot a shotgun down it and not end anything. It was just like, wow, this is like apocalyptic. This is the end of the world as we know it. So it was, it’d be quite a time to come back out of the penitentiary and have all that freedom too. That would, you know, that freedom just got to be overwhelming cars and getting your driver’s license again and doing all those little things. And as a, federal system they don’t really have to have much to help a prisoner reintegrate almost nothing i’m actually teaching courses now with the hinda institute and here in chicago uh-huh uh to that are on many tablets going into the prisons on how to best prepare for reintegration and release.

[25:34] And no they do nothing i mean as a practical matter virtually zero i mean it’s uh but even the more troubling thing is the psychology departments at these prisons are non-existent, they’re not helping people with real issues i mean uh so that you know the chance of uh re-offending is still great with many of these individuals so it’s just uh it’s a terrible cycle it just is and uh a lot of it is now resource driven now with the trump administration, even they’re losing people every day now yeah yeah so it’s even getting you know so it could because I, like I say, I do a lot of legal work for these inmates. They’re telling me they’re locked down on weekends generally as a rule. Now, when I say lockdown, essentially equivalent to being in the shoe all weekend. So, I mean, it’s just not good. It’s not good period, but it’s particularly bad of late, you know, with a lot of what’s happening with even more severe lack of funding being provided to the prisons. Now you don’t even have a director of the federal Bureau of Prisons in place. I think there is an interim now, but recently there was no one. So it’s very difficult. So then whenever you get there to a new prison, you have this whole pecking order and this whole adjustment and figuring out what your place is and who

[26:51] you can trust and not trust. It’s got to be. Yeah, for me, it was very difficult.

[26:57] Easy in a sense, because like I say, when they found out I was a lawyer and of course I, I, I went ahead and did this. I just told everybody quick. Yeah. No, I just became very busy helping people. And that became my thing because, and in a way for me, that was very good. My time went fast and I wasn’t a person to watch a lot of TV or read a book every day. I could read a lot, but not like that. I had a roommate once, by the way, he read a book a day. He sat in the room literally and read a 200-page book every day. Now, he was only in for a year or two. Yeah. But I mean, that’s a lot of reading. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I mean, but anyways, but for me, it worked out. It worked out. It kept me, you know, relatively intellectually fit and stimulated and, you know, keeping up with the law and, you know, I was busy. I mean, I had full-time typists doing the work. The typists were making more money than I was. They loved it, the typists, the legalists. Now, how does that money thing work inside the, behind it? Either, either you’re doing it for barter, for commissary, meaning the store, the store, people are getting groceries. And that’s really what I did. But then occasionally they could send money on the, you know, their families could send money to your family or to a friend or on the outside.

[28:16] You didn’t run into any problems anybody trying to extort you, did you? Never. Yeah. Never once. That does happen. But it never happened to me. No. And you know why? Probably not with me because I wasn’t dealing with any, I wasn’t charging much of anything. Yeah. So there wasn’t really, I had a reputation of not, you know, nobody would like think I was being involved in meaningful money with that situation. Yeah. And I wasn’t, so, you know. You were just doing a good job for a reasonable amount of money. I was trying. I was trying to give some guys hope when the reality is there’s very little, even in the legal system, I’m saying. The chances of victory are so slim. But if you have some hope, it’s still worth trying.

[29:04] Gary, thank you so much for having me. It was a joy. And I will speak to Jerry for sure. Okay. Thank you, David. Nice talking to you. You have a great day. Thank you. All right. All right.

[29:15] Hey guys, this is a, that was a fun show. I really like talking with that guy. You learned a lot of stuff that you didn’t know before. I think, uh, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So when you’re out on the streets there and you’re big F one 50, watch out for those little motorcycles. When you’re out, if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website and they’ll help you with your drugs and alcohol problem. If you got that problem or gambling, if not, You can go to Anthony Ruggiano. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his YouTube page or his Facebook, not Facebook, but his website. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. Just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books. I got my movies that are all on Amazon just going. And I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks, guys.

Gary uncovers the roots of organized crime in southern Colorado, beginning in Pueblo, where early mobster James Coletti, a one-time associate of the Bonanno crime family, helped lay the foundation. He and the infamous Carlino brothers, including Pete Carlino—dubbed the “Al Capone of Southern Colorado”—dominated bootlegging during Prohibition and attempted to expand northward. But peace efforts failed, and bloody gang wars soon erupted, culminating in drive-by shootings, betrayal, and ultimately murder.

From there, the story shifts to Joe Roma, Denver’s would-be peacemaker and one-time crime boss, whose 1933 assassination created a power vacuum. Into that void stepped the Smaldone brothers—Clyde (“Flip Flop”), Eugene (“Checkers”), and Clarence (“Chauncey”)—who would dominate Denver’s underworld from the 1940s through the 1980s. Their North Denver restaurant, Gaetano’s, became both a community staple and a notorious mob hangout.

Gary details the family’s criminal enterprises, from gambling, loan sharking, and bootlegging to jury tampering and racketeering, including the high-profile 1953 gambling raid that brought federal heat. But the Smaldones weren’t just feared—they were admired by many locals for their generosity, community involvement, and quiet acts of charity. They donated to orphanages, covered college tuition, and ensured no one in the neighborhood went hungry, blurring the line between gangster and good neighbor.

The episode also explores the Smaldones’ national connections, including partnerships with mob bosses in St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago. Gary breaks down their Las Vegas Riviera Casino skim, in collaboration with Anthony Giordano, and how FBI wiretaps and surveillance exposed their involvement in one of the Mafia’s most lucrative rackets. Figures like “Fat Willie” Villano, a nephew of Checkers, handled casino marker collections, sometimes doubling as muscle for overdue debts.

As always, Gary brings a thoughtful and grounded perspective, asking: Were the Smaldones cold-blooded criminals or Robin Hood-style community protectors? The truth lies somewhere in between.

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Transcript In this episode, I delve deep into the intriguing world of organized crime in Denver, Colorado, a city not typically associated with mob activities. The focus of my research centers around the Small Dome family, who dominated the organized crime scene for several decades. Many listeners are surprised to learn that organized crime had roots in Denver, often overshadowed by its reputation as a skiing and outdoor paradise. But as we explore the historical timeline, we uncover how mob influence permeated this seemingly tranquil landscape.

To kick off the narrative, I introduce the criminal origins in southern Colorado with figures like James Coletti, who made his reputation in Pueblo during the late 1950s. We examine Coletti’s ties to the Bonanno family and his subsequent move to Pueblo, where he became embroiled in local organized crime. The podcast elaborates on key players like Pete Carlino, dubbed the “Al Capone of Southern Colorado,” who aggressively expanded his bootlegging operations during Prohibition. I detail the thwarted attempts at peace meetings and the explosive gang wars that followed, highlighting the volatile atmosphere of the time.

We transition to important figures like Joe Roma, who attempted to mediate tensions among rival gangs in Denver but ultimately became a victim himself. His murder in 1933 left a power vacuum that would soon be filled by the Small Dome family. This episode traces the evolution of their operations, including how the trio of brothers—Clyde, Eugene (Checkers), and Clarence (Chauncey) Small Dome—tackled gambling and bootlegging in the area. Their restaurant, Gaetano’s, became not only a local hangout but a notorious hub for organized crime.

I offer a glimpse into the personal lives of these mobsters, highlighting their connections and relationships with notable figures, including governors and other crime bosses across the country. The exploration includes their legal troubles, particularly the significant raid in 1953 that landed them behind bars for jury tampering and other charges. Yet, the Small Domes’ charisma and community presence allowed them to maintain a degree of respectability, as they were known for their generosity and support of local causes, giving rise to conflicting narratives about their morality.

Through this episode, I aim to paint a complex portrait of the Small Dome family: part criminals, part community benefactors. Their duality resonates through anecdotes of their charitable acts juxtaposed against their extensive criminal undertakings. I discuss the intricate dynamics of organized crime and how even those entrenched in illicit activities can exhibit traits of loyalty and compassion.

Lastly, I highlight the broader implications and connections of the Small Dome family with other crime syndicates across the nation, including their links to Las Vegas and other mob families in St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago. The episode concludes with reflections on the perpetual fascination with organized crime and its impact on American culture, as well as my ongoing commitment to unearthing hidden narratives beyond the well-trodden paths of New York and Chicago. This journey through Denver’s underworld illustrates the complexities of human nature, where good and evil often intertwine in unexpected ways.

[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, good to be back here in the studio, Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. I have a story today I’ve been researching for a while, and I’ve had several people ask me about organized crime in Denver, Colorado. The Small Dome family ruled it for a long time, so we’re going to go take a look at Denver, Colorado. You don’t think of Denver, Colorado, having the mob. You just think of going skiing, the Rockies. And I can’t think of their football team all of a sudden. Anyhow, it kind of started more. The earliest is down in Pueblo, Colorado, which is a few miles. I don’t know, a hundred or so miles, a couple of hundred, maybe south of Denver. A guy named James Coletti was caught at the Appalachian Conference in 1957. And he had been in Pueblo for a long time. He was born in Italy.

[0:56] When he first got to the United States, he was arrested several times in New York City in the New Jersey area. Then he moved west and settled in Pueblo. At one time, he was listed as a member in the early days. He was listed as a member of the Bonanno family. And that’s probably because he was involved with the ownership of the Colorado Cheese Company with Joe Bonanno. So I would say he was a Bonanno-affiliated mobster, more than likely, and a maid guy, too, if he was at Appalachian. After him in Pueblo, I mean, he was there during this time. There’s a brother named Pete and Sam Carlino.

[1:32] And Pete Carlino got the nickname the Al Capone of Southern Colorado during Prohibition because there was a lot of bootlegging going on at the time as there was all over the United States. And they really wanted to expand their bootlegging empire from Pueblo on up to the bigger city in the capital city of Denver. Now, there was a guy named Joe Roma who was supposedly, quote, unquote, the boss of Denver. And he had a sit down with these brothers,

[2:00] Carlino brothers. and trying to head off into kind of a gang war. In 1931, this Joe Roma, he was kind of like, he was more like Al Capone or maybe more like Lucky Luciano. He had a meeting of 30 of Colorado’s top bootleggers in order to try to divide districts up and areas up or who had what area keep troubles down. And the cops at the time, of course, they were probably corrupt as hell, but they found out about it. And since these were all Italians, I’m sure they were all Peckerwood cops. They raided the meeting and the meeting was interrupted. There’s really no compromise was ever agreed on. And what happened now, that was a gang war.

[2:40] A few months later, Pete Carlino was standing on a Denver sidewalk and some gunmen and a automobile, a drive-by shooting, blasted him. I mean, they blasted the shit out of him, but he survived. Three months later, he and James Coletti, who I mentioned before, were killed at Carlino’s home. So, you know, that’s why it’s kind of interesting. Another member of the Carlino gang went to the police and cooperated with the police. And he identified a guy named Bruno Morrow of Pueblo as the gunman. But in a kind of another bizarre twist of the war, there’s Joe Roma. He really wanted, he did not want gang warfare. He just wanted to make money again, like Frank Costello or Lucky Luciano.

[3:23] Roma hosted a $5,000 bail. So… For his rival Pete Carlino, Sam’s brother, at that point in time. And after he had, Carlino had been arrested on some kind of an arson charge, a conspiracy to commit arson. So, you know, go figure. But that’s kind of something really early history that we can find of Denver and Colorado organized crime families in connection with the mafia. Now, Pete Carlino had been bonded out by Joe Roma, who was the Denver guy who was trying to keep peace among the bootleggers.

[4:00] He was up in Denver and he drove out to Cannon City, which is just outside of Denver, around September the 9th, 10th or 11th. Found his body stuffed underneath a bridge. And they said two days later, the killers returned to move his body to move it to a place where it could be more easily discovered. They wanted to discover it. You know, a lot of these mob guys, they like to send a message. So they want to send a message. This has become what’s interesting about this. That was the same around the same time as Joe Mazzaria or was it Maranzano? One of those was Maranzano was killed and they called that the night of Sicilian Vespers in New York City. Well, that, you know, that didn’t really happen. They didn’t kill mob guys all over the United States in that night. That’s a pretty good rumor and a pretty good story. But this guy was killed about the same time. Best I can tell and best I’ve researched this thing before I did an old show on the Night of the Sicilian Vespers and the myth behind that and how that didn’t really happen. But that would be one mob murder that they would link to that and to try to make that story true. This leaves Joe Roma as the organized crime leader in Colorado. He was called Little Caesar because he was five foot one and kind of a bigger than life personality. And he was a crime boss until his murder in 1933.

[5:29] We don’t know exactly who did it, but I got a feeling it might had something

[5:32] to do with the Smaldone family. There’s another prominent family involved in Denver area organized crime and bootlegging and gambling and all that. And that’s a Smaldone family. There were three brothers. I think the oldest was Clyde. They called him Flip Flop.

[5:47] Smaldone there was Eugene and he was known as Checkers Smaldone and then there was Clarence who was Chauncey small dome they were all involved in the bootlegging in the 20s and gambling all the way up into the 1980s and and they will dominate the underworld in Denver in Colorado eastern colorado and uh and the headlines too until the 1990s now these brothers all own all together they owned and operated a restaurant in North Denver, probably the little Italy area in North Denver called Gaetano’s. Gaetano’s Italian restaurant. Now, supposedly Gaetano was Italian for Clyde’s. I’m not sure about that. I read that. They were questioned about the murder of Roma, but nothing ever came of it. Almost the earliest days, during the 40s, by the end of the war, This place, Gaetano’s in the Little Italy neighborhood in North Denver, was known as a mob hangout. Everybody knew it as a mob hangout. You know, we all, especially in smaller cities like this, we have a place that’s known as a mob hangout. Besides his intellect, Clyde or Flip Flop was known for making a lot of friends. And he made friends throughout the United States.

[7:09] He got to know Al Capone back in the day. He got to know Carlos Marcello. Later on, he was friends with one of the Colorado governors, Ralph Carr. And everybody that knew him described him as a real gentleman. He was a real smooth personality, if you will. Born in 1906, and he started out as all of them with a burglary charge, and not all of them, but with some kind of a smaller criminal charge. And he served 18 months in Leavenworth for bootlegging in the 30s, 1933.

[7:39] After he got out, he served some time for the attempted bombing murder of a local guy named Leon Barnes. Now, his younger brother, Eugene, who went by Checkers, they were always at Gaetano’s. They were these restaurateurs who would walk around, and you’ve been there locally owned, especially Italian places. They’d come around and say, is everything okay? Is food okay? That kind of a thing. And get to know people real personable. Clyde always, always dressed immaculately in really expensive suits, and he always had a cigar in his mouth. Everybody knew them. Everybody knew the small dones. And the general manager during those later years, he will say that he said 10 out of 11 people that knew them will have nothing but great things to say about the family. They say that nobody in the neighborhood ever went hungry, no matter how bad times were, the small dones would always help out. 1953, Clyde and Eugene or Checkers made headlines after a publicized raid of one of their gambling dens in Brighton, Colorado. And they were later found guilty of jury tampering.

[8:49] And they really socked it to them. They gave them 60 years in prison and a huge big fine, 1953, $24,000 fine. Now, after 13 months in jail, a little over a year in jail, they got a new trial, and they pled out then and got a little less time.

[9:06] Clyde ended up getting 12 years, and he got a parole in 1962. By 1967, he’s back at it, and he and several others, including Checker’s son,

[9:16] were arrested on gambling charges and for running a $100,000 a week bookmaking operation. Now, Clyde will start pulling back during these years, the 60s, and Checkers, or Eugene, will become known as Northern Colorado’s leading crime figure, like all of Colorado’s leading crime figure, and the patriarch of the Denver crime family. He was the man by then, suspected of taking part in or being behind several murders.

[9:43] He was never indicted for murder. Over his years, he was arrested for auto theft, bootlegging, income tax evasion. People would describe him as a schoolteacher type. He wore glasses, he was very polite, very civil, you know, good mob guy. You know, he doesn’t act like a criminal. He’ll catch a case for operating the loan shark business out of Gaetano’s. He also, Eugene, with Clarence, the younger brother, who was known as Chauncey, and their nephew, Paul Clyde Polly Milano, pled guilty to several charges, including illegal gun possession. Now, Checkers will die in 1992 of a heart attack at age 81. Now, in the later years, Clyde and Checkers, or Eugene, were much less involved in the family’s rackets, and the youngest brother, Clarence, known as Chauncey, took over for the most part. Chauncey was known as the handsomest brother, the best-looking brother, And he had a particular table at Gaetano’s that he’d always sat at in the far back. And that restaurant’s still there today, guys, if you go to Denver. It’s table number 404.

[10:49] They have a famous hamburger that’s still on the menu called the Chauncey Burger. It’s a half a pound of ground chuck, mozzarella, melted mozzarella, and roasted Italian peppers served with a side of the house red sauce. You have to try that if you ever get it out there. Let me know if you do. You know, as of 1999, Chauncey was still alive and he was considered kind of the underboss of the boss. I’m not, maybe one of his brothers was still alive of a two member mob family. Never were, this family never was a national kind of a, you know, an entity. I know in Kansas City, we had, we heard that there were some connections between Kansas City and them.

[11:32] I don’t know. I don’t really remember anybody ever coming to that. But one thing they did get involved in, they were connected to St. Louis and we got that document in 1981. There was an FBI investigation and it revealed that Checkers and his brother Chauncey, the youngest brother, had partnered up with Anthony Giordano, who was the boss of the St. Louis family. And they were in a scheme, a scheme to skim money from the Las Vegas Riviera Casino. They got excerpts. They had wiretaps on them. There was conversations between them. And the Bureau would claim that Giordano and the St. Louis family kind of had the dominant position in this relationship. Now, they were also connected with Detroit in this, too, and Chicago. So this connected them with these other three families. One time they watched a St. Louis mobster named William Spinelli meet the small dones in Denver, discuss, talk about their arrangement.

[12:31] Another occasion when a nephew of Anthony Giordano, a guy named Jimmy Giamonco,

[12:37] came to Denver and he met with Chauncey Smalldown. And one time they even met with Joey Doves Iupa from Chicago about their investment in Las Vegas casinos. Now, I mentioned before there was Paul Fat Willie Villano, who was a nephew of Checkers Smalldown, and he was kind of their point of contact. He would be almost like their underboss, their street guy who kind of handled things on the street. He was their point of contact regarding their investment in the Riviera. And they had several conversations between Riviera executives and Isabelano. And what they talked about was a collection of overdue markers or gambling debts to the casino. So I assume that that was part of their deal, that if Riviera had people that owed them money around the country, why the small dones through this Bellano, Fat Willie Bellano would then go collect these debts. The Bureau watched Bellano travel to St. Louis and meet with Giordano, associate and underboss, and I think maybe the boss for a short period of time, John Batale, at least on one occasion.

[13:47] And here’s what the Bureau learned on how they got their skim out. Everybody’s got a different way. They took it out of the count room in the truck for Kansas City and brought it back with a guy who ran a junket out there back and forth between Kansas City and Las Vegas. So they had a kind of a unique way of getting their skim out of Riviera. It wasn’t as good a way. You didn’t get the cash money quite as easily. They would send a guy out and he was given a huge line of credit. Now, mainly, I think what he did, he played a little bit. Then he cashed in his chips.

[14:21] He got all the money and chips and played a little bit and then cashed in, took the cash back. But they also, if he would gamble, if he won, he kept all the cash.

[14:32] If he lost, the Riviera executive just destroyed any evidence of this line of credit or the marker that he had signed.

[14:39] So that’s kind of their, that was their one entry into the big time. Clyde will die in a nursing home at age 91. His son, who never got involved with the Bob, said that despite his father’s criminal past, he had a soft side and donated to local orphanages and churches and schools and different things. They were that kind of guy. They say you can go to Gaetano’s today, and it’s still Clyde’s favorite bar stools there and marked, and the table, the table number 404 is marked. And, you know, the tricky thing, I think, about figuring out the small dones, and a lot of mob families are like that, but I’ve never really heard this quite so strongly is what I read about them, is that depending on who you talk to, they were either modern-day Robin Hoods or they were shoot-em-up mafioso right straight out of a gangster flick. Of course, in reality, they were neither. It’s always, the story’s always somewhere in between. The stories about their generosity was true. Nobody in the neighborhood went hungry. They helped people out, helped people in the neighborhood out, helped people that they were connected to out, family members out. They helped destitute families with milk and groceries. They secretly paid college tuition for some local boys, and they funded Catholic orphanages.

[15:54] That was reported in the Denver Post magazine called the Roundup magazine. But at the same time, the Denver Post was always reporting on their criminal activity. They donated huge quantities of athletic equipment to kids. And I don’t know, there’s really no, it’s typical mob guys, you know.

[16:14] And that’s what I find so interesting about this is nobody’s all good or bad. A lot of your criminals, your serial killers and the booger-eating morons that are out here stealing your car and robbing the grocery stores or the 7-Elevens as we used to call them, you know, 7-Eleven robbers and street muggins and all that. You’re kind of normal small-time day-to-day criminals there’s usually they’re not out doing any good mob guys you know their families they help people out they you know they just you know partly they on one hand.

[16:48] As many of the old guys learned, and Frank Costello was a perfect example of this, you need to maintain a good front out there and keep people, keep the law enforcement off your butt when you’re running these rackets. And the rackets that they ran for the most part are, you know, bootlegging. People wanted booze. Everybody wanted booze. Gambling, everybody likes to gamble. Maybe not everybody, but a lot of people like to gamble. Mainly, they provide a product that most people want. And mainly, if there’s any enforcement activity where people get hurt, it’s somewhere within the family, even with loan sharking. Anybody that ends up going to a loan shark, more than likely, they’re a degenerate gambler. And that’s why they’ve been involved in a variety of different criminal behaviors already, where the embezzlement, for example, that’s the ones that end up with a loan shark. And that’s the ones that, you know, when they can’t pay it back, they get beat up. They allow, lots of times, if they have a company, they’ll allow the mob to come and bust it out so they can get their money back. It’s such an interesting subculture that I’m going to keep doing this because

[17:51] it is so fascinating to me. And there’s a whole lot of other mob. Every time I think I’ve heard every mob story there was, I look and I look closer and I see her. I get a message from somebody and there’s something that I haven’t talked about or haven’t covered.

[18:04] Try to, you know, get outside of New York and Chicago. And there’s still tons, you know, there’s tons of mob stories in both those cities. I’ve covered Denver, I mean, Dallas and Kansas City and then Rochester.

[18:18] New York, upstate New York. I need to do, I think I need to do, you know, the guy at Buffalo, all of a sudden I’ve lost his name, Maglioco. No, not Maglioco. You know what I mean? I’ll figure it out. I’ll get it done. But it’s, there’s other smaller families out there. Rock Island. Yeah. Illinois, I did a little bit on that, but that was mainly from under the pizza connection. I didn’t really get into what was going on there. And I found out recently that there was a lot more going on in downstate Illinois than what I realized. Peoria, there’s a little bit going on down there. Newport, Kentucky, and along that state line down there. Indiana into Kentucky and Ohio, there was a lot of stuff going on there. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a lot going on there. I’ve done Cleveland.

[19:08] What’s about Cincinnati? I’ve never done Cincinnati, and I’ve never really,

[19:11] really got into Detroit too much, and a couple stories. But anyhow, we just keep spinning them out there, guys, and I really appreciate all you supporting the podcast. Every once in a while, I get a donation still, which, you know, that’s wonderful. It kind of keeps me going. I’ll tell you right now, it kind of keeps me going. And, you know, you’re buying my books and all that kind of thing. So don’t forget, if you have a problem with PTSD, go to the VA website and get that hotline number. And mixing this up a little bit, you know I like to ride motorcycles, so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there driving your F-150. And if you have problems with drugs or alcohol, get down to Mr. Ruggiano down in Florida.

[19:52] Look at that hotline. Find that hotline number on his website. Get hooked up with him. Be sure and go to my website and check out my books and movies. You know, you can, you can, I got a way that you can stream my movies for $1.99 off my website. Now, of course, I got my books. If you want to hard copies for sale, you can get them probably cheaper on Amazon. I don’t even know what I, I think I put a kind of a higher price up there for some reason. I don’t even know why. Mainly I sell them off Amazon anyhow. You know, if people donate, then I make sure you get a book, whatever you donate. There’s some ways to donate and some stuff I’ll give you. anyhow guys i really appreciate you supporting this page supporting my podcast gagland wire podcast group uh youtube channel and all that stuff like and subscribe tell your friends about it and just keep coming back guys we got a new story every week or so thanks guys.

With decades on the force, Det. Don Tabak shares the emotional and technical complexities of working on some of Los Angeles’s most brutal homicide cases. He recounts haunting moments from the field, including a harrowing investigation involving a kidnapped woman who miraculously survived an attempted murder. Don walks us through the steps that led to justice—and the toll that work takes on those who pursue it.

After retiring from law enforcement, Don founded a private investigation firm that defends police officers and municipalities. However, his career took a surprising turn when a Hollywood producer approached him about adapting his real-life cases. That partnership gave rise to The Wiggle Room—an interactive crime-solving experience where audiences step into the role of investigator, uncover clues, and solve cases rooted in reality. It’s part thriller, part education, and all authentic.

The conversation also touches on Don’s take on the O.J. Simpson case, offering an insider’s look at how public pressure and procedural missteps shaped one of the most infamous trials in American history. He explains the razor-thin margin between justice and error, and why evidence integrity remains a detective’s most crucial tool.

Finally, Don Tebak unpacks the psychology behind effective interrogation, revealing how detectives walk the fine line between coaxing out the truth and understanding the emotional terrain of a suspect’s mind.

Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly.

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To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, welcome, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have a little different sort of a show for you today. We’re not going to go down that path of organized crime. You probably get tired of that anyhow. And what I found, I found another retired copper named Don Tabak from L.A. Who’s got in the entertainment business, just like yours truly. I guess I’m in the entertainment business. I’m in the entertainment hobby, as I just told Don. But, you know, anyhow, guys, welcome Don Tabak from LAPD. Hey, Gary, good to be here. Nice to meet you. Great, man. You got a good voice. You got a voice for radio. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Thank God. I have a good voice for radio, too.

[0:40] Tell us what you’re doing when you’re retirement. Well, I opened up a private investigations business, Gary, when I left. And I primarily do police officer and municipality defense for critical incidents. So a lot of the things that happen across the country. After the fact, the lawsuit is filed, I’ll be brought in to re-interview witnesses, talk to the officers, and try to mitigate what’s going on with the lawsuit. And if the officer is in trouble with that as well, we’ll represent the officer to try to make sure that we hopefully can clear him of any wrongdoing. You also, now how’d you get involved with this media business, the TV business? I got contacted throughout my career because of LA and some of the cases that we’ve handled in the past. It’s media-friendly between law enforcement. So when I left about five years ago, A producer who had known a friend of mine had given this guy my name about, yeah, Don’s had some unusual cases and worked this and that and whatever. And he called and we put together a couple of things that he wanted to try to bring to Discovery or Netflix in regards to some of my murders that I handled.

[1:49] And however, they didn’t work out or what have you. So about a year ago, he came up with a concept called The Wiggle Room. And this is a very small audience like an old nightclub room in a hollywood or in a hotel here in hollywood and it’s basically like my part of this is to bring in me talk about a couple of my cases um it’s interactive there’s a live audience there and then at the end of the second half of this we’ll talk about one of my crime scenes and let the people have a shot at it and trying to figure out what happened and who did it and did they have enough probable cause of good this and that and really get them an idea on how frustrating it is sometimes working some of these murders.

[2:30] Interesting. So tell us about your police experience in this. Were you assigned to the LAPD homicide division or robbery homicide? How does that break down? Yes, sir. I started out as a young detective. I’ve worked a number of detective divisions. LAPD has 18 geographic divisions in the city of Los Angeles, and each one has a homicide unit. Although now it’s centralized. But I eventually worked my way up to starting my own homicide unit. It was an arson bombing homicide unit. We worked in the same area as robbery homicide. Worked a buttload of cases over the 12 years that I worked murders before I retired. And handled all kinds of different things. Got involved with some phenomenal cases. I thank God wasn’t here when OJ was being tried. It was my unit that did that. And just in the give and take of the murders in Los Angeles back in the day, there’s a lot of interesting cases that we talk about in this crime scene live. I bet. So was that out of a division station, the Hollenbeck station? No, sir. It was out of our detective headquarters division, DHD. They call it the same area that our RV homicide division is in. Okay. So that’s down at Parker Center? The specialized unit, yeah, it was. Yeah, downtown, the central. Okay. So you were the big boys compared to them. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s how we look at it, don’t we?

[3:54] That’s how we look at it. You know, that’s how it is. So I wasn’t too varsity. I was kind of like between JV and varsity. Okay, all right. We all want to make the varsity on the PD. A lot of people don’t understand that out there, the breakdown between different units, but we all want to make that first team. I’m a working B, Gary. Then some of those guys kind of like kick back on their laurels. The Hollywood detective. That’s where I started.

[4:20] Tell us about one of your early cases that you remember that was particularly interesting. One of the most grave cases I ever handled, Gary, was a young female that ended up living, but her backstory is pretty amazing.

[4:38] She was the executive assistant to Wang Corporation. And Wayne was one of the first commercial-produced computers, word processing computers. And she had dropped her boss off at LAX and was taking his Porsche 925 prototype car back to where their offices were. And while stopped at a light on Sepulveda and 71st, right down the street from the airport, she was rear-ended on a very soft collision from behind. And she got out of the car. She walked back. He exchanged information. And one of the suspects took a gun in her belly. He said, get in the car. They put her back in the car. And for the next two days, they brutally raped, beaten, sold her for rock cocaine. And two days after the fact, they took her to an alley in South Central Los Angeles, dragged her out of the car.

[5:33] One suspect punched her in the face, knocking her to the ground. And my other suspect put two bullets in the back of her head with a 38 caliber, um, revolver. Wow. She waited. For a second until she heard the car leave, this woman got up and walked a block and a half to an a.m. p.m. Mini-mart and asked the clerk to call the police. And then she collapsed. She was saved by surgery. For the next literally 20 hours, we worked this case day and night. We ultimately found both suspects.

[6:09] And to hear this woman testify on a stand about what it was like having these two bullets shot in the back of her head is the most chilling, sad thing that I think I’ve had. To this day, I talked to her like it happened yesterday. She was an amazing woman. And the ironic part about this, Gary, is she wasn’t married at the time. And after everything had happened, and I only stayed in contact with, I probably handled 50 of my own murders and not 100 total. And you lose back in the 70s and 80s and early 90s. Man, this place, there was 1,200 murders in the city of Los Angeles by themselves. So you didn’t get to stay in contact with a lot of people. But I did with her for a couple of years. Then eventually I lost contact. Both the suspects were found guilty. Sentenced of 480 some odd years each in prison. Four years ago, Thanksgiving Eve, I got a call. And I’m sure you can attest to this or feel for this. It was a male, a young male. And he said, are you Don Tabak? And I said, yeah. And he goes, were you the detective that handled my mother, Carol Lepac’s shooting? And my hair, like right now, the hair on my head is standing up. I went, I did. Who are you? And he goes, my name’s Ryan Narai, and I am Carol’s son.

[7:25] And like, whoa, wait, what? So this was 33 years after this case had happened. She had passed away about a year before this, so three, four years ago. And Ryan wanted to find out exactly what had happened to his mother. She only articulated parts of what she called the event. And he wanted to find out. She became a conservationist up in Montana and divorced the husband. and it was just her and her son for a number of years. So Ryan came out to Los Angeles, a wonderful kid, looked almost exactly like his mom as I remember her. I took him to every spot that we found where she had been taken and then ultimately to the alley where she was shot. And it just, everybody that I’ve talked to, no one has had an experience like that where all these years later, this case came back tenfold to me because of her son. In September of 2024, he wrote an article that Esquire magazine published, and it said, the bullet in the back of my mother’s head. And it talks about my role into it, his role with his mother.

[8:36] Just an amazing case on how everything came together that we found so much to be able to convict these two animals of one which Gary just got out of prison last October. Wow. Floored me that they allowed him to get out. So I talk about that case because I was very, very close to it because of just the depravity and the torture that this woman went through. And then when they tell her, all right, we’re going to kick you out, we’re going to release you.

[9:06] And to humiliate her by punching her in the face and then killing, just shoot her, right? Don’t sit there and defame her and all. So it’s a case that’s close to me. And like I said, came back all these years later through her son. So it’s a pretty amazing story. It is. Now, a case like that. Now, she didn’t know who these guys were. No. Did you have witnesses quickly, get a license plate? How does that, does that somebody drop a dime? Did they start bragging their friends? These are some of the ways that this happens. How did that case start coming, unfolding? Well, we had to find where the whole incident took place by LAX. And we were able to talk to her. The responding officers were able to talk to her and she was able to get out before she passed out that she was hit from behind near LAX and that they had stolen her car, but they had hit her in a small Toyota Corolla, I think it was. They found the car. You know, the broadcast started going out. They found the vehicle.

[10:08] We interviewed her after surgery some hours after this and she was able to articulate that she thought she was in South Central Los Angeles and she thought, One of her suspects or one of the kidnappers was a gang member because he was talking about a role in 60s or a role in 20s. And that’s a very big Compton gang out of LAPD crash units, which was our gang units at the time, saturated. And I mean, they hit it hard trying to find, you know, somebody that knew something about this. And you know from yourself, sir, that you’re out there and you’re pounding ground. There’s a lot of pressure on these dope fiends and a lot of pressure on these gangs. They want to give up something so you can get the cops out of your way and move over to someone else. So we found where she was taken by good old-fashioned uniformed police work, by stopping suspects and basically letting them know that this isn’t going to be taken lightly. Wang himself was just absolutely pissed off about this happening to his secretary after he moved his headquarters to L.A., calling Darrell Gates, our chief at the time, demanding, you know, the entire department mobile. We almost did. We found a dope house at 85th Street and Wadsworth Avenue in South Central Los Angeles. And an individual by the name of Slim gave us information on the slide that said, yeah, I might have seen those two guys with a white chick here about eight o’clock last night or two nights ago. Right. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[11:37] So that’s the first piece of it. And we got their nicknames, their street names. Yeah. We get called in, I guess it was 8, 12, 15 hours after the initial kidnapping. It’s just a matter of putting this, trying to get the timeline right, first of all. But it was all by a matter of LAPD patrol, LAPD crash, other homicide officers that were working Venice Division at the time where I was.

[12:03] I’m just getting out there for two and a half days, well, actually about a day and a half of actually hitting the street. We were able to, we were just behind finding each place that they went. You hit one place and they have stuff to say and you hit the other place and they have stuff to say. Yeah. So I’ll tell you something that was, this woman had a will to live, Gary, and that’s what it’s all about. She refuses to come. The torture that she went through, she was bound and destined to survive this. After everything was done in LA and hours before she was shot, she was taken to a hotel in Anaheim, California, near Disneyland. And she was shoved down in the hatch compartment of the car. Suspects are driving. She remembers looking up out of the window, and she saw the Matterhorn ride from Disneyland.

[12:54] And so she knew she was in Anaheim. And then she started counting to herself the number of minutes going by 60s. until the car stopped. And it was 13 minutes. When we talked to her and found about this, we went and we went to every hotel we could find within 13 minutes of the Matterhorn. And we found the hotel that she was taking. And she talked about a black and white tile on the floor of the bathroom. They allowed her to go to the bathroom. We found that room. We found the manager that at the time couldn’t identify the two male suspects. We took a photo lineup to him after we had captured him, couldn’t ID him. And in the trial, Gary, he ID’d these two guys sitting at the defense desk. Well, you know how that came across, right? The defense attorney. It must be them. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[13:44] The judge allowed it in. He allowed the IV in. Oh, yeah. I don’t know if it was stacked or it was just a good ID. But everything came together. Fingerprints, we got off their car. Okay. Fingerprints off of the car that they stole. Great eyewitness, well, not eyewitness, but great testimony for witnesses that were in the houses that they went to, the crack houses. We found an individual that they sold to him, her, for sex, for rock cocaine. He felt bad for her and was trying to get her out of there, but they interrupted him. So he wasn’t going to say anything because he was another gangster.

[14:24] But because of the gravity of this thing and knowing that he was going to go to prison with everybody we talked to, someone’s going to prison for the rest of their life on this thing. So eventually he identified our second guy. On the end of the second day, we’re driving down a street in L.A. My partner was somebody else. I was with my boss who was not the sharpest guy in the world. And I think I see my suspect number two sitting on a bus bench and he’s nodding like this. So get out of the car, walk around him. Prone him out, you know, at gunpoint. And as we were walking up to the bus stop, another individual walked away from it, passed me and says, that’s the man you’re looking for. Yeah. So it was, you know, again, as a cop, when you’re hearing that and you go, okay, we now know this is the guy. Yeah. It was a phenomenal case just because we were able to put so much together and help her as much as we did. Ironically, with the two bullets in her head, one exited out of her neck that was at the scene. The other one lodged between both spheres of her brain. They weren’t able to operate on her, but the only residual effect that she had was she slurred words a little bit and she walked with a little bit of a limp. And that was it. So it wasn’t her time to go. And she ended up living a great number of years and she ended up dying of cancer, unfortunately.

[15:49] But there is no more courageous woman than that woman. She’s a hero of mine. That’s a hell of a story. So that bullet was lies in her brain until she died. Yeah. I’ll be darned. I’ve never heard of that before. Wow. Did everything that worked out. And I’ve handled so many different murders, but there’s always those two. Like you know, your case that you handled, there’s always those one or two that will always be indelibly asked in your mind because of just how it played out. It just starts falling. Once it starts falling. Oh, yeah, exactly.

[16:19] It starts falling and it starts falling and it starts falling. When it, when it works like that, you know, it’s working, it’s working. Many times you start down a path, it’ll sound real good. And then all of a sudden it’s dead and you realize, oh man, oh man, I got to step back. You spent a number of hours on that lead. This is the lead and it blows up in your face.

[16:41] Yeah. And this had that, that element to it, but it was just after we got through that initial phasing of it that’s when everything started falling down like you just said yeah i see how you got them convicted you did you get the gun too did you find the gun no never found the gun but you had the cars you had their fingerprints you probably had this was before dna yeah but you had fingerprints it sounds like we did and some of those witnesses yeah that hotel guy ended up being huge for us and as bad as he and i thought he just didn’t want to get involved and yet you know he came to excuse me he came to court and uh testified and when he pointed those two guys out and of course the defense attorneys went with them with the full line but you didn’t identify him at that time but you’re identifying him this time and he just said that’s them there you know i don’t remember the pictures as well as i do about them sitting there yeah so yeah pretty amazing case and in his defense there is a difference in looking at somebody live than I’ve been looking at one of those pictures. I’ve been showed photo lineups like, I don’t know, man. I know I saw that guy. That was probably the guy I saw about 30 minutes ago, but I don’t know.

[17:52] Yeah, and like I said, the Esquire magazine piece that he wrote about it really articulated it from his view, from what she had talked about it over the years that she lived and was productive, and then before she passed away. Wow, that is a heck of a story, boy. It was a good one. We love it when a plan comes together, I know that. Yeah, you know the feeling. When you bring a case like that together, when the jury comes back and they’re out like eight seconds, it took them long enough to go out of the courtroom, come right back in, and convict them on every one of the 480 counts on each of them. You feel good about the hours that you were away from your family. And it won’t replace at that time what happened to her, but at least justice was served for her. And that’s our job as law enforcement guys, right? So now what would be a case that you would use in the wriggle room? What would be a case example of that that you would throw at people? Well, we start out because everybody knew about O.J. Simpson. And, you know, that’s our first thing we talk about. And what’s ironic is we premiered last weekend.

[19:08] And I have always had distractors about Simpson’s case. There’s a lot of people out there that thought he was not guilty. so of the 45 50 people that were in this room after the video montage played i said how many in here raise your hands if you think oj sipson is guilty and every freaking one of them raised their hand so i didn’t have that adverse guy to go ahead yeah but we talk about the mistakes that lapd made on that and and you know you talk about dna um back in the day and this is only we’re talking about 1991. We only have a couple of places to be able to book blood.

[19:44] And that was in our downtown Parker Center area. And then the Van Nuys and the San Fernando Valley area. But when you’re running with a murder for 16, 18, 20 hours, and it’s time to go get some sleep, the last thing you’re doing is going and booking that blood. And I’ve taken blood home a million times. Bloody clothing, and I put it in my refrigerator and preserved it as best I could. And then in the morning, I would take it and book it in. Well, that gave the defense. And you have to understand, too. And I don’t think a lot of these people understand. And Simpson paid $14 million for those seven attorneys to do the most tackler job probably in the history of law. Yeah. They did that. Oh, absolutely. And they took Barry Sheck, who was a phenomenal expert defense lawyer on DNA, and made those people understand that if they couldn’t find the one guy, even though it’s 450,000 to one, they wanted that one person in there because that means there’s doubt. It isn’t 450,000 to zero. It’s one. And he did a spectacular job at that point with that jury. Maybe not would have happened if it was in Santa Monica, but that jury bought in and they were brilliant. And they defeated the living shit out of, I’m sorry. They defeated Badly, our LA County DA who had no idea what they were up against, none of them.

[21:08] Yeah, I just watched, there’s a documentary on that. I just happened to watch that recently. The new ones? Yeah. With his agent? Netflix and, yeah, with his agent on there. His agent says, I think he did it. The last scene, he goes, well, Simpson told me, had she not come to the door with a knife, she’d be alive today. Where was this like 15 years ago or 20, whatever it was, fool? So, yeah, everybody wants to make a dime up this poor guy since he’s dead. Yeah, yeah.

[21:43] Yeah, that case was snake bit from day one, though. Oh, man. I mean, we don’t even go in all the different ways it was snake bit. It was what we call snake bit. Yes, sir. Every way, every way. Yeah, if everything was going to go wrong, it did go wrong. It did. Yeah, it did. No doubt about it. Well, he got his in the end, I guess. He spent some time. Didn’t they do him in Vegas? Vegas. And you know what’s ironic, Kerry, is that was all his stuff. The guy just wanted him. I know. I know. That was all his stuff. Yeah. It wasn’t like it was stolen. It was his stuff they stole from the guy. I guess he carried a gun along with it. Thought he might have to threaten somebody with a gun. What an idiot. Yeah. He goes back and takes back his own stuff and he does like 15 years for Rob. Oh my God. I would go get nine of nine of them, but. He did nine. Okay. Yeah. I knew he did a lot. I think that was a payback though for, you know. Oh yeah. LA. Yeah. I think so. Really interesting. So here’s this one case I’ve mentioned to you before about, uh, uh, we’ve got a similar kind of case where the, uh, a missing girl, young child was, has never been found again. So this was a four-year-old Jesse Gutierrez. So tell us about that. How’d you get involved in that? I see it said back in South Carolina anyhow.

[23:07] Yeah, I was, uh, I’d been retired for a number of years and I have a partner of mine that moved to Lexington, South Carolina. And he just came across something. And I don’t know how he came across it, but he said, called me and said, hey, take a look at this murder that’s for or kidnapping, presumed murder of a four-year-old. And it’s on Google. And I Googled her name. And Gary, by the time I’m done reading this article, Matt, I’m smashing stuff against the wall. Like I was incensed that Lexington County Sheriff’s back in 1986 treated this mother like an absolute piece of crap because she married a Hispanic man and there’s some very strong feelings about race back in Lexington, South Carolina, which, you know, I wasn’t quite aware of. And they did absolutely the de minimis as far as investigating this case when they had jailhouse informants that this guy copped to. They had a cigarette butt that was laying below the window. They had a fingerprint on the windowsill itself.

[24:15] If this case happened in Los Angeles, it’s over in two days. It was that easy of a case. Leading up to and including when my victim’s mother.

[24:26] Um kept bugging these guys please help me help me you know get my little girl back um the sheriff of the time and i’ll tell you the guy’s name was a guy named metz sheriff metz told her that she didn’t leave her fucking people his people alone he would never do anything on this case and he apparently kept his promise because there was nothing that was done this like i said this case was an was a quickie if they would have just done the right thing. So the detective that was assigned to this case in 1986 was a young cop on the sheriff’s department who I ended up meeting. I ended up going back there, Gary. First, I asked my partner to go there and door knock Deborah, her mother, Jesse’s mother. And he called me and says, Don, she’s righteous, man. She absolutely got crapped on by the sheriff’s department. So I’ve never done this before I could you know it’s not LA I don’t get it wasn’t me wasn’t anybody I knew yeah but I got so pissed off Gary that they just shit on crap on her yeah for that you know and this is in 1960 this is like 1986 yeah so I went there just to probably go tell her you know is this really true and I’m so sorry that you didn’t get treated fairly like that’s what You’re a citizen here, man. That’s what you deserve is a righteous police investigation.

[25:54] So I went and talked with her, and she filled me in a lot of things. She has this tape of Mets telling her to lay off her guys and quit bugging them. I went and talked to a victim witness coordinator, a number of people associated with the sheriff’s department at the time, and they just said they did things their own way. They called them the Lexington Mob. So you talk about, you know, your end. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they, you know, but they said when? So this case laid dormant, Gary. There’s a landfill that’s about a mile and a half from her house.

[26:31] The primary suspect in this case, a guy named McDowell. I forget his first name right now. There’s a heel in the white truck. And there was a white truck scene going to this landfill that’s about a mile and a half from Deborah’s house, about 3 o’clock in the morning, which is the approximate time they think that this little girl was taken. And a sheriff’s unit is following it into the landfill. At 4 a.m. He gets a radio call and pulls off of the truck. Like I said, McDowell owned a white truck. It’s in close proximity where Deborah lives. And I would bet everything that I was ever trained under that little girl was in that guy’s truck and he was taking her to dump her yeah so I get home and uh when I met with the detective um.

[27:31] Dave Pritchard and he’s a lieutenant now getting ready to retire from there, very squared away guy good guy and when I asked I go how did you not do anything and he says Don Don, I needed the job, meaning he was told not to do shit about this unless he was told to. So I get home from Lexington, and about a week later, I get a call from Pritchard, and he says, Don, FBI is opening the case again. And they want the cigarette butt, and they’re going to look at everything. And Gary, I’m telling you, sir, I don’t know if I poked the bear, but I didn’t talk to any police administration officials. I talked to various people. But something happened. And I don’t think it was because of us, maybe the timing was, but inside of about a year after everything was done, he got his warrant for McDowell for the murder, a nobody murder and kidnapping of Jessica Gutierrez. They served a high profile warrant in Wake Forest, North Carolina, just over the South Carolina border. They took this lovely individual into custody. Wouldn’t talk to him last February.

[28:43] March 8th. Well, somewhere in there, they convicted him of the murder and kidnapping of Jessica Gutierrez. We couldn’t get the body back. And there’s an interesting dynamic here, and I’ll pick your brain for this. Richard calls me and says, what would you do to try to get the kid back? How would you talk to him? Go ask him what he wants. You know, he’s 69 years old. He’s in horrible health. He’s going to die in prison. Maybe he wants to get out in a couple of years if he cooperates and gets the kid. I said, the problem being is he’s going to tell you what’s in the landfill. The problem being that landfill has been turned over thousands and thousands of times since 1986. Yeah. So he makes the plopper. Hey, she’s there. They go and they try to find her and come back and say, well, she’s not there. He goes, well, that’s not my problem. You can’t. I get out now. So my advice to him was to say, you know what? Don’t make him a deal. F him. Don’t. Let him rot. Because you’re never going to. He could say that I dumped her in an alleyway at 54th or wherever. Well, now there’s a strip mall there. Right? So he could be lying on his ass and just to get his deal going. So the best part of that was leave him there, let him die there.

[29:52] She has some closure, although she still wanted her remains of her child back. It ended up being just a super case. And I touched on just a few of the highlights on there, but there was so much, so much that they missed. So much that they could have. Like I said, if this is here, Gary, or in Kansas City, I’m sure you all solved that crime within a couple of days. There was that much evidence and that much identification of this animal that did this to this little girl. The reason we believe he did it, he was dating Debra for a while. She’d broken off to go with one of his friends. He had been at the trailer a number of times. He knew how close to her and the kids that she was. And that’s probably his motivation for doing that, was to get back at her. Tough case, but it was neat to see that they at least were able to bring him to justice and give him his just rewards. How’d they tie him to it other than the white pickup in the area? His fingerprint, was that his? Of course, he had been in the trailer, so he could say, oh, I’ve been in that trailer. Yep, correct. Cigarette butts outside.

[31:01] Yep. The DNA on the cigarette butt was they weren’t able to get anything off because it had laid dormant for so long in a plastic bag. The fingerprint was his. She had cleaned that windowsill in the trailer a zillion times. And she had cleaned it that week. It was dry out. There was no reason that any kind of moisture would have gotten on the sill. It wasn’t chipping with the pain. It was pretty non-porous area. So over his print to be there that later in, in, after they broke up would be pretty impossible. Okay. But again, then they have three jailhouse informants to die. One’s left. And he, the jailhouse informant says he copped out to me that he did something very bad to a little girl in Lexington, you know, a few months before or a few weeks before. So, again, they had a great case to begin with, with that. They just let it go. It’s a little bit different back then. Really? Well, I’m going to tell you about this one locally that maybe you can come back here and solve this one. You and I, man, we’ll go out there and do it.

[32:09] Baby Lisa’s name of the case, her father’s name was Jeremy and mother’s name was Deborah. And about late in the afternoon, dad’s gone to work. Mom’s last known, you know, that somebody else saw her. She’s sitting down the front porch with the neighbor and they’re drinking some beer. And then she goes on in and goes to bed. She claims that she checked on the baby about 6.40 and then about 10.40 that evening. But when he comes in about four in the morning, baby Lisa is gone. There’s a couple of cell phones in the house that are gone. There’s a screen that was taken off of a window.

[32:47] And they’re like, I don’t know. You know, this is like a little baby. This is not a little kid who just got up and wandered off. This is a little baby. And then there was a neighbor that said they saw, you know, the bushy-haired stranger somewhere in the neighborhood that night. So then where do you go from there? Of course, first thing you do is you bring the parents in and then you start sweating them, which became a debacle because then they went to the press and complained that the cops were accusing them and weren’t really following up other leads. And so, you know, those are the things that happens to a homicide detective in those kinds of cases. Yep. There’s so many pratfalls. You almost think that it’s geared for defeat on our side of it. And that you have to try to overcome these obstacles. That’s going to be hard. You know, it’s like we had talked right before we came on about John Bonet is, you know, there’s so many people who have copped out to that, that if the righteous guy ever walked into the Colorado authorities, they could not convict him. They’ve trampled everything. This one, it sure looks like the people that were there are the people that probably are involved in this. Yeah. I mean, my personal theory is mom was drinking that night and somehow maybe, maybe fell asleep with the baby in the bed and she was a big woman and maybe laid over on her or something or baby, maybe, maybe the baby just died of, uh.

[34:15] Uh, SIDS, you know, sudden in that syndrome, you know, but then dad came home and he panicked. I don’t know. I think my theory is that’s what happened. And then dad panicked and hid the baby and set up and took these cell phones and got rid of them and then called the police. That’s my theory. But, you know, that’s.

[34:37] Plausible. It’s plausible. It’s just, but it’s a total, total theory. You know, there’s the other theory that we came up with that people knew that they had this newborn baby and there’s this syndrome that women get, certain women will get that will pretend like they’re pregnant. And then when it’s time to have the baby, they’ll like go to a hospital. That’s one reason that hospitals for the newborns are, they have these rigid security precautions because people, there’s people that will do this. This has happened. And they’ll get this baby and taken home and then tell all their friends and neighbors, yeah, I had my baby. Here’s my, he just got home in the hospital. Here’s my baby. So that was another theory. And, and then of course the, the bushy haired stranger, some kind of a, I don’t know, like the Madeline McCann case over in Portugal, where that little girl was taken out of her room and is, you know, missing, still missing. So somebody, you know, took that baby and raised it or sold it or what, you know, there’s always that, you know, they sold the baby that that’s big you know and that there was a mark you know you’d have to go back into what their their strata was the baby sales thing now is like you had talked about where they they pretend they’re pregnant and then they go find a baby and all but the sales of a baby you know.

[35:51] And to russian to you know going back the other way that’s big and you know if you looked at it you know were they in debt were they yeah i mean that that’s a great case yeah it works that’s viable and the problem being is the older it gets the harder it gets yeah to solve are they still actively looking at this you know probably not although they did have this guy um he came up with some these cell phones were missing and they claimed and let’s see it started in 20 uh.

[36:23] 2011 and 2012, they claim that a debit card that they had stolen that night, too, had been fraudulently used on a website that provided false birth certificates. This is almost a whole year later. The parents reported this. And there is such a website out there, you know, but I don’t know how much more they dug up. I couldn’t find out.

[36:46] It’s a KC case? Yeah, Kansas City. You know, at the time there, there’s, uh, didn’t have these attorneys get involved in these cases, high profile cases. This guy named Joe Taco, Taco Pina, Taco Pina. I think he got into the Trump thing for a while. He’s this New York lawyer. That’s this, you know, bigger than life and louder than anybody with a great New York accent. He came to town and they, and he started representing them for free. And then they were trying to collect DNA samples from the parents. And then he just stopped everything. He stopped everything, any investigation of the parents, except through him. And so that all died out. So it’s a- Did they polygraph the parents? Do you know? You know, I don’t think they ever got to- No, wait a minute. I looked at, I just glanced at my notes here. They did. They polygraphed the mom and she failed the first one. And then she had a second one that was inconclusive. So you know how the polygraph goes. Yeah. And then again, it’s just a, it’s a tool. Yeah. I don’t put a lot of faith in them, but it gives you a direction to go. Yeah. It just depends on how well the polygraph person could convince that. Yeah. They did bring a cadaver dog into the house and around the house, and the dog hit on a scent of a dead body that it was inside the house at one time. Now, of course, again, that and a buck and a half will get you a cup of coffee maybe. Yeah.

[38:13] It used to be 10 cents. And it’s way past a buck and a quarter now. Yeah, that would be a neat case to look at. They did hire. There was a non-benefactor that hired a private investigator and had a $100,000 reward for the baby back, I don’t know, during that time. And they never came up with anything. I don’t know. It’s just a heck of a case. Yeah, and you have to think that there righteously was a baby. Yeah. They’re with a baby. They lived there. Yeah. Causes demise, whether through SIDS or natural means or, you know, at the hands of them. It just seems there are a lot of things to do immediately. Yeah. You know, may or may not have been done. Yeah. That’s what I’d be interested to see is how did the crime scene go? What did they do? Well, I mean, I think they eventually got around to processing. Of course, it was a missing person’s case for a while, but I think pretty quickly they got around to processing the crime scene. Yeah. which is why they were wanting DNA and those kinds of things from other people. But none of that seemed to pan out to show anything. Child cases. So, you know, I never had a child case victim in my 12, 13 years of working murders. You know, a couple of child abuse things in patrol. But it’s funny, when I’ve done this PI thing now, I’ve had two, both victims of murders.

[39:40] That, you know, I have two sons and who were little at the time that I was on this job. And if a hair there would have been harmed, I would have been out with somebody, right? Much less how they could kill, or maim or hurt their child i know it doesn’t equate to like you know you got to be from another planet and then again it’s our it’s our job as detectives out there to speak for that victim and you don’t stop until like you have nothing left to say yeah in there and i feel bad for the for the child because it just doesn’t seem the same with gutierrez they just never got the investigation that they deserve to the u.s citizen and whatever the biases are you got to put them aside. I mean, every one of my victims wasn’t the neatest person in the world. No. It was yesterday’s suspect was today or tomorrow’s victim. So tell me about another case you worked at. Oh, man, I’ll tell you something, too. To show you the time.

[40:43] We get called in and a mother and son, son was buying rock cocaine in the San Fernando Valley. And there was a problem with the sale and the son got shot and killed at the scene. We roll up, process the scene, we get some names and all this and the mother isn’t saying shit to us. She’s refusing to talk. So we go through the whole case. We’re a little bit weird about her and finally we get around to her because it’s her turn. Everybody we’ve talked to now, we’ve got her and the boy in the car. We have four suspects Or at least appear to be suspects We know who the shooter is But three of my witnesses says No, the mother was buying the dope And got into it with the seller, And the boy And the boy, tries to grab the gun because the guy goes to put the gun in like it was a ripoff and of course he gets blasted mother doesn’t the mother might have been on mars during this whole time i don’t know what happened i don’t know where we were i don’t that that that that that that that that three weeks into this case gary we end up finding a wit that we hadn’t known about that had sold dope to the mother repeatedly in the process of getting the suspect in custody.

[42:09] We polygraphed the mother who did so bad, like the ink was hitting the polygrapher on the, you know, the needles are just going everywhere. And she finally cops out that she didn’t want to go back to jail. She was on parole for possession, you know, for narcotics possession and didn’t want to go back to jail. So therefore, if she just said it was she blamed her kid for, you know, causing his own demise. And it just to to this day i still think like how do you put yourself you funded your kid who got killed for you buying dope right and it can only happen here in the city of los angeles like that that your child 19 year old kid take a mommy to buy some rock and something gets blasted and you know she doesn’t even have the audacity to feel bad and cop out about what happened so So she ended up getting, she was a real jewel. And again, it’s just things like that that come up about, you know, humanity’s just gone. We’ve lost. Back then we lost, but it’s worse now. Worse now, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then on the other two, the kind of the, not fun ones, but we had a gangster that stabbed his girlfriend.

[43:24] And I plodded myself, Gary, on my interview and interrogation techniques. I’m not supposed to use interrogation anymore. My interview techniques. This little gangster, they arrest him. And it didn’t take an FBI academy guy to be able to interview these people. And my thing was, hey, this is your only chance to tell me what happened. I got 19 witnesses that told me exactly what went on. This is it because after i leave you’re going to tell your attorney or he’s going to paint a rosy picture for you and the bottom line is your attorney goes home and goes to bed and you’re sitting in some joint right just if you don’t want to talk to me just say yeah i’ll talk to you, but just don’t lie to me god i’m in the middle of the night i’m tired which you know i always spoke the truth so this kid just says okay well you know we we got in a fight and um she took out a knife and was trying to cut me. And I said, well, how did, how did the knife end up in your hand? And then she got stabbed three times. He says, well, I got the knife away from her and we were going down a stairwell and she tripped and fell into me and stabbed herself. I said, I got that part. Okay. So that’s, that doesn’t, that’s, that was an accident, right? Put off the other two Well when we rolled over She fell in life again Okay that’s two.

[44:52] And then I said, you’re missing one. He goes, well, I don’t know how that went out.

[44:56] And I said, listen, it’s still sweat off on me. And I was dead serious, Gary. I said, you’re going to go into court and you’re going to tell a jury that same story and they’re going to laugh at you. You know, he gets all this proud shit like, maybe they’re going to laugh at me. I said, it makes no sense. And you’re going to say that. They’re going to go, what an idiot. So you attack their manlyhood and then you attack the character. And he goes like, really? I said, yes, they’re going to walk out of that jury booth, come right back into court and go guilty. What should I tell them? I said, I’d stick with the first one. And he goes, oh, man. He goes, then I’m going to, you know, I’m going to, it’s going to be hard for me to explain. I said, all right, then just tell me, how did all the thing go down? And he goes, and there’s everything. They’ve been arguing all day, and she had picked up some kind of a pan to hit him.

[45:47] And he’s walking towards her with the pan and he slaps her and the pan falls out and he said, I’m just so pissed off at her. He just stabbed her. I said, okay, that sounds so much better than the thing about fighting and she stabbed herself and he’s all proud that he told the truth on this thing. So, you know, there were comical moments on very sad moments, you know, in this world that we worked in. That interview slash interrogation that in a murder, especially murder is such a psychologically powerful crime. You can get P I noticed you can get people to talk about all kinds of stuff trying to deflect your attention away from what you want to talk about. Then as you get them closer, if you can get them started down that path of any kind of a little.

[46:36] Thing that might’ve happened. You just get them started down that path and they’ll kind of go down that path thinking that they can fool you here and they can tell you something to get you off their butt. And then you come back like, just like what you did, it’s classic. Then you come back and say, well, you know, that ain’t quite, you know, that doesn’t make sense here, you know?

[46:55] And you just, each step, they just go down that path a little further until they’ve relieved themselves of the burden. Oh, and that, you know, I had a, yeah, absolutely. And you’re so run out with that. I had a judge who, who refused to believe that suspects would admit to doing their crimes. I would tell her, everyone understands saying, well, you know, people want to tell you they do what, uh, and probably 90% of the suspects, whether it be from a domestic violence act or robbery. They want to rid themselves of some of the guilt. So they’ll give you that omission, give you a little piece of it, right? And then eventually you’ll see their body language, you know, they’re starting to give in and like, okay, I feel better about this now, right? You don’t want to lie because you’re going to be caught in the lie and you make it, you know, worse for them. The ones that are tough, Gary, when you walk them in, they go, I ain’t got shit to say to you. Yeah. And then they, you know, the word, but, you know, when they’re hemming and hawing and, you know, moving in their seat, and when you start giving them so much evidence against them, it’s overwhelming, right? The psyche doesn’t want to hear all the stuff you have on me. So, you know, and the first, like, they’ll tell you, you know, your OC cases, you know, you’ll get that small pond down here and, like, well, what can you do for me? Right. As soon as, as soon as that happened, you’re okay.

[48:22] Okay. Let me tell you. Right. And you, here’s what I’m gonna do for you. I’m going to keep you out of the gas chamber. And then like, well, shit, all I do is carry the money. Right. And now I’m going to the gas chamber. So yeah, you know what? It was so much fun being imaginative and, you know, getting these people to talk or roll over, just give me something. And, you know, there were others that didn’t say stop. I respected that. Then I can go home earlier and play with my kids. Yeah.

[48:50] So much fun, Gary, working this job. In a tragic time, that was the fun part to what kept it sane and kept you going from the game. Yeah. And if you could treat it as a game. I always treat it as a game. It’s not personal. Oh, God. It’s a game. We’re like grown-up boys playing cops and robbers. We just happen to have real guns. Isn’t that it? That’s exactly it. And, you know, as long as I came home safe every night and my kids were safe, you know, I was, and, you know, I understand people get pissed off and, and men get mad at their wives or wives get mad at their men or gangsters, you know, this other gangster.

[49:26] And you know what? It was, it, it was all just, um, basically a game, you know, it cats, uh, cops and mobbers, like you said, uh, if it was you, I’ll give you a real quick thing just today. I wanted to show you on what side of the fence we were on. I had a triple murder. That uh on an arson guy a dope deal goes wrong somehow gas comes out and the guy burns up the place and kills three people okay so i have three eyewitnesses that identify this guy i have uh um, The gasoline there, I have everything we need. We wrap up the crime scene. 18 hours later, we’re driving around the area. This was in Vermont and 82nd Street in Central Los Angeles. And there’s the guy walking that they described. Six foot five guy wearing a gray sweatshirt, gray pants, short haircut. And we stopped the guy. Yeah. 18 hours later, Gary, the guy reeks of gasoline and his hands are all singed, right? I think you got him. Might be the guy, right? Yeah. Might be him.

[50:40] And from the moment we arrested him, vehemently denied ever striking, you know, starting that fire, he goes, I was there at the dope deal, but this guy, Bluebird or Jaybird, He came out and he’s trying to rip me off and has a gallon of gasoline, throws it on me, right? And then lights the fire. It goes all through the hallways. And, you know, these were really cheap-ass, yeah, partons. So he books in the interim with three-eyed wits and evidence of gasoline on him, go to trial, and he’s convicted, and he’s sentenced to death. And, Gary, you know this. from the moment we arrested him until the moment they were leading him out the door to go up to San Quentin. He’s screaming, you promised me, you promised me. Donald, his name was Donald. Give me the guy, dude. I don’t give a shit who goes to jail, right? If all the evidence points to you, which it did, it’s you. Even if you say it’s not, I can’t change what they’ve said.

[51:46] He is in Chino, which is one of the holding facilities before he’s going up to San Quentin to the death house. This is about a year and a half later. I get a phone call from him, screaming, Tabak, you said he’s here, he’s here, Blaine Bluebird or whatever his name was, he’s here. So I said, all right, I’ll be down there. I’ll go talk to the guy. So you know how we all keep out polygraph keys on cases, right? It’s probably key on this one was a yellow Bic lighter, which even this guy that we convicted didn’t know about. So I go and talk to the guy. We promised him. And Gary, it is in 10 minutes, and he mentions the yellow Bic lighter. Oh. Oh, yeah. You just went? That’s exactly what I did. She went, oh, shit. Oh, shit. So I called the DA, and I go, you got to get down here, right? Yeah. I got our guy off. Here’s what happened. This dope dealer, he was an enemy dope dealer. When the thing, the fire set up, he got three of these girls who live there to identify him.

[52:53] Absolute bullshit. They were not there. But as I would, how am I going to tell them they’re not there? I have no reason to suspect anything about them. We got them to recant. He goes in, the other guy, he cops out to a second degree murder. And my guy walked out. he went for whatever the thing was five six seven years it wasn’t a lot back in the day the three girls got a couple years each for you know and it’s false testimony and then, the the victim who lived who was in that pugilistic position when you burn up the guy was burned like 80 of his body and lived he’s in olive branch mississippi, And we go to Olive Branch, Mississippi with their officers where this guy’s living. And as we walk up on the front porch, Gary, his hands are fused together. The guy is smoking a cigarette. You think the last thing this dude would ever get about is by fire, right? He ended up being one of the suspects as well. So we walked that guy. The guy got out of San Quentin off a death row. And it truly was. I didn’t care who you were. If the evidence pointed to you, you win, you know, and I’m sure there’s innocent people that are on death row. Yeah. You know, if it looks, it’s the duck theory, right? If it looks like a duck and it cracks like a duck, it ain’t a moose.

[54:17] And you guys out there, if you, if you didn’t pick up on that in, in a homicide investigation, especially a high profile case that’s in the news, you have some little piece of evidence that only the police know. You’d never let that out unless you have to have it at the final trial. Otherwise, you don’t let anybody know because you have, in a high-profile case, you have all these nutcases calling in, wanting to confess, or somebody wanting to drop a dime on somebody just to mess with them. And so when they don’t know about that little piece of evidence, that’s the thing that will be the decider here. I’ll tell you a quick little story of my own. We had a double homicide downtown. I was a junior detective out in the burglary unit in the station. They brought us down because it was two young guys working in a downtown store, got killed by the same gun that’s already killed another store clerk a week earlier. So this was a hot one. And I had this informant back in the neighborhoods, and he’s telling me, well, this kid is bragging that he’s the one that killed those two guys downtown. town. So I talked to the sergeant and he said, well, I don’t know. He said, what do you think? And I said, you know, the guy, the kids never lied to me.

[55:34] He said, well, bring him in. He said, wait a minute. First, he said, will your informant take a polygraph? I said, yeah, I think he would. So I call up my guy and he said, yeah, I’ll do it. So he takes a polygraph and he passes a polygraph. So no doubt in my mind that this kid is, you know, has heard somebody say, yeah, I did those two guys downtown, the radio shack. So we bring that kid in. He’s a goofy young kid, about 18, 19 years old and a half a bubble off a plum, as we say.

[56:03] And so my partner and I, we take him back in the back. And it’s funny, the older detectives didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with this. And I didn’t really tell them about it. You know, they would have taken it away from us. There’s no doubt. I thought there was some glory in it. And we take this kid back in the room, interrogation room, and start interrogating him. And he starts talking about, you know, he starts breaking down the real simple kind of a, well, yeah, yeah, I was downtown that day. Well, yeah. Wow. Well, and finally he said, I said, well, now, how’d you do it? He said, you know, I went pooh, pooh. Okay. So, I mean, he’s like, he’s confessed to me. Right. So I go out and I get one of the older detectives that I knew pretty well. I said, Kenny, come here a minute. Here’s what we got going.

[56:47] He said, let me talk to him. So he goes in, starts talking to the kid. Well, I hadn’t been to the crime scene. I probably hadn’t read the original, read the original report because they just called us in as cannon fodder to go run down, you know, bullshit leads out here.

[57:05] Kenny starts talking to him. He said, okay, tell me what happened here. And he said, well, you know, I went in, I had a gun, I robbed the store. And he said, well, where’d you get the money from? He said, well, the guy said, well, the guy just hit the cash register ding and opened up and I grabbed the money out and I killed them both. And Kenny said, ah, come on outside Jenkins. I said, okay. He said, he didn’t do it. I said, what do you mean he didn’t do it? He just told you did it. He said, they didn’t have a cash register. They had their money in the money drawer down below the, uh, the, uh, I learned the lesson that day, you know, you learn your lessons. I learned the lesson that day, find out about that crime scene and make them describe in detail what happened at that crime scene. Oh yeah. And even with this yellow Bic lighter, you know, we, we took them back and forth. We made sure they didn’t hear from somebody else, although we’ve got nobody else to know about it. But like you said, that’s something can blow up in your face and you know, all the, the basic great teachings that you have, like you, you kind of let one of them go. And then, like you said, that you’re, you’re the laughingstock of your detective room for a while. Yeah, really? Yeah. All right. Don Tabak. Don, tell us again about your show. How do people see that? It’s for you in the Los Angeles area, it’s called Crime Scene Live. It’s at the Lowe’s Hollywood Hotel at Highland Hollywood Boulevard. It’s Friday and Saturday nights starting at eight o’clock.

[58:31] It’s immersive. It’s interactive. We talk about a bunch of our cases. And then at the end, we’re going to give everybody one of my murders and see how they can solve it and see what they would have done different than I did. And we got a, it’s a beautiful room. It’s 20 stories above, uh, uh, Hollywood Boulevard. Got a nice bar in there. So it’s, uh, it’s a time to meet and greet and talk. And then afterwards kind of have a good time with everybody.

[58:56] Cool. Well, true crime is a pretty popular subject nowadays. Man, I’ll tell you something. I had no idea too, Gary. And the demographic that, that everybody goes on, it’s probably your show as well. Yeah. Women 18 to 40 are the main, it blew me away when I heard that. That’s it, except in the area of organized crime. Organized crime is men about 25 to 65 or 70. Is it really? 90%, 85% to 90% men on my YouTube channel. Oh, damn, I had no idea. See, I’m telling you, to get these stats out, man, it’s amazing. Yeah, well, they count who comes to your channel. So you get them pretty easily. I get them every day. So let me ask you, Saul, and being an OC guy for as long as you did, where’s Jimmy Hoffa?

[59:48] Well, I’ve got a guy that swears and be damned, although the FBI did finally go out and dig for him. And he’s in underneath the St. Louis, I mean, St. Louis, the New Jersey Skyway. It’s some kind of freeway back east in Brother Moscato’s old dump, buried. Two different reasonable people that say that. And personally, I can’t imagine you would load that guy up after you killed him in Detroit and drive him clear back to New Jersey to bury him. I don’t know. I just, I have trouble with that one.

[1:00:22] I’d be, I’d be burning that body up or crushing it or, you know, they got plenty of ways. A mob in Detroit’s got plenty of ways to make a body disappear.

[1:00:31] Um, organized crime in Kansas city, Kansas is large. They have a large presence there. Yeah. Actually it’s Missouri, Kansas city, Missouri, but people make that, uh, just fail to make that distinction. We have a Kansas city, Kansas, you know, it was pretty big at these during the seventies and eighties, you know, it was our boss had these, uh, fingers out into Las Vegas big time and he was connected with Chicago and Milwaukee and Cleveland. But since they, you know, we busted all that, the Bureau mainly did it, but we, we took all that down and all those guys went to jail for the, basically the rest of their lives. And it just went to nothing. You know, we’ve got a sports book and, uh, you know, a little bit of loan sharking and, and some, oh, oh yeah. I tell you what they got into rather than the loan sharkings, uh, payday loans and title loans and buy here, pay here car dealerships. There’s a lot of money in that. I mean, I mean, and you can chart. Charge the interest that you want for a lot of those things. It’s just, and use learn shark tactic because you have to deal with poor people and poor people. You just, you go out and threaten them. You maybe go out and whack them around a little bit and you’ll get your money. So that’s, uh, that’s, that’s one of the big things they’re into now. So there’s still a few guys around that are doing that kind of thing. Not many, maybe 10.

[1:01:50] In your era, when you wrapped up a guy, uh, a mob guy, would they roll over on who they knew what was going on? No. Okay. We had, you might have a low level guy that would slip the information. Okay. Just, you’d have to have a bunch of them to get any kind of a real picture or compare notes with other people that had their own sources. Bureau had a lot of little sources. They had a couple of real deep throats that, uh, you know, cause they could, they’ve got the real hammer. And I had a couple of three, you know, minor guys that could kind of tell you who’s who and, and kind of a little bit about what’s going on. So, but it’s always, it’s a piecemeal thing that you try to put together as a bigger picture until you can get a wiretap or a bug or something that you’re not going to really learn anything. And we don’t have a local wiretap law. And so we always worked with the FBI. We just ripped. We were their foot shoulders out here. Yeah, of course. We were.

[1:02:47] You were the brains behind it. They put their lovely suits and their little badges and did their thing. They send these guys into town from some other city and they’re just, a lot of them are just out of college or they’ve only lived in, you know, San Francisco or New York or, you know, or, or, you know, uh. Somewhere down the south mid-south or something and so they get sent to kansas city well you know they don’t know anybody they don’t know the streets they don’t know where they use and the organized crime squad they’d send them over to the intelligence unit and we had one particular guy that would take them under his wing and he’d go out and drive them all around show them all the spots and this guy’s this and this guy’s that and this is this guy and he always you’ll find him at the city market about 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning they’ll all be at the social club about two in the afternoon. Here they are.

[1:03:38] And then they’d go back and take their, get their cases. Oh, of course. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah. You’ve got stories, obviously. Yeah.

[1:03:48] All r]]> In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired intelligence detective Gary Jenkins welcomes a special guest—Don Tabak, a former LAPD homicide detective whose life story bridges the world of real crime and creative storytelling.

With decades on the force, Det. Don Tabak shares the emotional and technical complexities of working on some of Los Angeles’s most brutal homicide cases. He recounts haunting moments from the field, including a harrowing investigation involving a kidnapped woman who miraculously survived an attempted murder. Don walks us through the steps that led to justice—and the toll that work takes on those who pursue it.

After retiring from law enforcement, Don founded a private investigation firm that defends police officers and municipalities. However, his career took a surprising turn when a Hollywood producer approached him about adapting his real-life cases. That partnership gave rise to The Wiggle Room—an interactive crime-solving experience where audiences step into the role of investigator, uncover clues, and solve cases rooted in reality. It’s part thriller, part education, and all authentic.

The conversation also touches on Don’s take on the O.J. Simpson case, offering an insider’s look at how public pressure and procedural missteps shaped one of the most infamous trials in American history. He explains the razor-thin margin between justice and error, and why evidence integrity remains a detective’s most crucial tool.

Finally, Don Tebak unpacks the psychology behind effective interrogation, revealing how detectives walk the fine line between coaxing out the truth and understanding the emotional terrain of a suspect’s mind.

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Transcript
[0:00] Well, hey, welcome, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have a little different sort of a show for you today. We’re not going to go down that path of organized crime. You probably get tired of that anyhow. And what I found, I found another retired copper named Don Tabak from L.A. Who’s got in the entertainment business, just like yours truly. I guess I’m in the entertainment business. I’m in the entertainment hobby, as I just told Don. But, you know, anyhow, guys, welcome Don Tabak from LAPD. Hey, Gary, good to be here. Nice to meet you. Great, man. You got a good voice. You got a voice for radio. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Thank God. I have a good voice for radio, too.

[0:40] Tell us what you’re doing when you’re retirement. Well, I opened up a private investigations business, Gary, when I left. And I primarily do police officer and municipality defense for critical incidents. So a lot of the things that happen across the country. After the fact, the lawsuit is filed, I’ll be brought in to re-interview witnesses, talk to the officers, and try to mitigate what’s going on with the lawsuit. And if the officer is in trouble with that as well, we’ll represent the officer to try to make sure that we hopefully can clear him of any wrongdoing. You also, now how’d you get involved with this media business, the TV business? I got contacted throughout my career because of LA and some of the cases that we’ve handled in the past. It’s media-friendly between law enforcement. So when I left about five years ago, A producer who had known a friend of mine had given this guy my name about, yeah, Don’s had some unusual cases and worked this and that and whatever. And he called and we put together a couple of things that he wanted to try to bring to Discovery or Netflix in regards to some of my murders that I handled.

[1:49] And however, they didn’t work out or what have you. So about a year ago, he came up with a concept called The Wiggle Room. And this is a very small audience like an old nightclub room in a hollywood or in a hotel here in hollywood and it’s basically like my part of this is to bring in me talk about a couple of my cases um it’s interactive there’s a live audience there and then at the end of the second half of this we’ll talk about one of my crime scenes and let the people have a shot at it and trying to figure out what happened and who did it and did they have enough probable cause of good this and that and really get them an idea on how frustrating it is sometimes working some of these murders.

[2:30] Interesting. So tell us about your police experience in this. Were you assigned to the LAPD homicide division or robbery homicide? How does that break down? Yes, sir. I started out as a young detective. I’ve worked a number of detective divisions. LAPD has 18 geographic divisions in the city of Los Angeles, and each one has a homicide unit. Although now it’s centralized. But I eventually worked my way up to starting my own homicide unit. It was an arson bombing homicide unit. We worked in the same area as robbery homicide. Worked a buttload of cases over the 12 years that I worked murders before I retired. And handled all kinds of different things. Got involved with some phenomenal cases. I thank God wasn’t here when OJ was being tried. It was my unit that did that. And just in the give and take of the murders in Los Angeles back in the day, there’s a lot of interesting cases that we talk about in this crime scene live. I bet. So was that out of a division station, the Hollenbeck station? No, sir. It was out of our detective headquarters division, DHD. They call it the same area that our RV homicide division is in. Okay. So that’s down at Parker Center? The specialized unit, yeah, it was. Yeah, downtown, the central. Okay. So you were the big boys compared to them. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s how we look at it, don’t we?

[3:54] That’s how we look at it. You know, that’s how it is. So I wasn’t too varsity. I was kind of like between JV and varsity. Okay, all right. We all want to make the varsity on the PD. A lot of people don’t understand that out there, the breakdown between different units, but we all want to make that first team. I’m a working B, Gary. Then some of those guys kind of like kick back on their laurels. The Hollywood detective. That’s where I started.

[4:20] Tell us about one of your early cases that you remember that was particularly interesting. One of the most grave cases I ever handled, Gary, was a young female that ended up living, but her backstory is pretty amazing.

[4:38] She was the executive assistant to Wang Corporation. And Wayne was one of the first commercial-produced computers, word processing computers. And she had dropped her boss off at LAX and was taking his Porsche 925 prototype car back to where their offices were. And while stopped at a light on Sepulveda and 71st, right down the street from the airport, she was rear-ended on a very soft collision from behind. And she got out of the car. She walked back. He exchanged information. And one of the suspects took a gun in her belly. He said, get in the car. They put her back in the car. And for the next two days, they brutally raped, beaten, sold her for rock cocaine. And two days after the fact, they took her to an alley in South Central Los Angeles, dragged her out of the car.

[5:33] One suspect punched her in the face, knocking her to the ground. And my other suspect put two bullets in the back of her head with a 38 caliber, um, revolver. Wow. She waited. For a second until she heard the car leave, this woman got up and walked a block and a half to an a.m. p.m. Mini-mart and asked the clerk to call the police. And then she collapsed. She was saved by surgery. For the next literally 20 hours, we worked this case day and night. We ultimately found both suspects.

[6:09] And to hear this woman testify on a stand about what it was like having these two bullets shot in the back of her head is the most chilling, sad thing that I think I’ve had. To this day, I talked to her like it happened yesterday. She was an amazing woman. And the ironic part about this, Gary, is she wasn’t married at the time. And after everything had happened, and I only stayed in contact with, I probably handled 50 of my own murders and not 100 total. And you lose back in the 70s and 80s and early 90s. Man, this place, there was 1,200 murders in the city of Los Angeles by themselves. So you didn’t get to stay in contact with a lot of people. But I did with her for a couple of years. Then eventually I lost contact. Both the suspects were found guilty. Sentenced of 480 some odd years each in prison. Four years ago, Thanksgiving Eve, I got a call. And I’m sure you can attest to this or feel for this. It was a male, a young male. And he said, are you Don Tabak? And I said, yeah. And he goes, were you the detective that handled my mother, Carol Lepac’s shooting? And my hair, like right now, the hair on my head is standing up. I went, I did. Who are you? And he goes, my name’s Ryan Narai, and I am Carol’s son.

[7:25] And like, whoa, wait, what? So this was 33 years after this case had happened. She had passed away about a year before this, so three, four years ago. And Ryan wanted to find out exactly what had happened to his mother. She only articulated parts of what she called the event. And he wanted to find out. She became a conservationist up in Montana and divorced the husband. and it was just her and her son for a number of years. So Ryan came out to Los Angeles, a wonderful kid, looked almost exactly like his mom as I remember her. I took him to every spot that we found where she had been taken and then ultimately to the alley where she was shot. And it just, everybody that I’ve talked to, no one has had an experience like that where all these years later, this case came back tenfold to me because of her son. In September of 2024, he wrote an article that Esquire magazine published, and it said, the bullet in the back of my mother’s head. And it talks about my role into it, his role with his mother.

[8:36] Just an amazing case on how everything came together that we found so much to be able to convict these two animals of one which Gary just got out of prison last October. Wow. Floored me that they allowed him to get out. So I talk about that case because I was very, very close to it because of just the depravity and the torture that this woman went through. And then when they tell her, all right, we’re going to kick you out, we’re going to release you.

[9:06] And to humiliate her by punching her in the face and then killing, just shoot her, right? Don’t sit there and defame her and all. So it’s a case that’s close to me. And like I said, came back all these years later through her son. So it’s a pretty amazing story. It is. Now, a case like that. Now, she didn’t know who these guys were. No. Did you have witnesses quickly, get a license plate? How does that, does that somebody drop a dime? Did they start bragging their friends? These are some of the ways that this happens. How did that case start coming, unfolding? Well, we had to find where the whole incident took place by LAX. And we were able to talk to her. The responding officers were able to talk to her and she was able to get out before she passed out that she was hit from behind near LAX and that they had stolen her car, but they had hit her in a small Toyota Corolla, I think it was. They found the car. You know, the broadcast started going out. They found the vehicle.

[10:08] We interviewed her after surgery some hours after this and she was able to articulate that she thought she was in South Central Los Angeles and she thought, One of her suspects or one of the kidnappers was a gang member because he was talking about a role in 60s or a role in 20s. And that’s a very big Compton gang out of LAPD crash units, which was our gang units at the time, saturated. And I mean, they hit it hard trying to find, you know, somebody that knew something about this. And you know from yourself, sir, that you’re out there and you’re pounding ground. There’s a lot of pressure on these dope fiends and a lot of pressure on these gangs. They want to give up something so you can get the cops out of your way and move over to someone else. So we found where she was taken by good old-fashioned uniformed police work, by stopping suspects and basically letting them know that this isn’t going to be taken lightly. Wang himself was just absolutely pissed off about this happening to his secretary after he moved his headquarters to L.A., calling Darrell Gates, our chief at the time, demanding, you know, the entire department mobile. We almost did. We found a dope house at 85th Street and Wadsworth Avenue in South Central Los Angeles. And an individual by the name of Slim gave us information on the slide that said, yeah, I might have seen those two guys with a white chick here about eight o’clock last night or two nights ago. Right. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[11:37] So that’s the first piece of it. And we got their nicknames, their street names. Yeah. We get called in, I guess it was 8, 12, 15 hours after the initial kidnapping. It’s just a matter of putting this, trying to get the timeline right, first of all. But it was all by a matter of LAPD patrol, LAPD crash, other homicide officers that were working Venice Division at the time where I was.

[12:03] I’m just getting out there for two and a half days, well, actually about a day and a half of actually hitting the street. We were able to, we were just behind finding each place that they went. You hit one place and they have stuff to say and you hit the other place and they have stuff to say. Yeah. So I’ll tell you something that was, this woman had a will to live, Gary, and that’s what it’s all about. She refuses to come. The torture that she went through, she was bound and destined to survive this. After everything was done in LA and hours before she was shot, she was taken to a hotel in Anaheim, California, near Disneyland. And she was shoved down in the hatch compartment of the car. Suspects are driving. She remembers looking up out of the window, and she saw the Matterhorn ride from Disneyland.

[12:54] And so she knew she was in Anaheim. And then she started counting to herself the number of minutes going by 60s. until the car stopped. And it was 13 minutes. When we talked to her and found about this, we went and we went to every hotel we could find within 13 minutes of the Matterhorn. And we found the hotel that she was taking. And she talked about a black and white tile on the floor of the bathroom. They allowed her to go to the bathroom. We found that room. We found the manager that at the time couldn’t identify the two male suspects. We took a photo lineup to him after we had captured him, couldn’t ID him. And in the trial, Gary, he ID’d these two guys sitting at the defense desk. Well, you know how that came across, right? The defense attorney. It must be them. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[13:44] The judge allowed it in. He allowed the IV in. Oh, yeah. I don’t know if it was stacked or it was just a good ID. But everything came together. Fingerprints, we got off their car. Okay. Fingerprints off of the car that they stole. Great eyewitness, well, not eyewitness, but great testimony for witnesses that were in the houses that they went to, the crack houses. We found an individual that they sold to him, her, for sex, for rock cocaine. He felt bad for her and was trying to get her out of there, but they interrupted him. So he wasn’t going to say anything because he was another gangster.

[14:24] But because of the gravity of this thing and knowing that he was going to go to prison with everybody we talked to, someone’s going to prison for the rest of their life on this thing. So eventually he identified our second guy. On the end of the second day, we’re driving down a street in L.A. My partner was somebody else. I was with my boss who was not the sharpest guy in the world. And I think I see my suspect number two sitting on a bus bench and he’s nodding like this. So get out of the car, walk around him. Prone him out, you know, at gunpoint. And as we were walking up to the bus stop, another individual walked away from it, passed me and says, that’s the man you’re looking for. Yeah. So it was, you know, again, as a cop, when you’re hearing that and you go, okay, we now know this is the guy. Yeah. It was a phenomenal case just because we were able to put so much together and help her as much as we did. Ironically, with the two bullets in her head, one exited out of her neck that was at the scene. The other one lodged between both spheres of her brain. They weren’t able to operate on her, but the only residual effect that she had was she slurred words a little bit and she walked with a little bit of a limp. And that was it. So it wasn’t her time to go. And she ended up living a great number of years and she ended up dying of cancer, unfortunately.

[15:49] But there is no more courageous woman than that woman. She’s a hero of mine. That’s a hell of a story. So that bullet was lies in her brain until she died. Yeah. I’ll be darned. I’ve never heard of that before. Wow. Did everything that worked out. And I’ve handled so many different murders, but there’s always those two. Like you know, your case that you handled, there’s always those one or two that will always be indelibly asked in your mind because of just how it played out. It just starts falling. Once it starts falling. Oh, yeah, exactly.

[16:19] It starts falling and it starts falling and it starts falling. When it, when it works like that, you know, it’s working, it’s working. Many times you start down a path, it’ll sound real good. And then all of a sudden it’s dead and you realize, oh man, oh man, I got to step back. You spent a number of hours on that lead. This is the lead and it blows up in your face.

[16:41] Yeah. And this had that, that element to it, but it was just after we got through that initial phasing of it that’s when everything started falling down like you just said yeah i see how you got them convicted you did you get the gun too did you find the gun no never found the gun but you had the cars you had their fingerprints you probably had this was before dna yeah but you had fingerprints it sounds like we did and some of those witnesses yeah that hotel guy ended up being huge for us and as bad as he and i thought he just didn’t want to get involved and yet you know he came to excuse me he came to court and uh testified and when he pointed those two guys out and of course the defense attorneys went with them with the full line but you didn’t identify him at that time but you’re identifying him this time and he just said that’s them there you know i don’t remember the pictures as well as i do about them sitting there yeah so yeah pretty amazing case and in his defense there is a difference in looking at somebody live than I’ve been looking at one of those pictures. I’ve been showed photo lineups like, I don’t know, man. I know I saw that guy. That was probably the guy I saw about 30 minutes ago, but I don’t know.

[17:52] Yeah, and like I said, the Esquire magazine piece that he wrote about it really articulated it from his view, from what she had talked about it over the years that she lived and was productive, and then before she passed away. Wow, that is a heck of a story, boy. It was a good one. We love it when a plan comes together, I know that. Yeah, you know the feeling. When you bring a case like that together, when the jury comes back and they’re out like eight seconds, it took them long enough to go out of the courtroom, come right back in, and convict them on every one of the 480 counts on each of them. You feel good about the hours that you were away from your family. And it won’t replace at that time what happened to her, but at least justice was served for her. And that’s our job as law enforcement guys, right? So now what would be a case that you would use in the wriggle room? What would be a case example of that that you would throw at people? Well, we start out because everybody knew about O.J. Simpson. And, you know, that’s our first thing we talk about. And what’s ironic is we premiered last weekend.

[19:08] And I have always had distractors about Simpson’s case. There’s a lot of people out there that thought he was not guilty. so of the 45 50 people that were in this room after the video montage played i said how many in here raise your hands if you think oj sipson is guilty and every freaking one of them raised their hand so i didn’t have that adverse guy to go ahead yeah but we talk about the mistakes that lapd made on that and and you know you talk about dna um back in the day and this is only we’re talking about 1991. We only have a couple of places to be able to book blood.

[19:44] And that was in our downtown Parker Center area. And then the Van Nuys and the San Fernando Valley area. But when you’re running with a murder for 16, 18, 20 hours, and it’s time to go get some sleep, the last thing you’re doing is going and booking that blood. And I’ve taken blood home a million times. Bloody clothing, and I put it in my refrigerator and preserved it as best I could. And then in the morning, I would take it and book it in. Well, that gave the defense. And you have to understand, too. And I don’t think a lot of these people understand. And Simpson paid $14 million for those seven attorneys to do the most tackler job probably in the history of law. Yeah. They did that. Oh, absolutely. And they took Barry Sheck, who was a phenomenal expert defense lawyer on DNA, and made those people understand that if they couldn’t find the one guy, even though it’s 450,000 to one, they wanted that one person in there because that means there’s doubt. It isn’t 450,000 to zero. It’s one. And he did a spectacular job at that point with that jury. Maybe not would have happened if it was in Santa Monica, but that jury bought in and they were brilliant. And they defeated the living shit out of, I’m sorry. They defeated Badly, our LA County DA who had no idea what they were up against, none of them.

[21:08] Yeah, I just watched, there’s a documentary on that. I just happened to watch that recently. The new ones? Yeah. With his agent? Netflix and, yeah, with his agent on there. His agent says, I think he did it. The last scene, he goes, well, Simpson told me, had she not come to the door with a knife, she’d be alive today. Where was this like 15 years ago or 20, whatever it was, fool? So, yeah, everybody wants to make a dime up this poor guy since he’s dead. Yeah, yeah.

[21:43] Yeah, that case was snake bit from day one, though. Oh, man. I mean, we don’t even go in all the different ways it was snake bit. It was what we call snake bit. Yes, sir. Every way, every way. Yeah, if everything was going to go wrong, it did go wrong. It did. Yeah, it did. No doubt about it. Well, he got his in the end, I guess. He spent some time. Didn’t they do him in Vegas? Vegas. And you know what’s ironic, Kerry, is that was all his stuff. The guy just wanted him. I know. I know. That was all his stuff. Yeah. It wasn’t like it was stolen. It was his stuff they stole from the guy. I guess he carried a gun along with it. Thought he might have to threaten somebody with a gun. What an idiot. Yeah. He goes back and takes back his own stuff and he does like 15 years for Rob. Oh my God. I would go get nine of nine of them, but. He did nine. Okay. Yeah. I knew he did a lot. I think that was a payback though for, you know. Oh yeah. LA. Yeah. I think so. Really interesting. So here’s this one case I’ve mentioned to you before about, uh, uh, we’ve got a similar kind of case where the, uh, a missing girl, young child was, has never been found again. So this was a four-year-old Jesse Gutierrez. So tell us about that. How’d you get involved in that? I see it said back in South Carolina anyhow.

[23:07] Yeah, I was, uh, I’d been retired for a number of years and I have a partner of mine that moved to Lexington, South Carolina. And he just came across something. And I don’t know how he came across it, but he said, called me and said, hey, take a look at this murder that’s for or kidnapping, presumed murder of a four-year-old. And it’s on Google. And I Googled her name. And Gary, by the time I’m done reading this article, Matt, I’m smashing stuff against the wall. Like I was incensed that Lexington County Sheriff’s back in 1986 treated this mother like an absolute piece of crap because she married a Hispanic man and there’s some very strong feelings about race back in Lexington, South Carolina, which, you know, I wasn’t quite aware of. And they did absolutely the de minimis as far as investigating this case when they had jailhouse informants that this guy copped to. They had a cigarette butt that was laying below the window. They had a fingerprint on the windowsill itself.

[24:15] If this case happened in Los Angeles, it’s over in two days. It was that easy of a case. Leading up to and including when my victim’s mother.

[24:26] Um kept bugging these guys please help me help me you know get my little girl back um the sheriff of the time and i’ll tell you the guy’s name was a guy named metz sheriff metz told her that she didn’t leave her fucking people his people alone he would never do anything on this case and he apparently kept his promise because there was nothing that was done this like i said this case was an was a quickie if they would have just done the right thing. So the detective that was assigned to this case in 1986 was a young cop on the sheriff’s department who I ended up meeting. I ended up going back there, Gary. First, I asked my partner to go there and door knock Deborah, her mother, Jesse’s mother. And he called me and says, Don, she’s righteous, man. She absolutely got crapped on by the sheriff’s department. So I’ve never done this before I could you know it’s not LA I don’t get it wasn’t me wasn’t anybody I knew yeah but I got so pissed off Gary that they just shit on crap on her yeah for that you know and this is in 1960 this is like 1986 yeah so I went there just to probably go tell her you know is this really true and I’m so sorry that you didn’t get treated fairly like that’s what You’re a citizen here, man. That’s what you deserve is a righteous police investigation.

[25:54] So I went and talked with her, and she filled me in a lot of things. She has this tape of Mets telling her to lay off her guys and quit bugging them. I went and talked to a victim witness coordinator, a number of people associated with the sheriff’s department at the time, and they just said they did things their own way. They called them the Lexington Mob. So you talk about, you know, your end. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they, you know, but they said when? So this case laid dormant, Gary. There’s a landfill that’s about a mile and a half from her house.

[26:31] The primary suspect in this case, a guy named McDowell. I forget his first name right now. There’s a heel in the white truck. And there was a white truck scene going to this landfill that’s about a mile and a half from Deborah’s house, about 3 o’clock in the morning, which is the approximate time they think that this little girl was taken. And a sheriff’s unit is following it into the landfill. At 4 a.m. He gets a radio call and pulls off of the truck. Like I said, McDowell owned a white truck. It’s in close proximity where Deborah lives. And I would bet everything that I was ever trained under that little girl was in that guy’s truck and he was taking her to dump her yeah so I get home and uh when I met with the detective um.

[27:31] Dave Pritchard and he’s a lieutenant now getting ready to retire from there, very squared away guy good guy and when I asked I go how did you not do anything and he says Don Don, I needed the job, meaning he was told not to do shit about this unless he was told to. So I get home from Lexington, and about a week later, I get a call from Pritchard, and he says, Don, FBI is opening the case again. And they want the cigarette butt, and they’re going to look at everything. And Gary, I’m telling you, sir, I don’t know if I poked the bear, but I didn’t talk to any police administration officials. I talked to various people. But something happened. And I don’t think it was because of us, maybe the timing was, but inside of about a year after everything was done, he got his warrant for McDowell for the murder, a nobody murder and kidnapping of Jessica Gutierrez. They served a high profile warrant in Wake Forest, North Carolina, just over the South Carolina border. They took this lovely individual into custody. Wouldn’t talk to him last February.

[28:43] March 8th. Well, somewhere in there, they convicted him of the murder and kidnapping of Jessica Gutierrez. We couldn’t get the body back. And there’s an interesting dynamic here, and I’ll pick your brain for this. Richard calls me and says, what would you do to try to get the kid back? How would you talk to him? Go ask him what he wants. You know, he’s 69 years old. He’s in horrible health. He’s going to die in prison. Maybe he wants to get out in a couple of years if he cooperates and gets the kid. I said, the problem being is he’s going to tell you what’s in the landfill. The problem being that landfill has been turned over thousands and thousands of times since 1986. Yeah. So he makes the plopper. Hey, she’s there. They go and they try to find her and come back and say, well, she’s not there. He goes, well, that’s not my problem. You can’t. I get out now. So my advice to him was to say, you know what? Don’t make him a deal. F him. Don’t. Let him rot. Because you’re never going to. He could say that I dumped her in an alleyway at 54th or wherever. Well, now there’s a strip mall there. Right? So he could be lying on his ass and just to get his deal going. So the best part of that was leave him there, let him die there.

[29:52] She has some closure, although she still wanted her remains of her child back. It ended up being just a super case. And I touched on just a few of the highlights on there, but there was so much, so much that they missed. So much that they could have. Like I said, if this is here, Gary, or in Kansas City, I’m sure you all solved that crime within a couple of days. There was that much evidence and that much identification of this animal that did this to this little girl. The reason we believe he did it, he was dating Debra for a while. She’d broken off to go with one of his friends. He had been at the trailer a number of times. He knew how close to her and the kids that she was. And that’s probably his motivation for doing that, was to get back at her. Tough case, but it was neat to see that they at least were able to bring him to justice and give him his just rewards. How’d they tie him to it other than the white pickup in the area? His fingerprint, was that his? Of course, he had been in the trailer, so he could say, oh, I’ve been in that trailer. Yep, correct. Cigarette butts outside.

[31:01] Yep. The DNA on the cigarette butt was they weren’t able to get anything off because it had laid dormant for so long in a plastic bag. The fingerprint was his. She had cleaned that windowsill in the trailer a zillion times. And she had cleaned it that week. It was dry out. There was no reason that any kind of moisture would have gotten on the sill. It wasn’t chipping with the pain. It was pretty non-porous area. So over his print to be there that later in, in, after they broke up would be pretty impossible. Okay. But again, then they have three jailhouse informants to die. One’s left. And he, the jailhouse informant says he copped out to me that he did something very bad to a little girl in Lexington, you know, a few months before or a few weeks before. So, again, they had a great case to begin with, with that. They just let it go. It’s a little bit different back then. Really? Well, I’m going to tell you about this one locally that maybe you can come back here and solve this one. You and I, man, we’ll go out there and do it.

[32:09] Baby Lisa’s name of the case, her father’s name was Jeremy and mother’s name was Deborah. And about late in the afternoon, dad’s gone to work. Mom’s last known, you know, that somebody else saw her. She’s sitting down the front porch with the neighbor and they’re drinking some beer. And then she goes on in and goes to bed. She claims that she checked on the baby about 6.40 and then about 10.40 that evening. But when he comes in about four in the morning, baby Lisa is gone. There’s a couple of cell phones in the house that are gone. There’s a screen that was taken off of a window.

[32:47] And they’re like, I don’t know. You know, this is like a little baby. This is not a little kid who just got up and wandered off. This is a little baby. And then there was a neighbor that said they saw, you know, the bushy-haired stranger somewhere in the neighborhood that night. So then where do you go from there? Of course, first thing you do is you bring the parents in and then you start sweating them, which became a debacle because then they went to the press and complained that the cops were accusing them and weren’t really following up other leads. And so, you know, those are the things that happens to a homicide detective in those kinds of cases. Yep. There’s so many pratfalls. You almost think that it’s geared for defeat on our side of it. And that you have to try to overcome these obstacles. That’s going to be hard. You know, it’s like we had talked right before we came on about John Bonet is, you know, there’s so many people who have copped out to that, that if the righteous guy ever walked into the Colorado authorities, they could not convict him. They’ve trampled everything. This one, it sure looks like the people that were there are the people that probably are involved in this. Yeah. I mean, my personal theory is mom was drinking that night and somehow maybe, maybe fell asleep with the baby in the bed and she was a big woman and maybe laid over on her or something or baby, maybe, maybe the baby just died of, uh.

[34:15] Uh, SIDS, you know, sudden in that syndrome, you know, but then dad came home and he panicked. I don’t know. I think my theory is that’s what happened. And then dad panicked and hid the baby and set up and took these cell phones and got rid of them and then called the police. That’s my theory. But, you know, that’s.

[34:37] Plausible. It’s plausible. It’s just, but it’s a total, total theory. You know, there’s the other theory that we came up with that people knew that they had this newborn baby and there’s this syndrome that women get, certain women will get that will pretend like they’re pregnant. And then when it’s time to have the baby, they’ll like go to a hospital. That’s one reason that hospitals for the newborns are, they have these rigid security precautions because people, there’s people that will do this. This has happened. And they’ll get this baby and taken home and then tell all their friends and neighbors, yeah, I had my baby. Here’s my, he just got home in the hospital. Here’s my baby. So that was another theory. And, and then of course the, the bushy haired stranger, some kind of a, I don’t know, like the Madeline McCann case over in Portugal, where that little girl was taken out of her room and is, you know, missing, still missing. So somebody, you know, took that baby and raised it or sold it or what, you know, there’s always that, you know, they sold the baby that that’s big you know and that there was a mark you know you’d have to go back into what their their strata was the baby sales thing now is like you had talked about where they they pretend they’re pregnant and then they go find a baby and all but the sales of a baby you know.

[35:51] And to russian to you know going back the other way that’s big and you know if you looked at it you know were they in debt were they yeah i mean that that’s a great case yeah it works that’s viable and the problem being is the older it gets the harder it gets yeah to solve are they still actively looking at this you know probably not although they did have this guy um he came up with some these cell phones were missing and they claimed and let’s see it started in 20 uh.

[36:23] 2011 and 2012, they claim that a debit card that they had stolen that night, too, had been fraudulently used on a website that provided false birth certificates. This is almost a whole year later. The parents reported this. And there is such a website out there, you know, but I don’t know how much more they dug up. I couldn’t find out.

[36:46] It’s a KC case? Yeah, Kansas City. You know, at the time there, there’s, uh, didn’t have these attorneys get involved in these cases, high profile cases. This guy named Joe Taco, Taco Pina, Taco Pina. I think he got into the Trump thing for a while. He’s this New York lawyer. That’s this, you know, bigger than life and louder than anybody with a great New York accent. He came to town and they, and he started representing them for free. And then they were trying to collect DNA samples from the parents. And then he just stopped everything. He stopped everything, any investigation of the parents, except through him. And so that all died out. So it’s a- Did they polygraph the parents? Do you know? You know, I don’t think they ever got to- No, wait a minute. I looked at, I just glanced at my notes here. They did. They polygraphed the mom and she failed the first one. And then she had a second one that was inconclusive. So you know how the polygraph goes. Yeah. And then again, it’s just a, it’s a tool. Yeah. I don’t put a lot of faith in them, but it gives you a direction to go. Yeah. It just depends on how well the polygraph person could convince that. Yeah. They did bring a cadaver dog into the house and around the house, and the dog hit on a scent of a dead body that it was inside the house at one time. Now, of course, again, that and a buck and a half will get you a cup of coffee maybe. Yeah.

[38:13] It used to be 10 cents. And it’s way past a buck and a quarter now. Yeah, that would be a neat case to look at. They did hire. There was a non-benefactor that hired a private investigator and had a $100,000 reward for the baby back, I don’t know, during that time. And they never came up with anything. I don’t know. It’s just a heck of a case. Yeah, and you have to think that there righteously was a baby. Yeah. They’re with a baby. They lived there. Yeah. Causes demise, whether through SIDS or natural means or, you know, at the hands of them. It just seems there are a lot of things to do immediately. Yeah. You know, may or may not have been done. Yeah. That’s what I’d be interested to see is how did the crime scene go? What did they do? Well, I mean, I think they eventually got around to processing. Of course, it was a missing person’s case for a while, but I think pretty quickly they got around to processing the crime scene. Yeah. which is why they were wanting DNA and those kinds of things from other people. But none of that seemed to pan out to show anything. Child cases. So, you know, I never had a child case victim in my 12, 13 years of working murders. You know, a couple of child abuse things in patrol. But it’s funny, when I’ve done this PI thing now, I’ve had two, both victims of murders.

[39:40] That, you know, I have two sons and who were little at the time that I was on this job. And if a hair there would have been harmed, I would have been out with somebody, right? Much less how they could kill, or maim or hurt their child i know it doesn’t equate to like you know you got to be from another planet and then again it’s our it’s our job as detectives out there to speak for that victim and you don’t stop until like you have nothing left to say yeah in there and i feel bad for the for the child because it just doesn’t seem the same with gutierrez they just never got the investigation that they deserve to the u.s citizen and whatever the biases are you got to put them aside. I mean, every one of my victims wasn’t the neatest person in the world. No. It was yesterday’s suspect was today or tomorrow’s victim. So tell me about another case you worked at. Oh, man, I’ll tell you something, too. To show you the time.

[40:43] We get called in and a mother and son, son was buying rock cocaine in the San Fernando Valley. And there was a problem with the sale and the son got shot and killed at the scene. We roll up, process the scene, we get some names and all this and the mother isn’t saying shit to us. She’s refusing to talk. So we go through the whole case. We’re a little bit weird about her and finally we get around to her because it’s her turn. Everybody we’ve talked to now, we’ve got her and the boy in the car. We have four suspects Or at least appear to be suspects We know who the shooter is But three of my witnesses says No, the mother was buying the dope And got into it with the seller, And the boy And the boy, tries to grab the gun because the guy goes to put the gun in like it was a ripoff and of course he gets blasted mother doesn’t the mother might have been on mars during this whole time i don’t know what happened i don’t know where we were i don’t that that that that that that that that three weeks into this case gary we end up finding a wit that we hadn’t known about that had sold dope to the mother repeatedly in the process of getting the suspect in custody.

[42:09] We polygraphed the mother who did so bad, like the ink was hitting the polygrapher on the, you know, the needles are just going everywhere. And she finally cops out that she didn’t want to go back to jail. She was on parole for possession, you know, for narcotics possession and didn’t want to go back to jail. So therefore, if she just said it was she blamed her kid for, you know, causing his own demise. And it just to to this day i still think like how do you put yourself you funded your kid who got killed for you buying dope right and it can only happen here in the city of los angeles like that that your child 19 year old kid take a mommy to buy some rock and something gets blasted and you know she doesn’t even have the audacity to feel bad and cop out about what happened so So she ended up getting, she was a real jewel. And again, it’s just things like that that come up about, you know, humanity’s just gone. We’ve lost. Back then we lost, but it’s worse now. Worse now, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then on the other two, the kind of the, not fun ones, but we had a gangster that stabbed his girlfriend.

[43:24] And I plodded myself, Gary, on my interview and interrogation techniques. I’m not supposed to use interrogation anymore. My interview techniques. This little gangster, they arrest him. And it didn’t take an FBI academy guy to be able to interview these people. And my thing was, hey, this is your only chance to tell me what happened. I got 19 witnesses that told me exactly what went on. This is it because after i leave you’re going to tell your attorney or he’s going to paint a rosy picture for you and the bottom line is your attorney goes home and goes to bed and you’re sitting in some joint right just if you don’t want to talk to me just say yeah i’ll talk to you, but just don’t lie to me god i’m in the middle of the night i’m tired which you know i always spoke the truth so this kid just says okay well you know we we got in a fight and um she took out a knife and was trying to cut me. And I said, well, how did, how did the knife end up in your hand? And then she got stabbed three times. He says, well, I got the knife away from her and we were going down a stairwell and she tripped and fell into me and stabbed herself. I said, I got that part. Okay. So that’s, that doesn’t, that’s, that was an accident, right? Put off the other two Well when we rolled over She fell in life again Okay that’s two.

[44:52] And then I said, you’re missing one. He goes, well, I don’t know how that went out.

[44:56] And I said, listen, it’s still sweat off on me. And I was dead serious, Gary. I said, you’re going to go into court and you’re going to tell a jury that same story and they’re going to laugh at you. You know, he gets all this proud shit like, maybe they’re going to laugh at me. I said, it makes no sense. And you’re going to say that. They’re going to go, what an idiot. So you attack their manlyhood and then you attack the character. And he goes like, really? I said, yes, they’re going to walk out of that jury booth, come right back into court and go guilty. What should I tell them? I said, I’d stick with the first one. And he goes, oh, man. He goes, then I’m going to, you know, I’m going to, it’s going to be hard for me to explain. I said, all right, then just tell me, how did all the thing go down? And he goes, and there’s everything. They’ve been arguing all day, and she had picked up some kind of a pan to hit him.

[45:47] And he’s walking towards her with the pan and he slaps her and the pan falls out and he said, I’m just so pissed off at her. He just stabbed her. I said, okay, that sounds so much better than the thing about fighting and she stabbed herself and he’s all proud that he told the truth on this thing. So, you know, there were comical moments on very sad moments, you know, in this world that we worked in. That interview slash interrogation that in a murder, especially murder is such a psychologically powerful crime. You can get P I noticed you can get people to talk about all kinds of stuff trying to deflect your attention away from what you want to talk about. Then as you get them closer, if you can get them started down that path of any kind of a little.

[46:36] Thing that might’ve happened. You just get them started down that path and they’ll kind of go down that path thinking that they can fool you here and they can tell you something to get you off their butt. And then you come back like, just like what you did, it’s classic. Then you come back and say, well, you know, that ain’t quite, you know, that doesn’t make sense here, you know?

[46:55] And you just, each step, they just go down that path a little further until they’ve relieved themselves of the burden. Oh, and that, you know, I had a, yeah, absolutely. And you’re so run out with that. I had a judge who, who refused to believe that suspects would admit to doing their crimes. I would tell her, everyone understands saying, well, you know, people want to tell you they do what, uh, and probably 90% of the suspects, whether it be from a domestic violence act or robbery. They want to rid themselves of some of the guilt. So they’ll give you that omission, give you a little piece of it, right? And then eventually you’ll see their body language, you know, they’re starting to give in and like, okay, I feel better about this now, right? You don’t want to lie because you’re going to be caught in the lie and you make it, you know, worse for them. The ones that are tough, Gary, when you walk them in, they go, I ain’t got shit to say to you. Yeah. And then they, you know, the word, but, you know, when they’re hemming and hawing and, you know, moving in their seat, and when you start giving them so much evidence against them, it’s overwhelming, right? The psyche doesn’t want to hear all the stuff you have on me. So, you know, and the first, like, they’ll tell you, you know, your OC cases, you know, you’ll get that small pond down here and, like, well, what can you do for me? Right. As soon as, as soon as that happened, you’re okay.

[48:22] Okay. Let me tell you. Right. And you, here’s what I’m gonna do for you. I’m going to keep you out of the gas chamber. And then like, well, shit, all I do is carry the money. Right. And now I’m going to the gas chamber. So yeah, you know what? It was so much fun being imaginative and, you know, getting these people to talk or roll over, just give me something. And, you know, there were others that didn’t say stop. I respected that. Then I can go home earlier and play with my kids. Yeah.

[48:50] So much fun, Gary, working this job. In a tragic time, that was the fun part to what kept it sane and kept you going from the game. Yeah. And if you could treat it as a game. I always treat it as a game. It’s not personal. Oh, God. It’s a game. We’re like grown-up boys playing cops and robbers. We just happen to have real guns. Isn’t that it? That’s exactly it. And, you know, as long as I came home safe every night and my kids were safe, you know, I was, and, you know, I understand people get pissed off and, and men get mad at their wives or wives get mad at their men or gangsters, you know, this other gangster.

[49:26] And you know what? It was, it, it was all just, um, basically a game, you know, it cats, uh, cops and mobbers, like you said, uh, if it was you, I’ll give you a real quick thing just today. I wanted to show you on what side of the fence we were on. I had a triple murder. That uh on an arson guy a dope deal goes wrong somehow gas comes out and the guy burns up the place and kills three people okay so i have three eyewitnesses that identify this guy i have uh um, The gasoline there, I have everything we need. We wrap up the crime scene. 18 hours later, we’re driving around the area. This was in Vermont and 82nd Street in Central Los Angeles. And there’s the guy walking that they described. Six foot five guy wearing a gray sweatshirt, gray pants, short haircut. And we stopped the guy. Yeah. 18 hours later, Gary, the guy reeks of gasoline and his hands are all singed, right? I think you got him. Might be the guy, right? Yeah. Might be him.

[50:40] And from the moment we arrested him, vehemently denied ever striking, you know, starting that fire, he goes, I was there at the dope deal, but this guy, Bluebird or Jaybird, He came out and he’s trying to rip me off and has a gallon of gasoline, throws it on me, right? And then lights the fire. It goes all through the hallways. And, you know, these were really cheap-ass, yeah, partons. So he books in the interim with three-eyed wits and evidence of gasoline on him, go to trial, and he’s convicted, and he’s sentenced to death. And, Gary, you know this. from the moment we arrested him until the moment they were leading him out the door to go up to San Quentin. He’s screaming, you promised me, you promised me. Donald, his name was Donald. Give me the guy, dude. I don’t give a shit who goes to jail, right? If all the evidence points to you, which it did, it’s you. Even if you say it’s not, I can’t change what they’ve said.

[51:46] He is in Chino, which is one of the holding facilities before he’s going up to San Quentin to the death house. This is about a year and a half later. I get a phone call from him, screaming, Tabak, you said he’s here, he’s here, Blaine Bluebird or whatever his name was, he’s here. So I said, all right, I’ll be down there. I’ll go talk to the guy. So you know how we all keep out polygraph keys on cases, right? It’s probably key on this one was a yellow Bic lighter, which even this guy that we convicted didn’t know about. So I go and talk to the guy. We promised him. And Gary, it is in 10 minutes, and he mentions the yellow Bic lighter. Oh. Oh, yeah. You just went? That’s exactly what I did. She went, oh, shit. Oh, shit. So I called the DA, and I go, you got to get down here, right? Yeah. I got our guy off. Here’s what happened. This dope dealer, he was an enemy dope dealer. When the thing, the fire set up, he got three of these girls who live there to identify him.

[52:53] Absolute bullshit. They were not there. But as I would, how am I going to tell them they’re not there? I have no reason to suspect anything about them. We got them to recant. He goes in, the other guy, he cops out to a second degree murder. And my guy walked out. he went for whatever the thing was five six seven years it wasn’t a lot back in the day the three girls got a couple years each for you know and it’s false testimony and then, the the victim who lived who was in that pugilistic position when you burn up the guy was burned like 80 of his body and lived he’s in olive branch mississippi, And we go to Olive Branch, Mississippi with their officers where this guy’s living. And as we walk up on the front porch, Gary, his hands are fused together. The guy is smoking a cigarette. You think the last thing this dude would ever get about is by fire, right? He ended up being one of the suspects as well. So we walked that guy. The guy got out of San Quentin off a death row. And it truly was. I didn’t care who you were. If the evidence pointed to you, you win, you know, and I’m sure there’s innocent people that are on death row. Yeah. You know, if it looks, it’s the duck theory, right? If it looks like a duck and it cracks like a duck, it ain’t a moose.

[54:17] And you guys out there, if you, if you didn’t pick up on that in, in a homicide investigation, especially a high profile case that’s in the news, you have some little piece of evidence that only the police know. You’d never let that out unless you have to have it at the final trial. Otherwise, you don’t let anybody know because you have, in a high-profile case, you have all these nutcases calling in, wanting to confess, or somebody wanting to drop a dime on somebody just to mess with them. And so when they don’t know about that little piece of evidence, that’s the thing that will be the decider here. I’ll tell you a quick little story of my own. We had a double homicide downtown. I was a junior detective out in the burglary unit in the station. They brought us down because it was two young guys working in a downtown store, got killed by the same gun that’s already killed another store clerk a week earlier. So this was a hot one. And I had this informant back in the neighborhoods, and he’s telling me, well, this kid is bragging that he’s the one that killed those two guys downtown. town. So I talked to the sergeant and he said, well, I don’t know. He said, what do you think? And I said, you know, the guy, the kids never lied to me.

[55:34] He said, well, bring him in. He said, wait a minute. First, he said, will your informant take a polygraph? I said, yeah, I think he would. So I call up my guy and he said, yeah, I’ll do it. So he takes a polygraph and he passes a polygraph. So no doubt in my mind that this kid is, you know, has heard somebody say, yeah, I did those two guys downtown, the radio shack. So we bring that kid in. He’s a goofy young kid, about 18, 19 years old and a half a bubble off a plum, as we say.

[56:03] And so my partner and I, we take him back in the back. And it’s funny, the older detectives didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with this. And I didn’t really tell them about it. You know, they would have taken it away from us. There’s no doubt. I thought there was some glory in it. And we take this kid back in the room, interrogation room, and start interrogating him. And he starts talking about, you know, he starts breaking down the real simple kind of a, well, yeah, yeah, I was downtown that day. Well, yeah. Wow. Well, and finally he said, I said, well, now, how’d you do it? He said, you know, I went pooh, pooh. Okay. So, I mean, he’s like, he’s confessed to me. Right. So I go out and I get one of the older detectives that I knew pretty well. I said, Kenny, come here a minute. Here’s what we got going.

[56:47] He said, let me talk to him. So he goes in, starts talking to the kid. Well, I hadn’t been to the crime scene. I probably hadn’t read the original, read the original report because they just called us in as cannon fodder to go run down, you know, bullshit leads out here.

[57:05] Kenny starts talking to him. He said, okay, tell me what happened here. And he said, well, you know, I went in, I had a gun, I robbed the store. And he said, well, where’d you get the money from? He said, well, the guy said, well, the guy just hit the cash register ding and opened up and I grabbed the money out and I killed them both. And Kenny said, ah, come on outside Jenkins. I said, okay. He said, he didn’t do it. I said, what do you mean he didn’t do it? He just told you did it. He said, they didn’t have a cash register. They had their money in the money drawer down below the, uh, the, uh, I learned the lesson that day, you know, you learn your lessons. I learned the lesson that day, find out about that crime scene and make them describe in detail what happened at that crime scene. Oh yeah. And even with this yellow Bic lighter, you know, we, we took them back and forth. We made sure they didn’t hear from somebody else, although we’ve got nobody else to know about it. But like you said, that’s something can blow up in your face and you know, all the, the basic great teachings that you have, like you, you kind of let one of them go. And then, like you said, that you’re, you’re the laughingstock of your detective room for a while. Yeah, really? Yeah. All right. Don Tabak. Don, tell us again about your show. How do people see that? It’s for you in the Los Angeles area, it’s called Crime Scene Live. It’s at the Lowe’s Hollywood Hotel at Highland Hollywood Boulevard. It’s Friday and Saturday nights starting at eight o’clock.

[58:31] It’s immersive. It’s interactive. We talk about a bunch of our cases. And then at the end, we’re going to give everybody one of my murders and see how they can solve it and see what they would have done different than I did. And we got a, it’s a beautiful room. It’s 20 stories above, uh, uh, Hollywood Boulevard. Got a nice bar in there. So it’s, uh, it’s a time to meet and greet and talk. And then afterwards kind of have a good time with everybody.

[58:56] Cool. Well, true crime is a pretty popular subject nowadays. Man, I’ll tell you something. I had no idea too, Gary. And the demographic that, that everybody goes on, it’s probably your show as well. Yeah. Women 18 to 40 are the main, it blew me away when I heard that. That’s it, except in the area of organized crime. Organized crime is men about 25 to 65 or 70. Is it really? 90%, 85% to 90% men on my YouTube channel. Oh, damn, I had no idea. See, I’m telling you, to get these stats out, man, it’s amazing. Yeah, well, they count who comes to your channel. So you get them pretty easily. I get them every day. So let me ask you, Saul, and being an OC guy for as long as you did, where’s Jimmy Hoffa?

[59:48] Well, I’ve got a guy that swears and be damned, although the FBI did finally go out and dig for him. And he’s in underneath the St. Louis, I mean, St. Louis, the New Jersey Skyway. It’s some kind of freeway back east in Brother Moscato’s old dump, buried. Two different reasonable people that say that. And personally, I can’t imagine you would load that guy up after you killed him in Detroit and drive him clear back to New Jersey to bury him. I don’t know. I just, I have trouble with that one.

[1:00:22] I’d be, I’d be burning that body up or crushing it or, you know, they got plenty of ways. A mob in Detroit’s got plenty of ways to make a body disappear.

[1:00:31] Um, organized crime in Kansas city, Kansas is large. They have a large presence there. Yeah. Actually it’s Missouri, Kansas city, Missouri, but people make that, uh, just fail to make that distinction. We have a Kansas city, Kansas, you know, it was pretty big at these during the seventies and eighties, you know, it was our boss had these, uh, fingers out into Las Vegas big time and he was connected with Chicago and Milwaukee and Cleveland. But since they, you know, we busted all that, the Bureau mainly did it, but we, we took all that down and all those guys went to jail for the, basically the rest of their lives. And it just went to nothing. You know, we’ve got a sports book and, uh, you know, a little bit of loan sharking and, and some, oh, oh yeah. I tell you what they got into rather than the loan sharkings, uh, payday loans and title loans and buy here, pay here car dealerships. There’s a lot of money in that. I mean, I mean, and you can chart. Charge the interest that you want for a lot of those things. It’s just, and use learn shark tactic because you have to deal with poor people and poor people. You just, you go out and threaten them. You maybe go out and whack them around a little bit and you’ll get your money. So that’s, uh, that’s, that’s one of the big things they’re into now. So there’s still a few guys around that are doing that kind of thing. Not many, maybe 10.

[1:01:50] In your era, when you wrapped up a guy, uh, a mob guy, would they roll over on who they knew what was going on? No. Okay. We had, you might have a low level guy that would slip the information. Okay. Just, you’d have to have a bunch of them to get any kind of a real picture or compare notes with other people that had their own sources. Bureau had a lot of little sources. They had a couple of real deep throats that, uh, you know, cause they could, they’ve got the real hammer. And I had a couple of three, you know, minor guys that could kind of tell you who’s who and, and kind of a little bit about what’s going on. So, but it’s always, it’s a piecemeal thing that you try to put together as a bigger picture until you can get a wiretap or a bug or something that you’re not going to really learn anything. And we don’t have a local wiretap law. And so we always worked with the FBI. We just ripped. We were their foot shoulders out here. Yeah, of course. We were.

[1:02:47] You were the brains behind it. They put their lovely suits and their little badges and did their thing. They send these guys into town from some other city and they’re just, a lot of them are just out of college or they’ve only lived in, you know, San Francisco or New York or, you know, or, or, you know, uh. Somewhere down the south mid-south or something and so they get sent to kansas city well you know they don’t know anybody they don’t know the streets they don’t know where they use and the organized crime squad they’d send them over to the intelligence unit and we had one particular guy that would take them under his wing and he’d go out and drive them all around show them all the spots and this guy’s this and this guy’s that and this is this guy and he always you’ll find him at the city market about 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning they’ll all be at the social club about two in the afternoon. Here they are.

[1:03:38] And then they’d go back and take their, get their cases. Oh, of course. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah. You’ve got stories, obviously. Yeah.

[1:03:48] All r]]> 1:05:16 false Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired intelligence detective Gary Jenkins welcomes a special guest—Don Tabak, a former LAPD homicide detective whose life story bridges the world of real crime and creative storytelling. With decades on the force, In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired intelligence detective Gary Jenkins welcomes a special guest—Don Tabak, a former LAPD homicide detective whose life story bridges the world of real crime and creative storytelling. With decades on the force, Det. Don Tabak shares the emotional and technical complexities of working on some of Los Angeles’s most brutal homicide cases. He recounts haunting moments from the field, including a harrowing investigation involving a kidnapped woman who miraculously survived an attempted murder. Don walks us through the steps that led to justice—and the toll that work takes on those who pursue it. After retiring from law enforcement, Don founded a private investigation firm that defends police officers and municipalities. However, his career took a surprising turn when a Hollywood producer approached him about adapting his real-life cases. That partnership gave rise to The Wiggle Room—an interactive crime-solving experience where audiences step into the role of investigator, uncover clues, and solve cases rooted in reality. It’s part thriller, part education, and all authentic. The conversation also touches on Don’s take on the O.J. Simpson case, offering an insider’s look at how public pressure and procedural missteps shaped one of the most infamous trials in American history. He explains the razor-thin margin between justice and error, and why evidence integrity remains a detective’s most crucial tool. Finally, Don Tebak unpacks the psychology behind effective interrogation, revealing how detectives walk the fine line between coaxing out the truth and understanding the emotional terrain of a suspect’s mind. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to "buy me a cup of coffee" To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, welcome, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have a little different sort of a show for you today. We're not going to go down that path of organized crime. You probably get tired of that anyhow. And what I found, I found another retired copper named Don Tabak from L.A. Who's got in the entertainment business, just like yours truly. I guess I'm in the entertainment business. I'm in the entertainment hobby, as I just told Don. But, you know, anyhow, guys, welcome Don Tabak from LAPD. Hey, Gary, good to be here. Nice to meet you. Great, man. You got a good voice. You got a voice for radio. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Thank God. I have a good voice for radio, too. [0:40] Tell us what you're doing when you're retirement. Well, I opened up a private investigations business, Gary, when I left. https://blubrry.com/kc_crime/145379605/little-vic-and-the-great-mafia-war-with-larry-mcshane/ https://ganglandwire.com/?p=10696 Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Mon, 19 May 2025 05:00:44 -0400 In this gripping episode of Gangland Wire, retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins welcomes back veteran crime journalist and mob historian Larry McShane to discuss his latest book, Little Vic and the Great Mafia War. Together, they dive deep into the violent and chaotic period known as the Third Colombo War—a brutal internal conflict that nearly tore the Colombo crime family apart.

Larry offers exclusive insights from his research, including rare interviews with Andrew Arena, one of the five sons of Victor “Little Vic” Orena, the acting boss at the center of the war. These firsthand accounts reveal the deeply personal toll the Mafia war inflicted on the Arena family and expose the raw emotions behind the headlines.

Gary and Larry revisit the key flashpoints of the conflict, including the botched assassination attempt on Orena. On June 20, 1991, A five-man hit team waited in a car outside the Long Island home of Victor Orena, the acting crime boss of the Colombo crime family. Orena recognized the vehicle—and managed to escape with his lifethe bloody street warfare that followed. We explore the complex dynamics between longtime boss Carmine Persico, rising star John Gotti, and powerful enforcer Greg Scarpa—whose shadowy relationship with the FBI cast a dark cloud over the entire war.

The conversation also tackles the shifting nature of mob alliances, how loyalty turned lethal, and how the RICO prosecutions of the early 1990s reshaped the Mafia’s grip on New York. As the war’s body count climbed, so too did its consequences—both for the Colombo family and the broader underworld.

Don’t miss this deep-dive into one of the most explosive chapters in Mafia history. And be sure to pick up Larry McShane’s Little Vic and the Great Mafia War for an even more detailed look at the treachery, violence, and fallout of the Colombo civil war.

Click here to get Larry’s book Little Vic and the Great Mafia War. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

  Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. You know, this is retired Detective Gary Jenkins from the Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit. And I have a man on the line right now, as you can see. Now, we couldn’t get the video. I apologize for that. We couldn’t get the video. So you got a picture. I mean, I’ll have other pictures in there, but he’s got a heck of a story. He’s a mob author, a well-known mob author from New York. He was on the show before, and we talked about Vincent the Chin Gigante. He wrote Chin, The Life and Crimes of Mafia Boss Vincent Gigante. And Larry McShane also wrote Last Dawn Standing, The Secret Life of Mob Boss Ralph Natal. So welcome, Larry. I’m really happy to have you back on the show. Oh, I’m happy to come back. Thanks so much for asking. All right. So you have written this book. Really, it’s about the Third Columbo War. Would you say that’s what this book was about? Well, yeah, the third Columbo war is kind of the centerpiece of the whole thing. And then, you know, later in the book, we get on to some other things.

[1:07] Legal things, what happened to the arenas and that sort of thing. But, yeah, it’s it’s a mob war book. What this is, is the title is Little Vic and the Great Mafia War. And, you know, these, these Columbo’s, I tell you what, this, they coined, they must’ve coined the phrase going to the mattresses because the entire community. Span of the colombo family both before joe died there was killed and and up until the end they’re always have to go to the mattresses people are always running around and cruise trying to kill each other and and this third one was was no different it’s uh it’s just crazy tell us a little bit about your process here how you started researching this not been a lot done about Vic Orena i don’t know what kind of resources you got on that you have to report cases but you talked to some of these kids too, I believe, which is really interesting. You got some inside knowledge there. Yeah, I’ll give you kind of the long version. I’d spoken to Andrew Orena, who’s one of Vic’s five sons, about doing something. He had approached me through a guy that we both knew. I thought it was a kind of story that isn’t told often, and especially with the idea of the son cooperating, I thought, this is kind of interesting. You know what I mean?

[2:20] So we shopped it around and, you know, we got no takers. The guy who helped me get the Chin book out, the guy from the publishing house, Kensington Publishing, was getting ready to retire. And he got a hold of me and he said, I’d like to do one more book with you before I retired. And I said, how about that Orena book that you sniffed me on? He said, well, send me the stuff. I’ll take another look. And he took another look and he said, yeah, let’s do it. It took a long while to get here. You know, I think, as you mentioned, the ability to have two of the Orena brothers, two of Vic’s sons, I think, make this a different kind of book. You know, there’s so much coverage of what happened back then in the early 90s because it was the last big mob war. And so I thought, you know, I thought and the publisher agreed that, you know, this is a story worth telling. Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot from, you know, FBI agents telling, you know, this is what I remember. maybe even an informant or two out there. This is kind of what I remember, but they’re really hard to find. But court cases, there’s a lot out of the court cases, but you got the family, the view from inside the family, which I think is fascinating because these families, that Orena family, they stuck together. They truly were a old school Italian from Sicily mafia family. Yeah. John is the older brother who I spoke to. He was a made guy. He had a brother who was Vic Orena Jr. He was a made guy.

[3:47] And Andrew, who I mentioned first approached me.

[3:52] Um, was, was, was never a made guy cause his mom put the squash on it.

[3:57] He said, you know, two sons in, in the life where, so he was, um, I guess you could say he was sort of mob adjacent. He, he, uh, he was involved in a lot of stuff and he knew about a lot of stuff, but he never, he never became a made guy. So now this, uh, you know, he, he was in the Clembo family and, uh, the Persicos had, uh, famously taken over from after Joe Clembo was killed and, uh, get them kind of mixed up alley boy and uh carmine the snake really were you know hand in glove with each other uh alley boy was i believe he was uh he was the younger wasn’t he and so carmine took over clumbo family was in real flux at that point in time try everybody was kind of jockeying for a position i would imagine and and for a while it ran pretty smooth at the persicos carmine went to jail and And he named three people to run the family, if I remember right. And then, of course, another person called Little Alley Boy is going to move on up. It’s kind of that way in Kansas City. If Nick Savella goes to jail, his brother of court becomes the titular head. He becomes the guy that everybody goes to and assumes he’s the boss. He may not be exactly, and there may be other people doing a lot of things, but because of that name identification, why, uh, they’re going to do it. And, and then Orena, a little bit Orena was right in there with them at that point in time.

[5:22] So can you talk about that part of it a little bit? Well, when, uh, when Carmine Persco goes to jail, that’s in the mafia commission trial, which is a big trial here. This was the start of Rico prosecutions around this time. And he, he very famously represented himself as his own attorney and got some pretty good reviews as well. Unfortunately, he did not get the verdict that he’d hoped for, despite his efforts. And he had been convicted on an earlier case. So he went to prison in.

[5:51] 80 or he was convicted in 86 he had this prior conviction over him so he had 139 year sentence ahead of uh and and clearly you know he was not going to get out and return to running the family so they they bring in a middle manny type guy not not a guy with um i guess not a guy with a lot of juice and uh persco quickly turns on this guy he’s executed in a garage in new jersey you know typical thing he’s taking his friends back to his house and he never he never gets inside the house kind of thing you know yeah and so at this point uh the agreement is made among all sides that vicarina is going to become the uh acting boss which is interesting because Orena is more known as like a businessman and an earner you know he’s got his own crew he’s living at this point out in the suburbs of long island but he seems to be a choice that that everybody is in agreement with and things go smoothly kind of seamless once he takes over you know they have a lot of uh income flows coming in and out he’s got as i mentioned his two sons vic jr and johnny capos in the family everything seems to be rolling in the Orena in his direction and then one night in the summer of uh 1991 he’s coming back from dinner and he’s almost at his house and he looks Sovereign sees a car with four faces that he recognizes.

[7:15] Four of his fellow members of the family, and they’re waiting to kill him. Fortunately for him, he sees them before they see him. He slams on the gas, gets out of Dodge. That’s how the war kicks off, you know, with this attempted hit on Vicarina. It rather than taking him out proves to be, you know, a total failure. Yeah, if you set out to kill somebody, you better get it done. And if they learned about it, you’re, you’re, you’re, you know, the war is on. I mean, you know, they know once, once that thing starts down the path, once that bullet starts down that barrel that you’re going to kill somebody there, there’s no calling it back. So it’s, it’s from then on it’s kill or be killed. Wasn’t it was Greg Scarpa. Was, was that one of the guys he recognized in there?

[8:01] No, it was not. Scarpa was, Scarpa was not one of the guys involved in that hit. And he’s going to get involved in a lot of this later on, which is a pretty interesting thing. The conflict with Scarpa and his FBI agent friend and what the Orena is, how they see that, what they have to say about that relationship and the trials that were going to happen later on. But now another thing, I think you mentioned something about John Gotti was pretty close with Orena and they had some business together. Yeah, it was…

[8:39] I mean it was good for for gotti because it gave him another guy on the commission, okay who would back you know what he wanted to do and so yeah the two of them were were on the same side of things sammy gravano who was the underboss at that point i had a chance to speak with him uh while i was working on the book you know and he said that vic was like a well-regarded guy and uh you know there didn’t seem to be any reason for any problems with the selection of vic he’s a guy that made money uh not a flashy showy guy sort of sort of the anti-goddy you know what i mean uh he’s he’s living at home with his wife as i mentioned they have five sons you know and he’s just a guy who’s pretty well regarded you know what i mean he’s a money maker which is always valued you know across any of the families what was uh persico carmine persico was he afraid that that vic was then gonna take away something he thought was his and that’s being the boss of the Colombo family? Was that what precipitated this? I think that had something to do with it, but it’s an odd thing because by most accounts, little alley boy was going to be getting out of prison in a couple of years in 1995. It seemed set up, and I think it would have happened this way.

[10:00] That he would finish his time, he’d get out of jail, and he would immediately move to the top of the family. You know, the war lasts through 1993. So really, if they had just waited two years, but as you sort of referred to when we were talking earlier, that’s sort of the way that the Columbos did things. You know what I mean? Yeah. You know, with the wars going back to the gallows. So, yeah. Yeah, that is true. One crew against the other. One crew feels like they’re out and are afraid somebody’s going to get something that they should have. And so as this heats up now, what kind of actions do Orena, his sons, take? I mean, if you take on a guy with two sons who are made guys and are capos, that’s pretty serious stuff because you’re taking on some real power, some people that are going to be hard to isolate. So what kind of actions did they start taking in their own defense? Well, the initial thing from their side, the Orena side of things, was they wanted to see if this was something that they could resolve. I use the old cliche, without going to the mattresses, you know what I mean? They wanted to resolve this. And so between the two sides, and I believe it was at the home of one of the Persico sons, the arenas were looking to broker a deal.

[11:28] And basically, the option was kind of, you know, we want somebody else in. It quickly became clear that everything was not going to go back to the way it was, even though, you know, Vic had been in during a relatively long time.

[11:46] Quiet stretch in the family um and uh you know he had a lot of supporters but they they just couldn’t come to a resolution which is a debate over a guy who’s going to be in prison for three or four more years yeah you know and to oust the guy who’s in there things just kind of fester for a while you know the the arenas are uh the arenas are wondering what’s going to happen next of course they’re all very upset that there was an attempt to murder their father near their home out in Long Island, Cedarhurst they lived. So I guess there’s just a very uncomfortable stretch until the arenas decide to strike back. So what was their first move back? They decide Billy Cattolo, who’s a high-ranking guy in the family, decides that if they’re going to go after somebody, they should start near the top. And so they target Greg Scarpa. Yeah, exactly. That’s how he comes into this. I remember now. Yeah. So they load into a van and they drive to Brooklyn and they lie in wait for Scarpa. He comes out of his house with his girlfriend, the girlfriend’s daughter, I should say, Linda Shiro, his girlfriend’s daughter, who’s carrying her infant son. These four guy shooters come out of their van. There’s another car that’s used to hopefully block traffic.

[13:09] And they open fire. Incredibly, in all the craziness, no one is shot. They jump in the car and they flee the scene. But at this point, this thing goes from zero to 200 or whatever analogy you’d like to make. Because now the Orena side has fired the first shots. As it emerges, Scarpa becomes the most active shooter throughout, the most aggressive guy throughout, begins to raise questions as time goes on about his relationship with Lynn DeVecchio.

[13:44] Who’s working the case for the FBI out of Brooklyn. So the FBI, their deep throat informant, their most valuable informant they probably maybe have ever had, but one of their more valuable informants is right in the middle of this Colombo active shooting war now. Now, I guess later on, as they have these trials, they’re going to accuse DiBecchio of fomenting even more violence and assisting Scarpa because Scarpa, he needs to win. Also, I have one other question before we get too far into Scarpa. He had a pretty decent drug business going, I believe, in the end. And then, and little Vic Orena was pretty, took a pretty strong stance against anybody in the family doing drugs. Did that have anything to do with it? Did the kids talk about that at all? No, not really. You know, there was so much.

[14:43] I mean, to me, this war was more personal than, you know, financial or, you know, this was who was going to run the family, who was going to control the family. You know, the Arenas found themselves locked in this war against the Persicos, who were yin to their yang. Johnny Orena and one of the Persicos ran a trucking company together. So they weren’t just involved in illegal money-making things. They ran businesses and they worked together side by side. And so, yeah, the initial hit, I think, is really a shocker. Months later, it’s like, here’s the second hit. They’re going after Scarpa immediately. You know what I mean? Yeah.

[15:27] And so at that point, I think all bets are off. There’s not going to be any peace achieved at that point. I mean, you couldn’t tell at the time, I guess, but it would be two and a half years before everything finally settled down. And at that point, Vicarino was behind bars, and he’s still there today despite best efforts of his family to try and get him out. Yeah, I was reading that in your book, how bad his health was and how much he changed his life around now. But before we get onto that, let’s talk a little more about Scarpa. I mean, they tried to hit Scarpa with guns right with his stepdaughter and step-grandchild standing right there. I mean, that’s, to me, that’s such a huge no-no. I mean, you see those civilians walking out, you just move on and let’s try again. But they didn’t. They tried to hit him right there. That had to, you talk about it being personal, that had to really make it personal. Yeah, I agree with you that it’s sort of a weird thing that you don’t hear about, putting somebody’s family in the line of fire. You know, I think there was a notion on the on the Orena side of things that if you killed Scarpa.

[16:40] Maybe that would be a way, an avenue to figure out a way to end the war if you take out their top guy, right? Yeah, right. But instead you end up with an infuriated Scarpa, who nearly sees his grandchild and daughter killed in front of his eyes on a street in Brooklyn. Winding down, if I remember this Billy Cattolo, they then went back after him. He was kind of a wild guy. I think he had the moniker of Wild Bill. I believe they ended up going after him. Yeah, Wild Bill Cattolo. He was an Orena loyalist, although he managed to make his way out at the other end of the war untouched. He did. But he ends up getting killed at some point in time since then, I think. He does indeed get killed. According to his son, he thought he had been sort of welcomed back into the fold, let bygones be bygones, and he was murdered. That his son was involved in the case against Alley Boy Persico.

[17:41] Andrew Orena told me that he had a chat with Itolo about this, about going back into the family. And he told him, you know, don’t do it. Don’t go in there, just steer clear. And, you know, in response, he heard like, no, everything looks good this time. You know, they’re bringing me back in. And, you know, the Arenas had been out for some time. You know, this would have been in, I guess, the early 2000s. It was a bad decision, obviously, just a bad decision. And the Persco’s are not the forgiving kind, I guess, would be a fair way of putting it, you know. And this guy thought that he was going to get a pass. And I think for, you know, like Andrew Orena would say, you know, if you’re thinking you’re going to get a pass from these guys, you’re not really thinking clearly, you know. And he tried to talk him out of it, but unsuccessfully. So when little Vic goes to jail, he catches a case on a murder, I believe a murder case. Tommy O’Cara.

[18:39] He ran a restaurant out in Long Island. It was very popular with the mobsters out that way. You know, very mob-friendly place. Vickery and his sons used to eat there a lot. He also did some mob business, including sports gambling, that type of thing, take bets. And there was a raid on his place. When they get inside, Ossera, rather than having all his books for these different things set aside or held somewhere else, he has them in the restaurant. They’re very damning documents about his gambling business. So he finds himself in kind of a precarious spot now. He’s eventually kidnapped, killed, and buried. There’s some dispute over who did what. Andrew Orena said to me that they weren’t involved in this.

[19:29] John Gotti was involved as well. Sammy Gravano. I mean, it’s sort of an, I don’t want to say nondescript. We’re talking about somebody who was murdered. But this was not a guy whose name appearing in the paper would have turned any heads. Yeah. And yeah, so this is what happens. It ends up that they’re trying to say that this was a thing by the arenas. And again, John Gotti is kind of a mercurial guy too. He and Gravano discussed the hit, according to Gravano, and this guy is murdered and buried, and then he’s finally recovered a few years later. And then I guess they turned somebody, I think. Yeah, somebody flipped. I can’t remember who. I can’t remember his name now, but I don’t want to get too many names there. But somebody flipped and drug little Vic into it. And his kids, did they give you indication that he really, he wanted to take over the Colombo family and push the Persicos aside? Or was this all kind of a misunderstanding? Yeah, absolutely. They were afraid he was going to, and, you know, one thing leads to another. Well, I think, I know that they were really kind of proud that their father had gotten to the top of the food chain within the family, you know? What i mean they were definitely not proponents of the war you know they were hoping to resolve things and like we’ve touched on this a couple times i i think that they believed close ties with the persicos would allow them to sit down.

[20:55] And and have a discussion yeah about you know what what could we do you know what i mean this is this is not the way to do this we know your family you know our family um we can come to a reasonable agreement clearly that was not the case i mean it’s funny like one decision like that like you know we we don’t want peace okay you know three years later i think if i have the numbers right there were like 122 people arrested on both sides of the war wow um yeah it’s uh.

[21:25] I mean, dozens of people involved in shootings and that type of thing, all related to this kind of pointless fight, the last fight for control of a, I don’t want to say dying mafia, but a foundering mafia at that point. Veds are starting already. The RICO prosecutions, which are obviously a total game changer. Yeah, and the commission trials were during all this, so I mean, they put away the heads of all the families during this. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing is when Irina got arrested, he was arrested at his girlfriend’s house out in the Long Island suburbs. It seems like some trials take forever to get going. He was prosecuted very quickly, convicted very quickly and sentenced to a very long prison term very quickly. That was a case where he was sort of the first domino to fall, and certainly at least the first big domino to fall. They brought in a really good prosecutor to handle the case. I mean, Andrew talks about how he was having a panic attack, waiting for the verdict to come in. Bang, their whole world collapses, you know what I mean? He says in the book that after the verdict, Vic Jr. Tells all the people in the family who were there, like, you know, we’re going to walk out with our heads held high. And that’s what they did. They didn’t come out moaning or decrying some crooked prosecution or anything.

[22:47] They walked out with their heads held high. I was on a wiretap once, and this guy, he was kind of a mob associate, and he was talking to a friend of his, and he was giving him advice because the guy was in trouble with some other people or something. And he was giving him advice, he said, and they were going to boot him out of a business or something. And so this Tommy Russo, he says, I’m going to tell you something. And he says, when they’re running you out of town, he says, go out like you’re leading a parade. So these guys, they’re being run out of town. They went out like they were leading a parade. Yeah.

[23:20] Well, I was going to say, I think their whole idea was, right, we’re not going to give these guys their pound of flesh. We’re going to walk out with our heads held high and just, you know, unfortunately for the arenas, that was just the beginning rather than the end of the prosecutions they would face. So, yeah, what happened to these other brothers? They all had cases that they could catch, and they all committed a lot of crimes. So what happened to them? There was a big case in which the two brothers were defendants along with some other guys. And this was a federal prosecution case.

[23:54] And it was linked to a number of things. One of them was a gas operation where they were squeezing money from legitimate businesses and taking a percentage of the cash that came in. So they wind up, them and some other five, six, at a federal trial in Brooklyn. As it turns out, this is kind of the trial that changes everything. Before the trial begins, the prosecutor has a meeting in chambers with the defense lawyers and the prosecutors, the chief prosecutor acknowledges a variety of different interactions between Linda Vecchio and Greg Scarpa. This is not a usual thing to happen, you know, and especially right before a trial is about to begin. And so now I think, you know, think, you know, Johnny Orena said that this gave everybody a big boost. Their argument was that Scarpel was getting information from Lynn DeVecchio about different things, a variety of different things. If I recall correctly, one of the things that was alleged was that DeVecchio had given information about where the Orena hideout was. When the trial starts, these guys are like, okay, we got really good lawyers. We got something to hang our hats on here. Prosecution was along the lines of, you know, at this point. Don’t don’t let this steer you away from what this trial is about kind of thing you know what i mean.

[25:24] There’s this whole weird thing that happens. Things are coming to a close, and the jury begins deliberations. Andrew Orena is very, he was telling me, he’s very nervous. They don’t know what’s going on. They’re waiting to see what happens. And the jury sends out a request for an FBI document. The document was never introduced at the trial, but the jurors, during their deliberations, figured out amongst themselves that this was something they thought they needed to see as part of the trial, you know? So the prosecutors turn over all the paperwork. It leans in their favor. The jurors go back to resume their deliberations. I mean, even now, I think, incredibly enough, they’re all acquitted. I mean, the judge in the case, Judge Corman, Federal Judge Corman, actually told the arenas before the deliberations continued that if the jury, I mean, yeah, that if the jury found the defendants guilty.

[26:29] He would vacate the convictions in order of mistrial based on this document that had been introduced. So if the jurors had gone the other way on this paperwork, the judge would have given them another shot.

[26:41] Johnny was telling me, I mean, these are things you don’t think about if you’re not in the mob, I guess. But johnny was saying they were taken back to the federal lockup him and his brother, when they went in they were like greeted with raucous cheers by the other inmates that you know here are two guys that actually beat the government you know what i mean really yeah that’s unusual that’s that’d be key it really is you know and uh yeah so bruce bruce cutler um, you know, who was Gotti’s attorney, came down to visit them at the prison after the verdict. And he basically, like I said to these, the two of them, like, you know, what you have just witnessed is something that will never be seen again and has never been seen before. That you guys beat this case is just, it’s astounding, you know? It is. And I guess the jury, it’s just enough to cause a reasonable doubt. I mean, that’s what a good defense lawyer is always trying to do, just bring something in to create any kind of reasonable doubt. And I guess the interactions between DeBecchio and Scarpa created that enough doubt and the other witnesses that they just couldn’t bring themselves to convict him. I would assume. What would be your take on that?

[28:04] Well, I mean, the whole thing is just so strange, like, you know, a jury sending out a note like, hey, where’s this document that we’ve never seen? You know what I mean? How did they know about that document? I did have that question. I’m glad you brought that up. How do you think they knew about that document even? I guess during the course of negotiations, it came up and they requested it.

[28:25] They deciphered during their, that this thing should exist. There should be a document like this that exists. I see. And so they send out a note saying, we’d like to look at this. And when they do, they come back with the other verdict. The Arenas, or I should say not all the Arenas, but Andrew Orena had some of the jurors over his house afterwards for like a little celebration. Yeah, yeah. And reading your book, I noticed that then when they’re trying to do appeals for their dad, they’re frantically trying to bring this relationship in and they cannot get that reintroduced to help with their dad’s case. Because it’s like this relationship between DiVecchio and Scarpa, that’s like a magic get-out-of-jail-free card, it seemed to me like for a while. Yeah, it was definitely, I guess, the number one choice of defendants trying to beat their cases. Really?

[29:18] Although in the end of that, right, DiVecchio beat his case too. Yeah, I was going to say, I wonder what DiVecchio has to say about this. He’s written a book. I need to get that book. And I’ve got another book here that really goes into that depth by this Peter Lance, Deal with the Devil. Yes, right, right. So it’s really got a lot. I’ve just kind of scratched the surface of it. I tried to get old of him, but he never did respond. I don’t think he does podcasts. I’ve never seen him on one. Well, now, hold on a second. I got a hold of him, and he got back to me. Yeah, DeVecchio. Which I was like, well, I’ll tell you the story. There’s a website you can visit if you’re working as a journalist.

[30:02] And retired FBI agents, you can reach them this way. Somebody at the FBI probably steered me that way.

[30:11] So I put up this thing. I get a message back from one guy who was involved in the arrest of Carmine Sessa and one of the Persco’s outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was like a huge arrest as the war was winding down.

[30:29] And this guy had some really good story to tell about how they’re staking out you know the steps of saint patrick’s cathedral and these four gangsters are planning what they’re going to do next and they swoop in and arrest them all i was like well you’re not going to do better than that you know what i mean it’s not yeah the next thing i know i get a message from linda vecchio which basically is kind of like saying i understand you’re looking for me and i’d be happy to talk Oh, well, cool. You did get a chance to get his take on all this. I guess there was an internal investigation, which dragged on for a couple of years, and he beat that. There were no charges, I should say. And then, you know, 2007, you know, the Brooklyn District Attorney just announces, you know, we’re going to charge him with four murders. Um and you know at this point de vecchio has been out of the spotlight for some time you know he’s living down in florida yeah you know and he writes in his book how uh he comes back to brooklyn and they have him in handcuffs in an office in the brooklyn da’s office you know and you know he’s charged with four murder cases uh one was uh the murder of mary barry yeah uh who was i think.

[31:48] Alphonse Persico’s girlfriend at the time? His girlfriend and he went into jail and he supposedly they sent some guys over and took all of her, you know, the jewelry he’d given her and they cut her out. He cut her off. Then it acted like they were going to give her a job because he was worried that she could talk about it. Right, exactly. And Scarpa and Scarpa’s son Scarpa killed her. There’s no doubt about it. Scarpa’s son was he testified that himself and of course scarpa bought his way out of that with uh his relationship with the bureau one of the murders he he got free of because of the vecchio but that linda shiro claims that the vecchio said you need to do something about barry and and maybe gave him an address with kind of a you know a wink and a nod kind of a thing right right right right, There was another friend of the younger Persico’s, Patrick Torco, who was killed because Scarpa thought he was going to rat on his son at some point.

[32:56] Uh lorenzo lampazzi i hope i’m pronouncing that correctly was a guy on the Orena side during the war he was charged with that murder as well and then there was another friend of uh serpico jr serpico god almighty persico jr yeah probably had slipped there yeah exactly and uh there was some concern he was going to become a born-again christian and then at that point if he finds god perhaps we’ll find and uh someone he can tell the whole story or two about what’s going on so he’s the uh he’s the fourth victim and and again d’avecchio is charged in those cases with you know working with uh persico and so when he goes to trial i mean look it was uh it was insane when the trial started you know what i mean it’s it’s out in brooklyn the courthouse is packed, yeah i mean here you have this guy who i think at one point was regarded as one of the fbi’s best agents he did instruction for incoming guys you know what i mean and they do the internal investigation, and he comes out at the other end of that with no charges. And so here’s the last big swing they’re going to take at this guy with Charles Hines, Joe Hines, and the Brooklyn prosecutors. And then the whole case fell apart in one day.

[34:12] That’s what I read about it. They somehow discredited a witness, and I can’t remember what it was now. Actually, I know the answer to this one. Oh, good. I know, but I forgot all of a sudden. Yeah. She testifies, among the people who are there are two reporters, Tom Robbins and Jerry Capici. They both worked, like me, at the Daily News at some point. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. And they had done interviews with her.

[34:45] Maybe like 10 years earlier yeah that was some time with scarf with scarper’s girlfriend linda shiro correct and uh they had done interviews with her for possible maybe a book project or something yeah uh and it all fell apart um but they they saved the tapes and so when she testifies they get in touch with each other and uh they find that they find the old tapes and uh what she says on the tapes is far different than the damning testimony that she gave under oath the day before, or I guess the same day. And so when they got to court the next day, the case was dismissed. The judge, if I recall correctly, told Linda Shearer, the next thing you should do is find yourself a defense attorney. And so their last big shot, Linda Vecchio, collapsed like the old house of cards in the course of 24 hours. I actually like this. This is a good little touch that I like.

[35:43] He went out to celebrate at Spark Steakhouse.

[35:50] So I guess they walked a walk past the old Castellano parking space, you know? Yeah. That guy, he had a sense of irony, maybe, a sense of history, a good sense of history, you know? Yeah well i mean look uh again i did not expect to hear from him uh he gave me oh yeah i’m surprised myself he answered all questions uh he was very insistent he had done nothing wrong much like you said it was a great surprise to me to hear from him but uh he was super cooperative he didn’t blow off any questions you know i learned a little bit about his uh earlier career which was interesting he was a very highly regarded agent um and i believe there were like three or four dozen, FBI agents who filled the courtroom on that first day of, uh, of opening statements and testimony. So there were guys that he worked with who, uh, who had his back and, and who backed him up. Well, it’s, like I said, you get in and working with these informants, the really good guys, the ones that there’s no stuff and are good criminals there. It’s, it’s a constant battle with them to, for the, who’s going to be in control and, And, you know, they can, they can then use you in the end.

[37:12] They’re going to use you or anybody else that can. I guess the secret is letting them think that they’re using you. Right. And actually you’re using them, right? That’s the secret. It takes a really skilled person to do that. I imagine it would. Yeah. Really skilled. I’ll tell you why. One quick little story. Here’s the kind of things these guys will do. I was, I met this guy at a strip club, right? So we go in there and meet another guy who, who was another policeman from another department who had actually introduced me to this guy. And, and he, he wasn’t really a mob informant, but he was a professional criminal and he knew everybody in that substrata, that professional criminal, you know, connected with the mob on one time and knew all the fences and, and he knew all these people, but he was always, you know, pulling at me. It is the kind of guy that even went to junior college and took law enforcement courses to find out what the police were doing. He had a stolen car operation himself. We’re sitting in a strip club, you know, having a merry old time. And he calls one of the girls over and he gives her some money and she leaves. And I’m watching. What the hell’s going on? She goes over and sits down and starts doing lap dances and talking with a guy with a snap-on tool uniform. And then my guy, he disappears.

[38:32] And I thought, oh, shit. As we saw, I remember seeing a snap-on tool truck when we pulled in the parking lot. And my guy goes out there and he comes back a little bit and he said, hey, he said, there wasn’t anything in that truck. I’m going, oh, my God. Oh, my God. You know, they do stuff like that to you, to try to pull you in a little bit. You know, you’d say something about, oh, it’s a nice watch you got there. You want one? I got two or three more just like it. So it’s a constant battle let me tell you, yeah larry this has been great this has really been fun and uh interesting story uh, Maybe not the last mob book that’s ever written, but I’ll tell you what, there’s been a plethora of it just in the last few years. Little Rick and the Great Mafia War. Guys, you better get this. It’s an interesting, easy read, and I promise you, you’ve got to learn about a little chunk of the New York or the Colombo War and the Colombo family and the later years of the mob before they really, you know, the 90s, when it just took a night. Nosedive, you’ve got to learn a lot of stuff that you didn’t know before. I sure did. Yeah, well, listen, thank you for having me. All right, Larry. I should leave with Len DiVecchio’s great line, which supposedly set off his coworkers. We’re going to win this thing.

[40:01] Was that the Columbo, the Persicos winning the Columbo War, or was that the FBI? Well, that was always the bone of contention. He insisted that he was saying that, you know, we, the FBI are going to win this war. And some of his colleagues went the other way. Yeah. And you’ll always have a couple of colleagues you work with that think the worst of you are going to go around and say bad things about you. That’s another problem when you’re doing this kind of thing. And you’re the stick and other guys are jealous. And so they’re going to somehow try to discredit you. So that’s another hazard of the business. All right. Larry McShane. Thanks a lot, Larry. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for reaching out. Take care, man. All right. See you. Bye. Bye-bye. Well, guys, that was a great story. It’s a really interesting little chapter in mob history in New York city. And I hope you get that book. Larry’s written. He’s a good guy. I really like talking to him. He’s, uh, he, he’s extremely helpful and he sent me a couple of three extra copies of the book. So I’ve got a couple of friends here that I’m going to be giving those two. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So if you are out there in a big SUV.

[41:14] Watch what you’re doing and watch your motorcycles. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, be sure and go to the website of the VA. That is, if you’ve been in the service, if not, there’s other places for help out there, but you got a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website. And with that, you know, if you’ve got a problem with drugs or alcohol, go to Anthony Ruggiano’s website or his YouTube page, uh.

[41:40] I can’t remember the name of it all of a sudden. That’s okay. You can figure it out. Not get a hold of me. He’s got a hotline number. And if you’re on YouTube, you’ll see that hotline number right now. He’s got a hotline number, and he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. So go see Anthony. He’ll straighten you out, get you in recovery. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, go to 1-800-BETS-OFF in Missouri. I don’t know what you have in other states, if that’s just a state-by-state thing or what. But there’s help for gambling. And you can have problems with gambling. Like starting off with bankruptcy and loan sharks coming after you and shit like that. So there’s help available for all those different things. Don’t forget, I have books and movies out there for sale.

[42:24] One last little sales pitch for myself. I’ve got, and also a pitch for a review. I’d like to get some reviews on that New York Mafia book I did, Big Apple Mafia and the Five Families or something like that. I just looked for my New York book, and I got the Chicago Outfit book, Windy City Mafia. And my book, you’ll see over my shoulder here, is the Leaving Vegas, how FBI wiretaps in and mob domination in Las Vegas casinos. And I’ve got my documentaries. I’ve got three great mob documentaries all streaming on Amazon for $1.99.

[43:02] And other than that you know you might want to check my uh gangland wire podcast group out uh if you can’t it’s a private group now we had to do that to get rid of the scammers and spammers and all that and then start went private and then ace people out so if you can’t quite figure it out well get hold of me and i’ll send you a link and don’t ever hesitate to ask me any questions you make comments on my youtube ask me questions you know i like to interact with people and maybe hear your stories and you can tell your stories on that too. So thanks a lot, guys.

Gary reflects on Rose’s gritty, high-energy playing style, recalling key moments like his controversial performance in the 1980 World Series, a memory that holds special weight for Kansas City fans. But Rose’s career wasn’t just about records and accolades—it was also marked by one of the most notorious scandals in sports history.

This episode tackles the darker side of Rose’s legacy: his gambling addiction. Gary explores how Rose’s betting habits led him into dangerous territory, including associations with mob-connected bookies, mounting debts, and investigations that eventually culminated in the damning Dowd Report. With evidence linking his bets directly to baseball games—including some he played in—Rose’s choices ultimately cost him his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Listeners will hear a detailed breakdown of Rose’s gambling spiraled out of control, the organized crime figures behind his wagers, and the broader integrity implications for the sport. Gary shares his perspective on the ongoing debate: Should Pete Rose be reinstated, or does the scandal outweigh his accomplishments? Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly.

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[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, there’s that little special extra for you guys. Because of the passing of Pete Rose, former MLB star, I want to talk about what happened to him. He died of natural causes last week at age 83. You know, this guy was a hell of a ballplayer. I’m sure most, I think everybody should know who he is, but if you don’t, I’m going to tell you a little bit about him. He mainly played with the Cincinnati Reds. He also played with the Phillies and maybe the Expos for a short period of time, but mainly the Phillies and the Reds. He set Cincinnati Reds franchise records like you couldn’t believe, and he became the face of the Reds. After he retired from baseball, he became the Reds’ manager for a period of time. We remember him pretty well in Kansas City because he played for the Phillies in 1980, and they beat us in the seventh game of the 80s series. He’s a Cincinnati native, and he was the all-time leader for the Cincinnati Reds in games played, 2,722, played appearances, 12,344.

[1:08] Runs scored, 1,741, hits, 3,358, singles, 2,490, doubles, 601, and walks, 1,210. I guess he wasn’t a big home run hitter, but anyhow, he was a hell of a player. Plus, defensively, he was magnificent. He was hustling all the time. And his whole career, he had 4,256 hits. Now, anybody that goes over 4,000 hits is a pretty big deal in baseball. He was a hustler like you couldn’t believe, both on the field and off the field. You know, once early in his career, he drew a lot of criticism for taking out a catcher in an all-star game when, you know, there’s nothing at stake there. But he is blasted home, and the ball beats him home, and he just takes out that catcher. He played with complete abandon, if you ever remember seeing him play.

[2:05] But he had an Achilles heel, and that’s why we’re here today. He was either a gambling addict, or at the very least, he wanted to gamble on sports so bad that he risked his entire career.

[2:17] Over several years as he placed bets on baseball and other sporting events. He liked basketball, too. But he placed these bets with mob-connected bookies, and either it was directly to a mob-connected bookie or it was to a guy who was like a picker would, but he was connected to the mob. Because if you’re going to bet with a sports bookie, trust me, you’re within one degree of the mafia.

[2:42] Because of his recent death, I want to take a look and see what evidence they had that caused Major League Baseball to react so strongly, because they banned him from ever participating in any league activities. He was already retired when this came out, and this ban has kept him from induction in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

[3:01] A lot of controversy about that. Now that he’s dead, I got a feeling they might put him in. But if he had not got caught up in the betting scandals and that hadn’t come out he would have gone in the hall of fame at the very earliest opportunity on the because of his skills on the field you know and i forgot i think i say i always think of him as being with the reds but i should remember that he played with the phillies in 1980 he played in the 70s and most of his career with the cincinnati reds but but he played with the phillies in 1980 he played against us beat the royals in the world series in 1980 i’d forgotten all about that i remember watching him he was he played with a passion that guy played at 150 000 miles an hour every play i don’t know you know i read somewhere about one of his wives or his wife was seen going to kmart wearing a you know like a ten thousand dollar fur coat driving a rolls royce so he was kind of uh kind of one of those kind of The guy is a guy from a humble background that made it big, but it’s hard for him to deal with that. I know a kid that played baseball up in about a little bit younger than my son, and I knew the family.

[4:13] And, you know, the dad worked at the Ford plant as a forklift driver, and they were from South Missouri, and they were just, they were nice people, and they were country people, and they lived real simply. And this kid went on to become a major league pitcher, and I think he’s gone now because they don’t last that long. But he was a big time. I won’t mention the names, but he was a big time pitcher, but he came from really humble backgrounds. So I had to imagine what effect that would have had on that family. I remember, like, you know, none of the kids went to college that I remember.

[4:45] The one brother is a little bit older, was more Scott’s age. He worked, he was an auto mechanic. I took my car to an auto shop up north there where I used to live, and he was working as the auto mechanic in there. So, you know, this kid goes on and becomes a multimillionaire in the end. Now, you know, you’ve got family with this really humble background, people that make working man’s wages, but yet you’ve got one family member who’s a multimillionaire. I wonder how that plays out. So I hope he took care of his family at Christmas time and I hope he set up his brother in his own repair shop if he wanted to do it. Back in the day, in the 70s, when he was this hotshot player, he was the king of baseball back then. He hooked up with a guy named Ronnie Peters out of Dayton, Ohio. And Ronnie Peters was actually controlled by the Chicago Outfit Gambling Organization. You know, a lot of these, you know, these Peckerwoods, Ronnie Peters, a guy like that, he’s pretty well got to be hooked up with a outfit in the Midwest like that with an outfit bookie.

[5:50] He’s got to kick bets up, but he’s got to kick money up. He’s got to have somebody to lay off to. He may need protection. But he was kicking up to a Chicago outfit mob crew leader named Dominic Basso. And Basso, he was in charge of all gambling operations in suburban DuPage County, Illinois, all of his life. But he also reached out into other places in the Midwest. You might wonder how they got on to Pete Rose. Not really going after Pete Rose, they were going after Dominic Basso. And they got his telephone.

[6:29] Back in the day, they had the mobile phones that you could put in your car. They weren’t really too mobile. They were pretty big. But they got on his mobile phone, got his mobile phone, and got some numbers, and started into it. And for some reason, I think Major League Baseball had already hired a thing called, a company called Business Risk International out of Oak Brook, Illinois. I think that’s a suburb of Chicago. And there’s a former FBI agent who met with one of the prosecutors, one of the DuPage County prosecutors, which that guy won’t confirm or deny. And he was able to inspect the Basso court file and all the evidence. In that evidence, they found a list of 130 bettors, all identified by co-names with amounts of money next to those numbers. And the prosecutor would say that those numbers, that amounts of money total more than $225,000, which is a lot of money for one person. It indicated to them he was more of a supervisor over other bookies.

[7:33] Which would then lend credence to the allegation that this Ronnie Peters out

[7:39] of Dayton, Ohio, was dealing with Dominic Basso out of Chicago. They ended up creating a report called the Dowd Report. The Dowd Report’s kind of the go-to document. If you want to look that up, folks, look up the DOWD Report. Talks about where Rose would even bet directly with Dominic Basso, phoning him and his Chicago residents to call in his bets. Now, he denied knowing Basso. His original bookie, Ronnie Peters out of Dayton, Ohio, he ended up getting shot. He survived it in 2002, but he got shot. I don’t know what he did exactly, but that happens to many of these guys. January of 1991, the Chicago Crime Commission public identified Dominic Basso in a report titled Organized Crime in Chicago, 1990. He was identified as working for mob chieftains Ernest Rocco Infelice, Donald Angelini, Dominic Cortina, and Salvatore De Laurentiis. When he ended up playing for the Phillies, that’s when he went to the Philadelphia mob guys. But let’s finish off with the Chicago connection because that’s really where they got him. He made calls, listed to Bassos.

[8:53] Home to other Basso-operated sports betting operations. He denied knowing Basso. Now, when he gets to Philly, he starts dealing with somebody else. When he first arrived in Philadelphia in 1979, he began betting through bookies connected to area mob figures Ralph Jr. Staino, Joseph Joypung Pungitore, and FBI and other street sources have confirmed that. During the 1980s, he got hooked up with a Staten Island, New York-based bookie named Richard Big Val Troy and began betting even larger amounts of money on different sports through him.

[9:35] Big Val Troy was linked to the Bonanno, Colombo, and Genovese crime families. By the mid-’80s, Pete Rose, according to this Dowd report, owed this Troy $200,000 in gambling debts. Troy was eventually busted in 2003 for illegal union activity, and it was connected with the organized crime family in New York. He was busted in the same investigation with three different mob guys of the Columbo and Genovese family. John Jackie Zambuca de Ross with the Columbos, Ernest Ernie Boy Muscalera, and Pasquale Scoop de Luca of the Genovese crime family.

[10:23] The Dowd report includes testimony from people that Rose bet as much as $2,000 on the Reds in every one of the 52 games over the two-month period of 1987, and he won 29 times. They also detail in that report baseball bets in 1985 and 1986. They never did accuse him of betting against his own team. It’s not really that he was…

[10:48] But how much he was betting, as much as it was as who he was betting with, that he put himself in danger and risk of exposure to these mobsters, which could then turn around and use it as blackmail. They had in a Dowd report, they have a taped conversation between a man named Bertolini, who was Rose’s partner in Hit King Market Incorporated. This is a company that represents autograph a member of baseball memorabilia shows. Now, Pete Rose is big in selling his autograph and baseball member a billion. That’s kind of how he made money after he got booted out of baseball. In this, his partner is a Mr. Jansen, and he will allege that he placed thousands of dollars in baseball bets for Rose. And in some of these taped conversations, Bertolini acknowledges Rose’s enormous indebtedness to New York bookmakers and said, he, Bertolini, is the only proof of Rose’s betting he would die before he told on Rose. When confronted with this tape, Rose said Bertolini was lying. This conversation was between Rose’s partner Bertolini and one of his bookies, a guy named Jansen. I don’t know how, I mean, Rose would have to say Bertolini was lying. When he said he knew that he was betting on baseball and he was the only proof of Rose’s betting. Otherwise, it just makes it true.

[12:15] Jansen alleged that he went to Rose’s attorney, a guy named Reuven Katz, in 1988, seeking payment of debts from Rose and told Katz that Rose had bet on baseball. So his little hidden secret was going to leak out sooner or later. Now, also in the Dowd Report, There’s copies of purported betting sheets.

[12:38] Obtained from Rose’s home, which contained baseball and basketball gambling activity with a win or a W or an L, a win or a lose next to each team. I did that once on a bookie. I got his trash and we had, he had all these betting sheets where he had been taking bets. I could decipher them and I could figure out how many bettors he had. I just had like code names, initials and in the mound, there’s 28 teams. And so they would play 14 games every week. So anytime, if you’re looking at something a bookie has, if there’s a list of numbers and there’s 14 numbers or how, you know, now there’s more, I believe, but there’s 14 numbers, then there’s, there’s 14 contests every weekend. You know, you’ve got the list that that’s like a giveaway. That’s something you could testify that, yeah, this is a list of the sporting events that weekend. Then you got to decipher the other numbers and what do those mean?

[13:29] And, you know, they’re pretty simple. Sometimes you put a W or L next to them. I’m not sure how this Dowd report came into possession of these sheets, but they got them, and they tied them to his home. It’s also included on these sheets were notations of April 10th, 11th, 1987, and next to those dates, it had the Cincinnati Reds, and they were designated with a W, and the Reds did beat San Diego on both those dates. Handwriting expert looked at those notes and testified that Rose was the author of the hand-printed and numerical entries on those sheets.

[14:03] I also had a statement of this Ronald Peters, who will leave by 2003, will get shot. Franklin, Ohio bookmaker Ronald Peters, and he testified that Rose won $27,000 in May of 1987 and $40,000 in June of 1987 on baseball bets, which include games on the Reds in which he was playing in that contest. Peter said that he refused to pay Rose all this money because Rose owed him from previous losses of $34,000. He actually filed a lawsuit on this. I probably filed for an injunction to lift the ban from baseball, more than likely, presented evidence, got a denial in lower court. They appealed it in the federal system, appealed it to the appellate court, and they denied any way to move it back to state court. So I’d say he was pretty well done, except for just the graciousness and the

[15:01] goodness of Major League Baseball, and they’re not giving in. Although if you noticed, he’s still trying to get reinstated in baseball, And if you notice during the World Series this last year, he has gotten a job as a commentator with one of the, I think, Fox News or somebody. But he’s in kind of a big-time job as a commentator. I’m not a big Pete Rose fan myself.

[15:26] 73 years old, still fighting to get reinstated. He’s written a book. He denied the accusations of his gambling on games that he actually participated in. But he did finally admit in this book that he bet on the Reds when he was managing them. He managed the Cincinnati Reds from 1984 to 1989. He’s got a book out, My Prison Without Bars, if you want to learn more about this. Now, guys, that was a short story about Pete Rose and his gambling activities. Now, any group of baseball fans will find both supporters and haters of Pete Rose. Me, I don’t particularly like him, probably because of the 1980 World Series.

[16:04] I don’t think that it’s much of a defense that he never bet against his own team. So, you know, I didn’t bet against my own team, so you can’t ever accuse me of throwing a game trying to win extra money. You know, I don’t know. I think that’s a pretty slim pig to hang your hat on.

[16:25] In my humble opinion, we’re trying to maintain a civilization here, guys. And just like the mafia or any law enforcement agency or political jurisdiction, we can only maintain a civilization if we have rules and everybody has to follow the rules. And if everybody that doesn’t follow the rules has to pay a penalty for the failure to follow the rules. Now, I understand some people get away with it for a long time, but mainly they don’t. And when they don’t, then the rest of society sees, hey, there’s a penalty to pay. And so I’m going to follow the rules. We’ve got to follow the rules. As Neil Delacroix said, you know, without the rules, we got nothing.

[17:06] But I do believe in mercy as long as justice has been served. In the case of Pete Rose, as much as we hated him here in Kansas City during that 80 World Series, I think it’s time to let up on his old dead body that lies moldering in the grave. And I think the message that was sent by MLB or Major League Baseball that kept him out of the Hall of Fame, kept him off the baseball field, kept him through his entire retirement, except for a few things here recently, last couple of three years, they wouldn’t allow him, you know, to be honored or anything in any stadium. And I think that is a message that has not been lost on other major league baseball players and other athletes in every sport. They let you know what this lets you know what proper behavior is and what it isn’t. And gambling on your sports that you’re playing is not proper behavior. In baseball, we have others like San Francisco giant Barry Bonds and Cardinal slugger Mark McGuire, who both got caught taking steroids when they broke major league home run records. So they get an asterisk, I believe, in the record book, and they probably will not allow them in the Hall of Fame until maybe after their death.

[18:24] So anyhow, you can always get in an argument, but other people think, oh, he never bet on his own team to lose. So, you know, who cares if he bets? Well, it’s like I said, in my opinion, my humble opinion, we’ve got to have rules. We’re going to have a civilization. And if you don’t follow the rules, then there’s a price to be paid. And for these guys and even their descendants, no matter what happens, their careers will always be stained by these scandals. Well, let me know what you think in the comments down below. We can probably get some real good discussions going on, pro and con on Pete Rose going into the Hall of Fame.

[19:00] If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, which I don’t think Pete did. He had a problem with gambling. There’s no doubt about it. You know, any addiction, if you have a problem with repeated use of activity of whatever you’re doing that’s causing you a problem, you just keep doing it over and over again, expecting different results, then it’s probably addiction. We won’t call him a gambling addict, but, you know. And if you do have that problem, if you go to the casino a lot and play those machines and you just, you can’t, you know, you need to know you need to stop, but you can’t seem to do it. You find yourself down there again. Why, you know, there’s help for you. There’s always, there’s 1-800-BETS-OFF-IN-MISSOURI and every state that has gambling. And on the betting apps, they’ve got some information about where you can get help for the gambling addiction.

[19:48] Because those are the guys that end up with loan sharks and those are the guys that end up getting beat up and losing jobs and losing businesses and that kind of thing. So, you know, it’s all up to you. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol only, you can go see Anthony Ruggiano down in Florida, former Gambino guy who’s now a drug and alcohol counselor. He has a hotline on his website or his YouTube page. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, Just be sure and go to the VA website and get that hotline. So thanks a lot, guys. You know, I always got stuff to sell. We don’t need to go down that path. Just check my name and Google my name or go to Amazon and see what I’ve got. You know, I tell you what I would like. I’d like to get some more reviews on my New York books. You’ve bought that book, a Kindle book or whatever. See if you can’t figure out how to get into Amazon and put a review or two on that book. So thanks a lot, guys.

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So anyhow. Well, anyhow, that’s a, that was a little aside folks. Uh, we’re gonna talk about the Narcotic Syndicate in Kansas City as an example. We got you up to, you know, creating this, uh, uh. Organization to, to fight these narcotics organizations. And, and they were developed with international connections and, and trade routes from Turkey to Sicily to maybe France, uh, um, Canada to the United States. I believe that’s the way the French connection kinda was, uh, part of their operation was through Canada, but part of it was directly from Marsai into, uh. To, uh, the port in New York City. And so, but Kansas City had a big piece of that. So, bill, let’s talk a little bit about, you know, Harry Anslinger and the Yeah. Early narcotics, uh, uh, bureau and, and fighting, you know, these specific mafia gangs here in Kansas City. Bill: Anslinger is director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics is going after. The, uh, trade routes. Of course, [00:01:00] they got narcotics agents in the various cities. They’re establishing what’s going on abroad. And at the same time, the uh, Italian Sicilian group, which is organized into what we call Cora, they’re dipping their fingers into the drugs and making it a major operation. Anslinger, uh, his organization is truly the only one, I mean. Some local police departments, uh, uh, were involved certainly, but uh, on a federal basis they were the main stay. So, uh, while, while he’s in working, the mob is working, you know, and Anslinger job is getting harder as they get better. What happened in Kansas City is our organization that consolidated during prohibition, seeing the end of prohibition, uh, the powers to be, uh, decide that losing [00:02:00] alcohol. They would replace it by going big time into a drug operation, and it was called the Kansas City Narcotics Syndicate. Our narcotics agent here, who was instrumental in, uh, breaking it up. Uh, he had another name for it, I forget right now, but it was like a, uh, subsidiary of the mob, which is what it was. They appointed one of the original founders of the organization, a guy named Joe DeLuca, and he was given the, uh, job. Of putting this together, he and his brother Frank, they put it together on a ba a criminal, I mean, on a business basis. Uh, this wasn’t gonna be just supplying a few little people here or there, or supplying Kansas City drug pool. No. The, this was gonna be as big as they could possibly make it. So [00:03:00] they had. Managers, supervisors, uh, legal people, bookkeepers, salespeople, other representatives. They had the whole thing. They had the whole ball of wax put together as you would, uh, a business organization. They established their trade routes where they would get the drugs from. Their drugs were coming from. Uh, Sicily, right? The, the Opium deal in, uh, in the Orient, which was the original Maine supplier that sort of dried up, uh, at least in the sense of what the mob was doing, I think because they had greater contacts, uh, with the, uh, French and the Italian mafia in Sicily. They’ve established their trade routes and very, uh, very skeleton. I will mention what they did. They had supervisors looking after local salespeople who were making drug sales. They had a [00:04:00] courier who went to, uh, uh, Tampa. The drugs that were coming in were coming in through the French connection and the Italians in Sicily coming in to Cuba. Cuba had a go-between, uh, a Cuban, uh, political, uh, who was also a nation, um, internationally known drug dealer. The drugs went from him to the Antonino Brothers in Tampa, our courier. We’d go down to Tampa, bring the drugs back, they would be distributed to our salespeople, and they were covering, uh, all of the states adjacent to US, plus, uh, California and wherever they could establish a contact that that was the, um. Skeleton of the narcotics industry and later Anslinger identified it [00:05:00] as one of the earliest large scale, truly organized narcotics syndicate in the United States. Gary: Interesting. You know, I’m, I’m looking through your book here and one of the, one of the early stories here, uh, uh, everything’s old, is new again about this, uh, car chase in, in 1923. You got two well dressed young men, speeding widely up and down the streets in a high powered car. Caught the attention of the police with little, uh, uh, not car chase, but uh, an investigation file to see who they were. Did a little surveillance on ’em and they ended up forcing their way into a, a residence that they caught ’em at, or they, they got in it and found, uh, four new car tires there and, and so they brought the tires in and they thought they were stolen, and they also found a suitcase there, which when they opened it up, it had a large quantity of morphine, cocaine, and opium. Value of, uh, $3,500. So they just stumbled on [00:06:00] to one of the first big drug busts in, in Kansas City from by accident. It sounds like you think that was all by accident by No, Bill: no, actually, uh, you are, you’re describing the beginning. Uh, uh, of, of a narcotics investigation. As we well know, working organized crime, uh, you develop intelligence, you take one thing that happened, hope to connect it with something else, and this guy belongs to him and what have you. So what happened is the narcotic, when they arrested Tony Gizo, who was the driver of the car, and would one day be the Kansas City Mob Boss, and I might mention. Even though preceding the syndicate, many of these guys were dealing drugs, but not on this basis. It wasn’t new to them. The narcotics agents were making buys, as I said, they, uh, last episode. They would’ve first to work undercover, make buys, develop [00:07:00] informants and, and, and work off of intelligence, uh, uh, and, um, uh, develop a scheme of things. Gradually, they’re making buys here. They don’t know that this is part. Of this national syndicate? Not in the beginning. Not in the beginning, but soon as it happens, A becomes connected to B. B comes connected to C. This guy belongs to that. They seize a suitcase that belongs to Pete DeGiovanni, one of the big guys in the back. The who are running things through Joe DeLuca. Uh, so now is a connection to the mob hierarchy. And then two things happened. They got a tip about the name Nicola, and that’s all they knew. Connected to drugs. Well, Nick Ito was the, uh, on the [00:08:00] street, CEO. But they didn’t know who he was. They didn’t know what this meant, but it was in the back of their head. So that was one thing. The second thing that happened is in 19, I think it was, um, 39, a guy by the name of Nicola Gentilly, he was a fascinating character in his own right. He became one of the other large narcotic syndicate and he had ties to Kansas City. They were operating mainly in the south. So he and his partner come up to Kansas City and they try to sell their drugs to Kansas City. Kansas City says, you know what? We don’t need your drugs. You know, we’re bigger than that, but if you want to. Buy anything we have left over, we’ll be happy to sell you. So they say, good, we’ll do that. They go home the same year Gentilly is arrested [00:09:00] and in his dress book is the name Nicole Estado. Now there’s another connection. This is a big deal. Who’s this Impasto? Little by little they’re putting this together. Then they see the big picture, uh, and and they go from there. And I might mention, because before I let you, I. See where, where you wanna go with this. Uh, a fellow by the name of Caram Musa, uh, had taken over as the drug carrier courier. Once the indictments were brought down, uh, which they were caram, Musa turned state’s evident, uh, federal, uh, became a cooperating witness. That was a huge break for the narcotics people. And so they convicted, uh. Uh, 13 or 14 people, that little vignette with the GIZ O guy in a car, uh, connected with a lot of undercover buys and the dots [00:10:00] were connected and it exposed a sophisticated. Well organized. One seizure on today’s market would’ve been, uh, over a half a million dollars. That was just one suitcase in one house. I think they turned, they, the term, uh, the figure of some $12 million a year. In 1940. Gary: Wow. That was a lot of money in 1940. And so Kara Musa, now, he was, was he going, he was going to Tampa and, and picking up loads of, of heroin and bringing them back up to Kansas City. Bill: That was the, that was the route they established. They had some other connections, but the, uh, the, the, the, the primary one, uh, was through the Antons. They were indicted by the way, uh, in the case. Uh, and later, uh, the main Anton brother was murdered. There were four people in this case that were murdered, uh, which is also [00:11:00] interesting, including Cara. Gary: Oh, was he? And, and, and there is a side story about Caram Musa and the intimidation of him, and, and I remembered that name from back in the old days before that and what happened. So why, why don’t you tell folks that side story? Bill: Yeah. Well, there are two things, two things that happened, uh, with Caram Musa. First, his 12-year-old. Uh, brother back in the early days of the black hand riding on a pushcart with his father, this black hander sh shotgun the little boy to death. Uh, it was a, it was a, a major, major thing. But there again, the fear of the black hand. No one came forward. The police, uh, knew who did it and went after him. Uh, but he, as it happened, escaped. Uh, so this car Musa may have had that in his mind when he decided I’m gonna cooperate. The fellow who, uh, they believe killed him was a guy named Ro. [00:12:00] So when the trial is going on, they call car Musa to the witness. And you who’ve seen the Godfather will see this replayed in the Godfather? Yes. They bring this car, uh, Zaro into the courtroom and Kara Musa knows that this is the guy that killed his brother and they sit him right in the front row and. Through hand signals and glaring and the whole, he went into the whole routine, uh, to intimidate, uh, uh, car musa. This was right out of the Sicilian Mafia book from, from Sicily. Finally, it got to the point that they, they had to eject them from the, from the courthouse. Gary: Wow. So you say, uh, Cara ended up getting killed in, in the end, Kara. Bill: Caram Musa, uh, there was no witness protection then. Uh, and so Caram Musa moved to Chicago. About it. Uh, he, he changed his [00:13:00] name and a. Uh, went to Chicago, uh, was running a business up there and all that. And, and, um, uh, one day he spots this car and he knows that he’s being docked. He’s trying desperately to get ahold of Claude Fuller. The, uh, narcotics agent here, former, can’t get to him in time. Uh, and he’s, um, shot, he’s shotgun to death leaving. Uh, his residence, uh, in front of his daughters. They caught up with him. They think that the shooters were from Tampa. Gary: Talk a little, talk a little bit more about, uh, this, uh, Nikolai Gentille or Gentille. Yeah. Uh, he was, uh, he, what was his base? It, was it, uh, new Orleans? Was he connected with the family down in New Orleans or? Bill: Well, uh, I outline in the book if anybody’s interest in this character. Uh, he had a big play in, uh. Uh, Kansas City. Uh, it’s [00:14:00] one of the first stops when he immigrated here. He, and it’s a funny story, he ending up in Kansas City from, uh, uh, a little, uh, no, uh, nowhere place in Sicily, uh, the buildings and the people, and he was overcome with, uh, uh, with the place. He had nobody to talk to. He didn’t know anybody, or he did know one person, his brother. But his brother wasn’t there. Uh, he was working in Topeka. Uh, so Gentilly had connections here, uh, and he graduated and was considered. Uh, the traveling emissary of the fledgling mafia here. He would travel around and troubleshoot. He would travel around and negotiate, uh, disputes. He would be connected to this family. He’d be connected to that family. He’d come back to Kansas City work for the, uh, mob. Uh, so he became like a, um. Uh, [00:15:00] a national figure, uh, in the burgeoning, uh, early Coosa Nostra, uh, and what happened in his life. He eventually, uh, due to financial problems and what have you, was hooked up with this major, uh, drug, uh, operator. Uh, and, uh. Uh, they, they formed a partnership and they were operating outta New Orleans. Uh, this was towards the end of his career, uh, and when he was arrested, he, he was then, uh, deported and, uh, uh, but his, his blue book, his black book, uh, was an important link, uh, to the Kansas City Narcotics Syndicate. And he came up here because of his earlier. Ties, uh, and knowledge of these people. Gary: Interesting. You never know how it works and, and how people make one connection [00:16:00] and then later on it comes back to, then it makes everything understandable once you learn about that earlier connection. So, yeah. Yeah. It’s, uh, you gotta study the history of organized crime in order to know what’s going on today. I learned that a long time ago. Bill: Well, it, you know, it’s so complex and so interrelated. Uh, and, uh, uh, there are family ties. There are, uh, uh, old country ties. Uh, there’s inter city ties. It’s funny how, you know. One city will, uh, have strong ties, uh, in, in some cities and none in another. Um, mainly because, uh, a, as the investigations came about, uh, and law enforcement became involved, uh, after the Appalachian meeting. Uh, these guys couldn’t just all get together. Uh, and it’s not like a big cookout where the families get together. Oh, Kansas City’s having a cookout with Chicago and we all know each other. So, [00:17:00] uh, but there are always ties somewhere. Uh, and if they don’t know someone in Chicago, they know someone in St. Louis who knows someone in Chicago, Chicago. Gary: Well, I, I actually do stuff like that myself today. Sure, sure. It’s, it’s human nature, I guess, isn’t it? It’s networking. Networking, yeah, exactly. Good word. I, I couldn’t think of the word. Yeah, good word. Networking. Yeah. So as we, we move on up into. World War ii things kind of usually go down on, not maybe the down low, but it gets really hard to do these kinds of things. During World War ii, the whole world, world was caught up in that kinda what happened. How, what was the progression of the Kansas City Narcotics syndicate on into the war and after the war in the early fifties, Bill: for all intents purposes, um, and for what are the whatever reasons, uh, the powers to be that, uh, ran the, uh, mob here. Uh, it appears that with the take down of the Narcotic [00:18:00] Syndicate, uh, sending, uh, these people to jail, they, they deported two people that in Poto was I import, deported, and another guy, uh, Simon Simon, who was one of the couriers before Caram Moosa. Deported Joe DeLuca sentenced to jail and they attempted to deport him, but he beat that case. Uh, on a technicality, it appears that the effect of that was to squash. Any, any thoughts of reviving this or staying in narcotics on a major basis? Because I know during my time and your time. They were, that was not one of their menus on their menu, and I could not find anything indicating that after the 1940 Indic indictments and prosecutions, that any attempt was made to ha to, uh, [00:19:00] deal on this scale. Gary: Hmm. Interesting. I didn’t, I guess I didn’t really realize that, but like you said, during my time I just, I never heard of it. The only people on the periphery were involved, but, but never anybody who was, anybody was, no, never was anything connected. Now Junior Bradley was on the periphery and, and he really was heavily involved and in his own way, but, Bill: well, you know, there’s a story and I think most of it is legend. The part of the story is true. The impact I don’t know about, but Tony Gizo, that guy in the cattle in uh, in the yellow sports car becomes the boss in 1950. He brings Nicksa in as his, uh, number one man. Nick had fled to Chicago ’cause they had been trying to kill him. Now he’s been rehabbed. Gizo son Robert was a dead bang addict. And was no end of problem to giz o. It was well known what the narcotics had done to this kid. [00:20:00] And, uh, so the legend is Nick being a close associate. Uh, having had contact with Robert, probably maybe trying to put out a fire for giz o he supposedly used that as a uh, signal. That this is not good stuff. I think combined with that is some of the draconian, uh, sentences that were coming out of the Harrison Act in the forties, fifties, and sixties, but for whatever reason it appears, and I think we can attest to that, that Nick was not going to dabble directly as a family operation in drugs. Gary: Interesting. Yeah. And, but you know, on a national basis now, I don’t remember, um, any of my, um. Readings or study indicating that Chicago, uh, the outfit did much in, in this area after the war, New York and, and particularly [00:21:00] the, uh, the people that got involved in French Connection in the end and the, uh, Bonanno family and, and the Gambino family, both, uh, John Gotti took it over. They were all heavily involved in, in this whole French connection thing. We did a story on the French connection and. They were heavily involved in that. Uh, Carmine GTE was, was in jail or just got put in jail about that time. And he was, you know, he came, he’d been the underboss. Mm-hmm. And he got a, like a 20 year sentence about 19, I wanna say 1960 or 61. So for some reason it was a little bit different back in New York ’cause they did not, they, they continued as a mob family, uh, osa, Nostra family. Both those families continued and. To be involved in the importation of a major importation of narcotics. Bill: Well, that’s true. And what’s funny about that, uh, is that they put out the word that we don’t do drugs. The bosses, you know, and, uh, but elements and, uh, parts of the [00:22:00] family did it. And they, uh, don’t ask, don’t tell. Um, and they were heavily involved, as you say. Uh, Galle was known as the drug king. That, that was his thing, was drugs. And they were hoping to revive even a bigger drug cartel when he was shotgunned in a, in a restaurant and killed by, uh, these, uh, guys. They called the zips. Uh, these were Sicilian Mafia guys. Sent over here, uh, to, uh, to operate on our soil doing drug, uh, cartels and to associate themselves where they could with the crime families. I, I don’t know about Chicago and drugs. I haven’t really looked into it. I’d be surprised if they didn’t do any, uh, but I don’t think they’re noted for it. Uh, others who know Chicago would know, know more. Uh, but, um, it, it, there’s no question, uh, that, uh, Coosa Nostra was heavily [00:23:00] involved, uh, heavily involved in drugs, uh. And the, uh, importation of, uh, uh, just every form of drug you could, uh, uh, marijuana and whatever it was, they had a habit of also turning these things over, uh, and ga gaining the benefit and not any of the risk. For example, you know, motorcycle gangs were associated with some mob families, and they, they got their drugs from them. They did all the work and cut the mob in, in some of the black neighborhoods. Uh, they went to the resident black, uh, gang leader, uh, and formed relationships. Uh, so they, they, um, uh, they were at it, uh, full scale. Gary: Exactly. And, and even in Kansas City is, uh. Our, our own junior Bradley, he, he formed a relationship with one of the black kingpins at, of Kansas City, Terry Kelton, while he was actually, he was in the joint when this was going on. I Junior always had connections with [00:24:00] people in the joint. Yeah. Did you ever notice that? Yeah. Oh yeah. He had this immense network within the Federal Penitentiary system and, and he, uh, he was supplying the money and, and Kelton had all these contacts out here and, and had been involved with a, um. Heroin operation was turned into cocaine operation into the seventies. And, and then he would put that money out in the street, so to speak, and they’d go buy the drugs and, and make the money. And then Junior would get a big piece of that back. And Kelton. Yeah, he was so heavily involved with them. He even participated. Kelton wanted to have, I believe his wife killed. And, and Bradley even participated in that kind of trying to set up a hit on his wife. ’cause I think she was gonna testify or something. I, I don’t have all the details. Yeah. But you may remember that, I don’t remember if you were still here, were you? Yeah. Yeah. Retired by then. That was No, Bill: no. That happened there. Yeah. Well, you know, we also had, uh, one of our guys who we believe, uh, he was, well, he was a shylock and we believe that what he was doing was lending money. To [00:25:00] some of the people. Yeah. And you know, he could go, his answer was, I didn’t know what they were doing with it. Everybody had, you know, uh, and, uh, but one, one other, uh, indicator to me that the, uh, velas mob wasn’t involved. There would’ve been no other people. If they were, there would’ve been no Kelton’s, not the Jamaicans. Uh, I don’t know if the Bloods came here. But the Jamaicans were heavy. Kelton would, those guys would’ve been suppressed and they were a, you know, to to, to Nick. It was, leave it there. Right. We, we don’t want it. Gary: Yeah. I think Bradley was just, it was a way for him to make money. Bill: Right. And if it had gotten, and like Gary: you say, he was loaning him money to do that on probably at loan shark rates or then some. Bill: Right. And if he had gotten too far involved and it made a wave for Nick, they would’ve killed him. He would’ve been gone. Yeah. Aaron: Yeah. Well, they had a pretty steady stream of income coming in from Vegas as well. Right. Gary: Yeah. That, that’s another thing that, about our family, we had a huge, they had a huge [00:26:00] amount of money coming in from Las Vegas all along, so, right. Bill: Yeah. Yeah. Aaron: Might get into something like that that’s dangerous that you might get busted on that. Bill: You know, there’s, there’s, uh, there’s one other item that I see in that. Uh, a protocol or, or in that dynamic is, um, Kansas City is like a big village. Gary: Yeah. Bill: And the, the Italian community is even more tighter, uh, knit. And I believe that the. It was, uh, Nick’s feeling that they would be ostracized, they would lose any support. A politician would not wanna be backed by somebody that was dealing drugs. And it was important for him, as you know, uh, all of us who worked organized crime, uh, interviewing, uh, people in that community, they didn’t know anything about. There’s no, there’s no mafia here. [00:27:00] We don’t know, we don’t know anything about that never happened. Uh, how about this guy? No, no, no. How about this politician who’s doing it? He’s a good guy. Gary: He’s a good guy. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve heard that. I don’t know how many times he’s a good guy. Yeah. Bill: Now, uh, if it had been the other way and, and the church pe they’ll go into church people, the priest and all this is saying our kids are becoming addicted. Uh, through it, it would’ve ruined, I mean, it would’ve been a big issue for, for Nick in this small community. Yeah. ’cause it is small. Gary: Yep. In, in that world especially, I mean, I, I play golf with a really good guy whose sister was the gal that, that bought that gun that, that Corky ended up with. I won’t mention any names, but I know you know the deal. Yeah. And he’s a good guy and he’s squares square John as anything and. You know, I, who knows, you know, I mean, it’s a, such a small world in Kansas City. Sure, Bill: sure. Yeah. Well, they’ve, um, they’ve supported them and, uh, not [00:28:00] supported them in that way, but supported them in the sense it’s, it, it wasn’t like a direct support, but in the indirect, in indirectly. Yeah. Uh, by, by, uh, ignoring it, by denying it, uh, you know, uh, by not ostracizing these people. That was important to Nick. Yeah. Well this Gary: has been interesting. Fascinating. Bill: Well, as long as they weren’t selling in that, in their community, in the, in the, uh, in the Italian c Italian American community. Gary: And, and, and you know, that’s a good question as far as kicking up, uh, they wouldn’t do that. What they would do, maybe they would borrow money. And pay exorbitant rates when they paid it back. But it would never be couched in those terms of, I’m doing this for you and so here I’m kicking back up to you. This is a piece of your piece of my action that you’re getting. ’cause you’re my guy. It would never be couched in those terms. It would only be couched in terms of a loan shark. Kind of a loan in which you made me a loan. I don’t know. He doesn’t know what I’m doing with it, and I’m gonna [00:29:00] pay him. He loans me $50,000. I’m gonna give him back $75,000 here in about a month or less. So yeah, that’s how that would work in Kansas City. Bill: One, uh, one final item is, uh, indicative of what happened to, uh, Coosa. Nostra. Totally. When the tradition, the traditions were ignored, the new breed came in. These weren’t true osa, Nostra people, greed, power, and all. At the end of, uh, while, while I was retired, many of the cases that started to come to the federal courthouse were some of, uh, in fact, if you remember. Uh, cork son, uh oh yeah. On, um, ripe Tonya’s son. Yeah. His nephew was, was indicted and involved in, in distribution. Gary: Right. Bill: Uh, then the BOA group, there were drug people. Some of those, some of them were. So that was the ch that’s the generational change. If things had continued on, we may have seen a, a drug [00:30:00] organization. Because they didn’t believe in any of this business, uh, of, uh, being careful keeping, uh, a, a, a good, uh, profile the youth. Uh, what has ruined, uh, what ruined Coosa. Ostra. Yeah. Gary: Oh, yeah. Well, our guys actually worked that case on that young and Rife’s kid. He was just a, a dumb ass two bit, kind of hanging out in the co in the, uh, disco bar scene. Sure. Selling little bits of, of, of, uh. Cocaine, Bill: the uh, uh, progression or the digression of the mob. I, what, what I saw one day and I said, look at this. I remember when they all had suits and ties. They were, they were businessmen like everybody else. And even when the ties went out, they were well dressed. Uh, I remember when there was the leather jacket era. They all had leather, leather jacket and sans be slacks. Slacks and Gary: polo shirts and leather jackets. Yes. Yeah. Bill: But they look good, Dan. Um, Nick didn’t allow beards or [00:31:00] mustaches. They had their, then there was a thing in, uh, one of the magazines. Of John Gotti Jr. Oh yeah. And his and his followers. He had a Wifebeater T-shirt on. He had muscles coming out of his ears and he had Bermuda shorts that looked like they came from the Caribbean. And this was the Mob Boss? Yes. I said it’s over Gary: really. And all the rest have wore tracksuits with big gold jeans around their neck. Bill: That was one of the progressions. Yes. From the, into the tracksuits. Then it was into this, I don’t know, beaters. I don’t know what that life, what that style is called. Gary: Really well. This has been fun. This has, this has, uh, been illuminating, enlightening about the history of the, uh, narcotics, uh, investigation and narcotic narcotics law and how we got to where we are. And,

Ouseley, known for his books Open City and Mobsters in Our Midst, shares insights from his years investigating the Kansas City crime family and the Vegas skimming cases. The conversation traces how organized crime evolved after Prohibition, finding new profit in the rising black market for drugs. From the early days when narcotics were sold in pharmacies and corner stores to the complex, international networks run by the Mob, Ouseley explains how organized crime adapted and thrived.

Jenkins and Ouseley discuss the rise of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, the societal shift in attitudes toward drug use, and how policy changes created a perfect storm for the Mob to exploit. Ouseley highlights how figures like Harry Anslinger pushed for punitive drug laws that unintentionally fueled organized crime, and how the government’s focus on punishment over treatment helped entrench addiction and criminal networks. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly

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3:20 The Rise of Narcotics in the Mob

5:22 Early Drug Regulation and Public Response

8:23 The 1800s: Opium and Society

12:08 Government Approaches to Drug Issues

13:54 The Impact of Prohibition on Narcotics

17:42 Consolidation of Narcotics Operations

24:17 Anslinger and the Federal Response

36:26 Kansas City’s Narcotics History Ahead

[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, it’s Gary Jenkins,

[0:02] retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective and later sergeant. Welcome to Gangland Wire. I have a friend of mine that I’m interviewing today. You might notice there’s not going to be any video with a bunch of images in there. It’s FBI agent Bill Ouseley. Bill, he was the case agent for all the skimming from Las Vegas cases from the Kansas City end. We worked with him over the years hand in glove in the intelligence unit. And he’s a good guy. He still lives in Kansas City. He’s written a couple of books, by the way. He’s got Open City, which is the history of the Kansas City mob, starting back in the Black Hand days and going all the way up till about the time he came here in the early 60s. Then he wrote a second book, which is really about his career and all the different cases he worked with additional information about the local Savella family, which would have been the Savella family by the time he got here in the, I think, 1964, maybe. I graduated from high school in 63.

[1:02] Today, we’re going to talk about the history of the mob and narcotics. You know, it’s all a much-discussed subject that whether they approve of them dealing in narcotics. You know, they do on the QT, they do in different ways. They invest money, maybe loan money and high rates of interest, if you will, to narcotics dealers or some of them, you know, deal directly. You know, the Bonanno family was famous for dealing directly with narcotics. Genovese went to jail for dealing in narcotics. So historically.

[1:34] Kansas City, I don’t believe Nick Savella really, he did not approve of it. He didn’t allow his guys to do it directly. There were some people that were indirectly involved in narcotics. Now, whether they kicked money up or whether they were using their own money or somebody else’s money to invest in these narcotics operations, we never really found out. Those books are, I’ll have links to them down below in the show notes. So you might want to get those if you want to know a lot more about the Kansas City crime family and his work here. And by the way, so many of those cases in that book that the second book, Mopters in Our Midst, I think I forgot to say the name of that, Mopters in Our Midst. A lot of those cases I’m reading the book when I first got, it’s like, well, I was there. I did that. I, you know, I, I stirred up this little bit of information and, and which the Bureau then takes and runs with, which is what we do. You know, we, we like, maybe they’ll come to us and they’ll hear about something and we’ll go out and, and run surveillances and get license plate numbers and bring them back. And it’ll help them make, make sense of what’s going on, whatever the investigation ends up being.

[2:44] Today, now listen up. We’re going to plumb the depth of Bill Ouseley’s knowledge about the earliest days of narcotics and the laws that were developed and society’s look at narcotics. To me, it may be a little bit dry for you, but I think it’s a really interesting conversation that I have with Bill. Thanks a lot, guys. With the end of Prohibition, they needed a new field.

[3:13] Narcotics was now starting to become a big deal. You know, it was not just the

[3:18] Chinese and the opium dens. So during Prohibition, the mob didn’t really pay much attention to it. They kind of kept their fingers in a little bit. Yeah, because Cork got arrested and this guy got arrested. And there were guys dabbling in it. But it wasn’t the moneymaker that it became. I see. Until the mob gets into it, then they get in. And that’s what the story is here. One of the earliest of these groups to put narcotics on a major business basis was Narcotics Syndicate here. The Kansas City Narcotics Syndicate. And the story of how they put it together. And then, of course… In 1930, finally, they came to the conclusion the laws were good, but they needed to be enforced. And in 1930, the Bureau of Narcotics was established.

[4:14] Anslinger came in. He was a tough guy. What interested me was not only the beginnings of so many of these Cosenostra families and how they started, and that’s what I covered in Open City, the history of the beginnings of the Kansas City family. But as I went through that, what was very interesting to me on a sociological basis was how the mob continually followed and prospered as regulation came in. The greatest of those examples, prohibition. They regulated liquor. Thousands and millions wanted liquor. Somebody had to provide it. And the mob was there or was created during that period. I could go through sports, horse racing, boxing, and all sorts of areas that the government or the state decided to come in and regulate that particular activity. And then somebody had to fulfill the black market need because the customers don’t just quit.

[5:19] You know, prohibition came in. If anything, it made more drunks. So anyway, one of the stories within the story is how this happened with the narcotics situation and that maybe it wouldn’t have been as big as it became if there had been more thought behind legislation, more enforcement.

[5:43] More dedication to eradicating the problem rather than just at the time suppressing it. You have to go back, and where are.

[5:53] We’re talking now about the Midwest and Kansas City. This has been duplicated in other areas. But keep in mind that my focus is on what happened in our area. Again, it’s mirrored around the country. But in the 1800s, there was drug use in the 1800s. It was recreational. It was doctors prescribing these elixirs and opium-based medicines. People’s problems. They were even treating addicts by just keeping them in supply. There was no regulation at that time, no government regulation. Most states didn’t bother with it. And at that time, they sort of blamed the problem as it developed on the Chinese.

[6:45] Most of the opium coming in was coming in from China. The Chinese had the opium smoking dens and what have you. And it was a major situation at that time. But as with all of these vices, the time came when the public became concerned. And just like they were concerned with liquor, that led to the prohibition. This happened with the drug use, which was unregulated. And the social workers and activists in the community started to raise the issue, and that led to the first regulation by the government of any substance, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1908. So regulation began then, in a sense. Soon, states started jumping in with laws and regulations and what have you. What we need to also focus on, because of how this developed, is who were the pool of drug users at that time?

[8:01] They were the street people, thieves, pimps, whores, the police characters. This was not your corporate board. This was not cocaine up on Madison Avenue. And many, many women were addicted.

[8:18] There was a product called Laudanum, which was an elixir, and it had opium in it. And they took it for various reasons. And if they couldn’t get it, their doctor would prescribe it for them. In fact, the doctors continued to be an enormous supply of opium at that time. So, you have to consider the character of the pool of users that was available. It wasn’t a big deal.

[8:47] But with regulation, as it always happens…

[8:51] The criminal element starts to come in because as you suppress one thing, that need has to be fulfilled. And when it’s things like alcohol or drugs or betting, sports betting, or wanting to go to the prize fights and it’s illegal, they’ll make it legal. I’m kind of curious about the, yeah, really, the 1800s, my dolly off for women with menstrual cramps. Yeah, well, they did a little dose in between. But now, like, I always think of these early days of narcotics and why it even started regulating it as a crime rather than some kind of a medical problem. Because that’s the that’s kind of the deal today. You know, wait a minute is maybe this we’re not doing so well regulating this as a crime. Maybe we should look at this as a medical problem. So back then, now, part I’d always thought was because, part of because what you said about it was criminals who already were wanting to take drugs and get high and maybe use that as a substitute for alcohol. Either one will make you high and only one of them, you know, it smells on your breath and you start stumbling around a lot worse than maybe if you’re taking some kind of opium or you’re smoking opium. It seemed like they just nod out. But anyhow, be that as it may, I just wonder why was that like the only way they had to look at it as a law enforcement criminal issue rather than, well, these women, they seem to be needing this stuff more and more.

[10:20] That seems to be a problem. Shouldn’t we do something medically?

[10:25] Well, I can’t address all of the reasonings that went behind it, but I think it’s inherent in how the government approaches things. Initially, they’re looking at taxing this product as a way of regulating it rather than enforcing it or, as you say, going at it from a different direction. It was pretty much the same with alcohol. Why not treat the drunks? No, they banned alcohol. So the government sort of doesn’t look from that standpoint. In fact, there was a huge argument when the next major legislation came in, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, there was a huge to-do about, well, are you people just looking to make money? You don’t care about this thing.

[11:21] You’re going about it as taxation. And they said, well, no, we’re not. You know, we’re going to ban something and lose revenue if you’re talking about taxation. But you can see there was this dichotomy in people feeling how it was being approached. But all I can say to it is from what I see in history, how the government approaches is these type of things, vice kinds of activity, gambling, drinking, boxing, horse racing, all at one time, all they tried to do is regulate it. They never looked at any other alternatives.

[12:03] And usually they never had sufficient enforcement to go with it. And that’s what caused a lot of the problem. I think probably Bill and.

[12:14] More than likely, it’s because a lot of people that are attracted to that may be kind of on the gray areas of life anyhow that are attracted to heavy drinking, to bars, to gambling and prostitution and things like that. And plus, there’s, of course, prostitution. There are certain biblical prohibitions of things like that, and probably narcotics use. I think of the early, in the 30s, narcotics use, you always thought of the jazz musicians and people that lived in that kind of netherworld, if you will, kind of exist in that, not in the Square John world and not in the total criminal world, but kind of in between in those kinds of worlds. Maybe that may be some reason why they looked at it more as a, let’s make this into more of a crime and more of a crime, and that’s a way to control it. Well, I think you have a good point there because.

[13:06] As I said, this pool was not a huge pool. I mean, there were a lot of narcotics users, but as I say, it wasn’t the social problem that it became where the middle class, the high class, the wealthy, the entertainment field, where, you know, drugs became as common as a Coors Light beer. At that time, they may have thought, you know, this is restricted to a certain element. And if we can get the doctors out of this, we can handle a lot of it. And at first, the doctors didn’t comply. But then they started cracking down on them. And of course, that shorted the supply also.

[13:50] So gradually, we’re leading to a black market.

[13:55] And I won’t jump ahead of myself, but we’ll get to the point where these entities that developed are going to take a rather modest need and they’re going to grow it into something that we see in the last 50 years or so.

[14:15] There’s a shortage out there of this product, and there seems to be getting more and more demand. And to find more of this product, which would be an opiate at that point in time, I’m not sure where marijuana figures into this. It may or may not. It comes later. It comes later. And so it’s an opiate, and we don’t really seem to grow opium poppies. That’s where they come from in the United States. So that’s when they start reaching out overseas. And this is a point in time when the Black Hand is setting up in your various Eastern to Middle West cities, which were criminal organizations with ties directly back to the Mediterranean area. And best I can tell, I know they grow a lot of poppies in Turkey and around in the Middle East. And they have these natural old ties, trade routes, if you will, from Sicily back into Turkey and Lebanon and around the Middle East. Is that kind of how, you know, is that, would that be the genesis then of the organization of this, you know, this product and getting, creating a supply and bringing the supply in? And then finding the customers? Well, as this situation we talked about, we’re talking about the turn of the century, the early 1900s.

[15:39] The Cosa Nostra doesn’t exist. The Black Hand is really not coordinated or organized. They’re establishing themselves, trying to get a foothold, but they’re pretty much relegated to the little Itlis of the city. They can get drugs from their friends in Italy and all that, but they’re not of the ilk yet to establish really big labs over there and transporting it. And this is still the embryo stage. Now, they’re supplying a little bit of drugs to this small pool of nerdo wells. It isn’t even a big population of users yet. And then before they can really maybe organize if they’re thinking about drugs.

[16:32] Prohibition comes along. Well, now they’re diverted in their interest to something way bigger than narcotics. Your pool of people who want to drink and all of the side lights that go with alcohol was enormous. It was an enormous potential. And the mob, pretty much around the country focused their attention on Prohibition. So in this early stage, historically, the Jews in New York and other places, some of the other ethnic groups that were, they did most of the narcotics. The Italian-Sicilian faction wasn’t fully developed yet. Our family didn’t develop until Prohibition when all of the black hand groups came together. And they’re pretty well focused on liquor, and it’s huge. It’s huge. In fact, the international lines of communication established through prohibition would be used later for drugs.

[17:43] So at this era, it’s not a big thing yet. They’re dabbling in it. Some of our characters who were attached to the family were arrested for narcotics. There weren’t big sentences. Most of them did maybe a year, if anything. And so there wasn’t any suppression of it, really. So in this early era, the narcotics…

[18:08] Trade, at least in this part of the world here and in many other areas, was relegated to, as I say, to Jewish criminal organizations, Irish criminal organization, and the Italians would come in later. So this is, you know, we’re going 1933, 34 is kind of the prohibition is winded down. When did it end? I can’t remember.

[18:32] 1933. Let’s see. It went from 20 to 33. 33, okay, that’s what I thought. So, you know, it’s winding down. That’s got to be a huge loss of money because, I mean, they could turn their speakeasies into legitimate clubs. I understand that. But you can’t make near as much money off of a barrel of beer or a carton, a case of whiskey as you could before. And I always thought of them moving more into gambling at that time, maybe even a little bit of the continuing with some organized prostitution because it was more susceptible. Prostitution is not susceptible to organization today, but back then it was more susceptible to organization. And I always thought of that, but they moved into narcotics and particularly what would be an example of how that would work here in Kansas City. Because it would be representative in Kansas City as in every other Chicago and New York and probably Tampa and all the cities that had a major family would have worked the same way. Well, yeah, because when the drug business was put on a corporate level where they were going to not only deal with this small pool, but they were going to expand it.

[19:55] You know, just as they did in Prohibition. If there were 12 bars on Main Street, they put in 40. When they get into something, it isn’t just to supply some demand, take over where someone else left off.

[20:11] The Cosa Nostra is like Walmart. They are going to promote their products. As you said, that gambling was one of the things that they saw on the horizon. They knew the wind was, it was in the wind that prohibition was going to be ending. It had done its deal. The people didn’t want it anymore. And so they were aware of this. In fact, they were supposed to have had a major meeting in Atlantic City in the 30s to determine where are we going to go from here. And so gambling was one of the areas. is they said, okay. And then we saw the plush clubs, the carpet joints, the bookie operations, the racetracks that they got into. They went in full blast. But there’s always enough people to go into other directions. And one of the other directions they saw as a moneymaker and has had great potential was the narcotics industry. So with the, and let me back up just a minute here before we get into that era. One of the main historical events of that era was in 1930.

[21:29] They established the Bureau of Narcotics. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics was established, and it was to enforce the Harrison Act from 1914.

[21:43] As I say, it had not been enforced to any great degree. That was typical of the government.

[21:51] They didn’t correlate law with enforcement. The regulation created a black market. The drug situation wasn’t changing that much, but it was still small in relatively to prohibition. The narcotics agents were.

[22:13] Prior to that, the Harrison Act was updated, and they banned all importation of heroin. And no use at all, no medical use. It just, you couldn’t bring it in, but it was coming in. So Henry Enslinger, the first director, he dispatched his people to Europe to find the sources of this drug and how it was getting here. And what’s important about that, their early investigations abroad provided the intelligence of this blossoming criminal organization that would later become Cosa Nostra. They were the first and only NARC bureau in the federal government to cry out that this syndicate exists here, okay? By 1932, Cosa Nostra had consolidated. So we had that situation of at least one federal agency was seeing the writing on the wall. Nobody followed suit.

[23:21] One of the things that happened, Anslinger, when he took over, he was a very, very forceful director. He took this seriously. They were the first to start using, I mean, on a broad scale against a narcotics organization informants, undercover people, all of that kind of stuff, which was not very well used in that era. But he was the one who said, anyone that has heroin, you know, is guilty. So I think that’s where we came to the user being included. He wanted it that strong. This is Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Treasury Department intends to pursue a relentless warfare against the despicable, dope-bettling vulture who preys on the weakness of his fellow man.

[24:17] And he was also the one who lobbied and resulted in the first Marijuana Act, which was like 1938 or so. And because he saw all drugs as evil and had to be addressed. So the protocol of what’s heroin, what’s this, how they do it, pretty much was something I don’t know how exactly they labelized all these drugs, but they didn’t want any of them. It’s probably as Harry Anslinger decided this is heroin and this is marijuana and this is illegal. Well, you know, they had been exempting many of the medical facilities, even some of the major producers that supplied the hospital. They had made exceptions for some of these people. In fact, you know, they made the exception for the doctors back then, but they had restricted them. And, of course, with his money to be involved, the doctors continued to put out prescripts like we have today. You know, it was similar to the opioid situation today where…

[25:34] You know, pharmacies are in a town of 200 are filling 6,000 prescriptions for an opiate. And drug, the major drug people today are sending 100,000 units to a city of 10,000. You know, and they say, well, we don’t know anything about. It was the same thing here. The doctors, don’t you do that? Well, of course, so-and-so gets a prescription. Well, finally, they really started monitoring them, you know, with the drug people. They came in and they had to have records and what have you, and they sent doctors to jail. And that’s the best deterrent for a doctor. I guess it’s a little bit like during Prohibition, you could go to a doctor or a pharmacist and get medical whiskey. You can get a bottle of whiskey that was prescribed for you. Yeah, well, they could do— Yeah, if it’s only a teaspoon full with some lemon and honey.

[26:30] It’s a connect the dots kind of thing. We do this, they do that. We have to approach that and then they do this. And so many times that could have been prevented if the ramifications and fallout of my legislation, when I propose this, the fallout should be considered. You know, during our time, Gary, you may remember, Kansas promoted a bingo law. Oh, yeah, sure.

[27:05] And it had to go through a VFW or that type of club. They had to apply for the license. Well, there was no regulation to go with it. They had maybe one guy for the entire state or something. So the mob went in and created a group that was, I can’t think of the word now. It was like a straw group. It was like a nonprofit straw group when they did that and then set up a bingo game. And you looked at the board of directors of that nonprofit that was supposed to be taking that money and doing some kind of good with it. And it was all these different mob wives and in-laws and stuff like that. So, you know, this has been a historical problem with legislation. Maybe sometimes there’s nothing you could do. But I think a good example for our community here is when Missouri legalized the casinos.

[28:04] They used all of the intelligence and information and documentation from the Vegas cases that were broken, from the intelligence from they hired the right commission. My former boss, Bill Quinn, was put on the commission, and I knew he’d be honest that a day is long. And they have not had a big problem. No, not at all. So they did the right thing. Legislation combined with a consideration of the fallout and the unintended consequences. And you realize that when there’s a lot of money to be made, that you need to really vet the people who are in control of these things. And they didn’t really do that very well in the 30s. Politicians were a little bit shady already. And so they just did not do that at all.

[28:56] That’s what Dan Slinger and the Bureau of Narcotics said about doing. They were going to try to cut off the trade routes to find out where it was going, how it was going, who was involved. Of course, by this time, as they get into the 40s and all, they’re starting to put together the French connection, how the labs were in Marseille, they were hiding the drugs in various packages or whatever, you know, cars and boxes and pottery and whatever you could think of. And then later, the Sicilian Mafia, as they increased, they had their labs, they had their trade routes. So that’s what they were trying to develop. And the legitimate people who to get their drugs would have to go through a more legitimate process. These would have to be vetted places that are not labs in some basement. You know, these were accepted and regulated providers of opium. So there had to be some of those.

[30:09] And if you have an exception, and we don’t grow poppies here or make heroin, although I guess you could. I don’t know that about it. But there was a process for that. The problem was, as the drug addiction and the drug organizations grew, that became the problem. Not some guy trying to give a prescription for laudanum.

[30:36] And so the real problem that the Federal Narcotics Bureau had to address was the huge amounts coming in to very large, sophisticated criminal organizations. It probably started out just like it still has developed today in South America. You have a really poor community in Turkey, rural community where people barely live from hand to mouth. Anyhow, you’ve got these little farmers out raising these poppy fields, and a lot of them are being sold to the legitimate people. But they probably found out they could make a little extra money on the side, and you’re going to have criminal organizations all around the Mediterranean anyhow. So they, you know, organize some of these farmers and create, you know, poppy fields that aren’t on the book, shall we say. And then they figure out these other lines of transport, you know, on end to where you can get it refined. And then on where there’s a market over in the United States. And it’s exactly what’s happened in Colombia and Peru and Mexico and all over the Western Hemisphere. And I guess it really started back then, it appears to me like. Well, that’s a good point to bring up. First of all, you’re talking about foreign entities. You know, Turkey and wherever those countries are that have huge poppy industry, that’s big money for not only the government.

[32:05] That’s their, like you say, that’s their livelihood. The government isn’t going to suppress the poppy growers. Our State Department is, they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. I mean, they want to go to Turkey and say, we’re going to cut off all your money if one poppy seeds or any of this gets into our country. They’re not going to do that, you know, because the, well, political.

[32:31] We need their support. We need to put a missile base there. whatever it is. So these people have a free hand in growing poppies. Not much you can do about that. Once the syndicate says, we are going to put heroin on a major basis, then they go and make the contacts.

[32:52] They make contacts with that guy in Columbia, this farmer out here, and they make a contract. We’ll take all of the poppy that you can grow, and we’re going to give you more than you’re going to get. And then they create the illegal labs. The poppy seeds are transported to Sicily, to the French people, or whoever is establishing these illicit processing plants. The heroin is then produced there. It’s very difficult to suppress something like heroin from its origin in the poppy fields. And it sounds like this really started back in the early 1900s and just has grown and developed a little bit more. The more there is a demand, the more their supply is going to continue to grow because those turkeys poppy farmers aren’t going to grow a bunch of poppies that they don’t have someplace to sell. And so it’s just slowly but surely grown over the years. It goes back to what I mentioned is once the decision was made that.

[34:02] Drugs will be our major, one of the major things. We are going to expand to make money.

[34:10] Okay. Once, and of course, being that the Italian Sicilian people, mobs, had open connections to the old country, that helped. But once they decided drugs is going to be on our agenda, then the rest of the system started to come to play. They sent their people over. They made contacts. They made contacts with the people who could get the poppies, or they went and did it themselves. But generally, they relied on their compadres, other illicit drug operations, whether they be French or Turkish or what. The connections were made and the lines were open and that increased the whole system. So it goes back to what I said earlier. When the mom gets into something, it isn’t just to take care of a few people or to pick up where somebody may have left off. Their idea is to expand it into a business where we’re going to make new customers.

[35:24] We’re going to promote this. And what they did in the big cities was. The mob guys went into the ethnic neighborhoods, the black neighborhoods, the Hispanic neighborhoods, whatever, or any neighborhoods, the poor neighborhood, and they were like hawking drugs. They made it cheap to begin with. They hooked people, you know, but they promoted this. And so the entire system grew as the mob, mainly to Cosa Nostra, as they outlived all the other organizations. But as they grew and promoted this operation, that whole system of growing, transporting, laboratories, importation, that became a corporate entity.

[36:18] They had, you know, salesmen. They had whatever you need.

[36:22] And we’ll see that in a minute if we get to the Kansas City syndicate. Next time, we’re going to look at Kansas City narcotics and the Kansas City crime family and what they did in the narcotics trade. They were heavily involved back in the 30s. By the 60s, 70s, it doesn’t seem like they were so much. And no maid guys were for sure. But the brother of Nick Civella, Cork Civella, got caught with heroin back in 1935-36. Bill will tell us about that. Don’t forget, if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, if you’ve been in the service, you can go to the VA. If not, go to Anthony Ruggiano down in Florida. He is a former proposed member of the Gambino crime family now.

[37:10] He’s now never went into witness protection. I don’t think he testified against anybody. I can’t remember. I interviewed him. I should. But he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down there, and he’s got a hotline on his website, and maybe you can even go into treatment where he is. If you have a problem with gambling, 1-800-BETS-OFF in Missouri, every state that has gambling is going to have some kind of way to find some kind of help. If you have a problem with gambling, you know, gambling addiction is, that’s what the mob lived off of was degenerate gamblers that had an addiction to gambling, get that loan shark money out there and man you know you’re on the hook you’re their slave for the rest of your life so just keep that in mind and you start making all these bets and then you’re losing money and these prop bets on the uh the uh apps and all that and you know it’s just not for me and i’ve got good friends that that do that but you know it’s just uh if you do have a problem with it you know i’m just saying that there is a way out so thanks a lot guys uh don’t forget i like to ride motorcycles i forgot to say that you guys out there in your big old wif 150s watch out for us next episode we’re going to talk about the kansas city crime family and heroin thanks guys.

Kurt shares a deeply personal account of his childhood in Elmwood Park, an Italian-American neighborhood where the surface was peaceful but the undercurrent ran dark. He recalls days spent playing sports and evenings surrounded by neighbors who seemed like family—but behind the closed doors of their three-flat home, fear and control ruled.

As the episode unfolds, Kurt discusses the moment he began to understand the truth about their father’s real occupation. Taught to lie and protect the family’s image, they told classmates their dad was an engineer—masking a far more dangerous truth. The psychological burden of carrying this secret is a recurring theme in Kurt’s story.

Kurt paints a vivid picture of mob family dynamics, the juxtaposition of family life and violence, and the emotional toll of being raised by a man, he both feared and revered. He reveals the lasting impact of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his father and how it contributed to his own diagnosis of complex PTSD.

Listeners will hear firsthand what living through the Family Secrets Trial was like, a landmark case that exposed the Chicago Outfit’s inner workings. Kurt Calabrese speaks candidly about the threats he and his family faced, the betrayal from his brother Frank Jr.’s cooperation with the FBI, and his complicated relationship with the truth, loyalty, and justice.

We also learn about Kurt’s marriage to Angela LaPietra—the granddaughter of another mob figure—and the intense family conflict that followed. From physical altercations with his father to the ripple effects on his children, Kurt doesn’t hold back. Click here for Kurt’s website.

Finally, Kurt introduces his podcast, Underbelly: Killing Kurt, where he digs deeper into his story to expose the unseen scars left by a life entangled in organized crime.

This episode is an emotional and eye-opening exploration of how mob life impacts not just communities but also the families at its core. Kurt Calabrese is not just telling his story—he’s reclaiming it. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here! [0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here

[0:03] in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have a story today and an interview, as you can see. My interviewee is Kurt Calabrese. Now, Kurt Calabrese is from Chicago and he grew up in a Chicago outfit family. Now, a lot of you guys know, if you’re real mob aficionados, you know about the Family Secrets Trial. And his father, Kurt’s father, was Frank Calabrese Sr., his brother, Frank Calabrese Jr., who we had on the show several years ago. One of my earliest interviews, actually. And then his uncle, Nick Calabrese, ended up going to Witness Protection Program. And so that’s why they called it the Family Secrets Trial, because it was all centered around the Calabrese family. So I really look forward to talking to Kurt. And Kurt, welcome.

[0:53] Thank you, Gary. Thank you for having me. So, Kurt, we talked a little bit before the show. And, you know, what I found kind of fascinating in a way was partly not the

[1:04] mafia stuff particularly, but your childhood. You all grew up in this three-story or three, what’d you call it? A three-flat? Flat, yeah. Three-flat house where your father, mother, grandparents, your brother, you, your uncle, Nick, all lived in this same house.

[1:27] Now, tell us a little bit about what that was like. And you might talk about the neighborhood, too. So, you know, tell us a little bit about what that was like. Well, the house that we lived in, actually, my father had built. It’s a three flat. It’s three apartments. And he had a family room, a very big family room built onto the house also with a garage and a room in it. Very unique building that he had built. But he had it built for family. So we grew up there. We lived there almost our whole lives. And I was in a community called Elmwood Park. Which is a suburb right outside Chicago, in fact, right on the border of Chicago. A very quiet neighborhood, very, I’m not going to say ethnic, but a lot of Italian grew up there. A lot of different nationalities, but probably predominantly Italian. It was a very nice neighborhood to grow up in. Everybody knew each other, very closely knit neighborhood. One of those neighborhoods where you didn’t have to lock your doors. A lot of things went on in that neighborhood. It was a very closely knit neighborhood, and I enjoyed it. I loved growing up where I grew up because I had a lot of friends that I grew up with, and there was a lot to do.

[2:47] Outside of the house, we had a pretty normal childhood as far as playing baseball and hanging out with our friends and going to school and played football and basketball. A lot of sports inside our home was a little bit different than it was in other people’s homes, which I didn’t realize until I wasn’t a kid anymore when I realized that what went on in our house didn’t go on in other homes. Interesting. Now, I’ve noticed that in Kansas City, our little Italy section and other cities, I see people talking about their neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods.

[3:22] Back at one time, they were really safe. Nobody was going around breaking in houses, let alone robbing people on the streets. They were really safe because people took care of each other. They were out on the streets. They weren’t hiding back in their homes all the time. They were out on the streets. Said, there’s a stranger that came through there. You know, everybody had their eye on it. Believe me, I know it was a policeman working an Italian neighborhood, a Peckerwood policeman. You know, we call non-Italians or Peckerwoods down here. I don’t know if you call non-Italians Peckerwoods up there, but they call us Peckerwoods. You see a Peckerwood driving through there, you give him the eye, like, who is that guy? Was it like that in your neighborhood? Yes, it was. It was, you knew, like I said, everybody kind of knew each other. And if somebody came into that neighborhood and didn’t belong there or was doing something they shouldn’t be doing, it was, you knew right away. You were, there were people out on the street all the time. And I mean, it was one of a few Italian neighborhoods. I mean, there were probably five or six very strong Italian neighborhoods in the Chicago and Chicagoland area that were, you know, predominantly Italian and Elwood Park being one of them. And not to mention that, uh, you know, there was a lot of mob guys that lived in our neighborhood So that, you know, that was something that made people feel safe back then in those neighborhoods, you know, and people still talk about that because, uh, you know, you don’t really have neighborhoods like that anymore, unfortunately.

[4:45] Yeah. I have to ask in Kansas city, there was this deal started in Italian neighborhood. If you tied a red ribbon around your, uh, steering column, nobody would break into that car. Did you have anything like that? That warned people off? There was a mob car, Bob connected car. No, not really. I mean, you know, growing up a lot of, a lot of.

[5:06] Guys I grew up with and people in the neighborhood had, uh, horns hanging from their mirrors, uh, you know, the Italian horn, uh, which warded off evil and, you know, the evil eye. So, I mean, that, that was something that maybe could be considered similar, but a lot of, a lot of people that were Italian just had those hanging from their mirrors. So nothing like, like that, that I can remember. That was probably before my time. I saw one when I was a young police, but I saw when this guy got killed in his car, You know, I was overlooking at the car just out of curiosity. I was a street policeman still. There was a red ribbon around the steering column. So I thought,

[5:42] well, you know, that rumor is true. So growing up, your father and your Uncle Nicky are involved in this outfit business, shall we say. When did you first start to realize that there was something a little bit different? I know on The Sopranos, they did a whole show about the kids starting to realize that their dad was a little bit different than the other dads. When did you first notice that? It was grammar school, probably mid-grammar school. I started to, there were, you know, there was people talking and, you know, there was a story that was put in a newspaper. I think it was about sixth grade maybe. And it was on the front page of the newspaper was a picture of a house. And it was a story about, you know, organized crime, about the outfit. It was funny because that day.

[6:31] We didn’t get the newspaper a lot in our house, but that day, particular day, there was no newspapers around the area. So it was, you know, we weren’t supposed to see that, but, um, and we didn’t, I didn’t see it personally. It was pointed out to me by some friends. So I guess it would be easier to say that my friends kind of caught on quicker than I did. You know, what was going on? Again, that was going on, but what, that our lives were different, that my father was different, that what he did was different, you know, because as kids, we were told. You know, he was a engineer that he was, uh, he was in the carpet business that, you know, things to, to say to people if we were ever asked. So, you know, the way we were raised with an iron fist, you know, we followed whatever we were told to say. And so that’s, you know, that’s how we explained it when I get school, when your teacher would ask, what does your father do? Or your friends would ask, what does your father do? You know, those were the answers that we were given to give people. It seems like I remember your brother, Frank, saying that he was an engineer and, and like, you know, he would tell that at school and they would say like a, like a train engineer and say, no, like just an engineer. Like he didn’t really even know what that meant other than he was an engineer. Right. That’s where it ended. It was, he was an engineer. We couldn’t explain it because we didn’t know.

[7:51] So, you know, it was, you know, just an engineer. And when people ask, just an engineer, that’s what he was. And for most people in your community, that would probably be enough. They would say, okay, let’s move on. It was for people. The teachers wanted more, but friends and parents, that was enough for them. That was enough. You know, another thing I have noticed with mob families, and I find this fascinating that you have, on one hand, now I worked a lot of criminals as a policeman, but with mob guys, you have this family. You have children at home, you have Christmases, you have Easter,

[8:31] you have the normal holidays, you give presents. But I’ve talked to some mob kids and they talked about all the, what they didn’t realize at the time was all the swag that they would get in there and all the new stuff and boxes and some of the presents that would show up at Christmas time. Do you remember that? Was he bringing a lot of swag in for you guys as presents and to do things with? Yeah, not as much for the holidays, for Christmas and stuff, but there was always something in our house. There was always, like one time he came home with a box of hockey sticks. There was like 25 professional hockey sticks. They were, you know, and we didn’t think anything of it. I mean, we used them. Yeah. It was stuff like that. There was stuff that he would bring home in quantity.

[9:18] And, you know, again, we just, it was kind of, It wasn’t odd. It was kind of normal, but it was, if you go back to think of it now on, you tell people now, I mean, that’s, you know, evidently this stuff was falling off the back of a truck somewhere. Yeah.

[9:34] Yeah. It fell off a truck. The great euphemism for having some stolen property. Oh, it just fell off a truck. Oh, okay. I’ll take some.

[9:43] And what’s different about us, Gary, is we weren’t, we never asked. We were so, the discipline in our house was you really couldn’t ask somebody, hey, dad, where’d you get these? Or, hey, dad, how did you get these? It was just, you just, you know, you just lived. You didn’t ask questions about anything, especially if it was something that he was giving you. It wasn’t like, you know, hey, where’d you get this? Or, you know, where did this come from? It was just happy to have it, you know, which I think is different, was different in our home than it was in a lot of other guys’ homes that were part of that life. because, you know, my father wasn’t, you really couldn’t ask him anything. You really couldn’t, couldn’t really have a conversation with him about anything. Cause he just, you know, you couldn’t ask questions. You couldn’t, you just had to accept whatever was given you or whatever was

[10:32] told to you as an answer and you live with it. You deal with it. So that gets around to the, you know, next logical question is I believe he had a pretty violent temper. How did he express that in the home? Was it, I mean, out in the streets, he might kill somebody. He did kill several people in the home. He’s not going to kill anybody, but did you see a lot of evidence of that violent temper or did he keep it under control at home? No, he, he was very violent in our house. He, he was, especially with me, he was very, very hands-on. He was very abusive. He was very, you know, he, he bullied me.

[11:08] He, he wanted you to fear him and he, he enjoyed that fear. when he knew that you feared him. And I literally shook around my dad. I literally shook. I mean, that’s how he was with me. He was, you know, I mean, the beatings and the, you know, the abuse and the, you know, both physical and verbal, you know, that, that’s how he was with me, especially. And, and I don’t, you know, I can’t really answer why, you know, people have asked me, Hey, why was your dad like that with you? You know, I mean, he brought it home with them. It was in our house. And, you know, again, at an early age, he, you know, he involved us in his life, you know, gradually at the beginning. But I mean, you know, and I, me personally, didn’t want anything to do with that life.

[11:54] And reason being is I didn’t want anything to do with my dad. I mean, he was my dad and I loved him and I respected him. And I, and I, you know, I was there with, for him, for anything he ever needed all the way till the end. But I did not want to be part of anything he was part of because he just was the hardest person in the world to get along with. And he was he was abusive. And, you know, and again, you know, the why would you want to be around a world with someone who, you know, who’s that way? You know, I mean, he could have been a postman or, you know, or whatever.

[12:27] And I and if he was that way, I make me not want to be around them. And that’s, you know, he used the term sad sack when he referred to me in code. And the reason being is because if you looked at me, I had that look on my face my whole life. I just did not want to be around him. I feared him and I shook around him and he made me shake. And again, for nothing, just for, that’s just the way he was. And people, and once I saw people on the street act that way around him, you know, and a lot of things started to make sense to me. Yeah. You probably knew you had to walk on eggshells is what I hear you’re saying around him.

[13:09] And that continually abuse, that continual fear, even though he wasn’t going off at the present time, you never knew what was going to set him off. Right. And I guess one of your defenses was to just look down and be kind of downtrodden because you knew that was a way maybe to keep him from going off on you.

[13:30] Yeah, I would hope that it would, whatever, but it didn’t. I mean, when I, whenever I put my head down or I had that look on my face, he would, he would point it out and he would, he almost made fun of it. You know, that’s how, that’s how the sad sack came up. I mean, it was like a joke, you know, look, look at him. He’s, you know, it was always looks like a mope or always looks like, you know, the look on his face is like, he’s not happy. Well, I wasn’t happy. I mean, it was, I didn’t have a good poker face. So, and, and, and Gary, what you got to understand is this didn’t happen occasionally. This was every day. This was part of my life every day. This wasn’t an occasional him getting mad or him an occasional, you know, going, you know, going off on me. This, this way he was in walking on eggshells was every day. And it was, and that’s what I, what, what I want people to try to understand. And that’s what I talk about in, you know, in, in my, uh, in the podcast is, is, you know, this was every day. This wasn’t a portion of my life. This wasn’t, uh, this was every day. And, and, you know, it’s had, it’s, it has its effect on me. It’s had its effect. I mean, it’s still, still till this day. I mean, it’s never going to go away.

[14:37] I believe it. Matter of fact, we’ve been a little bit remiss.

[14:40] We should have brought this up earlier. Kurt is now part of a ongoing, I don’t know, eight, eight, eight, eight series of podcasts called underbelly killing Kurt, which is part of a larger podcast, a professional ran by a company, if you will, a podcast. And so they’re in the middle of that right now. You’ve got a couple more episodes, I think, come out, and then you’re going to do some wrap up. He even mentioned it, guys, to give you a little teaser on this podcast, you got to start listening to it. It’s good. I’ve listened to some of them myself. And at the end, Kurt said he gave me a little teaser. They might release some audio of his Uncle Nicky Calabrese at the end. Now, we don’t know for sure, and he’s not committing to me, but that’s a little teaser. You might get a little of the actual voice of Nicky, his Uncle Nicky Calabrese. Because if you remember, a lot of you guys are real aficionados, but after the skimming from Las Vegas trials took out, Angelo LaPietra, Iupa.

[15:44] Jackie Cerrone took out these high echelon guys. The next one was a family secrets trial in which his Uncle Mickey testified and his brother Frank testified and took down his dad’s crew for all these murders and also took down, I believe, Jimmy Marcello for the Spalatro brothers, which was kind of the next boss. I mean, it really, between those two prosecutions, just about decimated the Chicago outfit. Wouldn’t you agree, Kirk? Oh, yes. Yes, definitely.

[16:16] Had to be a really tense time. I guess your dad was in jail during the trial. But you’re talking about your dad. Now, when he realized that maybe there was something going on, you know, he saw surveillance on himself or he knew people were asking, FBI agents were asking questions in places that they shouldn’t be, that, you know, people that really might know something to hurt him. Did he get even more tense then? Was there a lot more anger? What was his life? I always wondered, does it ever bother him that we, as law enforcement, are after him? Does it ever bother him at all? They never acted like it.

[16:55] You know what he was he taught us at a young age to always be respectful to to everyone including law enforcement um never never give anybody a reason to you know to have a problem with you uh so he you know he was he was always the same way he was with people especially strangers especially people he didn’t know and he was very even keel he was you know he didn’t get excited I did when, when stuff was going on and, and a lot of stuff was going on at that time. Um, yeah, he, he was very, uh, you know, he, he, he was very edgy. He was very easy to, to get mad. I mean, but, but again, to me, that was everyday life. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t different to me, but people, you know, outside of his family, you know, noticed it, recognized it. And, um, you know, I, I, I don’t know. I think you’re probably aware of, I mean, during the family secrets trial, you know, my family was threatened. You know, I, I, my life was threatened. There was a, there was a fake bomb put on my porch at my home, uh, on the day of the jury selection for that case. There was, uh, rats put on my doorstep previously to that, um, two white rats with nooses around their necks.

[18:12] Um, so I, my life was a lot different than the stories you’re going to read in the family secrets books. And, you know, that’s one of the reasons why I did this podcast, because I wanted to be able to explain to people what I went through, what my family went through because of my father, because of the life that he chose for himself and for us. You know, and that’s where I think that’s a little bit more unique for people, because I actually dealt with that stuff. I mean, it didn’t happen to anyone else. It happened to me and I didn’t cooperate. Yeah. I refused to cooperate. I refused to talk. That’s one of the reasons why, you know, I’m speaking my piece now and doing the podcast. And when and the name of it, Killing Kurt, I mean, this story is killing me. It’s it’s it’s taken its toll on me, you know, especially since I came home from prison. You know, I did two years in prison. I made a deal, cut a deal and pled out so that my family could get their deals. The government hinged my deal, their deals on my deal. My father, my uncle, and my brother had negotiated pleas, but they wouldn’t accept them unless I agreed to plead out too.

[19:23] And unfortunately, had I had my day in court and I was able to get severed from the case, I think I would have won my case because I wasn’t charged with the same things that they were charged with. Even though I was part of that life and I wasn’t charged with any of this stuff because there was no evidence to charge me.

[19:42] To me, it’s unique and it’s different than a lot of stuff people have done. And my story is different and it just needed to be told. It is killing me and it’s had its effect on me. And I suffer from complex PTSD because of the life I’ve lived, according to the doctors, and it’s getting worse. And there is something for me being able to tell my story. It, it, it may not give me closure that I hoped it would give me, but it does give me some peace for people to understand what I’ve lived and why I am the way I am because of how I lived.

[20:20] Interesting. Yeah. And, and I think a lot of people don’t understand in, in these tight communities like, the outfit community family, the extended family bears. If somebody that’s, that’s why we’ve never had anybody go into witness protection and really testify here in Kansas city, because it’s so hard on the extended family. And, and it’s such a small community that you can’t go anywhere without running into somebody else. Now, Chicago is a little bit bigger, but you still lived in a really small community. So you go to some, some friend’s wedding or some friends, you know, go to church or, or just your restaurant that you would normally go to. There’s some of these mob guys, and now they’re painting you with the brush of being a rat. Is that what you experienced? That’s exactly what I’ve experienced. And it’s, you know, I, when, when all this happened, uh, you know, people automatically think that you’re part of what’s going on. And if you don’t come out and say, Hey, I had nothing to do with this, or I have nothing to do with this person. Um, then, then they start to understand it. And when proof, when, when everything comes out, they can see it. But I never did that, Gary. I never went out and said, Hey, I got nothing to do with my brother. I have nothing to do with my uncle. You know, I don’t agree with what they did and I wouldn’t do it, but I never, I never, you know, I never threw him under the bus or said, Hey, I, you know, I don’t, I’ve got nothing to do with them.

[21:48] Unfortunately, I had to start being more honest about what Frank Jr. Has done because unfortunately he has a tendency of, of lying and telling stories that aren’t true or accurate just to supplement his, his, his story or what he’s created. And it’s, it’s, you know, unfortunately my brother’s dead to me. It has to be that way because, yeah. And I’m not proud to say that or happy to say that because I was as close to my brother as I was to anybody in my life. When I asked him to stop lying and just tell the truth of how what really went on… He wouldn’t do it. You know, there were things that he put me in the middle of, you know, when he decided to cooperate, you know, I didn’t judge him and I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t agree with what he did, but I didn’t judge him. But he, you know, he, he packed up and he ran away and left me and our whole family there to deal with the mess that he created. And, and he didn’t seem to care about the people that he hurt by doing what he did. And I don’t mean the outfit. I’m talking about family members on both sides

[22:52] of my family, on my mother’s side. You know, he, he hurt a lot of people with things that he talked about that really had nothing to do with the mob, had nothing to do with the outfit. It was more family stuff. And, and, you know, it’s, it’s offensive because.

[23:06] You know, people come up to me and say, well, why did Junior talk about, why did he bring me into the book? Why did he talk about me? I can’t answer that question. But at some point I had to say, listen, this had nothing to do with me. I had nothing to do with this. I wanted nothing to do with this. I remained loyal to myself because I never believed in doing that. I never believed in cooperating or telling on people or, you know, I just, I don’t know. And all the way till the end. I mean, I claimed my father’s body when nobody would go out there to claim it just because, you know, for my own selfish reasons. But I needed to see this man dead. I needed to know that he was actually dead because he haunted me. I mean, he, you know, in some ways he still does, but I can’t, you know, I can’t fix that. And it’s never going to get fixed overnight, but it is what I live every day. And it’s different. What I live every day is different than what these other people live every day. It’s different from what Junior lives every day. And everybody’s got their, their issues and, and, and things that have happened. But I, you know, I needed to, to tell the truth. I needed to tell the story. I needed to tell it accurately because a lot of lies have been told and it’s offensive. and it’s killing me.

[24:19] I can only imagine the pressure that the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office brought to bear on you as…

[24:27] They started taking down this whole family secrets thing. It got, it got the son, they got the brother and now they got, then you’re out there and you were close enough that you might know some, I bet that, I bet they grilled you. I bet they threatened you with everything. They did. Talk about that a little bit, what that was like. Well, they, they first threatened for first, according to my uncle, um, the deal that he made with them was for them to leave me alone.

[24:57] And he even went as far as telling them when they went to see him, um, that they were going to see his nephew next. And he said to them, which it’s how it’s my uncle. It’s my relationship with my uncle. I’m proud of how, what my uncle thought of me, but he kind of, he kind of, it kind of hurt me because it, it made a problem for me. He told the FBI, don’t go see Kurt. Cause Kurt won’t talk to you. So they didn’t want to hear that. They didn’t like that. I’m sure it made them even have a bigger problem with me. But they told my lawyer, we want to talk to Kurt. And my lawyer told him straight out, Kurt won’t talk to you. And they said, well, we’ve got immunity already for him. If we subpoena him, we already have the immunity. And if he doesn’t testify, we’re going to lock him up. And my lawyer told him, go right ahead. He’s not going to talk to you. And he told him straight out, if you lock this kid up, this kid wants nothing to do with this life anymore. He wants nothing to do with his father. He wants nothing to do with what’s going on here. He just wants to be left alone. If you go ahead and subpoena him, we will go to the newspaper and we will let them know that, you know, this kid went and did his time. I did my time. I came home. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted nothing to do with either side. And they kind of backed off But then my father subpoenaed me.

[26:25] My father had the nerve to actually subpoena me and put me on a stand. I mean, he pointed me out during the family secrets trial. And I was sitting in a watching like everyone else. He pointed me out. He subpoenaed me right outside the courtroom.

[26:41] And it was a mind game that my father played with me. He did that to me my whole life. Same with the threat, the threatening letters I got, the threats. They all came from him. They were all his way. I don’t know why, but they were all his way of, of playing a mind game with me, either trying to scare me or scare me more than I was already scared. But he, you know, he played those games with me and the government, you know, I ended up when the, when my father was going to sentencing, I was, uh, government got ahold of my lawyer and said, listen, uh, they had already locked him down and it was called the Sam’s measure. Uh, they locked him down like a terrorist. And at that point, they can decide who you can see and who you can’t see, who can visit you, who you can talk to. And so the government got ahold of my lawyer and said, listen, if Kurt ever wants to talk to his father again or say anything to his dad, he’s going to have to do it at the sentencing. Well, I didn’t, you know, Gary, I didn’t really get why they wanted me at the sentencing. I thought about it. I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing. I wrote something out. I thought about it. I didn’t decide till the morning of the sentencing that I was going to actually speak. And that’s because I didn’t want anybody to know I was going to do it. I didn’t want it to be a circus and courtroom.

[27:58] So I decided the last minute to go in there. Well, they put me in the, in the road with the victims families and the FBI saw me sitting in the room. They, they had known now that I was going to speak and I didn’t understand exactly why they wanted me there until I started speaking. And the only person who can get my father to lose it was me. For some reason, whatever the reason is with me, he just lost it. And so when I got up to speak, which I had second thoughts about doing, and I, again, I didn’t realize why they wanted me in the courtroom. But once I started to speak, my father lost it. And I, I, I figured out that at that point, the government wanted, wanted my father to lose it in court and wanted the judge to see it. And he wanted the, the, uh.

[28:50] The jury to see it. And sure enough, they got to see it. And that’s when I realized why they invited me into the court that day was for them, for the judge to see my father actually lose his temper. Like they kept claiming he did his whole life and he claimed he didn’t. Well, he lost it when I started to speak. So they got what they wanted out of it. I didn’t even get a chance to finish my statement because he cut me off. So, you know, it was my way of saying, yeah, normally I would never have done something that way. I didn’t want to do that, but I, I, I wanted to be able to say what I needed to say. I didn’t want to do it in front of anyone. I wanted to do with him alone, but I wasn’t, I was told I was never going to get that opportunity. So I chose to do that. Um, it’s something that I, I probably shouldn’t have done. I wouldn’t have done it. You know, if I had thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have done it, but I got to say some of the things that I wanted to say and get them off my chest. And I just, I, you know, he wasn’t very happy and And he, you know,

[29:49] he basically tried to come after me, come at me in the courtroom. Now, you said you did a couple of years. Now, what did he suck you into something that wasn’t for not refusing to testify? Did he pull you into something that make dirty you up a little bit where they can make a case on you? Well, there were two. Our original case that we went away to prison for.

[30:11] That’s what I went away for. I, I, my charges originally were conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the IRS and some mail fraud counts. But they, when I pled out, I pled out to conspiracy to defraud the IRS. And, um, that, that was a charge I should have never gotten because there was nothing there on a case that, that had me guilty of anything there. Uh, but it was, you know, it was there when they come to you with a plea, you plead out to what they tell you. Cause I offered to plead out the perjury.

[30:45] Cause I, I lied during, uh, depositions, uh, in our first case about money that belonged to my dad and, and properties. And, you know, I, I claimed that was all my stuff and, you know, I perjured myself, but I, but you know, when I got charged, if he had, had that case went to trial, uh, I would have never gotten charged. Uh, I, I most likely would have beat him in court because that’s how weak their evidence was against me. But they wanted me, you know, there was a time, Gary, in our first case where, uh, when we got arrested, you know, they, they pulled my father in a room and my brother and I were sitting in a room across the hallway with the door open. It was all staged. And my dad was in a room across the hall and they told my dad point blank, if you agree to take responsibility for what’s happened here, not plea, not, not rat on anybody or not telling anybody, just take responsibility. Billy, we’ll let your kids walk out the door right now. And my father said to them, I’m not worried. Both of my kids are men.

[31:49] So at that point, I thought I was, I thought I finally earned my father’s respect when he said that to me. I was, you know, I was so messed up mentally at that point that I thought that was a huge compliment my father gave me, but he had the opportunity to get us out of the case. And I think the government expected him to accept that and the case would have ended right there, but he didn’t, he would not, he would not do it. He didn’t even think about it. He didn’t even take a second to think about it. He just basically said that I’m, I’m not worried. Both my, my boys are men. And so, you know, that’s the kind of person my father was. My father was about himself. My father was, listen, my father was very good at what he did. Okay. Very good at what he did. He was just a horrible father. He was, he was on the street. He was respected. He was feared. You know, he was very good at what he did. And even the government didn’t know what he was doing until my uncle cooperated. They had no idea that my father and uncle were both part of all those murders. They had no idea, which, you know, is their job to find that out.

[32:55] You know, they had no idea. In fact, in fact, so much, Gary, that they didn’t believe my uncle. When he first started cooperating, they didn’t believe him. Really? The point where he got frustrated and he said, okay, fine. He said, I’m done. Let me out. Let me get, get me out of the room. Cause they were like, no, no, we got information that that’s somebody else. He said. You know, the stuff he gave them and he was so, my uncle was so particular and his mind was so sharp that he remembered things that nobody would have remembered. So he was so accurate when he described things, that’s when they started realizing these guys were part of, you know, very serious part of what was going on. Really?

[33:33] Those little details from a crime scene that were never made public. Like, see, when a guy comes to you and he can give you those little details, you look back at the crime scene photos or the, you know, the description of the crime scene and you say, oh, man, this guy knows. And he was able to do that, it sounds like. Yes. Oh, yeah. And to point to, like I said, it confused them because who has a mind like that could remember all that stuff to detail like that. But that’s how my uncle’s mind was. I mean, he was, you know, and again, my uncle was a stand-up guy. Uh, you know, I, I had my, had junior not did what he did, my uncle would have never cooperated. I mean, he would have died in prison. He had no, you know, no, no ideas or thoughts to do that. And it broke his heart. Man, you know, people don’t realize what it did to my uncle. I mean, he, you know, he, he couldn’t live with himself with, with how, what he did. Now he was a loyal, loyal soldier, my uncle. And, you know, unfortunately, my father didn’t do the right thing with him either. He didn’t do the right thing with anybody. My father, he didn’t, he treated everybody that way. It seemed to me like everybody was disposable in his world. Everybody’s disposable in order to protect him. No matter what you’re disposable.

[34:55] And we all did protect him. I mean, we, we were willing, we were all willing. There was a time when my father was going to leave. In fact, it’s in the, it’s in the podcast. There was a time when my father was going to run, run away and go in hiding. Um, because of, uh, uh, Joe Bonanno did that years ago. Yeah. I remember he, yeah. Where he claimed that they were going to kill him. So he was afraid of his life. Well, my father was going to do that. And I was working with him to, to try to do that. And uh you know he got mad because when he said he was going to do it and he was going to disappear he wanted us to be upset that he was going to leave and we were all saying go you’re like all right go let me help you right we did we were helping him and he said you know what’s going to happen is when i disappear they’re going to arrest you guys immediately and we said fine fine just to let him go just to get rid of him just to let him you know because we we had no life the three of us had no lives our lives were his life and that’s you know that’s what people need to understand about this story is you know that’s how he was and i mean the controlling you know he he controlled you he controlled me to the point like i said i was i was a you know the fear of god from him you know for for reasons and i’m not talking about you know listen i as a kid i got in trouble.

[36:19] I did things, you know, I came home late and I, you know, and I got grounded and I got hit.

[36:24] And, and, and, you know, when I did stuff like that, I expected that, you know, but when, when, when I’m, what I’m talking about, the abuse and the bullying was every day was about nothing, was about nothing. You didn’t have to do anything to be treated that way. You know, that’s, that’s just the way he, you know, he was with me and, you know, it’s taken its toll. Now I have to ask a little bit, uh, later in your life, you married into a outfit family. You married Angela LaPietra’s daughter, correct? Granddaughter. Granddaughter. Yeah. So how was that? I mean, how, you know, that had to be kind of interesting.

[37:04] Well, it, it put it this way. It was, nobody wanted that. Nobody wanted her and I to be married. Nobody wanted her and I to be together. Um, it started off as a, as us dating. Uh, I used to, how we, how we started dating and, and I mean, we were raised as cousins. That’s how close our families were. So we were raised, you know, as Italian cousins, you’re not really blood related, but that’s your cousin. Cause, cause. Right. And, and what’s weird is a lot of people find very unique is, is my father. how that started was my father wanted me, and I was probably about 16, 17 years old. And my father decided every Sunday morning, I was going to go to the bakery and pick up bread and drop it off at Angelo’s house and other people’s houses too, but Angelo’s house was one of them. And so I started to do that every Sunday morning and they would invite me in and I would go in and I would have cup, you know, coffee with them and bread. And so that’s how that all started we became friendlier that way and then we started dating and but um they they didn’t really want us together uh her her mother didn’t particularly like me and I think part of the reason she didn’t like me was because I was part of that world my father had me being part of that world so um I think that was part of the reason why she didn’t love me um.

[38:31] So it was, it put a lot of pressure on, on, on, and then we decided to get married and we went to city hall and got married because my father told me to stay away from her. Uh, she was told to stay away from me, but not in the same way I was told.

[38:46] Uh, but we decided to go to city hall and get married and, uh, nobody wanted that. And Angela was in prison at the time for the skimming case. And so he wasn’t even on the street. so it was he didn’t even know what was going on because he was being lied to but he was trying to control me from prison through my father telling me uh stay have your son stay away from my granddaughter um and you know my dad kept telling me well you know once angelo comes home it’ll all get straightened out and then if you guys want to be together well you know that was a long time he was going to be away still for a long time he’s gonna be we decided to do that and um you know my father beat the shit out of me the night he found out that i went and did that and i had to go in hiding for for like three days and the only person i was in contact with was my uncle and uh you know it was just one of many stories that i talk about like i said in the in the podcast um and and you know it was just it’s stuff that you can’t even imagine.

[39:51] Gary, you can’t dream this stuff up. And it’s, it’s sad because now, you know, my kids, you know, are aware of everything that went on and, and, um, you know, and it’s just, it put a lot of, it, it, it had a lot to do with us getting divorced. I mean, we ended up getting divorced after 20 years and, you know, and again, it was, it was rough on, on everybody was rough on my ex-wife.

[40:13] It was rough on my kids. It was rough on my mother. You know, it was rough on, on, you know, everybody’s lives because everybody was involved.

[40:22] Yeah, really. I have to ask if, did you have big, when you were a kid and younger, did you have big family dinners on Sunday, every Sunday, everybody had to be there? Yes. Yes. We, we had bread. And again, I used to go pick up the bread, bring the bread home. We’d have, you know, we’d eat. My ma was a phenomenal cook, um, which, you know, my mother wasn’t Italian. My mother was Irish and, um, we We have, you know, uh, relations on that side who were considered associates of organized crime. We, you know, I had it between my family, my mother’s family, and then the family I married into, you know, I was kind of surrounded with this.

[41:02] Totally surrounded by it. Yeah. And it’s, you know, it is what it is. Yeah. Yeah. We used to, on Sundays, my, my mother was a phenomenal cook and, and, um, and I, uh, my mother was, was the best. I mean, I, I just lost her two years ago, but she was, I was lucky enough to have the best mother in the world. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the best father, but I did have the best mother.

[41:26] Did she sometimes try to run interference for you a little as best she could? I know it’d be hard in that, you know, male dominated patriarchal society that you live in anyhow. Did she sometimes try to run a little interference for you? She did all the time, Gary. But what I have some regrets in my life and that I’m not probably ever going to be able to fix. But, you know, I watched my mother. I watched my father treat my mother horribly.

[41:53] And um and i i have regrets that i didn’t do anything about it as a kid and then as growing up because uh she didn’t deserve she she was a wonderful person my mother and she was there for everyone and you know he treated he treated her the same way he treated everybody else and it was just horrible and i just wish that i would have done something about it when i could have because i i she didn’t deserve to live like that nobody did nobody deserved to live like that it was not a, not a good life for anybody. Um, but I, you know, I, I have regrets that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to let go of cause it was, it’s personal. Yeah. She didn’t deserve it. Yeah. Yeah.

[42:34] And my mother was loyal to my father all the way to the end.

[42:40] Yeah. I mean, even they were divorced and the FBI came to the house and wanted to show my mom pictures of my father with his girlfriend and the house that they built and my mother slammed the door in her face you know and and that’s to me that takes that’s quite a person to be able to do that you know when you’re you know when you’re upset and you’re going through you know you’re grieving and you know and you know and again I’m not you know my father and it goes to show you you know there’s there’s so much more to this story Gary that hasn’t even been told yet but you know my my father was able to get a, annulment from my mother through the church while he was in prison on trial for murder. And they, and the church didn’t even notify my mother until it already went through, you know, and that’s, that’s the kind of guy my dad was. I mean, you know, for whatever reasons he had, and it was, I mean, he thought he was going to be able to put my mother on the stand and testify against junior. But I mean, how do you get, you know, how do you get an annulment while you’re in prison for murder?

[43:48] Yeah exactly that you were married to all these years you’ve got kids with and that that kind of hurt my mother that that was kind of the last straw with my mother but i mean he wanted to do this in order to try to discredit junior to get her on the stand i know they do that a lot when you get a really frank culotta when he started testifying they they had a parade of people that would discredit him as being a liar so they could discredit the witnesses. Wow, that’s typical. But he was told that they’re not, you know, you can get your marriage annulled, but that’s through the government. The church. They’re not going to recognize her and allow her to get up on the stand and testify. They’re not going to do it. But he had his own mind, his own way of thinking. He thought he was his own lawyer at that time, and he knew what was right and what he was going to do. And he didn’t care about the last thing he cared about was hurting anybody’s feelings. That was the last thing he cared about.

[44:48] So I have to ask kind of the last things here about his Cody finish. Did you know them very well? Did they come around? Was it like Joe Lombardo, you know, lumpy? Was he like uncle Joey to you or, or anything like that? Did he come around? What kind of a guy was he?

[45:03] You know what? I, he didn’t come around. Uh, we didn’t know him really much other than bumping into him. Um, I remember meeting him when I was a kid at, uh, at Dr. Pat’s Palatro, who was a dentist at his office. And I met him there and I used to bump into him. And, you know, in fact, he was Joe’s in a club that I used to, a friend of mine had a club on grand Avenue and I used to stop at the club occasionally. And the night before the indictments, he was at the club. He slept at the club because they couldn’t find him. Yeah. He disappeared. They weren’t able to find him. But I was with him in the club that afternoon. I was playing cards with him that afternoon. But, um, yeah, we didn’t, um, Jimmy Marcello, we would see occasionally. Um, we knew his family pretty well. Um, and, and we would see him. And again, Gary, I, I, I never had any problem with any of these guys. I liked them. They were all very, very nice to me, you know, just, you know, and again, I’m, I’m just saying as how they were with me, you know, and, and all the people in that world, they were all, you know, they were all nice. They were all very, you know, when I would see them, you know, hug me and kiss me. And, you know, if it was in a restaurant, they’d want to buy me a drink or buy me dinner. And, you know, and, you know, and then when all this happened, you know, a lot of people kind of looked at me differently because of, you know, what my family did. And, you know, and I know there’s hard feelings there because of, you know.

[46:29] Because a lot of people went away. A lot of people got hurt because of it. Yeah, they did. That, uh, that cop or former cop, Twan Doyle, was he a policeman during that time earlier? Did you know him as a policeman or was he always an ex-policeman? No, he, well, when we were younger, he, we knew him because he was around my dad a lot years and years ago. And then, uh, in fact, I was with my father. We were at a wedding and we bumped into him and that started up the friendship again. So he started coming around again, but, uh, he was, yeah, he way back, he was a policeman. Then he, I don’t remember when he wasn’t a policeman anymore, but we didn’t see him that much until the wedding. And then after the wedding, he started coming around again by my dad, hanging out with my dad a little bit. Yeah. It seemed like he was more involved with gambling and running a sports book or something. If I, what I read about him was right. Yeah. He, yeah. And I mean, they started visiting my dad when he was away and they kind of tied these guys into the case and, you know, with the bloody glove and, you know, right. So they, you know, again, you know, I got to look at my dad’s AG, you know, why would you involve these guys? Why would you, you know, but it was all about my dad, you know, he didn’t care who he hurt or who got hurt because of him.

[47:49] One last quick thing, explain to the guys out there about the bloody glove. I can, I can, if you don’t remember all of it, I can fill in a little bit maybe, but the bloody glove that is like oj’s bloody glove man this bloody glove was the nail in the coffin it seemed to be like can you explain about that and then we’ll we’ll let you go kurt, Yeah, there was a glove left at the murder of John Feccherata that my uncle dropped.

[48:17] My uncle was the one who killed him and how it was all done and set up. He chased him down. He had to chase him down. He got shot in the car trying to kill Feccherata. He got shot. He shot himself in his arm, and he chased him down at a bingo hall, in front of a bingo hall, and shot him, and one of the gloves fell from out of his pocket. And, uh, and the government had the glove. They just never had the DNA. They just never knew, you know, that it was my uncle that did it. Uh, and then when junior decided to cooperate, he opened up that can of worms with, with the, with the glove. And, and that was the, the, the nail in the coffin for my uncle because they had his DNA. They had the, you know, the bloody glove and they had the, they, they took x-rays of his arm. They saw the, you know, where he got shot with the bullet. it. So that was, you know, at that point it was, uh, and again, it wasn’t just that, that got my uncle to cooperate. It was, there were other things, but it was, yeah, they, at that point, they, they knew everything and, you know, and again, it, it all came through Frank Jr. Didn’t come through my uncle. It came through Frank Jr. And, you know, I, I kind of wish Frank Jr. Would be a little bit more honest about everything that he did with that and how he started that whole case instead of basically there’s times when he’s blamed my uncle and said, you know, He didn’t put these people away. My uncle put all these guys away. Well, that’s not what happened.

[49:40] The name of the podcast, guys, is Underbelly Killing Kurt. Be sure and check it out. I’ll have links in the show notes and on the YouTube down below. And Kurt Calabrese, do you have any final words here for my guys out there?

[49:56] Just I hope people can understand why I’m doing what I’m doing.

[50:01] I hope they get a chance to listen to the podcast. it’s through entropy media it’s on apple it’s on uh spotify anywhere you can listen to podcasts it’s on and i just hope people can understand that i’m not looking for any sympathy or any any pity because of what my life was i just want people to know this is what i live this is what i live every day and we’ll watch interviews i do i hope okay thanks kurt calabrese thanks a lot for coming on, Kirk. Thank you very much for having me, Gary.

[50:31] Hey guys, that was really interesting. I thought I really liked that guy. He’s, uh, you know, he had a tough way to go growing up. You know, we all have fathers who can be a bit strict. I was a little bit strict and, and brought an edge of violence home from my work. I didn’t really, uh, flail on the kids and, and didn’t really yell at them, but I just had that edge of violence. And when you work with a violent, area in your life you’re going to bring that edge of violence home wherever you go with you another thing kurt told me we didn’t mention during that he has a website that has a bunch of different articles and different things he’s written so if you want to learn more about kurt calabrese it’s kurtcalabrese.com and and so check that out and i’ll have a link to that in the show notes down below so uh once again you know that i like to ride motorcycles so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the streets, driving your big F-150s. If you have a problem with PTSD, like Kurt does, Kurt’s not been in the service, but he’s getting help somewhere else. I’ve been in the service. The VA website has a hotline and hand in hand with PTSD many times is a problem with drugs or alcohol.

[51:42] And Anthony Ruggiano has a hotline on his website and he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in florida you have a problem with gambling addiction always goes hand in hand with ptsd also but you can have a problem with these new apps a lot of people are having problems with uh with addiction uh to to gambling so there’s uh help out there for you somewhere i know in missouri it’s 1-800 bets off i don’t know what it is in your different states i think each different state that has gambling has a different website or a different hotline number I have my books and movies out there.

[52:18] Don’t forget about them. I have a Chicago book, which has a lot of the stories from the podcast going all the way back to the early days. And I just selected different stories from the podcast. It’s called Windy Cities, the Chicago Outfit. I have one about New York families. It’s called Big Apple Mafia, the five families. That has a lot of stories from the oldest to the newest. I took from my podcast. my book, Leaving Vegas, which you can see back over my shoulder here, right over there, right over there, uh, Leaving Vegas. That’s tells kind of the inside story of the skimming investigation from the Kansas city side. I don’t know if I have anything else to sell, you know, just Google me. You can find me. I’m all over the internet and keep coming back guys. I really appreciate y’all turning in. If you have any suggestions or, you know, get on my YouTube, my YouTube has a huge following anymore. It’s getting bigger than the audio podcast. Well, not quite, but it’s, it’s getting pretty big. Uh, tell your friends about it, like, and subscribe the YouTube channel so you can get notified that there’s a new show up, which I put up pretty much one every week and sometimes one during the middle of the week. Although I’ve been a little bit, uh, lax on that here in the last few months while I was writing that last book, I’ll get back into it again pretty soon as soon as I can. Uh, so thanks a lot guys.

Two of the most important men who influenced the rise of rock and roll were Morris Levy and Alan Freed. Levy had close ties with the Genovese crime family. Levy was the notorious head of the record label Roulette Records. Reportedly, Morris Levy used illicit money from the family to fund his businesses, with several members of the mob said to be present at his meetings. At the time, Freed and other corrupt Disc Jockeys corrupted the entire industry with their “pay for play” of records, which became known as “Payola.” Morris Levy terrorized young performers into giving up thier royalities.

Meyer Lansky, AKA the “mob’s accountant,” was one of the most successful mafiosos in history and had many investments in jukeboxes. Reportedly, he “controlled every Wurlitzer jukebox in the New York area”. So too, did the Chicago Outfit (who rose to power under Al Capone) have many dealings with Lansky and his jukeboxes. A mob history book, The Outfit, argues that the Wurlitzer Corporation accused Lansky and his Chicago associates of disrupting the distribution of Wurlitzer jukeboxes.

The Outfit is also said to have worked closely with Jules Stein, head of the Music Corporation of America. Apparently, Stein, the mob, MCA, and Meyer Lansky had all worked at least in some form with the mob fixer Sidney Korshak, a prominent mafia name in Los Angeles.

Click here to get Backbeat Gansters: The Rise and Decline of the Mob in Rock Music by Jeffrey Sussman. Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

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To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here!

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here!

Transcript

[0:00] So, hey, welcome all you Wire Tappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have The Last Mob Lawyer. Now, you know, we did a series on mob lawyers, Bruce Cutler and, what’s his name, Jerry Nagel and a bunch of those guys. Well, I have Chris Franzblau. Now, he has written a book called The Last Mob Lawyer. And I really, I started looking at his stuff and the promos that his editor put out. And he really has had an interesting career. You know, he did some stuff with Mayor Lansky and around the Hoffa case. And he’s got a lot of really interesting stories. So welcome, Chris. I’m really happy to have you on the show.

[0:44] Thank you. Good morning. Chris, tell the guys a little bit about, you know, your law school experience and your early practice of law, how you developed into becoming a defense lawyer. You don’t just jump out and start defending big-time criminals. We know that. So where’d you go to law school? Well, I went to law school at Duke University in North Carolina.

[1:08] Kind of a good Southern school almost, huh? After you got out of law school, then I believe you went in the service. I believe we talked a little bit earlier. You went in the service. So tell the guys about, and you went in as a, in the JAG Corps, the Judge Advocate General. Is that what you went in as a lawyer in the Navy? Not quite. I went in, I went to this very extensive training to become a Naval officer before there was a JAG unit in the Navy. Okay. And then during that period of time, though, they sent me to what’s called, after we finished that hectic program, and the Navy sent me to a very top secret cryptography school.

[1:53] So that I could have those kind of duties if I were assigned to that. And then they sent me to Navy Justice School because I’d been a lawyer so that I could also do court-martial work in the Navy.

[2:07] Then when I got out of Newport, that was all training in Newport. And then I was assigned to an admiral down in Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. In Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was part of the command of the Pensacola Admiral in Florida. The Last Mob Lawyer, you’re going to get out of the Navy, you’re going to go into private practice, I believe. Now, this book, guys, I want to read you something about this book. Joe Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco, said, The Last Mob Lawyer, true stories from the man who defended some of the biggest names in organized crime. It’s a book that pulls back the curtain on mob life in a way only an insider could.

[2:51] Chris Franzblau’s extraordinary legal career offers a fascinating glimpse into the dangers, the characters, and the often bizarre legal wrangling that defines the mob heyday. The Last Mob Lawyer is an essential read for anyone interested in the darker side of American history. So it sounds like a really good read and a fascinating read for a mob fan of which my guys out there that are listening, my regular listeners, especially, they are mob fans. They want to know all the intimate behind the scenes details. And I know you’ve got some being the lawyer and you’re the first actual mob lawyer I’ve talked to. I only talked to a guy who was a lawyer who studied mob lawyers. So you’re the first one I’ve talked to. Guys, listen to Chris tell a little bit about how he got into defending the mob or defending and organized crime guys. Again, you just don’t drop out of, Law school, the Navy, and defending mob guys. How did that come about, Chris?

[3:50] Ironically, before I got out of the Navy, just shortly before, which was in the late 50s and early 60s, that’s when the federal government was starting to unwind this organization they call La Cosa Nostra and organized crime and the mob.

[4:10] That’s the way they had denoted these investigations. It started with Kefauffer and McClellan, and then there was that famous meeting in Appalachia. But I wasn’t even here then because I was still in the Navy. So I got out of the Navy, and then I wound up as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

[4:32] And that was the beginning of the prosecutions of organized crime, basically by Robert Kennedy, who was the attorney general when John Kennedy was president. And I was in the U.S. attorney’s office doing investigations, criminal investigations. So I’d done some criminal work in the court marshals in the Navy, so it was a natural for me to go to the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey. So when I got out, as luck would have it, a couple of the well-known criminal defense lawyers died. There weren’t too many people doing that kind of work. And as luck would have it, coincidentally, when I was a young man, a boy, a teenager, I knew some people who were later identified as organized crime figures, mostly, for example, Jerry Catena or the guy they called the boot, Boiardo, the boot. And because they played golf at the same country club, and I was a pretty…

[5:39] Skillful golfer at that time, as was the admiral in Pensacola. So that all worked out very well. So they knew me as to what would have it. And I came out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office as organized crime was developing. Then what happened was very early on, because I’d done this federal work, I represented a labor leader named Riggie, who later went to prison and his father in that one union, and the father was being deported, and I tried that case, and we beat the deportation back then at different times. And then I got to meet Sam the Plumber, the famous Sam the Plumber, Sam DeCalvacante. And that opened up a Pandora’s box because in that, But I uncovered the fact that J. Edgar Hoover had done these very secret investigations, wiretapping and so forth, in Sam the Plumber’s office without a search warrant. And then when I asked for the discovery, they had to, after a year and a half of trying not to have to produce that discovery.

[6:50] Then they had to divulge it, and they’d divulge it to the newspapers, and it uncovered this huge amount of organized crime, the interrelationships, and so forth. And that kind of put me on the map, and I was very young at that time. I was in my early 30s, probably. You know, Chris, that really almost put… The mafia on the national map, almost as much as Appalachian and some of these other things, because those tapes were dynamite. And they released the transcripts of some of those tapes of Richie the Boot talking so candidly about the mafia and everything. They were dynamite. So you’re the guy that really caused those to be released. That’s really interesting. Yes. At that time, you know, Giuliano was the U.S. Attorney in New York. and after the Appalachia meeting, all the later people who are identified in organized crime were in Appalachia and then there were indictments in New York and that’s when I started to represent Catena and then it went to the New Jersey State Investigation Commission and he wouldn’t answer questions. He took the Fifth Amendment and we took that to the United States Supreme Court and lost And he did almost five years in civil contempt because he wouldn’t answer questions.

[8:16] And then we finally got him out. I did before the New Jersey Supreme Court. That was the first case of its kind based on cruel and unusual punishment. So finally, I was able to get him extricated after doing almost five years. He was almost 75 years old. Wow. Yeah. See, we’ve got a picture here of a young S.E.M. Chris Fransblau with Geraldo Catina as they arrive in Trenton for an appearance before the Supreme Court. So that’s look pretty young in that picture.

[8:53] Well, he was one of the guys up at Appalachia. Yeah, he was. And then he had to be represented in New York when Giuliani was the U.S. attorney there. And then we had some issues over there, which was interesting over there because when he had to appear at the grand jury, they assembled a lot of the people from Appalachia who were all in the waiting room for the long grand jury at the same time. Catena was called in, and he came out to consult with me. And as he was consulting with me, another attorney had a scuffle right at our feet. The fight began right then, and the other lawyer tackled got away with a suitcase that seemed to have an aerial outside and got away. It seemed like it was an FBI officer who was trying to overhear the conversations outside that grand jury room. That resulted in my making an issue out of it. Then Catena got his subpoena

[10:00] to testify, was withdrawn. Wow. That was exciting. That was. That was. That FBI, they were aggressive back then, and I guess there was really no exact law.

[10:13] Against technical surveillance, wiretapping, or hidden microphones. You couldn’t use it in court, but until, what, 1968, I think, at that Omnibus Crime Control Act is when they actually created a law which had a path to get a hidden microphone or a wiretap. But before that, there was just no path, but you just couldn’t use it. But it was just embarrassing. I mean, it happened in Kansas City, too, and all major cities. Well, it happened in Atlanta, too. Yeah. Which was also interesting when it came out that they had wiretapped some conversations between Martin Luther King and Cassius Clay. And that came out as a result. It all came out at the same time. So that was an embarrassment to J. Edgar Hoover and to Robert Kennedy. Yeah.

[11:07] You know, it was one thing to do this to members of the mafia, but there’s another thing to do this to actual political figures, which is what they were. So that was really a black eye for the FBI as a whole and J. Edgar Hoover in particular. So I guess you talk about Jimmy Hoffa and Tony Pro Provenzano, who Tony Provenzano was from New Jersey. Is that, you know, from this New Jersey connections here with Gyp DiCarlo and Richie the Boot and those guys? Is that how you got in with Tony Pro Provenzano? Well, Tony Provenzano had been indicted and convicted of some labor racketeering.

[11:53] I didn’t represent him at that time, but there were some issues as to whether the previous lawyer for the union was responsible for taking some of the bribes that had taken place in that conviction. So the union decided to get rid of that lawyer. His name was Jacob Friedland, who was a state senator in New Jersey. There was a very infamous, wonderful, brilliant lawyer, former attorney general in New Jersey named David Wilentz, who was the prosecutor of the famous kidnapping case, a Limburg case, which was an international case. And he knew me. And so when the lawyers who were representing Tony Pro needed to get a new lawyer to replace Jacob Friedland, they were from New York. They contacted David T. Wilentz, and he recommended that.

[12:54] They needed a lawyer to keep that union clean and the pension funds clean. And so all of a sudden, I was called upon based upon his recommendation. And I began almost overnight to represent several of the major teamster unions and a state council of teamsters throughout the state and several bigger pension funds. And so that’s that’s how i got to represent tony pro that’s a long story but yeah no but it’s interesting how those i like those details how those things work now i have a question i guess maybe personally for you chris i want your opinion on this and and maybe as a way of an explanation for guys a lot of people think that because you’re a lawyer and you defend the teamsters or tony Provenzano or Jerry Catena or some of these other big time monsters that somehow you’re part of the mob, that somehow you have this guilty knowledge of what’s going on. And I know Oscar Goodman is off. He really never was. But I know a lot of FBI agents and people involved in investigation of the mob, you know, will say, oh, no, he was part of it. And a lot of lawyers. Now, can you explain the kind of professional relationship that a lawyer has with a mobster that he doesn’t become part of the crime itself?

[14:22] Number one is that when I was a young man, a teenager, I had known Catena before he was alleged to be a member of organized crime or Boiardo or the others.

[14:36] And Zwillman, they lived out here. My father knew some of them. And I was in a position where I didn’t have to worry about that. I was a young guy, but I was independent.

[14:49] I came out of the Navy. I got promoted. I came out. I was a lieutenant commander. I went in as an ensign, retired out of the Navy, and I came out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. And so, fortunately, I won a little case that had some notoriety before these things happened, but there weren’t that many people that came out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Organized Crime was just starting. All of a sudden, I had a little federal case, and I won that case where the guy was going to be deported. And there weren’t that many lawyers at that time.

[15:28] There were only five lawyers in the prosecutor’s office at that time. Now there’s probably 60 or 70. So It was a small community and people knew my father and I grew up in that community. But I could be independent in that sense. Okay.

[15:45] But in a couple of cases, people come to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you don’t have to… You can easily set a boundary. I’m a lawyer myself and former policeman, and I had some criminal cases, and it’s easy to set a boundary that here’s what I do for you. I just represent you in court, and when we get done, you go on your way, you pay me or you pay me up front because I’m not taking a chance that he’s going to walk away with whatever he gets and not pay me, of course. And so you set a boundary. And that’s what people really don’t understand is when you walk into those cases that you set a boundary immediately with these guys. You had to keep a certain distance too, not to get too familiar or whatever.

[16:35] And that’s good. You know, there’s certain formalities and that separates the men from the boys. There you go. That’s a good way to put it. Now, historically, we know that Frank Sinatra was hand in glove with a lot of mob guys. So tell us about that. Well, on a particular occasion, remember Sinatra grew up in Hoboken. The original Provenzano Union was there. So before all that, they knew each other.

[16:59] And as time went on, one time I was out, Tony Pro, we were at some negotiations in Nevada and Sinatra was performing at the Sands, and he said to me, would you like to meet Frank Sinatra?

[17:16] Well, Sinatra didn’t mean that much to me. I said, yeah, sure. So we went to the stage door to see Sinatra. He knocks on the door. He knew Sinatra quite well, obviously. Knocks on the door, and Sinatra’s right-hand guy, I forget his name as we’re speaking, comes to the door and, Tony says, tell Mr. Sinatra that Tony Pro is here. So he said, oh, just wait a minute. He shut the door. He comes back and he said, I’m sorry, Mr. Provencino, but Mr. Sinatra can’t see you.

[17:48] Tony Pro was so mad. He kicked the door and so forth and so on. But of course, Sinatra had his own problems because he couldn’t be seen out there with a member of organized crime, which Tony Proe had classified for. I tried to explain that to him because then he would be ineligible to perform the license under the Nevada State Gambling Commission. Yeah.

[18:20] Also talk about Tony Pro and his connection to Hoffa. What can you tell us about that? Well, they had a most interesting relationship from my observation.

[18:32] Hoffa was probably one of the most independent people I ever knew, you know, with no sense of humor. Oh, really? Tony Pro was a very entertaining guy. I mean, I’ve seen him. He could be the most charming and the most difficult person, depending on the circumstances. But his personality seemed to really appeal to Hoffa. And in many respects, he was very independent because Hoffa was very demanding. But he was almost on a level. And Hoffa, I got the impression that Hoffa was very dependent because Tony was a very personable person. and he knew everybody, every place we ever went.

[19:21] I mean, he could be a charming type rogue. Interesting. But I never had any problems. He and I always got along very, very well.

[19:34] What do you remember about the famous quarrel between Hoffa, the famous quarrel between Hoffa and Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano? Yeah, I recall that. That was out in Lewisburg in Pennsylvania. That was interesting. What happened was when Hoffa went to prison, he didn’t lose his pensions. He had a very substantial pension when he left the unions.

[20:02] But when Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano was put on the sidelines because he was no longer able to be a member of labor unions or be an officer of any labor unions, he forfeited his pension. Oh, wow. And he always believed when Fitzsimmons took over the Teamsters unions that Hoffa could influence Fitzsimmons for Tony Pro to get his pension benefits, that they shouldn’t be forfeited. Why should Hoffa have gotten his? But Hoffa was convicted of a crime that didn’t require his forfeiture with Tony Pro, which under the Taft-Hartley Act and everything was different. Tony Pro never got through his head that it couldn’t be done, and Hoffa made a couple of remarks, you know, and Tony Pro lost his head, and he went after Hoffa in the meeting. It was no big deal. It was, you know, that was very unpleasant.

[21:05] Yeah, okay. I understand now that Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano’s conviction was for crimes in connection with union activity, while Jimmy Hoffa’s conviction was for jury tampering that didn’t have anything to do with union activity. That’s why he got to keep his pension, and Tony Pro didn’t. I understand now.

[21:25] I’d see why Tony Pro was mad, but, you know. He had a hot temper. So speaking of all that relationship, this hitman that worked for him, did you know him, Sally Buggs, Brigulio?

[21:38] Yes, I know him quite well. So tell us about your relationship with him and tell us, you know, your opinion of him, what you remember about Sally Buggs. Kind of purportedly the man that killed Jimmy hoffa possibly well he was always a target.

[21:54] Uh he was a target of that and uh as was tony pro as cold as ice and uh he he went his own way and he was a very independent guy and a nasty kind of guy too i really never got along that well i was never that friendly with him uh very frankly he was really like a bodyguard or chauffeur, but he was a business agent at Local 560, and he was on the board of trustees of the union. And I had a big argument with him at the Teamsters Pension Fund, and there’s still a guy who was there who witnessed it, who’s still alive. I spoke to him just the other day, named Bob Archibald, who was one of the trucking company appointees to the board of trustees. Reason, Brigugliao wanted to have the board, the pension fund give a mortgage that became a big issue to some people from Detroit.

[23:00] And he outlined it, you know, because the pension funds often made investments. We had investment advisors. It was a huge, big pension fund, and I was the attorney, but I was selected to keep everything on the up and up. So I said I would not approve. I recommended against it and so forth. They said, look, you’re here for legal advice, not what to do or not to do. And he threatened me, and we never got along too well after that. Wow, well, that’s… Bob Archibald, who was still alive, was there.

[23:43] Most of the other guys are gone. Bob Archibald just turned 101 a couple months ago. Interesting. That was bold of you to not approve a mortgage, a pension loan that Sally Buggs wanted approved. That was pretty bold of people who’ve been killed for less, I think. Well, they went and they did the mortgage, though. That was the problem. Well, they got it done, okay. And they put the mortgage on, and some other lawyers handled it. I wouldn’t do it. Yeah, wouldn’t judge it. And the guys who got it were later indicted because the deal fell through. They were tried by a federal judge named Alistair Hastings. Alistair Hastings then was, after that trial, was impeached by the United States Senate, and they took his judgeship away for allegedly taking bribes. So then after he lost his judgeship, he ran Fort Lauderdale to become the U.S. House of Representatives representative, and he got elected, and he served in the House of Representatives for 30 years. Believe it or not. Believe it or not. Only in America, as they say. Yeah.

[24:58] What seemed to have happened was when Hoffa got out, he was pardoned by Nixon. He got the pardon, but he was supposed to be pardoned a year earlier. Hoffa, because as we said before, did not forfeit his right to go back to become a union official. So he was still eligible. So he was supposed to get a year sooner. He was thought to get out at Christmas. In those days, if I can remember.

[25:30] Pardons were really only granted by a president just before Christmas. In that year, he was promised or thought he was going to get the pardon. And the last minute it got canceled and he went nuts. So finally it got put back on the next year. But when they got it the next year and he got the pardon, it had been the former international lawyer for the union was a good friend of mine who I later during some of these days got to meet a friend of a guy named Edward Bennett Williams. Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of him. He was the finest, greatest lawyer I always looked up to. What happened was he had resigned. He had some differences, and he resigned, and a new lawyer took over. And when the pardon was drawn and given to Hoffa, they put in the pardon that he could not become a union official anymore. And that was not Hopper’s understanding of what the deal was. So when he got out, he wanted to go back to the union, and he wanted to get the pardon revised. So he was threatening everybody.

[26:42] So he was threatening people that if he didn’t get back to union office and didn’t get the pardon revised, feeling that people could influence the president or whatever, that he would give evidence against others or whatever. But I never knew anything further until I was heard about his disappearance. And now, I had this coincidental experience just last year when I knew that they were looking for Hoffa all over the place.

[27:17] The FBI could never dig up. They must have gotten lots of tips of where Hoffa was buried. And they dug up two or three places in New Jersey right under the Pulaski Skyway. Yeah, I read about that. Two or three different times. And one day, I was out playing golf with some friends of mine. I was introduced to someone there who I’d never met before. And he was just new, you know, meet so-and-so. When he heard my name, he said, you know, I’ve always wanted to meet you. There’s a story I want to tell you. And he proceeded to tell me exactly where Hoffa was buried. Oh, really? And why and how he was there to see it and what he described. And there’s some stuff in the book about it. All right. Well, that’s a pretty good teaser by that book. Based upon what he told me. And he told me that at the time that it happened during the FBI investigation and they were digging up, he said he called and reported it to the New York Times, but he never heard anything or anything.

[28:29] And all these years had gone by. He’s now in his middle 70s, this guy who I met at Mount Ridge Country Club. But what he described, I absolutely believe that that’s exactly where Hoffa is buried, within a couple hundred yards of where the FBI had apparently gotten some tips of where he was buried. Back in New Jersey, those New Jersey tips. New Jersey, under the Pulaski Skyway, not far from the Pulaski Skyway. Yeah, I interviewed that guy that came up with that theory, and he had some pretty convincing arguments that the people, as he related the people that told the stories about where he was and how he ended up back east, that it was a pretty convincing argument enough that the Bureau didn’t spend a bunch of money to go out there. This guy told me he saw it. He saw it.

[29:22] He’s still alive. Well, I tell you what, if you can dig that body up, you can get a lot of hits on the internet. I know that. That would be a big deal. That would be huge to dig up Jimmy Hoffa’s body. It’s taking on mythical proportions, as you know. So, you know, there’s Tony Provisano and he was taking a lot of money personally out and these guys were really raiding the Teamsters Pension Fund in a way.

[29:51] What did you see? Do you have one kind of one last question? How would you comment on the efficacy of the loans that the Teamsters Pension Fund made? I get a lot of questions about that. Did they really, did the mob really hurt the pension fund or did they let some people would say, oh yeah, all those loans, they got paid back or were there a lot of defaults? Did you, do you have any comment on that? I can tell you this. I probably, I can only tell you I was the only pension funds that I were, where we were here in New Jersey that I was counseled to. Okay. The only suspicion I ever had was that one I just described to you a little while ago. We had the best investment advisors and the pension funds were extremely successful in their investments. We had the biggest investment advisors on Wall Street. It was very, very, very carefully monitored.

[30:48] Okay. So the New Jersey pension fund was different from the one in Chicago. I think the one in Chicago must have been huge. It was. We had a big fund here for a size at that time, but the pension fund here was as clean as a whistle.

[31:09] Okay. All right. Interesting to know. All right. Chris Franzblau, named the book as The Last Mob Lawyer, True Stories from the Man Who Defended Some of the Biggest Names in Organized Crime. Chris, it’s a fascinating book. I got the PDF and I’ve, I’ve read some bits and pieces as much as I could. I got to get back into it now. Cause you, you’ve kind of stirred me up where I want to, I want to learn more out of what you, uh, out of your experiences. So I really appreciate you coming on the show. Anytime. Well, that was pretty interesting guys. Uh, a guy, he’s, uh, he’s seen a lot of history, man, a lot of history. So don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles. If you, uh, are out there in your car and your big 10,000 pound SUV, Watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there because you can squash us like a bug.

[31:58] If you have a problem with PTSD, be sure and go to the VA website if you have been a vet. And if you haven’t been a vet, well, I figure out some other place to go get some help because there’s help available. And PTSD affects a lot of people. And hand in glove with PTSD is problems with drugs and alcohol. You know, they always, you know, get treated for one. You probably got the other. Uh, our friend, Anthony Ruggiano from the Gambino crime family is a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. And he has a hotline on his, uh, YouTube channel or his website. One of the two or both of them, maybe I can’t remember. And if you have a problem with gambling, there’s one 800 bets off, at least here in Missouri, you know, getting ready to do the apps for, for gambling. And there’s a lot more, more and more gambling is out there and more and more opportunities, you know, uh, I don’t really care for it myself. I lose $20 at a casino and I like, oh shit, get me out of here.

[32:54] But you know, it’s everybody isn’t like that. Everybody has a different appetite for that kind of risk with their money. And so if, if you feel like it’s causing any trouble, why try to get some help for that. Don’t forget, I’ve got books and movies out there. I’ll have a link to the last mob lawyer down there at the show notes. I will have links to my books and my, uh, documentaries that you can stream for just, I think a buck 99 on Amazon, or I’ve got them on my website. I figured out a way you can stream them off my website and I get the whole dollar 99 instead of only 95 cents of it or whatever it is. Uh, and the books the same way I got them on my website or you can get them on Amazon, which is a lot easier. And you get the Kindle books, which is a lot cheaper if you like Kindles. And so help me out with those books, uh, every, every time. And, and give me a review on those books. I didn’t get many reviews on my New York book. I didn’t really kind of push people on that. I did push them a little bit to buy it, but I didn’t remind them to give me a review. And I’ve got, I don’t have, I’ve sold more books than the Chicago books, but I’ve got less reviews. So it helps for me to get reviews on those books. Why you help out the podcast because you sell more books and then I get more money. And, you know, I’m more, more enthused about doing the podcast and, and this is, you know, you got to watch a few ads, but other than that, it’s, it’s all free content here. So thanks a lot, guys.

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[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I am here with Anthony Arillotta.

[0:07] As you guys, if you are on Facebook at all or on YouTube, you may know this name. He has been quite prolific, and he’s got a great book out there, and he’s got a hell of a story to tell. And he’s a really – I just told Anthony, I said, you know, you’re a great interview because you know your stuff. And, Anthony, you really do. Welcome, Anthony. Oh, thank you, Gary. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to this. Now, the book is South End Syndicate, How I Took Over the Genovese Springfield Crew.

[0:37] And so, you know, I want to read just a little bit about one thing. I’m really impressed with this particular promos for your book, little blurbs that you get other authors to write in your book. T.J. English, who is New York Times bestselling author of The Westies and several others. And I just interviewed him recently, a prince of a fella. And this guy’s word means something to me. And T.J. Writes, the last days of the Roman Empire if you were populated by snitches, gamblers, mobsters, lowlifes, and homicidal maniacs. In other words, this book is entertaining as hell, chronicling one small parochial, though notorious, faction of the American mafia in Springfield, Massachusetts. Ariadna tells the story of the whole damn thing. South End Syndicate is a worthy addition to any organized crime bookshelf. So Anthony, that’s, that’s quite a compliment from a guy like TJ English. Wouldn’t you agree? Oh, I agree. Definitely. That was a really good write-up that he gave. And, uh, you know, he knows his, uh, he knows the, um, uh, the genre. So he does, he, he knows how to write it and, and he knows it, you know, he really knows it. He really does. Yeah. And he said, he, um, you know, his re you know, he can detect. The true, the true to the faith. Yeah. It’s got a good bullshit detector. I could tell that when I interviewed him. Yeah, that’s, yeah, that was really impressive.

[2:02] Anyhow, so let’s get down to talking about the book. You know, right now you’re not in witness protection or anything. You did testify, but you’re not in witness protection. So that’s, I’ve noticed there’s a lot of guys like that out there that are living on the streets so much for the old get you no matter what. But in the end, you wrote this book about your life, but you also talked a little

[2:26] bit about the old days, I believe. You know, I talked, let’s talk about the old days in Springfield, Matt, just a little bit before we get into that. You know, I interviewed this, I think it was Gina Cunningham. Her grandmother was Pasqualina Albano, and she had a heck of it. And that’s a heck of a story. There’s a lot of inner fighting and all that going on. And that was when Springfield got connected to the Genovese family in New York. Could you explain to the guys kind of how that first worked, how they, the, the Springfield became basically a crew or not a, maybe not a crew, but a, its own entity, but yet we’re connected to the Genovese family. Yeah. So like you have drugs today, you had alcohol back then.

[3:10] Organized crime really wasn’t established at that time where they had traditional mafia of families back in the early 1900s, but you still had Italian immigrants. And with that came a way that the Italians lived and brought their traditional ways over to America. And so they got involved in bootlegging, protection rackets, some of the same rackets that continued on throughout the years. Springfield was heavily populated with a large Italian immigrant city. It was flooded, a lot of, you know, you know, from Calabria, Naples, Sicilians, all, you know, throughout Italy. It just flooded into Western Mass to Springfield. And so back in those days, there was a lot of gang activity, like you would call today. It was the same thing, gang activity, The only was, you know, instead of Latinos and blacks and, you know, whatever other Chinese, it was, you know, a lot of Italian, Jewish and Irish gangsters, you would call them. And so Springfield was heavily populated with that. They started to create some known figures back then. And just through the hustling and the bootlegging created an organized crime presence throughout Western Mass in Springfield. How they got involved later on.

[4:39] With the New York connections where, you know, New York is heavily populated and then it’s only two hours away from Springfield. So there was some big heavyweights and a lot of people are related. This one particular guy, the Miranda family, they were like heavyweights in the Genovese family. And so I believe Philomena ended up marrying one of the Mirandas. One of her husbands was a Miranda and he was, you know, I, I believe it was, uh, Mike ended up being on the, uh, later on and like maybe in the fifties, but he was like on, uh, uh, you know, one of the panel administration for the, uh, Genovese crime family. And he had relatives in here. He was related to the Fioris.

[5:29] And so, um, you know, it’s just like, you know, they had a satellite crew where they, you know, big no Sam Kane. He was from Calabria. He was, uh, you know, was in New York, but then came to, uh, Springfield. And so, you know, you got these active organized crime criminals and that’s when the mafia started to get organized, you know, in the thirties and starting to get structure and territories, they started getting the territories down. So there’s no, you know, they could stop the violence and the murders and, and, and have like territory split out so everyone could earn peacefully and big no sam kafari ended up being one of the uh you know well you’re going back to like you know philomena she was actually a woman i think they shot her like 30 times and um there was a few murders uh the guy the one of the bosses uh siniscauchi he was murdered biori i believe was murdered there was a lot of brutal murders back in the early 1900s here. And so when Sam came in, he kind of solidified his presence. And then the structure came out where there was mafia induction ceremonies.

[6:39] And Sam ended up blasting from the thirties all the way up into 1984 when he passed away, never spending one night in prison, never going to prison. He was just, he was a legendary mafia boss that, you know, you could put up there with Carlo Gambino, Tony Accardo. There was a, But he was a very notorious, he was at the Appalachian meet in 1957 when all the mobsters got rounded up.

[7:03] And he was there as a representative. So…

[7:08] Yeah, and that’s how Springfield pretty much formed its base with the Genovese side through. I know the Mirandas had a big role in it because of blood ties.

[7:19] Yeah, I think that Mike Miranda was, when Vito Genovese went into the penitentiary, he appointed a three-person commission to keep running the Genovese family. And he was one of those three people. And then he had these relatives out here at Western Mass. So just a natural kind of a connection, it sounds to me like pretty, pretty interesting stuff. How that, you know, how that developed, you know, you mentioned about comparing this to blacks or Latinos today and the gangs, you know, anytime you have a large cohort of people, newly arrived immigrants.

[7:53] And so Italians get here. What I’ve noticed in Kansas City, the Italians got here. Well, the Irish had been here for quite a while, and they had all the police and fire and, you know, Trice Holland jobs, you know, the lower end jobs sewed up and the unions. And they had all that sewed up and a lot of politics already sewed up. So the Italians get here and they’re like they’re kept out. You know, they’re not going to allow them to come in anymore than they can. So then you’ve got all these young, bright guys, Prohibition comes along and hey, here’s a way we can help our people and help ourselves and, and get a piece of the American pie. Everybody just wants a piece of the American pie and that’s what they wanted at the time. So it’s, uh, you know, and it’s, you know, still going on today, I would say it has greater or lesser extent. So Springfield had the Italian section back then, you know, was the South end of Springfield. But prior to that, like when my grandfather was here, the North End had Italians, the South End, six corners of Springfield was heavily populated with Irish and Italian. That’s where I grew up at first was six corners Springfield.

[9:01] And throughout the city and throughout the suburbs of cities, there was many Italian restaurants that. But instead of just being all stuck down in the South End, just like it is today, you could go anywhere throughout Springfield in the suburbs and eat authentic Italian meals from people that come right from Italy. To this day, they still have their families heavily involved in the restaurant

[9:26] business. So I grew up in Springfield. The South End was, when I was growing up, was basically the Italian section still. All my friends lived down there. I lived down there for a period of time. And, you know, as you get older.

[9:39] People move out. They want to get a better life. They want more peace and quiet. They move into a quieter neighborhood. And, you know, and so with that, the next immigrants that are coming in, uh, Spanish, you know, started moving in. So the more clients are moving out and the next thing, you know, little, but it’s still remained Italian businesses down there. And where we hung around growing up my whole life. And it was great. It was, uh, the, like I said, the presence back then, we had hundreds of guys lined up on corners all the way down main street you know you had the youngest guys like would be us then you had a little bit older across the street then you had a little bit older a few blocks down a little bit older another and then you had like we call them the grease balls from italy all down because we had a lot of italian social clubs italians come over the wife don’t want to get away from their wives go out play a little cards have an espresso and they had we had three italian clubs down the south end and it was you know we had restaurants pastry shops coffee shops everything you could think of. And it was really nice growing up. And it was just a nice, the camaraderie of being Italian growing up with that, because it doesn’t exist anymore here. And it really doesn’t exist anymore throughout the country. You know, you go down, Boston to me has the best Italian neighborhood in America.

[11:00] And the only reason that is still existing, all them, they moved out too, But Boston remains expensive to live there So all the tenements above Mostly college kids They’re paying $4,000 or $5,000 a month for rent.

[11:15] More for one bedroom apartment. So you don’t have any crime, criminal activity there and all the rest. And it’s loaded still with Italian restaurants and coffee shops, one after another. So it’s still got that Italian neighborhood feel to it. And especially the streets are so narrow. Springfield lost all that. You know, we still have some of the places where you can go buy your cold cuts and shop sausage and, you know, coffee shops and things like that. but it’s nowhere near what it was back when I was growing up. And it was just a really good, really good growing up in Springfield. We had a little gang of us, you know, we had a big gang of us actually. And we were, my generation was, you know, right around four or five years younger than me. It was kind of like the last generation that grew up down the South then where we were as hanging around on corners. My father was 100% a hard, probably one of the hardest working men I know. And I’m not just saying it because he’s my father. Anybody from here will tell you. And he was a sweetheart of a guy. And everybody will tell you that.

[12:23] He was a hardworking man. His only thing that he liked to do, and it’s not illegal, but he liked to bet on the sporting games. And he was pretty good at it. A lot of people would come and ask him for their picks. And he was actually good at picking the games. And that was his only thing he liked to do. Work. He was a sports fanatic And played golf and work And he worked seven days a week Hard work, hard work, hard work But being Italian He was a kid.

[12:51] The mobsters would frequent his store and they were always around. I had family members also that were involved in the mafia, but not my father. Growing up, you grow up in this environment as a young man and you’re looking for opportunities and jobs.

[13:08] And so how did you start getting, becoming involved at what pulled you into that life? So I was always a wild kid growing up, getting in trouble at school, fighting all the time. I never had to worry about money because my father, like I said, had a, uh, was a hardworking man. He had the biggest, one of the biggest businesses in Springfield. He was into the fruit and produce and the wine grape business. He was the biggest wine grape distributor in all of mass. So I never, I lived at home. I didn’t have to worry about food on the table, paying any bills, which, you know, I believe is bad for a kid not doing that, you know, because it puts you in a complacent mindset and you don’t got that hustle instinct. Whereas another kid grows up poor, he’s out shining shoes at eight years old. He’s trying to help, you know, he wants to, what the other kids have. So I never had to do that. I just got involved because I love the action. I was a, I also was a huge gambler. It started off with me gambling and, you know, betting on sporting events at a young age, you know, like I was in the second grade at high school, you know, betting 25 cents a game, you know, with the little kid then. And it just, you know, went crazy.

[14:20] And, and then, you know, in my teens, I always getting in trouble and mafia had a huge presence and, you know, you know, John Gotti had just killed Castellano. You know, I’m at my, I’m only like 16 years old. You know, the mafia was, you know, big time news back then. I mean, it was nationwide and worldwide news. And to be involved with the mafia meant something. So everybody it’s like, oh, I know, you know, if you knew the boss, if people like Like Sam Kapari. Oh, I’m friends with Sam. Oh, I’m friends with Sam. I’m better friends with them. They wanted to be around the mafia. If they knew the mafia hung around at this restaurant, they all wanted to go to that restaurant. That’s what it was like. So.

[14:57] I just started being, you know, a wild kid gambling. And of course, the mobsters knew me because they know everybody in our area, especially the ones that are a little bit crazy and wild. And I just started getting involved more. I ended up getting a shooting case back in 1990, and I got a five-year sentence. That is when I came, you know, and I dabbled a little bit in some drugs prior to that, selling drugs. I never used drugs, but selling drugs, I just was small time prior to that. I went to state prison in 1990 for a shooting case. I got a five-year sentence with a mandatory one year. When I came out of that prison sentence after the year, that’s when I was pretty much a.

[15:44] I knew where I was headed. The streets were for me. That’s when I got approached by Al Bruno. He was a cousin on my mother’s side. He was a maid member of the mafia. He approached me. There was another maid guy that wanted me to be with him, but Al Bruno was the one that came to me first. He put me on record with him, meaning that I was now associated with the Springfield faction of the Genovese crime family. That was in 1991.

[16:10] And I just started hustling the streets with him. And that’s how I started getting involved with the mafia activity. But I was also involved with my own criminal activity. I was a large marijuana distributor. And that was where I made 90% of my money back then, was in the marijuana industry. I mean, I don’t want to say 90%, but the bulk of my money was, and the mafia had nothing to do with that. So I was a large marijuana distributor. I was in the cocaine business. I don’t consider it big, a few kilos a month. Um, I was in, but the marijuana business, I was the, one of the largest, if not the largest in Connecticut, Massachusetts, um, areas.

[16:54] And so the money, the money brought me in the money. Yeah. You know, I’m a crazy kid. Now I already got the violent reputation and now come with it. You know, at the end, we all want to make money and I’m not going to make it at my father’s business. Hard work, hard work. I mean, backbreaking work. So, and it’s his business. You know, it’s, you know, he’s got his, my mother and sisters and whatever his life to live. So I just started making it on the streets and I made a lot of it. So I did very well. Interesting. Now I’m always curious about how some of these things work. Now, did, uh, with the marijuana business and the drug business, that was all yours. Did you have to kick anything to anybody?

[17:36] And so that was just yours and they didn’t pay any attention to that. Now, now a big marijuana business like that, how did you, how, how’d you make those connections? How do you find somebody that will then bring you, you know, bales and bales of marijuana and truckloads of marijuana. How do you find that from the streets, from a guy that’s just, you know, selling dine bags or whatever for fun, for a little extra shop of spending money to get into those big bunches? I’m always curious about that. So it’s not like the mob doesn’t, you know, our area, they were very strictly, enforced, no drugs if you were around them. All right. So you could get killed for that. And the Genovese family, you know, there’s a lot of hypocrites, you know, because, you know, they sold heroin back in the day. And then they said there’s more selling drugs, but some of the guys still did and just don’t get caught and you don’t get killed and things like that. But when I went to that prison for the state prison for a year, you know, I was in a, a violent state prison, not County, not local, you know, and I was around guys that were doing life that could never get out. And so I made a lot of contacts with those people. Okay. So that’s when I pretty much learned how to really be an organized crime criminal rather than being some guy that’s just going out having fun, being a fly-by-nighter, just doesn’t make any money like most of the guys.

[18:56] It’s about business sense too, and I have that. So it would be the same thing as a salesman in any business. How does he acquire connections? He goes out and sells. He tries to get accounts, which is to sell his product too. And then he also tries to get a place where he can get a product to sell at a good price. And so that’s basically what it is. And then you get involved in that business. You know, I started dealing with guys out of Boston at first and, you know, I’m new to the business. So, you know, they’re charging me way overpriced at first, but then it got to the point where I got so big. I was selling to Boston to the guys that thought that they were selling to me. I started selling to them and that’s how I got big in Connecticut. And, and so I had connections like I can’t even, I had every ethnic group there was doing business with me, heavily involved with Jamaican gangs. And I’m talking to serious Jamaican guys, gangs that were cutting people up in pieces in New York. They’re bad. They’re bad.

[20:01] Business with the irish crazy irish in boston lunatics i was in prison with them just like us crazy stab you shoot you they’re armor car guys they’re bank guys um i was doing business with the spanish you know tons of spanish friends doing big business all the black gangs that i was uh heavily involved with you know and when i say involved like you network you work together.

[20:26] And you know if i got if it might be i might come to the to one crew and looking to sell to them and they’ll be like here look at this and next thing you know i’m buying from them and selling to them and then i might be buying from them and selling to them it’s all you know depending on the connections that you make i had multiple a lot of them and then the more you’re in it the more you’re learning the more you’re going the more you know you’re getting access to better connections you know we started doing business in Mexico with the cartels um going over the border and grabbing the marijuana there and then bringing it back from there it led to that, and you know Texas we were getting from California locally too like local I was I got you know all the Jamaicans would get you know two three hundred pounds they’d be bringing me you know their weed their marijuana was a little bit less, uh, more commercial grade, you know, and there’s different grades all the way from marijuana for 200 a pound or 6,000 a pound. It all depends on what the market is and where, you know, what your, your customers want. So it’s just, it’s just a business. I mean, it’s just a regular business. And it’s legal today. It’s not like legal today. Yeah. So it’s like, you know, crime is an unethical crime to commit. it’s legal today. It’s just, you know, Uncle Sam wants their money and you’re not paying them to.

[21:54] And, you know, and with that, with the street stuff is, you know, you get a lot. I fronted all my stuff. You know, I would front. I had times where I had four or five hundred thousand on the streets. People owe to me. Yeah. With good for I never got beat once. I never got nobody never not paid me. So. But what I’m saying is, is like, you know, you, you network, you, you, I get a front that I fronted to these people, you know, a guy selling 10 pounds a week, I’ll give him 50. Now I don’t have to see him for over a month, month and a half. And so, yeah, it’s a networking. It’s a legitimate business.

[22:30] Everyone smokes pot. You could go up to a cop. You could approach a cop. Hey, approach a lawyer. You smoke marijuana. I mean, no cop is looking to get you in trouble for buying an ounce of weed. I never sold ounces, but you know, like you could just go up to a cop. You know, they’re looking for the heroin guys, the guy selling crack. Remember in the 90s when crack came out? Oh, yeah. Crack guys. even the cocaine guys because they’ve started making crack with it they’re looking for the cocaine guys now you know so there are big sentences marijuana you get a slap on the wrist nothing it was like you know in massachusetts the law under 50 pounds was a misdemeanor and i got caught with and i was a misdemeanor so now you’re making a lot of money and and your Your friends,

[23:15] Al Bruno’s crew, see this, I’m sure, and you’re a mover, and you’re a guy with connections. So you become more valuable to them, to that family, I would imagine. Now, how did he utilize you as you moved into the family more? Bruno is the type—.

[23:35] Bruno’s a businessman just like me. He was great at it. Prior to him being a mobster, he was a salesman and he was great. So, I mean, if he never got into the mafia, he would have been a multimillionaire legitimately doing all kinds of stuff. And so how it worked with us is, you know, the money that we made here stayed here. Now, that does, you know, it’s not like you’re not giving up money. How it worked with with us the people that were somebodies that were in the mafia, it would be a partnership so like when i went partners when bruno brought me around i went partners with him in the sports book making there was like four of us so we all got 50 and bruno got 50 so if we won 10 000 bruno got five and we got five okay but a partnership it same thing with the loan shark and if we had a hundred thousand out and we were making four thousand a week bruno got two we got two okay that’s how it started back in the early 90s, then after was just me and bruno and i was his partner and i was getting 50 he was getting 50.

[24:44] And on all the businesses so it’s it’s not like now if he ever knew the amounts of money that i was bringing in like I could care less about oh we made we made a hundred thousand in the sports, and I’m gonna get 50 you would have to make a week like that for me to say was considerable amount of money because I was making money like that on the side doing everything I did not just the marijuana like I said I wasn’t in the coke business and I was making tens of thousands of month just off the coke robin hijacking trucks uh joker poker vending machines in other um states connecticut and all this was under bruno this is how crazy it was when he put me on record in 91, We were doing business with another loan shark who was a rogue gangster. He wasn’t affiliated with nobody, Albert Calvinis. In fact, they call him the boss at one time around here afterwards when I went away.

[25:50] And we were doing business with him, giving him two points. We owed him $400,000. This was in the early 90s. Bruno knew nothing about that. And so like I’m working with Bruno but I’m also got 400,000 out with this guy and I’m still a young kid I’m only 22 years old and so it’s um you know what Bruno what they liked about me with the real the gangsters really liked about me at first was I had you know I was a ballsy kid and I was violent I could you know inflict violence that’s what they really want because these guys were old school gangsters and and it come to the day they’re going to want you to pull the trigger these guys had that old school mentality you know especially bruno anthony de lavo you know these guys are going to be like hey i had a kill why should what you get in here without because then they resent you afterwards they don’t respect you when you don’t kill what happens is oh really yeah they look at you i’m like you never busted it you know this guy never did nothing you know they don’t even though you’re a made guy they don’t they don’t look at you like Like the other made guys that pulled the trigger four or five times and were involved in multiple hits, you know, so they knew I was violent. And I was also a very, you know, what you don’t see in the mafia is you don’t see guys that can commit murder, pull that trigger, be violent, and also make millions of dollars. Yeah. And that’s it.

[27:13] I was just going to comment about that. See, some people move in and move up because they’re a huge moneymaker. And some people are violent. Sure. And rarely, you know, are the killers and the ones you can depend on for that. But rarely did I’ve noticed that you can have both. Right. And so you could do both, which is interesting. That made you like a double whammy for Bruno. Man, especially a big moneymaker on top of all that. Sure. And it’s like, I think any group of men, you got to prove you’re tough. Whatever group of men it is, whether it’s a police unit or a football team, you got to prove that you’re tough.

[27:55] No different, right? You’re going to get tested, but it is. And even on the streets, there’s bullies that bully people, and then they bully the wrong person, and then they turn into the biggest coward you put up. And that’s pretty much what it is. Anybody can be a tough guy, you know, and bully guys because of maybe who their father was or who, you know, they got a lot of guys around him. But, you know, going to come a day, what happens if, you know, I gave somebody 50,000 worth of marijuana and the guy said, fuck you, I’m not going to pay you. Well, that guy is going to get shot. And that’s no, that’s how you build your, that’s how you build your reputation. I mean, there’s tough guys are a dime a dozen. There’s guys that didn’t fight, but pulling that trigger is a totally different level. Yeah, that’s for sure. You know, um, yeah, you know, some guys, you know, you got a guy that’s the smaller individual, you know, say he’s, you know, five feet four and you got a guy six feet tall that knows how to fight MMA style fighting. It’s not a fair match, but you take that five foot four guy and get put that pistol in his hand. Who’s going to win that?

[29:06] You know there’s an old saying uh big or small no matter the size i will equalize samuel colt so well you know what i used to always say too it’s like yeah i’m you know i might be five foot you know say your guy’s five foot four five foot five right yeah but you got a gun in your pocket now i’m what now i’m seven foot six you know now that now the tide has turned you know it’s not uh.

[29:32] Yeah so did you have like a making ceremony then where you eventually inducted and and you went through the whole ceremony and everything and had people stand around guarding the door and make sure nobody came in you had to wear a suit was that is that how that went down you had everything right but with me i was in my boxers your boxers yeah penitentiary or something i was in my boxers in a bathrobe. I came out with the knife on the table and all the guys around, like you said, and this and that. And, uh, the boss at the table would, uh, one of the high powered captains. And I was in a bathrobe and my boxes with the gun and the knife. Man, I thought you had to wear a suit to that ceremony. You know, back then in the days, you know, it was, it’s, you know, they called it the honored society was if you were Italian and you, that was a dream come true. Yeah you know to be inducted into the mafia anybody that was a wild kid growing up that’s what you wanted today you got to be a nut to every people want to get you know nothing out there to there’s nothing that you could say to to get your button that it’s going to prove to anything unless it’s a networking type business type of uh corporation type thing where you know made guys like a brotherhood like the the masons or the yeah you know um you know like a secret just group like that you know that they help each other out and things like that it was an honor.

[30:58] To, uh, to be inducted. You had to pull that trigger back then. You know, some guys escaped through, you know, without having to do it, but I would say, you know, all the way up the majority back then had to, you know, shoot to get, uh, inducted. Yeah. I believe that. So now you’re moving up and you’re moving up and, but there’s only so far to go in this crew here. It’s not like you’re in New York city where there’s several crews and You can go to Capo and then the next one up above and then the under boss, the consigliere and all those different ranks. You’re a young guy that’s immensely successful. You’re a racketeer and a gangster, it sounds like, as Sammy the Bull once talked about the difference in the two. And so now where do you go from here? You’re looking at Big Al’s, the boss. Do you aspire for that?

[31:49] Yeah, so you could still get those same positions here. We’re still, uh, we’re still a family, you know, like even the Genovese family in New York, you got a Manhattan faction, you got a Bronx, you know, faction, got a New Jersey faction, you got a Florida faction, you got a Massachusetts faction. So you still got the positions of a boss here. What we never did was you don’t need an under boss, you know, because you don’t have like 300 guys underneath you. So a boss here, it’s pretty much like, he’s like a captain running a crew. We had so many guys made guys and associates and throughout Western mass in Connecticut that they did an article in the Boston Herald and said, uh, in 2006, Michelle McPhee wrote from page of the newspaper and it’s on my Instagram. I posted it. She said there was more wise guys and made members of the mafia and associates throughout new England, Western mass Connecticut, you know.

[32:47] Than anywhere in the country per capita. You know, so meaning, you know, we, we don’t have 10 million people living here, but the amount of gangsters and organized crime associates that we had per amount, the, uh, the, the people that lived here, we had more compared to what they had in the Bronx and Brooklyn, the strongholds of like where the mafia is, you could still rise up. And I, you know, I started in 91, but I didn’t end up getting made until 03. And along the ways, I mean, I went and got killed. I was a proposed member. Then they wanted to kill me. And then I was proposed again. And then I, you know, so I was like throughout those, that time, not only did I have the illegal stuff, I was involved in like a dozen bar restaurants, nightclub. I had the biggest nightclub in Connecticut. So that, you know, that’s where I ended up. I had real estate. Developments that I had. So not just the illegal money, I had legitimate money that I was actually.

[33:52] Prospering very well in. Throughout those years, that’s what I was doing. In 96, Bruno, I got caught with the marijuana. Bruno wanted to kill me, wanted to chop my head off. He told my father he was going to leave me for dead on my front steps. And so I got shelved. Shelf means I got banished for a two-year period. They can’t banish me. I had the biggest crew. I was the biggest money maker. I had the biggest violent guys around me. And all I did was just, I just networked in other cities and made more connections. I was dealing with the top, I was dealing with captains in New York city and the other families, Boston, everywhere I was going dealing, Connecticut. And so I had, I just started building up reputations and networking and, and I didn’t get inducted until Oh three in that life. So I guess there came

[34:40] a time when you and, and Al Bruno bumped heads for real. We always, me and Al Bruno had like a father son relationship. You know, it was exactly what the way it was. You know, he used to talk, go to my father and say, why does your son always go against the grain? Why is he, he thought my father would be like, oh, he’s crazy. You know, things like that. He, he don’t want me hanging around one time with this kid, Emilio Fusco, who’s a made guy in our area in Springfield. And he says, I don’t want you hanging around with Emilio. I said, why not? I go, you talk with him. I go, because I don’t want you to hang around with him.

[35:16] I go out that night. Who am I with? The kid Emilio. He comes to my house the next day, Bruno, because we used to have to settle up and do the work once a week. He goes, you go out last night. It was Saturday. This is every Sunday. He would come over my house. He said, you go out last night. He goes, yeah. He goes, who are you with? You with the kid Emilio? Now he knew because everybody told him everything. Everyone reported back to him. He goes, you were with Amelia? I said, yeah. He goes, but why do you always define me? Why did I tell you not to hang around with him? Do you hang around him? So we had a relationship where we…

[35:46] You know, was like father and son, but I know that he really, um, he wanted to make me with him.

[35:53] Bruno’s problem was he, he wanted too much control. Like, you know, he would, he would, uh, investigate me worse than the IRS could, you know, like we’d be, he goes, how do you do it? He goes, you’re out to dinner every night. He goes, you got a wife, you got three kids. He goes, you don’t work.

[36:08] He goes, and you’re out. You smoke, you, you got cigar. You hear it. I go, Bruno, I go, when I go out, we all chop up the bill. He was like on me like that. And because the reason was because his son would always run back to him and tell him I’m in the drug business. And then he used to tell, if I find out Anthony’s in the drug business, I’m going to chop him in half. I’m going to cut him in half. So that’s what I was dealing with. It was like 50, 50. Could I have gotten killed? Absolutely. So we never had a falling out where we hated each other ever. It was just all little things like that. When I got caught with the marijuana, if he ever knew the millions and millions of dollars that I made and he never got a penny of it that he would stick to his stomach if he ever found it ever knew but I was just good at that I was just good at making money and being good about not you know flashy like his son was flashy I didn’t need a you know to walk around with a hundred thousand dollar watch and driving around with brand new Mercedes or anything you know I was but you know I’m about making the money so I had a me and Bruno never had a thing where I could say, I hate that guy. Like Emilio Fusco, I wanted to kill him. Every other guy I wanted to kill, I could tell you dozens of guys I wanted to kill, right? And they, you know, it was just, we hated, we had hatred. Emilio was a made guy. He came from Italy and they made him in like 96.

[37:27] And he tried to get me killed several times. And I swore, I said, I told him, I said, I’m going to kill this kid one day. We’re the same age, but me and Bruno never had a, like, I’ve never had feelings like that towards him. And he never, it was never like that. Like I said, it was like a father-son type relationship. I mean, I pled guilty to killing him, but not like, and that’s hard to believe.

[37:50] But it wasn’t like what’s reported and the way it went down. And that’s pretty much why I wrote the book. And that’s pretty much why I do podcasts and to tell people what really, I don’t try to say I’m innocent at all, you know, but it’s not what they think went down.

[38:11] The way it went down. Uh, interesting. That’s, that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m guilty and I’m not saying that, but it’s not the way, you know, it went down the way, like, you know, I, I wanted to take his position or, you know, you know, anything like that or the motive. And I could walk you through the whole thing and you’ve got common sense. You’re going to be like, yeah, you’re definitely involved in it, but you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Guys. That’s why you got to get this book. It’s a, it’s going to give you a real insight, inside look at how this thing that we study, we talk about, we’re interested in, and we want to know more about how it works.

[38:50] If you really want to find out how it works. Now, I’ve got one last question here for you. I got to know about Freddie and Ty Gease. I know you know them. You were close to them. They were in your crew, I believe.

[39:03] If they heard the way you just said their last name, they would probably want to do to you. They want to do me like they did the whitey, huh?

[39:13] It was funny. It was funny. It was funny because we were in trial and they were going to the trial. The judge, but he wasn’t calling them geese. He was calling them, he was calling them gay as. Gay as. It’s called E-A-S. So he was calling them gay as. How about G-A-S? G-A-S. That’s how you say it. All right. So, you know, the paranoid, schizophrenic tie got all upset because the way the judge was referring to his last name, you know, maybe, but he was paranoid over that, you know, ask me about them. That’s kind of like, I got an Italian FBI agent that came here back in the sixties and I’ve got, I know him really well. He’s retired now. We talk all the time and we both worked to mob in Kansas city. And he said, yeah, when I first came here, everybody was an Italian. Yeah.

[40:05] So, I catch myself saying that once in a while. Yeah. Old habits are hard to break. So, you know, what was the deal with them? I mean, these are a couple of bad dudes, a little bit I’ve read about them. And, of course, they hit the headlines big time. And that murder was brutal, man. I mean, it was brutal. Right. Well, listen, here’s the story with them. I used to call them the Beverly Hillbillies. You know, the Beverly Hillbillies? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, they originally, I think they were born in California. And they uh they migrated to uh i think worcester for a little bit and then uh um springfield west springfield they were um the family owned a jewelry store and they were nothing on the streets like i reason i call them hillbillies like i met ty in prison we were both young kids and we’re both in state prison our first time ever and he used to chew tobacco you know you would you know he was like a hillbilly i i you know i used to call him a hillbilly like we had plans when we got out Freddie, the brother, believe this or not, was a prison guard. Freddie was a prison guard. I’m in state prison. I meet his brother. And me and the brother were always in trouble getting into fights in there. And they warned us, next time you guys fuck around, we’re going to ship you to the max, which was Walpole, one of the most dangerous prisons in America. Sure enough, he ends up beating up the Spanish kid.

[41:23] And they shipped him out. And I was supposed to… And I was getting out in February of 91. He was getting out in March of 91. Well, he ends up beating up a guard. Yeah. So he doesn’t get out until 96. He did like four years straight in the hole, but they, you know, they were good kids. They weren’t killers. Then they weren’t, they were just, you know, type of kids that would fight all just like me. They weren’t my muscle. They were friends of mine that if we had an issue and I says, guys, come on, they would come with me just like if they They needed someone to come with them. They were very ballsy kids, just like us, just like me and guys I grew up with my whole life. We’re all ballsy kids growing up. And as the years went on, Ty ended up coming home. So then when I got out in 91, I started to hang around with Freddie was no longer a prison guard. And they knew nothing about making money on the streets.

[42:17] You know, their thing was, Freddie’s thing was, cause Ty was still a young kid. He don’t even know nothing on the streets was, you know, credit card fraud, things like that. You know, maybe, um, low level, low level selling a little Coke, you know, and to scam guys, nothing like that. When I started hanging around him, that’s when I started, you know, getting him involved when selling some marijuana, we were hijacking trucks. We started making money doing that. I did a little loan sharking with him. He used to come to me. I used to give him the money. He’d have guys that want to borrow 30,000. you know we gave it to this one of these guys one time and we are charging him high amounts of juice i think we’re getting like we’re charging him four points we’re getting like uh 1200 a week off the guy and he couldn’t pay anymore next thing you know we took over to the guy’s bar and then after that we partners in his bar in westfield and then we ended up becoming the partners with the guys rest a bar in um cape cod which was like doing five million a year and gross back in the 90s So that’s how I started making one with Freddie. And then these guys never killed anyone prior to that. They were tough kids. If I needed them to go around, I would, you know, bring them.

[43:24] Would end up, you know, and I could go on and on and on and on and on stories with them. But, you know, it gets reported that they were muscle for me. They were never muscle. They never did anything for me. If there was, if we had to go shoot someone, I would go shoot with them. If we had to go beat someone, which we beat several people up, I was right there by the Smashing people with clubs and bats and knives and everything Muscle to me is when you say to somebody Hey, go give that guy a beat and report back to me type of thing You know, I didn’t I didn’t build my crew like that You know, I get accused of having a biggest crew, I don’t call it a crew. I call it a network of my friends.

[44:01] I network and I consider you my friend. I have you at my house. You come to dinner. I sell you 100 pounds of marijuana a week. You don’t report. I’m not your boss. Next week, you might sell me the marijuana. So that’s how I considered them. And I considered them the same thing. Things just started getting very deep. The mafia, in the mafia world, in Springfield, New York started coming. And I mean, it’s, it’s a story, Gary, that I could go on and, and, and talk till tomorrow night to explain treachery that happened, you know, what they did, but it just started getting a lot more serious where, you know, the, the beating now we’re getting into, now we’re talking about murders and murder plots and murder conspiracies. And when, and then it started, we started committing murders and like, you know, they, they were with me. And, uh, on my first hit that I did for the Genovese family in New York was in New York city, them two brothers came with me. That’s how I got made into the, uh, the family.

[44:57] Um, we went out, we went and shot, uh, a union guy nine times on the streets of New York. And so the two brothers came with me to do that hit. And, you know, that’s a, that was like a ballsy move to do something like that. You know, we had to travel to two and a half hours to New York. We had to get there, wait there with silencers for the guy to come out of his house. I mean, you know, there’s a lot of risk involved in there. Meaning who knows if the guy’s got a gun and shoots back. I mean, not only when you’re going to jail, but maybe you get killed, right? They were good kids. Fast forward, they could be out here talking with me just like you are talking to me right now. And they chose a different path and that’s why they’re in prison. Freddie ends up killing Whitey Bulger in prison. It was reported that they stabbed. They didn’t stab him. What happened was.

[45:42] They, he hit him with a lock in a sock and Whitey was so old that the bruising of, you know, hitting a 90 year old man that’s in a wheelchair, the bruising that it was causing made his eyes bulge out of his head. You know, it, his whole face got so swollen that it looked like his eyes got gouged out, you know, and this is coming right from the, um, the, the, the guy in West Virginia that, you know, like one, uh, how you call it? The path, path, forensic pathologist. The forensic guy. Yeah. Like one of the guys that did the autopsy. Yeah. The guys that, you know, he, he would know exactly, you know, cause it was for it all. He hates, you know, rats. And that’s why he killed the guy. Listen, if he did, you know, hate rats, then why, how could he be a prison guard ever? You just don’t flip on a night’s, you know, the light. And one day you’re locking guys up in their cells and the next minute you’re killing them because, you know, it was nothing that, you know, they, they report that for, it was for notoriety purposes that that went down and everything. Interesting. Well, it was quite a shock. I remember when I first read the headlines. It’s like, oh my God.

[46:51] Yeah. It’s shocking. People call me up and I just had prison in 17 and this happened in 18. And I had got the first job ever I ever got in my life was selling cars. I never had a job in my life. I worked for my father. That was it. So I had a, you know, I got a job that was good. I started selling cars. I don’t know nothing about cars, nothing about engines, anything about that. Right. And so somebody tells me a calls me up and they said, Hey, Whitey Bolger just got killed. I said, so what? And they said, you know, who’s in the prison with that killed that he got killed. And I said, Freddie, I knew right away he did it because that’s the type of, if you knew Freddie, that’s a type of son that he would want to do for the notoriety of it. Now I’m, you know, worried because they were co-defendants of mine on one of the trials that we beat got found not guilty in 07. I’m at the work and it was national news, worldwide news. Because Whitey was like, you know, I think number two on the most wanted list behind Bin Laden, right? For a long time. Yes, he was. With that, I’m on the TV. They’re showing pictures of me because, you know, they’re going to link me with them. Like, who’s Freddie? Like, when you say who’s Freddie, all right, he killed Whitey. But if he didn’t kill Whitey, nobody would know who Freddie is. Right? Right. So now then, who is this guy? Oh, he worked for the Genovese family guys, and that’s how you’re going to refer to him. So when they say that, I was the boss, so they say it worked for me.

[48:13] You know what I’m saying? And he did work with you. He worked with me. Yeah, we did. Like I never considered him a subordinate or there were just guys that were in my crew that I had guys that were 10 times more killers than they, they only killed the only guys they ever shot and killed was when they were with me. They didn’t kill no one else or shoot anyone else. You know what I’m saying? So it’s like, you know, like, uh, were they tough kids? Absolutely. Do they got both? But we all had balls. We had a lot of guys like that back then. Yeah. It’s crazy world. Crazy world. You came up in guys. You got to get this book. There it is. There it is. Yeah. That’s in syndicate. How I took over the Genevieve Springfield crew. Anthony Arillotta.

[48:56] Anthony, this has been great. I really appreciate you being so candid with us and kind of telling us how it is. Guys like you, it’s, it’s been this big mystery for a long time and, and how all this works, especially for me. And I came up, I was a young policeman out here following these guys around and I never knew what was going on. I just knew that they went from here to here and they had this license plate and they met this person, they had this business and he went there. So it’s been a real revelation for me these last two years talking to you guys. I’m glad you’re talking. Now you’re going to have, you got a YouTube channel, correct? Yeah. So you probably got some amazing stories too, in your line of action. Well, not quite that amazing, but. Someone got to pull stories out of you one day.

[49:41] No, but yeah, so I got a, um, I got an Instagram is my name. Anthony or a lot. I’m on Facebook. I’m on all that stuff, social media, but I have a wine coming out. It’s called Pazzo P A Z Z O in Italian. That means crazy.

[49:57] It’s a good story. My father was in the wine grape business, so I’m proud that I’m involved in the wine business itself. It’ll be out for pre-orders next week, and then it’s launching in March, where it’s actually going to be able to be distributed. And yeah i have a mafia youtube channel called mafia money mayhem and the mafia okay and i’m gonna be starting that up back up because i have to sell i’m not in the selling business i’m i’m selling uh wine and uh books and so i gotta start you know you know a lot of people are interested in this mob genre i get so many messages a day when you’re coming back when you’re coming back when you come back. So, um, I am going to come back. I don’t, and I can, and I like talking about everything, not just mob stuff. So a lot of people out there, I guess DM people that are depressed, people that want to eat, live healthy people. How do you get through adversity? You know, like I love talking about all that stuff. I like, you know, I think like, that’s what I can, you know, help people like give back to people. So, you know, if I can help anybody get through something through the, you know, how I lived would be that. So yeah, going forward, uh, that’s what I got going on. No, I’m helping. I got my cousin and my nephew, my nephew’s MMA and my cousin in Worcester, Danny Dogemo, he’s fighting.

[51:18] My nephew’s fighting this week. My, uh, Danny Dogemo’s fighting, um, uh, February 15th. I’m helping out all those young kids in the Worcester area, young kids, good kids that will get them off the streets and get them into the box. And, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m sponsored them. I get them, you know, I helped them with their fighting and, you know, get them cause they have nobody and they’re going to end up going to prison. So this way, keep them on the right road.

[51:43] All right. Great. Anthony, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Hey, Gary, thanks for having me. Great job. Good talking to you. All right. Uh, guys, you know, I like to ride motorcycles, so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. And if you have a problem with PTSD, if you’ve been in this service, go to the VA website and they have a hotline on there. And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, Anthony Ruggiano, he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida, of all things. And he has a hotline on one of his website or his YouTube channel. I can never remember. This is not a paid promotion for him. I just want to give you some resources out there that I think would be entertaining too or fun for you. And if you have a problem with gambling, there’s plenty of resources out there for that so uh we all need help once in a while and and i’ll be the first one to admit it and my life has been a whole lot better since i asked for it back years ago so thanks a lot anthony arelotta and uh south end syndicate how i took over the genovese springfield crew and get that book guys thanks Anthony thank you.

Listeners will hear about notorious gangsters who frequented the Alto Knights, including Vito Genovese, Michael Miranda, and infamous enforcer Buster Ardito. Through historical anecdotes and law enforcement surveillance records, this episode paints a vivid picture of mob life—its power struggles, criminal enterprises, and the relentless pursuit by federal authorities.

Click the link on Anthony DeStefano’s name to see his mob books.

Subscribe to get gangster stories weekly

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

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To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here!

Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in Studio Gangland Wire. A little bonus episode here. Hopefully, you just listened to or watched my interview with Anthony DeStefano, who had these books about Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, and from which Nick Pileggi researched to write his screenplay for the most recent movie that’s just released, Alto Nights, It’s a pretty interesting movie. We haven’t seen a movie about the mob in the 50s since the 50s or the 60s, I don’t think. And they talk about the Alto Knight Social Club. That’s what this was all about, the Alto Knight Social Club. It was a Genovese social club. But what I’ve noticed is there’s a lot of discussion about where was this club? And there’s a whole school of thought, thanks to the New York Times or another New York newspaper, were obviously conflating the Ravenite Social Club and the Alto Knights Social Club. Two different clubs. So let’s look at the Ravenite, which was at 247 Mulberry Street. And what the papers are saying, that the Alto Knights name was changed by Carlo Gambino when he inherited it from Albert Anastasia after he was killed. Barbershop Quartet, if you remember, murdered him in the Barbershare most famous mob photos ever, I think. Bosley Gambino changed it to the Raven Knights, Raven Knights, like, you know.

[1:26] Knights with a sword and the raven, because he loved the Edgar Allan Poe poem so much, the one called the Raven, you know, the Raven, quote, the Raven nevermore. Now, it seems kind of weird that Gambino must have been a pretty erudite, sophisticated mob boss. If you read Edgar Allan Poe and poems, you know, I remember it because it’s just so immensely popular. It got to, you know, quote the Raven nevermore. It’s such a great line that, you know, you’ve heard of it. I don’t think I ever read the whole thing. It’s certainly not for fun, maybe in school. And Raven Nights was then slurred into Ravenite. And, you know, that makes sense. And that became Paul Castellano’s club. Uh neil della croce really don’t neil della croce took it from carlo gambino and and then castellano as he was promoted to boss not della croce uh he never went down there that was that was the the kick on him was he never wanted to get his hands dirty and come down to on the street level where all the guys hung out and and so that’s when gotti after he had castellano killed.

[2:34] He moved his crew from the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone Park and the Queens over to Manhattan, you know, the center of the world, Manhattan, New York, and took over the Ravenite, probably the most bugged or most attempted bug club ever. And this was about two blocks away from another club at 86 Kenmare, same general vicinity, real close to the old original New York City Police headquarters, or they called it the Broom Street Addicts or something like that. And the 86 Kenmare was a well-documented bookmaking center, and it was known as a Café Royale back in the day. Now, going back to 247 Mulberry Street, you know, it was, there’s another story that says it was Albert Anastasia’s club. This is a Ravenite, and it was called the Knights of the Alto Social Club. And he took it over from Joseph Profaci, who inherited it from Lucky Luciano in 1936. And so in order to, you know, the 247 Mulberry Street was always a Gambino Club, regardless of exactly how it got there. But Anastasia, Carlo Gambino took over that crime family after Anastasia was murdered. And, you know, I suppose he could have named it the Raven Knights Club. I don’t know. But then when Neil Delacroce dies, he gives it to his underboss, really, because he doesn’t like going down there anymore.

[4:02] 1985, Mr. Neil dies. John Gotti has had Paul Castellano murdered, and he’s now the boss of the Gambinos. And he moves over there, like I said before. But if you think historically, this was Albert Anastasia’s club, for sure.

[4:19] Gambino club, it’s just always been a Gambino club, not a Genovese club at all. And the Alto Nights in the movie Social Club is a Genovese club. Now, the other location is 86 Kinmar, K-E-N-M-A-R-E. That’s about two blocks away from the Ravenite.

[4:38] Still in the same area, Chinatown. You call that Little Italy, I’m not sure, in the Chinatown area. That’s where Anthony DeStefano claims the Alto Nights Social Club was after it was the Cafe Royale. There’s an old article that I found that shows some bookmaking going on and a guy named Willie, they said Willie Morati, who was a Genovese guy, was actually probably Willie Moretti was arrested there. So it goes back as a club Royale as a.

[5:10] Or Café Royale as a Genovese club, which then became the Alto Knights. Found a surveillance photo with the caption, Alto Knights Club, and that’s where these photos were taken. And that was, you know, many early members of the Genovese crime family, as well as Ben Ovidio Genovese and his underboss, Michael Miranda, were there. Another source, Scott Bernstein, reports from FBI surveillance logs in 1958. They documented that a Genovese soldier named Sally Byrne, called Sally Byrne, Salvatore Granello, said he was arriving at the Alto Night Social Club in the afternoon to meet with Genovese to discuss some recent jewelry heist and hijackings that Genovese was owed a piece of. And so, you know, he also talks about in 1955, the Genovese was photographed by the NYPD narcotics squad, going on walking talks with one of his Newark, New Jersey lieutenants, Little Pussy Russo, outside the Alto Night Social Club, which indicates it’s a different club. And this is in that area. And then it’s probably, it’s got to be where this Club Royale used to be because the Club Royale was at this 86 Kenmare. I found an article that said that. Never could find anything that said that address, that Kenmar address, but it’s a different location from the Ravenite.

[6:37] 1950s era newspaper, several photos taken in front of the Alto Knights Social Club. I may have said that before, showing Vito Genovese and a consigliere Michael Miranda standing there with some other photos of Genovese guys. You know, Michael Miranda, he was longtime consigliere, and he was actually part of the one. When Genovese went to jail after Costello and Luciano purportedly set him up to take a pension and actually ended up with a 15 year sentence for dealing narcotics and went to Atlanta. He set up a three-man ruling panel, which was Tommy Ryan Ibole, who was the acting boss, but Vito Genovese remained the boss, and then Jerry Catena and Michael Miranda. And they ran it, but Genovese relayed orders in the penitentiary. He did not like to give up control. Another photo in front of this alternate social club that shows some more long-term, well-known Genovese guys. A guy named John Ardito called him Buster Buster Ardito. He was a capital regime in the Genovese crime family under Mike Miranda.

[7:49] Caption said that he was a well-known narcotics peddler, and he was talking with Alphonse, good-looking Al Criscolo, who was also a well-known Genovese family soldier, and that Criscolo had been arrested once by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics when they, what the article said, smashed an international dope syndicate in 1945. I couldn’t find out much else about him. A lot about Buster Ardito. He lasted in the Genovese family, clear up to modern times, up in the 2000s. Came from Brooklyn. His legitimate cover job or a cover company, he was part owner of Butcher Shop at 590 East 156th Street in South Bronx. He was involved in narcotics. He took pops, took pinches for narcotics, extortion, loan sharking, gambling, the usual stuff. He was described as a button man in Michael Miranda’s crew. Ardito was once busted for slipping some medicine to a guy. A Genovese mobster was on trial in 1983, Gus Cercio.

[8:58] And all of a sudden he had a heart attack, or it looked like a heart attack. And the FBI found out later that he had, Ardito, Buster Ardito, had secretly given him some medication to simulate cardiac problems to delay the trial. He ended up actually taking a conviction for conspiracy to instruct justice for that. He only did a couple, three years on that one. But, you know, it’s, I’ll tell you what kind of guy he is. Back on up into 2003, the FBI had a whole bunch of electronic surveillance on him, recorded in several different places. He was eating, meeting people in different Bronx restaurants. And they discovered some of the devices and he moved to retail shops and medical offices. But the Bureau was on him. They actually ended up bugging his cell phone where they could turn it off and turn it on, And once they turned on their cell phone, then it would be the listening device. That’s pretty scary, ain’t it? I was like, have your cell phone turned on by

[9:59] somebody, and they listen and tape everything you’re saying within earshot of that cell phone. You know, as a result of that big-ass surveillance in 2000, they charged Ardito and several Genovese family members with labor racketeering, mainly a bakery confectionary and tobacco workers union and the International Union of Operating Engineers. He was out on bail for these racketeering charges, and he died of pancreatic cancer.

[10:27] You know, three other guys are photographed together in this set of photos from the 1950s in front. What was described as in front of or next to the Alto Night Social Club, although you can’t really see the club in the background. Lorenzo Brescia, Joseph Jostretz Stracki, and Joseph Toriki Brescia, or we’ll call him Chappie, which is what everybody called him. He came from Italy, from Italy, or Sicily, I believe. And he had been a soldier in Mike Miranda’s crew for a long time. He had been a suspect at one time in the Anastasia murder.

[11:03] He’d been a strong-armed man, a killer for the Genovese family. He was part of their union racketeering, been arrested for homicide, extortion, conspiracies, all those different kinds of things. He really was a close associate and in a crew by a guy named Peter DeFeo and was supposedly DeFeo’s top soldier. A number one man number one killer that don’t gross joe stretch or strachy he was a long time friend of mafia and former of joe velacci again he’s you know obviously he’s a genovese guy, uh according to blotchy strachy was president the assassination of joe the boss masseria in that coney island hit uh back in 1930 so this guy you know he he is a long time genovese guy Uh.

[11:54] Strocky was actually came up under Lucky Luciano back in those days. And as, as a blot, she did another guy toward a Ricky, I couldn’t find out anything about him. Uh, but he was listed as a soldier in a, in a, uh, organizational chart in the family, but really it was people going back to Cyril, the artichoke King.

[12:19] Uh, Terranova and trigger Mike Coppola. So, I mean, these were long time guys. And, uh, another newspaper article identified this cafe Royals and gambling location. And they gave the address there, 86 Kenmar street. And, you know, that, that newspaper article had a guy named Willie Morata, M O R A T T A is proprietor. But at the time there was really well-known Genevieve’s bookmaker named Willie Moretti.

[12:48] So I got a feeling that to me that puts it together. My humble opinion the Alto Nights Social Club is was at 86 kenmar not 247 mulberry 247 mulberry the raven knight was historically anastasia and then gambino club and the alto knights was historically and always a genovese club going back to cafe royale so a little extra one thanks a lot guys how you like my uh my little uh got my book as my backdrop here kind of cool i just figured that out uh how to do that i’ll probably do some more different kind of fun backdrops to get tired of seeing my, uh.

[13:29] Stupid little office and studio here. And don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re on the street. If you have a problem with PTSD and been in the service, go to the VA website, drugs or alcohol, get hold of Anthony Ruggiano. I’ll put links down there to my author page. I’ve got three books out there. One on Chicago, a windy city mafia, and one on New York to Big Apple Mafia or something like that by the crime families. You’ll find it if you go to the, if you hit that link and my book on the Las Vegas skimming investigation from the Kansas city standpoint. And I’ve got movies out there. I got three documentary movies about Kansas city mob activities. You can get, you can rent those on Amazon for, I don’t know, buck 99 or two 99. And I go, that’s all I got to sell. Well, I really appreciate you guys tuning in and being supportive. You know, my YouTube page, you’re so supportive. We’re over 20,000 subscribers now and get a lot of comments. I really like it when you give me comments. I usually comment back or try to answer questions or, you know, whatever, as long as it’s a rational, logical question or whatever. So thanks a lot, guys.

One of the most significant topics we cover is Alto Nights, the highly anticipated Mafia film written by Goodfellas scribe Nicholas Pileggi and starring Robert De Niro in dual roles. Anthony shares how his books Top Hoodlum, which focuses on Frank Costello, and The Deadly Don: Vito Genovese Mafia Boss played a crucial role in Pileggi’s research. He also gives us an inside look at the film’s development, including how real-life mob history is translated to the big screen.

We explore the legendary rivalry between Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, diving into their power struggles, assassination attempts, and Costello’s efforts to legitimize himself while staying deeply tied to organized crime. Anthony reveals new details from unseen FBI interviews, shedding light on Costello’s complex underworld dealings. We also discuss Costello’s mentorship under Lucky Luciano, the infamous Manhattan meeting that escalated tensions with Genovese, and how Vincent “Chin” Gigante played an unexpected role in Costello’s fate.

Beyond the mobsters, we also examine the women behind the Mafia men, discussing how the personalities of Costello’s and Genovese’s wives influenced their rise and fall. Anthony breaks down the casting choices for Alto Nights and the creative liberties taken to heighten the drama.

Finally, we reflect on why the public remains fascinated with Mafia history, from books to films to documentaries. If you love true crime, mob history, and behind-the-scenes Hollywood insights, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Click the link on Anthony DeStefano’s name here to see his mob books. Subscribe to gangster stories weekly

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here!

Transcript

[0:00] Well, welcome, all you wiretappers out there. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. We have a show today with Anthony DeStefano. Now, any of you guys that read my books, and especially about the New York Mafia families, you probably know this name, Anthony DeStefano. And welcome, Anthony. I’m really glad to have you on the show, because you have been a huge contributor to the knowledge base of Mafia history in this country. Welcome. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me, and thank you for that very kind word. You know, I’ve read some of those books, and you’re a good writer. You’re like an old newspaper guy, right?

[0:38] Well, yeah, I still am. That’s right. You still are. You and, well, Nick Pileggiis an old newspaper guy. Larry McShane is a newspaper guy. There’s several of you guys in New York that kind of cut your teeth on the mob news, and there’s a lot of news there. And speaking of Nick Pileggi, you got involved with this movie that he’s written a screenplay for called Alto Knights. It’s creating quite a stir among mob fans right now. They’re really anxiously waiting for this movie to come out with Robert De Niro playing two parts of

[1:13] all things. I don’t know how that works, but we’ll see when the movie comes out. So how did you get involved with this? I’m sure you know Nick Pileggi and known him for quite a while. And he probably reached out to you when he got the job to do this. Is that how that worked? Yeah, what happened was, I’ve known Nick for a long time, like you said, and we were talking one day, I was doing research for a different book on the Lufthansa heist, and we were talking, but Nick started to veer off into talking about Frank Costello at length. And he was saying, look, I’m writing scripts. I think, you know, I make a great movie.

[1:50] And he said to me, you know, I think he also makes a good book. And I thought for a second and I said, yeah, you’re right. And I spoke to my publisher and we decided that let’s do a book right away. A book right away. You know, we can get into the story. By the time the film comes out, we’ll be there.

[2:11] Well, little did I know the way Hollywood works is that, although I could get a book out pretty quickly, and I did with Frank Costello, the book called Top Hoodlum, Nick’s film was not going to happen right away. You know, you got to go through a process out there with Hollywood. You got to get a director. You got to get a producer. You got to get talent. You got to get money. So it took about six years before this project really got off the ground. running. In the interim, I wrote about three or four other books, one of them being Vito Genovese, you know, Vito Genovese, The Deadly Don. So these books all came together at the same time.

[2:52] And Nick had both books, Top Hoodlum and Deadly Dawn, on his desk to write the script for the Alto Knights. And, you know, it’s a process. It’s really, you know, he had to do the research. He had to rummage through my books and my files. And, you know, I did this for him because I’ve known him a long time. And it was kind of thrilling to see this finally get off the ground. And you know he put the script together i think in 2023 and by 2024 probably late 23 they were in production and they had a delivery date or actually a premiere date sometime in the fall of 2024 well again hollywood never works where you think it’s going to work and this date It got pushed back or forward into late 2024, then early 2025, and finally March 21st, 2025.

[3:57] Which is the new premiere date, the date when it’s going to hit the screens. You know, it was a process. You had to get funding. You had to get actors, actresses, and, you know, it all came together. But it took a while, and it was Nick’s sort of passion to do this story,

[4:15] because what What it did was meld together a lot of the mob history from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. And that’s what was crucial here. It happened that way. It took a long time. The finished product is going to hit the screens very soon. It’s hard to make a good movie. Let’s hope that he hits it out of the park, which I think he and Scorsese did with Casino for sure. Yeah. And Goodfellas also. And I assume you were working on the Lufthansa heist. He probably consulted with you somewhat on that. Lufthansa Heiss was part of that. Actually, in other words, I consulted with Nick.

[4:53] Oh, did you really? Yeah. He had had the Wiseguy book, and of course, they did Goodfellas. And Lufthansa was part of that. So it was important that when I write my Lufthansa book, that I had to talk to Nick. And he was very generous with his information.

[5:09] We sort of swapped stories. And of course, we got into Frank Costello. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Speaking of Frank Costello, you know, I was kind of looking back on him and about your book. And I see that you were able to find some some secret interviews with federal investigators and some private meetings he had with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, Frank was debriefed probably one or two times.

[5:34] By the FBI. Now, he really didn’t give them that much, but he defended himself saying, look, I’m a businessman and I never stole a nickel from anybody. He tried to put his best foot forward. Those I found in his FBI files. And also there was some litigation when he was fighting against his deportation order back in the early 60s, I think it was. He gave a statement And there was material included in that bit of litigation, which also sort of helped the story. It helped him with his own words and with the words of other people who worked with him.

[6:17] So it was interesting. It’s interesting to find that stuff. Yeah, that really would be a fine, just be fun to read and put in some historical perspective. And speaking of historical perspective, you know, he was mentor. His first boss was Lucky Luciano and he was actually running Luciano family, uh, when Luciano was, was gone. So, uh, talk a little bit about that and his partnership with him. It seemed like Luciano was a real businessman and Frank was a real businessman. They wanted to run this thing with less murder, although they created it on murder, but they wanted to run this thing with less murder. Now, that transition there, that’s really interesting to me. Well, Luciano is credited with creating the concept of the commission and the sort of almost corporate organization for the mob with all the families. We get together in sort of a ruling council, like a board of directors, and try to mitigate violence and run things as a business. Costello was, of course, under Luciano at the time and during that period. Luciano got convicted, as you know, on a prostitution case and got sent away to prison. And the caretaker really was Frank Costello of that family.

[7:35] Ultimately, after World War II, Luciano was allowed to go to Italy. His sentence was commuted, I suppose, and he went to Italy. So we had Costello nominally in charge.

[7:54] And interestingly, when Luciano left the country, Vito Genovese came back because he was ducking murder rap out of Brooklyn. He fled to Italy, got palsy with Mussolini, and ultimately worked as a translator, if you believe it, for the U.S.

[8:11] Armed Services Provisional Government after the war. But, of course, they got wise to veto, and they realized that he’s wanted a murder rap back in Brooklyn, so they deported him back to Brooklyn, where he beat the case. And that gave him an extra bit of armor and sort of clout, if you will, because he got out from under that indictment and he had ambitions and he was vying over the years for power with Costello. So this is where the sort of friction and the rivalry comes to pass in post-World War II. And it really, of course, hit a peak in the 1950s when Genovese really wanted to be the power and moved against Costello in the assassination attempt. And we all know what happened then. Frank survived. That’s part of the Alton and I’s story, by the way. It’s the main focus of it. And that rivalry and the assassination. And ultimately, Frank Costello decided to retire.

[9:22] And did he retire fully well the fbi watched him from months and years and they came up with no indication that he was involved in anything in terms of the crime family but the suspicion is and i think this is suggested in the alto knights a film is that costello tipped off the authorities to Genovese’s big upstate crime conclave in Appalachia and New York, where they were all sort of busted. And people think that.

[9:59] Costello had a hand in tipping off the cops to get back at Genovese. And when you think about it, look, it’s plausible. But I think really what happened was that Genovese was very headstrong and he didn’t heed people’s advice. They kept saying, Vito, let’s not have a meeting in upstate New York where we don’t know any of the cops. Let’s go to Chicago or someplace like that.

[10:24] But he stuck to his guns and they had the meeting upstate. They got busted by the state police. There was all this bad publicity, indictments, which ultimately got thrown out. But still, veto stock did not increase or get any better with that disastrous meeting in Appalachia. Frank Costello, meanwhile, was the eldest statesman. He was watching the things from afar and telling the FBI, look, I’m just a gambler and a businessman. And I have nothing to do with any of that stuff anymore. And Vito, of course, after the disastrous meeting upstate, gets indicted for drugs. And that was his real undoing because he got convicted on little evidence, by the way, I must say. I read the case file. And there was really little evidence except that coming from one informant who had some credibility issues. But he got convicted anyway and sent to prison where Vito died.

[11:31] Frank lived the rest of his life out and died in his own hospital bed, so to speak, outlasting Vito by a few years.

[11:42] He was such an interesting guy. He was able to affect this front even before he, quote, unquote, retired. he had such great rapport with politicians and reporters. And, uh, and so he was, you know, and you even saw him in the Keefoffer commission, you know, he was not your, you know, he didn’t come across as your atypical gangster wearing sunglasses inside and, and talking to this real Brooklynese accent, like some of them did that, that really painted a picture for the rest of the United States of what a mobster was like. He was a interesting guy. Yeah. Frank Costello, Oh, aspired to be legitimate, aspired to be accepted by money society and political society. And to some extent, he was, particularly in the politics. And he really tried to create this veneer of respectability. And to some extent, he succeeded, particularly after he so-called retired. Now, with Vito, it was just the opposite. Vito was not a very good businessman.

[12:57] He had some businesses, but they weren’t as prominent, politically connected as Frank’s. And this is where the antagonism is portrayed in the film. You’ll see that. Frank wants to be respectable. Vito says, well, you can’t be part of them. You’re just like me and the rest of us. You know, we’re all gangsters, basically.

[13:22] And the interesting thing, you know, I should mention, people are saying the original name of the film was Wise Guys. Of course, that’s very close to the book Wise Guy that Nick wrote. They changed it to Alto Knights. And the Alto Knights was a real mob social club in the post-World War II era. Period, on the intersection of Mulberry Streets and Kenmare in lower Manhattan, not far from the old police headquarters, as it turns out. And that’s where Vito had his club and base for operation. And of course, until he got sent away. The story I hear was that Robert De Niro, as a young man, young teenager, used to play pool in the Alto Knights, which eventually gravitated to more of a sort of neighborhood club because the gangsters like Vito were gone. And so he was probably the only person I’ve heard who actually was alive, who actually was familiar with the club. So it has a special, I think, ring for him in that regard. But that’s where the Alto Knights name comes from. It was a club. Now, you’re asking me why Alto Knights as a club name? I have no idea.

[14:40] But there’s certain, you know, some people think it was an operatic connotation.

[14:47] But who knows? I mean, I don’t know where they got this from. And I’d read a little bit about it. It had been a social club for a long time. I didn’t realize it kind of morphed on into a regular social club, you know, on up into the 50s for neighborhood people to come in and play pool. That’s interesting. you know, before the Rebonite and, you know, the Bergen Fish and Hunt Club and all the Wimpy Boys Club and all those famous clubs later on, there were the Alto Knights with the club. Yeah, and De Niro, I think, as a teenager, and I’m not sure what period that would have been, possibly in the 60s. Yeah, should have been 60s. But, you know, I’m told that that’s, you know, he hung out there, played pool and knew some of the people. Today, it’s a restaurant. I went downstairs.

[15:40] I visited the place, and it’s like a strong room with very thick concrete walls and pillars and stuff. It’s kind of interesting. Today, it’s a restaurant. It’s not- Yeah. Is a lot of the movie set inside and within the walls of that? No, I don’t think a lot of the movie, a lot of the movie is set outside the club. Now, some of it must be in the club, but a lot of it is, you know, the upstate meeting, Frank and Beto meeting, the… The hotel in New York, on the streets, and just some flashbacks to their youths, respectively. And of course, a big part, some part of the movie deals with the relationship they had with their wives. Frank’s wife was Jewish, Bobby, and they met, married probably in 1920, either 1917 or 1920, somewhere in there. Vito’s wife was the second wife in the film. Anna. She was a very tempestuous, pretty woman from the photos I’ve seen, scheming in her own way. And she ran some of Vito’s nightclubs in the West Village.

[16:58] He actually signed a power of attorney when he fled to Italy. And he complained later on that she sort of screwed him out of some money. But she was very, very – she was a mob wife in the sense that When she was first interviewed by the congressional investigator, she denied knowing anything about anything he provides for me. He gives me money. I buy the groceries, whatever. Later, when she filed for divorce, she, of course, made the allegations against Vito that he was the head of all crime in New York. He was the head of gambling. He was doing this. He was doing that. And he used to meet with gangsters. So the tune changed, I guess, to suit her strategic needs. And it was funny because ultimately they didn’t get divorced.

[17:49] Divorce action was dismissed or withdrawn. And Vito signed an agreement to support her. She complained about the amount of support anyway. And she did her own life, and he had his own life. He didn’t live with her. But they’re buried together out in St. John’s Cemetery in Queens, which is an interesting twist. This is Beto with his first wife, Donata. He died of tuberculosis back, I think it was the 1930s.

[18:24] So it’s interesting the way everything sort of comes together in the end. Yeah. Those parallel lives that were so different, but yet so similar.

[18:33] I think that’s a fascinating topic as they went along. Now, the famous Cuban meeting in 1947, was that kind of like almost the genesis of a conflict between Vito Genovese and Frank Costello? Because there were some problems down there with Lucky Luciano trying to put Genovese in his place, if I remember right. Yeah, yeah. If I guess he’s right. Well, I think the rivalry started before then. I think Genovese saw, when he came back to the United States after being exiled, that he saw Costello as the man in his way. So this would have been just before that Cuban meeting, which was a notorious meeting. And I suspect probably knowing Vito, he felt slighted. He felt that he wasn’t getting his due well before then. So I think that’s where the antagonism started. You know, this is a classic tale of a conflict between a gangster and a racketeer, it seems to be like. Yeah.

[19:42] Sammy the Bull Gravano explained the difference between a gangster and a racketeer. Who’s a racketeer? That’s a more sophisticated, you know, union infiltrator and that kind of thing. And the gangster is a guy that runs the narcotics networks and does all the loan sharking and that kind of a thing. A racketeer will run a sports book. So it’s kind of a classic story between those two personalities. And in every crime family, you’re going to have some gangsters and some racketeers. Yeah, I think that’s a very apt sort of distinction. There are people who are more sophisticated, and there are others who sort of are like the street guys, you know, do the work, the dirty work. I think that’s what they have here.

[20:27] I think that the role of the two women in their lives is interesting and plays out in the film. Anna Genovese was the more…

[20:39] Uh scheming whereas uh Bobby Costello was the more supportive uh in that in that regard uh they they were costello didn’t have any children as far as we know although the rumors that he may have had a child at a wedlock but nothing’s ever been proven veto had with anna a uh a son of Philip, who died not long ago. He died probably within the last year and a half.

[21:14] And Anna had a daughter from a previous marriage, I believe. That’s how it went. So there was some offspring on the Genovese side, but nothing on the Costello side. Yeah, it seemed like when he got out of the business and died, it was just like that name was gone. It’s totally gone. Yeah. You can go to St. Michael’s Cemetery in Queens and Costello has a nice mausoleum there. He’s there with his wife and I think his parents and her parents. So it’s interesting. That’s his monument. What about Vincent Gigante, the purported hitman that flubbed the hit on Costello? How does the movie deal with that? Is it really gigante as a personality very much or well yeah he is uh the certainly the movie opens the movie compresses time and events that didn’t happen in the sequence you see it in the movie the movie opens uh if i had this right with costella being fetid at a um at a uh charity ball so to speak, which really did happen. But that happened many years before the assassination.

[22:33] Which took place right after the ball in the film. But it didn’t happen that way in real life.

[22:46] But Gigante is the heavy in the assassination attempt. the guy portrayed as pulling the trigger.

[22:57] He also, as it turned out, actually had a friendly relationship with Frank Costello afterwards. He’s actually socialized. He’s socialized, wow. That’s amazing. And, you know, it’s kind of like he became, as he moved on in his life, in my opinion, he kind of became a kind of a combination of gangster and racketeers. He took over the Genovese family and was pretty slick, but yet had plenty of gangsters out there working too. Yeah. You’re talking about Vito? Gigante, yeah. Oh, Gigante, of course. As he moved on and took over the Genovese family, he was kind of that perfect

[23:40] combination of gangster and racketeer. Yeah, well, of course, he got his comeuppance, notwithstanding the fact that he tried to come off as mentally ill, which was a scam. I interviewed Mike Campisi, who was one of the FBI agents that worked that case, and talked about the day that Gigante had to admit in open court that he’d been faking all that time. Pretty interesting. Yeah, I was there that day in court. Yeah, he made the admission.

[24:18] Okay. Yeah, really. Well, the federal government has a way of bending you to their will if they put enough people on you, that’s for sure. Yeah, that’s true. All right. Anything else? Any interesting little stories about the making of the movie that you remember or anything else you’d like to say about this story? No, other than the fact that when I went out to visit Nick Pileggi in the.

[24:45] Home out in uh east hampton he had the books right there on his desk all dog-eared you know put together uh with uh you know little index indexes and he had uh he called me up to ask me about certain photos and films and if i could get them for him so you know but like i said it was something i did for him because he was actually in my life my career he’s been pretty helpful. He never asked for anything. So I should reciprocate. Yeah. Like you, I know you do your research, but like you, he does his research. He doesn’t just go to the internet and pull off what he can. He does his research. I know when he was working on Casino, he was here in Kansas City with an FBI agent friend of mine. He was a case agent on that. And he spent, I think, two or three days with Bill. And Bill had snagged a lot of stuff that he brought home from that. And he really, You know, he really went into Bill’s mind and memory and his papers that he brought home and wiretap transcripts and all that at great length. Yeah, well, Nick, he’s out of that school. He’s out of that school where he does, you do the work. He also has an institutional memory, a lot of the mob events and history and personalities over the years. So he has that advantage.

[26:07] He told when I was a younger reporter he gave me a little tip on looking at the local newspapers out of Brooklyn these little you know weeklies and he said well why do you do that, And he said, well, do you see these photographs here? And they were photographs of local social events. But in the events, there were some of these mobsters who would show up, like at a wedding or an anniversary party. And he said, yeah, here’s Tommy Gambino. And sure enough, there is Tommy.

[26:38] And I said, so I started looking at those newspapers. I didn’t find anybody particularly important later on, but still, it was an interesting tip. And he was full of little tidbits like that.

[26:51] Very interesting. Well, the movie is Alto Knights, and this is Tony DeStefano and his two books. Do you have copies of those books there? I do, actually. It’s too hard to get. It’s Frank Costello. Yeah, Frank Costello. It’s the top hoodlum, Frank Costello. Frank Costello, Prime Minister of the Mafia. Yeah. And the other one is The Deadly Dawn, Vito Genovese. Yeah. And guys, I’ll have links to those books or you can get those on Amazon in the show notes. And Tony has a whole bunch of other books out there. It’s almost too many to go into. I’ll put a link to his author page on Amazon. You just go into that author page. You’ll find all the books that he’s done. I really appreciate your research into the mob over the years because, Tony, you have added, as I said earlier, you’ve added so much to the body of knowledge. Did you ever think it would become so popular?

[27:46] You know, over the years, I thought, is anybody really interested in this anymore? And it turns out they are. They are. Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe thanks to The Sopranos, I don’t know what

[27:56] we have to think for it. But it’s immensely popular. They can still continue to make these huge, big-budget productions with people like Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese and people like that. We’ll see more. I’m sure we’ll see more films. Yeah, I think we will. All right. Tony, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Well, thank you, sir. And thank you for your good perspective and also for your own personal knowledge of events. And it really helps for a great interview. Thank you. We try. We try. Thanks a lot, Tony. Okay. Take care. All right. Well, guys, that was a fun interview. I really like Tony. He’s just a real good guy, easy to talk to, and so knowledgeable. It’s just amazing how knowledgeable he is.

[28:44] And don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So look out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the streets. And if you have a problem with PTSD, be sure and go to the VA website and get that hotline number and hand in hand with PTSD. I say the same things over again. I hope you don’t get too bored with it. Most guys probably shut off at this point in time, but go to Anthony Ruggiano’s website and enter his YouTube page and get that hotline number. He’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in, uh, Florida. He was a Gambino prospect, I believe proposed member at one time. His dad was a mate guy.

[29:19] And you have a problem with betting, gambling, 1-800-BETS-OFF. We’re just about to get the sports app here in the state of Missouri. So that’s been a big contributor. I know a lot of you guys use it correctly. My son uses it a lot, and I think he uses it correctly. I’ve never seen him have any problems with this.

[29:36] But you can get hooked on those things, those prop bets and all that, and they really create an addictive kind of a pull to people. And I understand that. I’ve had my own problems when I was young. I figured out that it was not doing me any good. I could do a lot better without these things in my life that I was addicted to. So don’t forget, I got some books out there. Like I was talking about Tony. I will put a link to my author page. I’ve got the book of my old podcast, some of my old podcast shows about the New York Mafia or Big Apple Mafia, New York Five Families or something like that. I’ll put a link up to it. and a windy city mafia, Chicago outfit. And then I’ve got my book on the skimming case in Las Vegas from a Kansas city perspective. We know the casino perspective from Las Vegas. This is from the Kansas city perspective where that investigation first started. That’s called leaving Vegas. How FBI wiretaps ended the mob domination of Las Vegas casinos. And I’ve got a few videos out there. You can, you can either get the, we can rent the DVDs online. I got three of them at, uh, Amazon and I’ve also got them. You can buy the DVDs or you can rent them streaming both on my website and on the, uh, on Amazon. So thanks a lot, guys. I appreciate you putting up with my little sales pitch here at the end. And, you know, nothing happens to you. Sell something. Uh, thanks guys.

Mary chronicles her journey into uncovering the mystery surrounding Augie’s murder, citing familial silence and societal stigma against discussing such topics. With Augie being part of the Milwaukee crime family, the Balistrieri Family, his history revealed a world filled with complexity, where he was not just a victim but also an active participant in gambling. Mary emphasizes that Augie ran a bar and was deeply involved in the gambling scene, but he was also a caring figure in his community, known for his generous acts and connections with local residents. This narrative complicates the typical portrayal of organized crime figures and invites listeners to see them as multifaceted individuals rather than solely as criminals.

The conversation touches on the broader context of organized crime in the 1970s, detailing how crime families in cities like Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Cleveland interlinked in schemes, particularly the infamous Las Vegas skim operation. Prominent figures like Frank Balistrieri, known as a ruthless mob boss in Milwaukee, are discussed, highlighting the violent measures he allegedly employed to assert his dominance. This included extortion and bombings, methods that claimed lives and instilled fear within the community. Augie’s murder was surrounded by speculation; many believed it was due to a refusal to pay tribute or cuts to Balistrieri, who was known for his violent reputation. Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

Click here to listen to Mary Spicuzza’s podcast.

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Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers. Welcome back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is retired Sergeant, Kansas City Police Department Intelligence Unit, Gary Jenkins, as you all know. And I have a really interesting show today and really interesting interview. I’ve not done much on Milwaukee. And you know, Milwaukee really was a part of the cartel, if you will, of Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Chicago that skimmed all that money from Las Vegas. And I’ve done a little bit on Milwaukee, and I’ve got one old show where we had a relocated witness from Milwaukee who was here in Kansas City, and we were starting to make a case on him, but then it came out he was a witness, and they sent him on to another city. But today I hear Mary Spicuzza. Mary, welcome.

[0:42] Thank you so much for having me. Now, Mary, tell me how I should really pronounce Spicuzza. Well, if you’re in Sicily, my family’s from Termini Moresi, and I’ve gone back to visit a few times, and they will say, if they see my name or my passport, they’ll say, ah, Maria Caterina Spicuzza. There we go. There we go. So I don’t expect you to say that, but it’s always lovely this time of year if you want to go and you can practice.

[1:08] Yeah, I’ve been wanting to go. I’ll get there eventually. I’m sure I want to see the volcanoes is one of the things I want to see.

[1:15] So Mary is an investigative reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and she also has her own personal connection to the Milwaukee crime family, the Ballesteri family, her cousin, and she has done a whole investigative piece on that, a big long article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which is online, by the way. I’ll have a link to that article down below. And she started her own podcast talking about this journey that she had in trying to uncover the murder of my cousin Augie, and that’s the name of the podcast, guys, My Cousin Augie. So look down in the show notes for that, uh, that link. So Mary, welcome. And, uh, you know, I, this is just, uh, it’s gotta be compelling as heck because you were, you know, you knew Augie and you know, all these guys and you’re,

[2:01] you were warned by people not to get into this. So start telling us about how you got into this.

[2:07] Yeah. So this was something that, um, uh, My family did not talk about and like pretty aggressively didn’t talk about. So my dad was very, my dad and cousin Augie, Augie or August, Augustino, Palmisano, they were born and they were both born around the same time. I believe they grew up together as cousins. But at a certain point, well, Augie was killed when I was a very little girl. He was killed in 1978. And my dad would not talk about it. And he would only say things like, don’t fall in with the wrong crowd. You know what happened to Cousin Augie. Don’t gamble. You don’t want to end up like Cousin Augie.

[2:51] Don’t talk back to the wrong person. You know what happened to Cousin Augie. And it was like, Dad, and I was a baby of five. And we’re all like, Dad, we don’t know what happened to Cousin Auggie because you won’t tell us. We just know it was something really, obviously really bad happened to him. But I went years before I realized what had happened to Cousin Auggie. And what had happened was that he was leaving for work one morning and went

[3:15] down to his parking garage and tried to start his car and was immediately killed. There was a car bomb, and it blew up.

[3:24] He was burned very badly and killed instantly. Luckily for the city and for others, nobody was in the parking garage at the time. And because it was like an enclosed concrete big parking garage, the damage was contained to just empty cars and the building itself. But it could have been. I talked to some retired police officers who talked about with that kind of explosion and the amount of sticks of dynamite that were used in the booster that it could have damaged several city blocks and killed a lot more people if it had gone off in the open. Yeah. And he was known, your mob boss up there, Frank Balistrieri, was known as the bad bomber. He liked to use bombs. Yes, he did like to use bombs. It was interesting because I wonder if how much of that was like a nickname in real time or like a nickname after the fact as people, because I heard like some people called him like Mr. B for Mr. Balistrieri or Mr. Big or Mr. Slick. fancy pants was one that yeah and i know some of the kansas city uh organized crime leaders kind of mocked him and called him fancy pants because they didn’t necessarily like him um but i do think yeah he is somebody i don’t think we know um i know there are rumors that he was behind a bombing or two in las vegas including the failed um if the failed car bombing that someone survived because of the car, like the makeup of the car.

[4:53] So I think, but yeah, Augie was killed. Obviously no one was ever convicted in the murder. Frank Balastrieri was convicted of other things. So we can’t say definitively who ordered it and who placed the bomb, but I think we have a pretty good idea of what happens. So tell us a little bit about your cousin Augie. He didn’t just appear one morning and have a bomb placed in his car. There’s some backstory here. So tell us a little bit about Augie. Yeah. So I learned a lot of this backstory as I was reporting because I knew so little about him from us not talking about him. But from what I was told. And what I was able to report. I did request all the FBI files on Augie. He was a gambler. I don’t want to portray him. And even some of our family members were like, we don’t want to portray him as this saint or angel.

[5:43] He was a gambler. He was a bar owner. A lot of gambling was going on in his tavern, some horse racing, some sports gambling, some money was changing hands, we will say. And this was in a neighborhood that’s known as the Third Ward in Milwaukee. Now it’s kind of this posh neighborhood where there’s boutiques and places for like boozy brunches and anthropology and plant stores.

[6:13] But it was not that neighborhood back then. This was where a lot of the Milwaukee Sicilians. When they came to Milwaukee, a lot of us, myself included, our grandparents when they got here, or great grandparents, grandparents in my case, Milwaukee, the third ward was a pretty, very working class, very like pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Lots of people did what my family did was sell fruit, sell bananas, selling places where you could work, even if you didn’t know English and you didn’t have like a high school education because a lot of people just didn’t have that privilege. But it was a rougher neighborhood back then. And Augie’s was kind of, it had, it was kind of, it was changing when Augie was killed. And I don’t know what he would think if he was able to, you know, come back or my grandparents come back and see it now because it’s such a different world. But back then there was a lot of people working round the clock in the produce business and they’d want to go and have a drink and some food and maybe do a little gambling afterwards.

[7:12] But, you know, I think I was raised to think that Augie was like a bad guy. And I think that the way people would talk about organized crime victims back then is like, they had it coming. And, you know, and I think now I’m like, wow, he was in some ways, I feel like, I should be more like Augie, not in the gambling, but there were all these stories of his generosity where if somebody got sick and couldn’t do their produce route, he would pick it up for them and just give them the money so they wouldn’t lose their livelihoods or sponsor all these softball leagues or bowling leagues. The generosity and the looking out for community. Certainly, I think people’s notions of gambling have changed. So a lot of the police officers and the FBI agents I talked to back then who were like, yeah, we tried to build cases on gambling. Now it’s practically legal. But back then we’d bust him for, you know, sports gambling or pony racing. And, you know, they kind of the idea was you get the little fish to try to get the big fish.

[8:16] But there was also a lot more to Augie’s backstory that I was not aware of. Like he, there was bad blood from between the Balistrieri family and the Palmezanos going back to his older brother fell in love with the Balistrieri. And when his family found out that he wanted to marry a Balistrieri, I think the phrase was like, what are you crazy? And they really tried to talk him out of it and didn’t want him marrying into the Balistrieri family, which I’m sure the Balistrieris did not appreciate. But it’s my understanding that when he basically married into the Balistrieri family and was told, you’re now a member of the Balistrieri family, you can’t be part of the Palmozano family anymore, which apparently broke his mother’s heart. As any, I cannot imagine, I guess he went to his mother and said, I can’t love you anymore. I can’t come to Sunday pasta dinners anymore, which if you’re, I mean, I think probably not even not being Sicilian, but like, I can’t imagine my, if my father had said that to his mother, like, I feel like it would have been world war three. He was like, he was his mama’s, he was the youngest of 13 and very, you know, so, um.

[9:27] I think that there was bad blood going back to that time. And apparently his son, this lost, they kind of disowned him and said like, okay, if you’d want to be part of our family, you’re not part of our family. And so when Augie’s nephew, who was also Frank Ballestieri’s nephew, went and asked him for a job at his bar, and apparently Augie gave him a job, which Frank Ballestieri did not like. And apparently there’s some wiretap transcript or I’m sorry, not wiretap transcript. A witness overheard Augie arguing with Balistrieri. And apparently it was about a shared relative and this, you know, Augie giving him a job. And apparently Frank Balistrieri said, I will like chop you up and write your name in blood.

[10:14] And it’s so I think beyond Augie gambling, running gambling and apparently refusing to give Frank a cut of his profits. Which, as you know, I’m, yes.

[10:26] So I think that, you know, it’s hard to say like, what was the last straw? But I think this bad blood was building for a while. But I do think there were rumors that Augie Ballast, or I’m sorry, there were rumors that Augie was an informant or that Ballast jury said he was an informant. However, a lot of people said like, you know, FBI agents I talked to, federal prosecutors I talked to said like, police officers said, we have no information or we don’t have anything to suggest that Augie was an informant. But sometimes Frank would say someone was an informant because he wanted permission from Chicago to kill them. And he couldn’t say, this person hired my nephew or this person hurt my feelings. But the informant was something that would get him the approval to car bomb somebody in a really public way in downtown Milwaukee, um, in a way that saying he hurt my ego would not.

[11:24] So I’ve looked, yeah. I’ve noticed that. And I saw it a couple of times in Kansas city. And I’ve noticed that in some other cases that many times they’ll start, these rumors will start being floating out there, uh, denigrating a guy, this, this last one guy had a guy that disappeared. And so I’m asking around here just lately. It was like 30 years ago he said oh he was gay you know oh he was uh he was going to testify and none of it was true but what they do is as you just pointed out they start denigrating the person accusing them of things that would be uh the antithesis of that in that lifestyle to denigrate them that makes it easier when something does happen to them they just say oh that guy was you know was this or that or the other. And so it’s an interesting thing. It happens, I think, throughout the entire, United States and mob families like that, because as you’ve described, everybody’s so close. They live close together. They’re interrelated in some manner. Everybody’s a cuz. You know, that’s why everybody calls everybody cuz, because everybody is a cuz. Yes. I’ve got so many cousins. I wouldn’t even, I mean, when you’re the, when my dad’s the youngest of 13 and, you know, a lot of his brothers had kids and their brothers and sisters had kids and And it is, yeah, it is amazing how many cousins you have in that kind of situation.

[12:47] And if you’re not their cousin or true cousin, sometimes you’re the cuz. Anyhow. Yes. Yeah. Or a lot of them went to grew up together. They came out of the third ward. They went to the same high school. They, you know, Ballester, he went to a more prestigious school, I would say. He went to Marquette and then dropped out of Marquette Law School, which Augie did not, you know, but went to the same public high school. So a lot of them went back years. Now, so those pictures over your shoulder there. Yeah. Is that that’s Augie? Yeah, this is Augie. So we I was kind of there were so many stacks of documents that I was going through. Like we’re talking thousands of pages of police reports and Augie’s homicide

[13:32] file and other homicide files and FBI reports that I started. Sometimes I tend to over-report, which I always think is better than under-reporting, but I thought this board would kind of help me just keep everything in focus of, I put Augie up. He was a handsome guy, I think, but this was, he was kind of in the center of, this was all unsolved homicide victims that they would, people would refer to them as the murders often of people who were believed to have been organized.

[14:04] Murdered by organized crime. Many of them were believed to have been ordered by Frank Balistrieri, but again, he was never convicted of murder. He was convicted of gambling and that sort of thing, extortion, but not murder. And then here is Frank Balistrieri, who’s deceased. John Alioto, who was his father-in-law that he kind of took over the family business from.

[14:28] There’s actually some really interesting wiretap recordings that one of my colleagues, someone who was an investigative reporter before me, actually got to listen to, which is phenomenal. But she hired somebody to translate. They were arguing in Sicilian and going back between Sicilian and English. But John Aliotto, his father-in-law, was actually begging him to kill fewer people and be less bloodthirsty and, and, um, have some mercy on people. And because he was killing other Sicilians, um, you know, and it was, I think he thought like, cool it with the killing and, and Balistrieri’s answer was, no, I want to kill more people. And at one point he said like, gosh, if only I could have a funeral home or a, you know, a cemetery, so I could bury more people. Um, and then his sons, um his sons who have both passed away uh john passed away last year um he did not want to be interviewed for the story i did reach out to him i wanted wanted to be fair and give him the chance to talk um you know anytime we we try to do that anytime we’re mentioning somebody’s name that you want to give them the opportunity and then we had a row of i don’t know if you can see these folks but um, Some of the suspected hitmen who we believed are kind of the top suspect of the bomber was this man.

[15:48] George Nick, Nick Montos, who was a kind of prolific, involved in kind of organized crime, burglaries, that sort of thing. So, but again, since no one. Enforcer type. He was kind of an enforcer type. He looks pretty tough. He was. Yeah, he was pretty tough. I think he first was arrested maybe at age 14. And I think he was from Florida. And he was a safecracker, a burglar, and kind of a go-to guy for Chicago organized crime. He was seen in Milwaukee right around the time of an attempted car bombing of Augie’s best friend who survived because the bomb didn’t go off. But it was somebody who, Vince Maniaci, who his brother, Augie Maniaci, had been killed and gunned down in an alley. And Vince, shortly before Augie was killed, Vince was driving and had trouble starting his car and then was trying to figure out why it wouldn’t go more than like 15, 20 miles an hour and pulled into his mechanic shop and they opened the hood and saw the mechanic said, I think it’s a bomb because it was like very similar, apparently in structure to the bomb that killed Augie, but a bunch of sticks of dynamite with a booster close to the engine on like the driver’s side.

[17:06] So unclear whether that was designed to kill him or designed to be a warning but certainly could have killed him and a lot of people if it had gone off if you see now now are most of these bombs did you find in the reports did they report that most of them in their opinion were made by the same person in the same manner that was the that was the general uh quite a few folks including a couple of FBI agents now retired, felt strongly that they were built by the same person built based on how similar they were and just the method of, you know, planted overnight, stick the dynamite with a booster, the alligator clips. Obviously, maybe somebody learned from the same teacher. So it could have been, they could have franchised out. But I think a lot of

[17:52] people felt like it was Nick George Montos or Nick Montos who was the bomb builder. But again, And I don’t want to convict anybody of who was not convicted. But that seemed to be the general sense was the same person. And they had a strong feeling of who it was. Now, Augie and these other two fellows were they were all killed within a short period of time. So was there there must have been some kind of was it over maybe not paying the tribute or what did you what did you learn about that? They somehow they were kind of connected. That’s what my policeman’s mind says. These three murders were connected.

[18:27] That, yeah. So I think there were, Frank Ballast, there was a trail of unsolved murders that that extended earlier. And there was an attempted bombing of a restaurant as far back as like the 19, I want to say 55. It was the 50s, who was this Fazio family owned this restaurant that apparently, and there was apparently tension because Frank Ballestieri wanted to buy a restaurant or a bar that they had bought. And so he was a top suspect in that bombing where nobody was killed, but there were severe damage and definitely shook people up. And somebody, one of the older Fazios died of a heart attack shortly afterwards, the senior member of the family. So I think there was a sense that he was not shy about using force and using bombings and murdering people. However, all of Augie and Vince Maniaci, the attempted car bombing of Vince, the fatal car bombing of Augie, and the shooting death of Augie Maniachi, those were all in the 70s, 75 to 78. And I think at the time, there were a few things going on. There was Frank had taken over from his father-in-law, brushed off his concerns about being too violent.

[19:44] By a lot of accounts, Frank was a pretty ruthless person who wanted power and was not afraid to, uh, exercise force or to, to get it. Um, uh, so I don’t think from, from people I interviewed, a lot of people said like, you know, he was not the most popular mob boss, which might sound funny, but there were some like John, you didn’t hear of that kind of brute force being

[20:09] used on the regular from somebody like John Alioto. So I think a lot of people felt like he didn’t earn his, he didn’t earn his place that he kind of got it through marrying the boss’s daughter and that they didn’t necessarily respect him. And they called him fancy pants behind his back as somebody who was kind of a more.

[20:29] He was not like a, I mean, he went to Marquette Law School, which a lot of people in organized crime did not, he didn’t finish his law degree, but just, you know, that he was seen as somebody who was more kind of an elite, I guess. And that people didn’t necessarily feel like he had earned his place and that some people were maybe, not paying a cut or that they felt like he wasn’t giving them, they weren’t giving him the proper respect, I guess. So I think he maybe, from some of the folks that I interviewed, felt like he was trying to put people in their place. And I think Augie was somebody who does not sound from everything I’ve heard that he was not exactly the.

[21:14] Kowtow to somebody in power type of person, that he was more of the like, this is my money, I earned it, I’m keeping it. And from what I’ve heard and what I’ve read and been told that Frank Bell’s jury, it wasn’t just like gambling businesses that he wanted to cut off. It was if you, he was very into the vending machines. So he would often go and show up at a restaurant, whether they wanted a vending machine or not, he was going to try to put it in there and shake them down and try to get cuts of their profits, legal and illegal businesses, from what I was told by folks like Joe Pistone. So if he had somebody who was making a lot of money and a very successful as a bar owner, Augie had a produce company. He also had his gambling side hustle.

[21:59] I think with that kind of money changing hands, he sees somebody who’s successful who’s not giving him a cut. And I think it might’ve been from some of the folks I talked to, it was, well, I want to make an example out of him and show who’s boss and remind people who’s boss. And there was some interesting stuff in the police reports of FBI surveillance on Balistrieri, where shortly after Augie was killed, he went to another family and said, like, about that bar, I want to buy from you. And they, from what the police report said, they basically sold him what he wanted to buy. And then for the first time in their life, took a trip to Italy to get away, which kind of makes you wonder if it was the message was received and it was like, give Frank Balistrieri what he wants and try to, you know, be careful when you start your car or be careful where you go. Wow.

[22:53] Interesting. You know, another interesting thing I find from my viewpoint, those same years in Kansas City, we had a mob war and we had killings and bombings. And in Cleveland, that was during the time when Danny Green and Kill the Irishman story, if you know that at all, they had a mob war going on with killings and bombings and stuff in Cleveland during those years. I often thought it was kind of like as the baby boomers started growing up and the old guys that came, you know, were like their dads,

[23:28] like baby boomers were moving in and the dads were wanting to kill them off. Keep them out. So I don’t know, but.

[23:35] Wow, that’s so interesting that you say that. And in this case, like John Frankie was saying, he did this really interesting presentation when I talked to him and he was very gracious with his time. But he was saying that at one point he said he asked the FBI to get him a list of all of the like made members in Milwaukee. And he looked at it and he said it was a remarkably small crew and a remarkably old crew. And that Frank was not. And that part of, he kind of thought part of why maybe Frank welcomed Joe Pistone and Ty Cobb, who was undercover as Tony Conti. And um you know ty not as much as joe pistone he really wanted like really was recruiting donnie brasco to join his crew and come to milwaukee um but john was like i wonder i think he wanted to show off these like young guys because his crew was so old and i think some of the old timers were kind of like who is this punk kid frank balestri who does he think he is you know, ordering me around and telling me what to do. And so like when, when Augie Maniaci was murdered, I mean, he’s somebody who was older.

[24:46] He was an older gentleman, you know, he was like starting his car to go to work. And I, I don’t want to misspeak, but like, he was not a young guy. So yeah, but it is, it’s interesting that he, that I think in some ways, Frank was not getting the respect from the older guys who might’ve been worked their way up from the streets and started with lots of more, you know, TVs falling off trucks or meat, you know, meat, you know.

[25:12] Like very petty crime. We’re talking, this was not like, these were not big time, you know, criminal masterminds. They were not skimming from Vegas casinos. They were, you know, hijacking a meat truck or something. Interesting. Yeah. As, as Balistrier was. And at that time he was, you know, he started in that skim. Did he, did he like let other people know, or did he keep that really close to his vest. I know in Kansas City they kept that really close to their vest, but he did share it here with some of the other old timers.

[25:45] Yeah, it was so interesting. I don’t know if you’ve talked to the retired agent who was Gary Magnuson, who was here in Milwaukee and then Vegas. So it was really interesting talking to Gary because he kind of recounted some of what was in the book Casino about Frank was really trying to keep it close to his vest, where he knew somebody on the Teamsters pension fund here and introduced Alan Glick. And he had that kind of sweetheart deal that for his kids to essentially get ownership of this, they could claim ownership of this casino for like very, very little money. And that, so they had this deal worked out. And apparently that was in a safe hidden at the Shorecrest Hotel, which is not too far from where I’m sitting here now. Unfortunately I wish I could take you on a driving tour still there not owned by the balisteries anymore um but um I think he kept it initially very very close to his vest and apparently that got him in trouble you probably know more about this but got him in trouble with some of the Kansas City folks when they started asking Alan Glick and called him in and um I think there was a quote um it was either in Gary’s book or in Casino where they said like they talked to Alan Glick and said something like, drive up to Milwaukee and get that fancy pants here. I don’t care if he’s in his pajamas. Bring him here. We have some questions for him.

[27:12] I think he kept it maybe less close to his vest after that just because I don’t think he had much of a… I didn’t get the sense it was necessarily out of generosity and team spirit that he was deciding to share, but more wanting to not get killed by the Kansas City folks. Yeah. I think so. But you probably know more about that than I do. Yeah, that’s a whole other story. And I wouldn’t do that some other time, but that is a whole other story. But I’m really interested in…

[27:42] And you mentioned Joe Pistone and wanting to bring in new people. I know you interviewed Joe and that other agent who was undercover in Milwaukee at the time under the name of Tony Conte. Is that correct? And he had a, did he have a, trying to start a vending business, which anywhere you see vending machines back in those days. And to me today, if you see video poker machines or something, you got somewhere there’s going to be some mob involvement. I don’t know where, but, but vending machines was huge back then.

[28:13] And this guy was moving in. So you got into that in your research. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. So back then, I think that back then the, you know, Joe Pistone had been so successful as Donnie Brasco infiltrating organized crime. So they started sending him to different cities around the country. And there was a agent in Milwaukee here, Ty Cobb, Gail Tyrus Cobb, I think he went by Ty.

[28:45] Although then he started going by Tony Conti. That was his undercover. But from all accounts, and especially from talking with Joe, he was having a lot of trouble. He was not having the success that Joe had infiltrating. He set up, I think he called it Best Vending Company. He set it up on the east side, not too far from the Shorecrest Hotel, where that was like Ballast Jury headquarters. So he was basically kind of thrown in in their face, you know, like I’m here and I’m trying to open. And then, but he was just not having a lot of luck or getting a lot of reaction. I think unbeknownst to them, Frank Ballast Jury had guys following him and he was thinking of killing him. But to his, as far as he knew, he wasn’t getting any kind of.

[29:31] Interaction. They were probably just following him and trying to decide when to kill him. But so then they bring in, they’re like, you know, talk to Joe about it. Like, how about you come here? So Joe starts kind of from what he described, kind of, you know, laying breadcrumbs out for Lefty saying, hey, Left, I got this friend in Milwaukee. He’s going into the vending machine business. And then, you know, I guess it was over. They were at some restaurant or something. And apparently Lefty throws down or drops his fork and is like, where’d you say he was? Milwaukee. And then the reaction, I always think of us as Milwaukee is so Wisconsin nice, but that was apparently not the reputation. His response is like, Milwaukee, what is he, crazy? They’re crazy out there. They’re not just like New York where they’ll beat you up. In Milwaukee, they’ll kill you. They’ll blow you up. If he’s a friend of yours, tell him to get out of that city. Which again is, you know… I knew so little about organized crime growing up because I was basically told, just stay away from it and stay away from those people, stay away from those establishments.

[30:40] You know, we were not going to Snugs, which was the balustrier-owned place in the short crest, or having anything to do with anything like that. My dad was a school teacher and a wrestling coach. And I joke that he was about as like, buy the book as you can. Like he was kind of like one step away from a cop to us where it was like, you do not, you know, like you are, you know, you pay your traffic to if you get you pay your bill on the day it’s, you know, day you get it kind of guy. So he was not messing around with any of that kind of stuff. But but at that time, unbeknownst to Ty, he was being watched. He was being followed. Then Joe comes in and Balistrieri, before he knows that he’s Donnie Brasco, who’s friends with Lefty, he had his guys apparently following both of them, thinking he was going to kill, probably kill both of them or have his guys kill both of them. So Lefty and apparently the Chicago folks and some folks from Rockford organized this meeting at Snuggs where it was going to be Donnie Brasco, Joe Pistone.

[31:52] Tony Conti, Ty Cobb, Balistrieri, and then some of the Rockford guys and Lefty to try to work out a deal of where basically the Balistrieris would get a cut of best vending.

[32:04] And Tony Conti would get to stay alive. Seems to be the terms of it. I don’t think they were buying in, really. You know what I mean? I think on paper they were buying in, but it was more like, we won’t kill you and you’re going to give us a cut of your profit.

[32:18] I think we call that extortion. Yes, extortion. Correct. Yes, that would be what they were charged with eventually. But, you know, they decided that it was too dangerous for Tony to wear a wire into that meeting because he’s in a balustrary stronghold surrounded by people. People who were, you know, had probably killed people or ordered people to be killed or some of a mix of both. Donnie got called away. Joe got called away because his wife was in like a terrible accident and he had gone back to visit her. And he was not there for that initial meeting, but he heard about it from Ty. And then he did have another follow-up meeting at Snugs.

[33:05] And I hopefully I’m getting all the details right. He laid this out really well in Donnie Brasco and when we talked to him. But essentially, you know, the story goes that Ty gets there as Tony and Frank gets introduced to him and he kind of reaches out his hand and then he goes, he’s like Tony Conti and like kind of his hand recoils and he’s like, we were going to hit you. We thought you were the G. And he’s like laughing about how he was going to kill him unbeknownst to you. He was actually the G or the government agent, but, um, but he’s a friend of lefties at this point as according to everybody. So he’s cracking up. Cause he was like, he had guys following him and he’s like, oh yeah, you’ve got that office. You’ve got your apartment in like, he knew the car he was driving. He knew where his office was. He knew where he was living. Um, I guess lucky, luckily Tony and, uh, Donnie tie and Joe had been staying at a hotel while Joe was in town.

[34:03] So that might have, I mean, I think Joe being there and Joe facilitating that meeting very likely saved Tony’s life. And I think Lefty making it happen saved probably Joe and Ty’s lives because I think that they were pretty close to getting killed. And at one point, like, uh, they were so close to, they were looking for him. They were going to kill him. And I think Frank took a trip to Florida. So he would be out of town for like a few days when the hit was going to happen. Um, but yeah, so he kind of went into business with these government agents, not knowing obviously that they were government agents and really took Joe, especially under his wing and, And before icing them out, before icing out Ty, and I think it’s widely believed that he found out from somebody that he had a source maybe in Milwaukee Police Department.

[34:58] That’s not to say that there weren’t some very good police officers at Milwaukee Police Department at that time, but there were certainly some on Ballesteri’s payroll, as judging by some of the FBI files where it’s all redacted, unfortunately, so we couldn’t see who it was. But he had somebody he would pay for information from police reports, somebody he would pay to get license applications so he would know before anybody else. So it’s unclear whether there was a leak at MPD at the time or if they just found out from somebody or somebody recognized him. But, yeah, I think they are very lucky that they were not killed and that they, you know, went on to obviously Ty’s operation fell apart after he got iced out by Ballester. But Joe said to this day, he does not know why or how, if the Balistrieres believed he was a federal agent, why that wasn’t conveyed to Rockford or Chicago or New York. And he said that’s kind of like a mystery to this day.

[35:59] Interesting. Probably Balistrier, when he learned he was probably embarrassed and didn’t want anybody to know that he was taken advantage of. Yeah. I mean, that’s what Joe was like. Well, it could have blown back really badly on him if they found out that he had given kind of big, you know, huge access. And he actually offered Joe as Donnie a job running like gambling for him, I think, in 1978, fall of 78, I want to say, or maybe 79. But yeah, so he really like threw open the doors and welcomed them, especially Joe with open arms. So maybe he didn’t want to have to report that back. Yeah. Yeah, really. I didn’t know that is interesting. Could be embarrassing or also probably embarrassing. Yeah. Or I’m sure he wanted to save his, his hide too. You know, I guess it could go badly for him if they find out like he’s opened, opened up the operation so much to undercover agents. Right. Chicago would take him out just like Joe Messino took out Sonny Black, Napolitano. For introducing him in, being so stupid as to introducing him in, that’s part of the game. That’s one of the rules there. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s why they were kind of thinking that Lefty was in trouble at one point, too, but I think he was in custody by the time. He got lucky. Yeah, he got lucky.

[37:25] Interesting little side story there. I have a guy here in Kansas City that was in Springfield Penitentiary with Lefty. Oh, okay. And Joe Pistone once said he’d hate to be in a cell with Lefty Ruggiero because he’s so demanding and such a one-way dude. So I got a hold of Joe and I got him to give me some soundbites on that. And then I interspersed it with talking to my guy here in Kansas City, talking about being in the cell with Lefty Ruggiero or actually being in prison and joking around with him and doing stuff with him. And my friend said the same way, he said, he just is a taker. He wants everything all the time. He’s wanting more and more and more.

[38:06] Yeah, it was interesting. Both Joe and John Franke mentioned the hours and hours and hours of tapes they were all listening to, either from ones that Joe or Ty had recorded or ones that were on the wiretaps. And they did share one with me of, it was basically like Joe in the car with Ty driving around where Lefty is convinced that Lake Michigan is so big it must be the ocean. And he’s going on and on about like, no, that’s not a lake. That’s the ocean. Did you see the size of that ship?

[38:40] And, you know, I think Lake Michigan is very impressive. It’s a great lake, but it is not an ocean. Um, but they said that like, it was, it was a part of the challenge of listening to the tapes was that lefty would just talk and talk and talk and talk in these circles and, but like to not underestimate him because he was very street smart and would, um, he was not a dumb guy when it came to, you know, he was, he was street smart. He was very savvy. He was good at making sure he got money, but he would just talk and talk and talk and talk. And so some of it was like they said, like it was just hours and hours and hours of listening to like lefty rambling on and on about all kinds of things. But I’m sure if they’re, you know, the FBI trying to listen to something that’s more like incriminating, it was probably kind of torturous for them, honestly. It would be. It would be. I’ve listened to a few tapes like that, and they can be torturous after a little bit. You mentioned Rockford. What is Rockford? Is that Rockford, Illinois?

[39:39] Tell me about the geography and how Chicago, Rockford, and Milwaukee, how did that work? From a kind of mafia institutional standpoint, a table of organization. How did that work? Yeah, it’s interesting because Rockford is not as known as Chicago, obviously, but apparently they did have a thriving organized crime family there.

[40:03] It seems like in this case, they were kind of intermediaries, which is interesting because they’re really close to the, they’re not far from the Wisconsin border. So maybe they were kind of like the Switzerland or something. I don’t know, but they were mediators in the middle on multiple things. But apparently it sounds like they kind of were played kind of the like introducing making connections in the case of lefty Ruggiero and Donnie Brasco kind of meeting. It was almost like networking or something. That’s what Joe called it, like networking and that, you know, let us introduce you to this family up here and kind of like trying to facilitate connections. So, but they were, I mean, I think that they were certainly, I did not know that Rockford had this thriving family that was well known, but I’ve talked to others who were like, oh yeah, Rockford, they had this family. So I think for people who probably know more about organized crime than I ever did growing up. That was probably a very known family. But for me, because my dad specifically raised me to know virtually nothing about organized crime to the point where he always presented it as like, it’s a slippery slope and you just want to stay away. So I didn’t see the godfather until I was maybe 30 years old.

[41:28] I think I didn’t, yeah, I was very afraid of, It gave me nightmares and really spooked me. I had a nightmare that I was like a mafia hitman and it was kind of like, you had to kill or be killed all the time. And it seemed like a stressful, miserable existence. So I knew so little growing up that I had no idea there was even a family in Brockford, but apparently they are very well known. So that’s probably very disrespectful to them to not know that. But apparently they’re quite successful. I don’t know much about their status now. So maybe you’ll hear from this. I may have to look in a little further in Rockford. Maybe I did something one time, just touched on Rockford. I can’t remember. I’ve done so much. But anyhow, really interesting. Mary Spicuzza. Spicuzza. Spicuzza, yeah. Great, great story. It’s going to be a great podcast, or it is a great podcast, guys. You’ve got to get out. You really go down deep into the Milwaukee crime family. And as you can tell, she knows her stuff and, and she really has done her research and talked to all the people directly involved. And she was directly involved herself through her family. And, and so we like that firsthand accounts and it’s, it sounds like a wonderful podcast. I’m going to have to, I’m going to have to squeeze you in all the other podcasts I listened to.

[42:46] Thank you. I haven’t done it. Thank you. I know there are a lot of them. I’m still learning when it comes to organized crime and podcasts. Um, but it was, I did feel like I could almost, I feel like I could spend seven

[42:59] years researching this and get like a PhD in the Milwaukee organized crime family. I knew so little and there was so much. And like, even from, um, I have a, this is funny. This is just one of my fact checking binders where each chapter by chapter for the story, I have a podcast fact checking too, but, um, just cause I don’t want to get sued and I I don’t want to, you know, defame anybody or get anything wrong. It was just a lot of learning. And then can I say this? And how do I know this? And I tried to be really careful not to convict somebody of a crime they had not been convicted of because, you know, Frank Balastrari was never convicted of murder, although he was suspected of ordering many. Um, he was here, he was convicted. Um, and then he went to Kansas city, obviously for the, the skim, um, the skim trial, which I’m sure you’re far more familiar with than I am. It was a real challenge.

[43:55] And I think part of my struggle was I wanted to be honest that my, uh, cousin was a gambler. He was not a saint. He did not have a halo. Uh, at the same time, I didn’t want to revert to victim blaming and say like, well, he had it coming. Cause from everything I’ve seen, It’s like just, um, having a successful business and not kowtowing to somebody that should not be a crime punishable by car bombing death.

[44:20] Um, in my mind, um, and I have not seen anything of him ever murdering anybody or anything like that, you know, it was, so it was kind of a relief for me to say like, oh, I grew up thinking my cousin was like, or fearing that my cousin was like a pretty bad guy. And by all these stories of him, um.

[44:38] One person called me the day the story ran and said they wanted to talk to me. And I was like, oh, God, I’m going to hear he beat somebody up or killed somebody or something terrible. And instead, they were saying their dad died unexpectedly before Christmas. They were Greek Orthodox in a period of mourning. And Augie unexpectedly showed up at their door with this fancy, expensive flocked Christmas tree and told his mother every boy needs to have a Christmas tree. And I was like, oh my gosh, it’s such a relief to hear stories about what a kind, generous person he was. So to say he was not an angel, he was a gambler. There’s hundreds of pages of FBI surveillance of them watching him and all of his gambling activities. It was pretty wild. At one point they were watching, I think they’re called, you know, they don’t use this term now because it’s offensive, but they were saying there was like a suspicious midget outside his bar who had horse papers. And I was like, just because like a little person was outside your bar, that’s suspicious. But I think there was at the time I, and then I asked somebody and they’re like, Oh yeah, that was, that was so-and-so he was actually, uh, like running, he was like a runner or like running gambling stuff. So I guess he was actually suspicious or, or involved in gambling too. But, um, they, they had this raid at one point on Superbowl Sunday here where they knew that they were gambling on the game. And, um.

[46:07] They went in and apparently like just all these FBI agents and they found, you know, all of this gambling paraphernalia and cash. And somebody said they walked in and their agents were just counting cash on the pool table. They also found dynamite in the basement. But, yeah, it was like a whole like coordinated raid. And it’s amazing to think now of all the people I know who gamble on Super Bowl Sunday. I don’t because my dad always told me not to gamble. but, uh, it’s just a different world, I guess. A whole different world now. It’s, uh, between marijuana and sports gambling, it’s just, uh, and casinos too, but especially sports gambling, it’s just so ubiquitous and the marijuana is the same way. It’s just so many people went to jail so many times, but I have to explain to you from a law enforcement standpoint, that’s an easy way to get into the mob because they got to get on the phone and they talk to all these different people. And it’s, you know, there’s a case you can make on people. And so then you make

[47:06] that case on that guy and then you put pressure on him to then learn about this and learn about that. So that’s, that’s how it works, you know? Yeah.

[47:15] Yeah. And definitely, I think that idea of like starting with the little fish to try to get to the big fish and then get on wiretap or, um, so yes, I think what got Augie onto the front page for gambling, um, and he was working on like a general motors plant. And I think his first, I want to say his first big bust was, uh, he was, um, working at General Motors and collecting spats. Yeah. It was the bookie. Yeah. Yeah. Bookie. Um, yes. Yeah. It was funny. I was talking to somebody who was like, oh yeah, I worked at Augie’s bar. And then I worked at this other bar and I was like, oh, were you bartending? And they’re like, no, I was making book. And I was like, oh, okay.

[47:56] That makes sense. But, um, yeah. Now boy corporations are doing it. Right. Right. Silly me. I thought he was bartending, but I think a lot of those bars back in the day had some side hustles going of bookmaking. Swag, stolen property, stuff that stole off, fell off a truck. And it’s all part of it. Yes. Yeah. Stuff that. Yeah. I was talking to some people who grew up in the third ward and they were saying like, yeah, we never asked uncle so-and-so how he got that. You know, if we asked how he got a TV, it just always whenever we got like nice appliances or a color TV, it was always something fell off a track. Yeah. I was in a restaurant recently whose guy, his mother was in there, and she was about 85 or 90 years old. They were retiring, and a lot of other people from the neighborhood came in. This was a family that was well-known. His dad was involved in politics and was not connected at all, but everybody knew everybody. The mom was in there, and she starts talking to this other old guy, and she starts talking about that time. That and then she dropped a mob name brought a fur coat to her and how cheap it was so.

[49:14] That is some it’s just part of it that is something that vince money actually got in trouble for was he apparently was he fenced like four stolen mink coats and then i got a after the story ran i got a message from uh we got like a facebook note from somebody i worked with gosh 20 years ago at a paper down in Florida um and he had I forgot that he had family from Milwaukee he’s Italian and of course like his I think his dad or his grandpa he had a relative who had like bought um bought a fur coat from Vince and had to go testify and I was like what a small walkie world we call it small walkie and it’s like of course to me I’ve known for 20 years just happened to have this connection to like buying a fenced mink coat from a friend of Auggie’s.

[50:04] But yeah, it was, it was, I think one of the really comforting things for me was hearing these stories about Auggie, because I think, I think I grew up fearing he was a really bad guy, which by all accounts, he was not, you know, besides the gambling, he was not like this hardened criminal. And I think just hearing of his generosity and kind of care for the community and the looking out for each other back in the old neighborhood. Neighborhood. I think with gentrification and people dispersing, you find people like that still, but I don’t know. And I think some of my cousins, I still have, some of the Palmizanos very much have that trait still of being just so caring and so kind and so thoughtful and looking out for each other. But I’m trying to be more like that in my life because everybody’s not in the same old neighborhood anymore that they used to be when my dad, you know, when my grandparents came here.

[51:08] But I also think that like trying to capture who he was and who he wasn’t has been very meaningful. So even though I don’t have somebody and I didn’t like nobody’s in handcuffs being charged with his murder, I think just kind of setting the record straight on who he was and who he wasn’t has been very meaningful for me and my family. I think a lot of people thought of him as like the guy who got blown up in a parking garage and who probably had it coming or something like that, you know? And I think, um, it was very, it was just really, um, meaningful for me to find

[51:42] out more about who he actually was. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. That’s what I’ve learned as I’ve done this podcast and really got into it is, is everybody has family and everybody’s not one-dimensional and and a lot of people were it’s just part of the the culture really because people that come from another country who speak a different language who were a little bit darker complected than the irish and the english that were already over here and had all the jobs sold up then you know you got to figure out a way you got to figure out how to make your way and and the language barriers to start and then you get businesses small businesses and And with those guys come these young, bright guys that don’t have any opportunity.

[52:23] The english and the irish they got all the the police and you know fire jobs and and uh other kinds of jobs sewed up and they don’t they don’t not gonna let you in right away and so you know now you got you know crime prohibition started you know there’s all this money to be made and and just yeah and uh the gambling and on into the future so that’s uh i mean it’s just part of the american everybody just wants a piece of the american dream and yeah and there was a huge fire before the Sicilians moved into the third ward and Italians, I shouldn’t say just Sicilians, but there was a huge fire.

[52:58] And then the, the, like, um, people who had lived there before who kind of, they’d started moving out, but then the fire really kind of forced their hand. It was actually the Irish immigrants who arrived before them, who were kind of the poor group before the Italians and Sicilians. And, uh, so yeah, not to, not to discount the Irish side of the family who I think I had a Irish family member who opened bars and my grandpa Spacusa and the Palmezanos who sold fruit.

[53:27] It’s funny. I’m like, wow, I feel very cliche with the bars and the fruit, but they really, you know, they kind of, the Irish had come and they were kind of the poor immigrants before, but then they had worked their way up and left. And then this fire came and then And the Italians and Sicilians moved others too, but primarily them in the third ward. And they, yeah, I mean, talk about hardworking, like the stories you hear of my grandpa or Augie’s father or Augie himself of working like around the clock and like being up before dawn. And Augie’s work schedule was, he would often close the bar or his son or a bartender would close the bar. That was like 2 a.m. then he would often go to like pitches which was this place that a lot of people would go and get like a breakfast or kind of uh eat briefly and he would try to stay awake especially on fridays because it was busy days he tried to stay awake so he could check the produce when it got delivered that’s like 4 4 30 then uh he’d go catch a few hours of sleep then go back to the bar like produce business at like, I think it was 9am, typically, to start his day with like getting the produce rats out, then open the bar because they were open, you know, some people would go and get a drink before work or after they were getting off their all night shift. So it was like a nonstop operation. And this, I mean, I’m like, when did he sleep? And somebody told me we would often like nap in.

[54:56] In the booths at his bar, um, in like a lull kind of the afternoon doldrums. But yeah, I, I mean, I just am in awe of like the amount of work that people put in. Um, I feel like I work hard, but I was, I’m not working like around the clock like that. I would be, um, and my grandpa was, you know, up before dawn often pushing a fruit cart and then worked his way up to get a horse. I think was Dick the horse and then, you know, a horse and wagon, then a truck. And a lot of Augie’s father was the same way. You know what I mean? Like everybody had their horse and they just worked their way up. And like the long hours, it’s pretty amazing. And I think, I think there are a lot of Sicilian families, Italian families that have similar stories to that. Not always in fruit, but many in fruit, but also bars, restaurant, bakeries. It’s, it’s pretty phenomenal. Yeah. I tried to capture a little bit of that, too, of just kind of the backstory, I guess, of how people came here and how they lived. Yeah. Interesting. Well, that’s I like those backstories. Well, Mary Spicuzza and my cousin Augie kind of a play on my cousin Vinny.

[56:07] I’ve never I’ve actually never seen my cousin Vinny, but I just I was I called my cousin Augie and people were like, oh, like my cousin Vinny. And I’m like, I have to watch that. But it was partly just because that was always what he was like. It was always just don’t fall in with your own crowd. And it was always just Cousin Auggie. Like, I don’t even think I knew his last name for a long time. So it was just this kind of figure hovering over of, you know, something that some we didn’t know what happened to him. But something tragic happened to him for some some reason we didn’t know. And it was like the mystery. But all we knew was something bad happened to Cousin

[56:44] Auggie. and this kind of nefarious figure was behind it. Kind of a cautionary tale in this Bakuza and the Palmasana family. Yes, but thank you for the reminder. And I do need to watch my cousin Vinny because I’ve heard it’s good. And I’ve watched a few mafia things now.

[57:03] Just I have to get over the fear and maybe not watch it too late at night because it tends to give me nightmares. Okay. All right. Got to get your recommendations. I’ll give them to you. Thank you so much for coming on. It’s been a great show. Thank you so much for your time. So guys, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website and get that hotline number. And, you know, hand in hand with PTSD is problems with drugs and alcohol or gambling to addiction. And our friend, Angelo Ruggiano, he has a hotline number on his YouTube or his website. I can’t remember. I’ve got a picture of it here on YouTube. And he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. So you can have a counselor in your rehabilitation from addiction who was a former family member of the Gambino family. So wouldn’t that be cool? Let me know if you ever do that. And I got books and movies out there. Just Google my name on Amazon and Gary Jenkins Mafia and books. And I’ve got a new one that just came out about stories about the New York crime family called Big Apple Mafia, stories from the five families. And I’ve got the Chicago Windy City Mafia, the Chicago outfit. And other than that, you know, thanks a lot, guys. And Mary, thanks so much for coming out. Thanks for having me.

As the conversation unfolds, the host and Benson delve into the Skank brothers’ encounters with organized crime. They recount how notorious Chicago Outfit extortionists sought to muscle in on the movie theaters by taking over the projectionists’ union. The brothers cleverly turned this threat into an opportunity, negotiating a deal that ultimately benefited both sides while ensuring their continued financial success. This anecdote exemplifies the intertwining of crime and commerce during the era, showcasing how the Skank brothers operated in a morally gray space to maintain power.

Benson narrates incidents from Hollywood’s scandalous past, explicitly focusing on Fatty Arbuckle, one of the Skank brothers’ most prominent stars, whose career unraveled due to a notorious scandal in the 1920s. Arbuckle’s involvement in a tragic incident highlighted the dark side of celebrity culture and the lengths to which the Skank brothers went to protect their financial interests, including paying for Arbuckle’s trials. Through Arbuckle’s story, the conversation touches on the reputational risks that could derail even the most profitable careers and the measures Hollywood took to manage public relations crises.

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To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here! Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, it’s good to be back here in Studio Gangland Wires. Colder in hell here in Kansas City today, as you can tell by

[0:06] the flannel shirt I’m wearing. And I see my guest, Michael Benson, is wearing some more cold weather clothes, too. So anyhow, Michael Benson is our guest today. I’ve had him on before. He has written several mob books with Frank DiMatteo. I just actually just really read with, in detail, really read through this story of Carmine Galante’s cigars. It’s really, really a good book. It was kind of interesting to really sit and go through a book, you know, line by line rather than just, you know, going through it real fast is really good. Well-written. And then we got Mafia Hitman by Frank DiMatteo and Michael Benson. That’s, that’s the story of the guy that really killed Joey Gallo. Not the Irishman. So you got a couple more, I believe. We love Scorsese, but he prefers stories that aren’t quite true. And he tells them really well. Yeah. But it’s not history. Yeah. And Frank had a kind of a front row seat to a lot of these. You’re a co-author.

[1:05] He is the authority. Yes. He is. He truly is. He’s a good guy too. The first book he wrote about his own father and a lot about that. It’s got to be. Well, you know, the deal that he wrote a book called Lion in the Basement. About Joey Gallo and the lion in the basement on President Street. And Gary Goldstein at Kensington Books read it and said, this is a diamond in the rough. And that’s how I got involved with Frank. He came to me and said, can you turn this into a book that people in Kansas City will read? And I think he actually said Kansas City. He said, Mr. and Mrs. Kansas City will read.

[1:39] And I said, sure. And it turned out, Frank, I got along and the rest is history. We’re writing mafia history like it’s never been written before. Yeah, no, I agree. I totally agree. So we’re going to do some more shows on this with you guys. So anyhow, moguls, the life and times of Hollywood film pioneers, Nicholas and Joseph Schnick. Is that how you pronounce that?

[1:59] Wow. That’s the worst pronunciation I’ve ever heard. That’s what I’m famous for. You realize that nobody gets it right, but that was special. Oh, no, it’s skank. Skank, huh? Yes. I don’t know how you get that out of S-C-H-E-N-C-K, but skank. It’s Russian. And their descendants pronounce it shank, which is a little easier on the ear. Yeah. But I think one of the reasons that the Skank brothers weren’t better known is because Americans reacted just that way to the sound of their name. They were referred to as the Skunk Brothers by their enemy. Oh, it’s easier to make fun of somebody. They hid behind other people’s logos. They ran Lowe’s Inc. Marcus Lowe was long passed away. And they ran 20th Century Fox. Fox no longer had anything to do with it. It was the Skank Brothers. Interesting. So how’d you get into this? Well, my friend Craig Singer, who was a film director, Good Night to Die, 645, The Dark Ride, about a haunted amusement park, came to me and said that he had worked with the great nephew of the Skank brothers. And they were wondering why nobody had ever written a biography of them, considering they were the most powerful brothers in show business history. And Craig said, who? Who?

[3:18] And eventually we found out that there were some reasons why they had almost slipped off of having a legacy, despite, uh, Nick being the eighth richest man in America at one point, the only Jewish man in the top 10, uh, his brother, Joe, not far behind. They ran three out of the five major studios in Hollywood, um, and tremendously powerful, but Nick in particular didn’t like publicity, paid a publicist to keep his name out of the newspapers. His family was trained not to talk about him. They don’t talk about grandpa. They don’t talk about daddy. And so they almost lost their legacy, but Craig and I stepped up. We went back in time, searched the archives, found everything else to know about these men. They had fascinating lives. And we don’t have to worry about them being forgotten anymore. Nick and Joe Skank, three times as powerful as the Warner Brothers. And if they had named the company after themselves, they would be just as famous. Interesting. I was wondering why I heard of Louis B. Mayer and David O. Selznick and names like that are like household words, but these guys, I had not heard those names. Nick is Louis B. Mayer’s boss.

[4:31] And sometimes you’ll hear in old movies, you’ll hear it referred to like the studio bosses. We have to check with New York. Yeah. And that means the money people who were in their Gatsby mansions on Long Island, they’re actually calling the shots. Interesting. That is really a deep dive into the early foundations and look at the movie industry. And you touch on the mob in the movie industry. Assorted and crime-ridden, yes. Oh, it was. I mean, there’s so many great crime stories in there. It’s hard to believe. I mean, there’s a lot of good just actual history, but there’s a lot of great crime stories in there, too. You would have to agree with that. Joe and Nick faced a lot of big enemies. I mean, as we’ll talk about, the mafia tried to take a bite out of them. The U.S. Government did not like the fact that this was a major industry being run by a handful of un-Christian men.

[5:24] And in the long run, the thing that got them was television. You know, they stayed really, really powerful until TV invaded the living room. And they were old men by this time. And I think that younger skanks would have seen TV as an opportunity. They saw it as competition and they lost. But before that, they took on the Chicago outfit and in a weird way, created a system where everybody made money, which I think is the forte of really, really rich men. What happened was there were these two low lives in Chicago named George Brown and Willie Bia.

[6:05] And they were extortionists. They ran a protection. And they went up and down Fulton Avenue and they said to everybody with a shop or a restaurant or a bar, they said, you pay us and nothing bad will happen to your place. If you don’t pay, you know, who knows? You can get a firebombing or something. And they decided that they were going to take on movie theaters.

[6:28] And they had some minimal success. They got payments out of Benny Balaban, who’s a Chicago magnate of theaters. So they decided to hit up on the Skank brothers. And, uh, well, actually what happened was they, they, they, first they had, they got the money from, from Balaban and went to a casino and started spending it very fast. And frank nitty watched this and said where a couple little lives like that get all that cash so he calls them in they think they’re gonna get whacked but he says look you’re thinking small you’re small time what you got to do is you got to think big and the do not threaten a fire bombing or or even a brick through the window in order to pull off a really classy extortion scheme You have to make it always appear as if no crime is being committed.

[7:20] So what they did was they took over the projectionist union. All the projectionists who showed the movies at all the theaters had a union. And the mob saw it as politically weak, went in, bullied their way in, and took over. And they come to the Skank brothers and say, you have to pay us or else the projectionists go on strike. Nick and what are you going to, who’s going to show your movies then? Smart guy. Well, Joe and Nick put their heads together. At this point, Joe’s living in Hollywood and Nick’s on Long Island. They talk three times a day on the phone and they come up with a scheme and they say, okay, we’re going to pay you. And we’re going to talk all the other moguls in Hollywood into paying you, but, You have to promise us that union is never, ever going to ask for a raise.

[8:16] So what happened was the Skank brothers made money on the deal in raises they didn’t have to pay to the projectionist union. Mafia made their little cut. And it all came out in 1941 when Joe Skank went down for tax evasion. He never used the word tax in his life without adding BS immediately after. Yeah.

[8:39] That’s still true today. Yeah, it’s typical of the, probably typical of. We probably all said that. Yeah, they probably still do. I have a question here. You’re talking about that we’re out in Hollywood with studio heads, extorting them for projectionists. Now, back then did the studios, and now, like AMC owns a lot of theaters. Other little companies own theaters. A local company here owns several theaters in Kansas City. The studios owned the theaters where all the major pictures were shown throughout the whole United States, correct? Marcus Lowe, during the vaudeville era, built palace theaters across America for his acts that would go from town to town. And when movies started, they turned into movie houses. And when he passed away, Nick Skank took charge of Lowe’s Inc. And he was in charge of MGM, which made the movies, and the Lowe’s theaters, which showed the movies, and took the tickets. He was in charge of the whole, the whole thing. And his brother, Joe was the owner of 20th Century Fox. He had Daryl F. Zanuck running the studio for him, much like Nick had Louis B. Mayer running MGM for him, but they owned everything and they owned stock in each other’s companies. It was a little bit incestuous in that way. So yeah, it was.

[10:00] The money stayed with the skanks the whole way. The expenditures were paying the talent and paying for the operation and upkeep of the theaters, which was relatively cheap considering about 30 million, 40 million people were going to the movies every week. There was no TV. It’s what you did. That’s how you got your news. And the projectionists got screwed. Working guys got screwed. Everybody makes money. I’m not counting the projectionists who got screwed. Yes. Yeah. Well, that’s, you know, I was a projectionist for four years and I don’t know how it was back in the 1930s, but it wasn’t a job I planned on using to raise a family.

[10:38] I was 21 at the time. And basically I wanted to buy a six pack of beer on Friday.

[10:47] These guys they they’re then this you know the changing of hollywood they go from the times when there was a lot of real sexual innuendo conduct on screen and then there’s a big crackdown on that right and when you can’t show that and then you have they had one particular scandal a sex scandal by one of their big stars a guy named fatty arbuckle and i think most everybody my age has heard of Fatty Arbuckle or a little older, heard of Fatty Arbuckle or some big scandal, but I never knew exactly what it was. He worked for Skanks, right? He was Joe’s biggest star during the silent movie era. He was a large man, as his name Fatty would imply, 300 pounds or so. But like a Jackie Gleason or a John Candy, the joke was never the things he couldn’t do because he was fat. It was the things he could do even though he was fat. You know, he was very acrobatic in his physical comedy. And…

[11:44] Was a guy who could party and over the Labor Day weekend in 1921, very early, goes to a party in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. There’s a lot of starlets in there. A woman named Virginia Rape, R-A-P-P-E, kind of an unfortunate spelling considering how she ended up dying. She’s a 30-year-old woman. She’s been a bit player in Hollywood. She’s probably best known as the cover girl on the sheet music for beautiful lady or the, some, some song that was a big hit at the time.

[12:21] She’s a nobody. And she is in the hotel room alone with Fatty Arbuckle. Other people are partying outside, but the door’s locked. When Arbuckle emerges after the pounding on the door, he’s obviously very, very drunk. He’s wearing Virginia’s hat at a weird angle. and she is lying in the, in the room with a broken bed, dying. And she goes to the hospital. They find out she has a ruptured bladder.

[12:51] So the immediate assumption is that, uh, that there’s a horrible sexual attack has taken place here. This is inflamed by the Hearst newspapers that when they report, uh, anything about the Fatty Arbuckle case, always would put an uncaptioned photo of a long necked beer bottle, which apparently was what Fatty was supposed to have used to violate the poor woman. It gets complicated from that point because the witnesses, Virginia’s friends, turned out to be extortionists in their own right and had held up rich men in the past for sexual improprieties. So the tendency was to not fully believe them. Joe Skank crosses the country because he’s still living in Bayside Queens in 1921, goes out to California, talks to Fatty Arbuckle. Roscoe says, it was an accident, Joe. Which implies that it was something happened. There was an incident that involved her being injured. Joe pays for all three of Arbuckle’s trials. He is convicted at the first trial, but that’s overturned by the judge because of jury impropriety. Second trial is a hung jury. Third one, he is acquitted, and the jury makes a public statement about the horrible dishonor that’s been done to this poor man because there’s absolutely no evidence connecting him with any crime. A little bit overboard.

[14:13] And by this time, of course, Joe Skank’s money is fully behind Arbuckle. Trouble is, Arbuckle has been acquitted. He now wants to go back to work. And Joe has to tell him that, okay, you’re innocent in the eyes of the law, but you have been rendered forever unfunny by all of this scandal. Nobody’s ever going to laugh at you, the situations we used to put you in with, with, you know, skinny women and dancing around and doing pratfalls, you know, because it’s all going to remind them of that thing that happened. They’re going to go see your movies for the wrong reasons. And our buckles life falls apart at that point. I’ve heard talk that, you know, he was making a comeback near the time of his death, but not really. He was doing roadside nightclub acts with song and dance girls, completely deaf to what people were saying about him behind his back.

[15:07] So yeah. And, uh, and it cost Joe a lot of money and he ended up, uh, taking our Buckles house as payment. And he and his wife lived there for a long time. Uh, but he put a system in place after that involving a guy we’ll talk about named Eddie Mannix, uh, called the fixer system. And from then on, if anything happened in Hollywood, there was going to, uh, reflect badly on the studio system, on any of the stars who all had squeaky clean reputations, Eddie Mannix, who was a skank henchman, would go in and work the crime scene to be confusing. And then the police would show up, which is why, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever read a book called Hollywood Babylon, but every murder in Hollywood is completely bizarre and makes no sense whatsoever. You know, they make a little more sense than the John Bonet case, but not really. There’s always, well, gee, it had to have been murdered, but no, it couldn’t have been murdered. And like Thelma Todd, even George Reeves, the TV Superman. Yeah. He committed suicide, but he committed suicide right after ticking off Eddie Mannix.

[16:24] Eddie Mannix, he was kind of, he’s like a story in himself, it sounds like. But he is. Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Hail Caesar by the Coen brothers. Eddie Mannix is the hero of that movie. He starts out as a juvenile delinquent who’s stealing stuff from Palisades Amusement Park, which is owned by the skanks. Nick catches him. Instead of calling the cops, he says, you work for me now. The old saying, it’s better to have them steal for you than from you. Yes. And Eddie turns into the amusement park bouncer. He’s in charge of security. He’s also pretty good with the books. He can do two sets of books in his head. stuff that people that don’t believe in tax BS enjoy. And years later, when Nick becomes the head of Lowe’s Inc., he sends Eddie Mannix to MGM. Eddie Mannix is a rough kind of guy. You know, completely sociopathic. Sends him to MGM to keep an eye on Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalbert, make sure they do whatever Nick says. Plus be a spy, read every telegram that goes in and out. And if anything untoward happens, get in there and fix it. So Eddie Maddox becomes this hugely powerful man in Hollywood. He’s a thug.

[17:42] His first wife dies in a horrible accident. I don’t know if it’s Mulholland Drive, but it’s one of the, she, she goes off the side of the road and down the cliff, like you’ve seen in a thousand movies after being sideswiped by another car. Ah, this allows, this, this allows Eddie to marry, uh, the million dollar legs, uh, girl from the Ziegfeld Follies. Her first name is Tony, T-O-N-I. And she becomes the, uh, the, the, the second wife after years of being the mistress. mistress, and they grow old together. They have an arrangement.

[18:16] Eddie has an affair going with the maid, who is a young, beautiful woman. And Tony has an affair going with George Reeves, who is TV Superman on the Adventures of Superman. George Reeves commits suicide. The common theory is that Eddie was a jealous husband. But that wasn’t the case. It was not the case. They had an arrangement. They used to all go on vacation together. The maid and George was sitting in the back of the plane. Playing Tony and Eddie would sit in the front and then they do whatever they did on their vacation and come back. What happened was George Reeves broke up with Tony Mannix and started in with another woman in the house on Benedict drive that Tony had bought George with Eddie’s money. So she goes to Eddie, he’s cheating on me in your house. Eddie says, I’ll take care of it. And we know he did because one thing, Tony Mannix confesses on her deathbed. She’s afraid of going to hell. Eddie and I did it. We did it.

[19:14] Yeah. And Eddie himself, of course, you know, used to wink when ever anybody suggested such things. He was, he never denied.

[19:26] I’ll tell you what, Michael, you have given me a great story as I meet my different friends center of my age about the death of Superman because everybody at a certain age, you know, will go back and forth about how did Superman commit suicide, you know, and all that. Now I’ve got the real story and she confessed on her deathbed. That’s a great story. Thank you. Yeah. And that comes from Beverly Hills Publicity.

[19:53] Ed Lotzey, who apparently was, you know, Tony, Ed Lotzey was there when Tony made a deathbed confession that she and Eddie did it. He did it. I’ll be darned. And Eddie knew how to mess up a crime scene pretty well. Well, you know, there was a party going on downstairs and the, what the witnesses said was so bizarre that you had to believe that it couldn’t possibly be the truth. Like one woman says according to the story you know she says in a moment you’re going to hear a gun and then seconds later gun went off upstairs and it was george reeves committing suicide and they found him naked with the gun between his legs the bullet went through his temple and ended up in the ceiling so i don’t know maybe lying down um and there are two bullet holes also in the bedroom them that went forever unexplained. They just threw a throw rug over them. They were in the floor.

[20:53] Huh. Interesting. That’s really interesting. Yeah. Um, the other case that, uh, the skanks or Joe in particular was, was involved in was the death of Thelma Todd. I don’t know. She was nicknamed Hot Toddy. She was a comedian, kind of a, a Lucille Ball type from the early thirties. She made movies with the Marx brothers. Um, she with Zazu Pitts and Thelma Todd made a bunch of shorts together or, you know, one being a kind of a tomboy, the other one being a beautiful blonde. And this was the beautiful blonde. And she was also the mistress of the very married Roland West, who was one of Joe Skank’s best friends. And Roland West invented the haunted house movie with the.

[21:41] Bookcase that turns around and leads to a secret passageway and the paintings that have the eyes cut out for real eyeballs. Oh my God. He was the first guy with that. And he got it from Joe’s mansion in Hollywood, Owlwood. And Joe got it from his backyard neighbor, Bugsy Siegel, who put in all of those things in case he was raided by the cops. He could sneak down into a secret passageway. Joe used his secret passageway for starlets rather than for escaping the police. And he, he was a mentor of your early Marilyn Monroe and she was still normal. Oh, really? So she came up in that system under her when she was young. Yeah, and she became a star for 20th Century Fox for Joe. And Joe was her first mentor. But he had, he liked her the best out of all the starlets he had visiting him and moved her into a bungalow in the back, but then he was worried about Confidential Magazine, which had paparazzi, the very first paparazzi for a scandal sheet magazine. So he built a tunnel from his house to the back bungalow so Marilyn could come in to his casting room behind the bookcase without being seen from the outside.

[22:54] The old casting couch. Thelma Todd ends up being dead in her car, died of carbon monoxide. Coroner conveniently didn’t seem to notice that she’d been beat up and that her face was all bloody. Yeah. And Roland West was one of the primary suspects. But crime scene was confused and the coroner said it was suicide. And those studios, they must have dominated the police and the politics and everybody because they had so much money. They were like the drug cartels can do today. That’s right. The police served the studios. Yeah.

[23:33] I mean, corruption in LA, I mean, it really was the old West. They’re making these movies about what it was like in the old West because they knew, I mean, that the sheriff of LA County, you know, was nicknamed two guns. And we’re talking about the, you know, during prohibition. So it’s. Yeah. And even today, everybody wants to be in the movies and they want to have some, some connection to the movies. Right. And it went, and you know, the, the criticisms that Hollywood was, was played with sexual excesses were largely true. And it occurred to me while we’re working on mobiles that Hollywood was a very strange social experiment. I think it’s the first time in human history where you have a colony of really, really good looking people. Everybody. And with, you know, lots of labor, very few jobs. I think it was Joe Skank once said, getting starlets for a mogul’s like, you know, drawing deer to a salt lick. Yeah.

[24:34] Slightly unpleasant analogy, but a good one. Yeah. And I think Marilyn Monroe herself once called Hollywood a, an overcrowded brothel.

[24:47] So, so it was largely true. And that, that was why untoward things kept happening. And William Desmond Taylor was murdered during a Fatty Arbuckle trial. Uh, maybe he was killed by a starlet who was trying to outrage. Maybe he was killed by the starlet’s mother because he had outraged her. Outrage was the word for rape at the time.

[25:10] Interesting. Well, I’ll tell you what, this is a heck of a book and it’s got a lot of great stories. It’s kind of punctured the balloon, the veneer, if you will, of Hollywood. And, you know, even today, now you just recently had Kevin Spacey and different stars. Harvey Weinstein’s case. Harvey Weinstein, he’s still in jail. Can you believe that? That dude was like the king of Hollywood and he’s been in jail for, I don’t know, seven or eight years now. I mean, one of the things I do in the book, I think, is I put shades of gray in the Me Too movement because Joe Skank had a casting couch, but he was not a rapist. We know from Maureen O’Sullivan, who was a virgin and was afraid of him. He patted her hand and said, everybody tries to bother you. You tell me and let her go. She didn’t get the fur coat. You had to go into the casting room to get the fur coat. But he wasn’t threatening anybody with, you know, you’ll never work in this business unless you do what I want you to do right now. It never ain’t there. They were like sweet little dates he had with these women. He would feed them and then light some candles and take them to bed. Maybe it would happen. Maybe it didn’t have to happen is what you’re saying. It didn’t have to happen. And the women it did happen with always liked him afterwards. Like he was a favorite. And he really did call him Uncle Joe, like the cliche.

[26:33] Well, I’ve learned that when you get down to actual history, it’s always shades of gray. It’s never black and white. That’s right. That’s right. And this is a lot, there’s a lot of shades of gray. Yeah, I have issues with me too. My daughter once said that Joe Namath should be on the Me Too movement list. And I said, what? Everybody left. Because of the thing with Susie when he was drunk? No, there was no victim. Yeah.

[26:59] We don’t want to go too far down that path. But obviously Harvey Weinstein’s a real creep and is probably deserving what he gets. Yeah. Everything I read, and of course, I say what I read, but he was actually adjudicated in a court of law, which goes a long ways for me. I mean, there’s all the rules at place in a court of law to get to the truth. So it’s a deal. But this early Hollywood, there’s just so much history, the history of our country, you know, is encapsulated out there in Hollywood. You know, the moguls, the making the money, the creating monopolies and then breaking them up. And it just, you know, it’s really It really has the roaring 20s it has the depression it’s got World War II with the morale boosting oh, we didn’t even mention Nazis I mean, the Nazis tried to take over Hollywood and the skanks helped finance a spy system that infiltrates the German American Bund and gets them out of that, so that’s a chapter in the book so if you like Nazi stories, that’s.

[28:04] We all love Nazi stories. They bit off more than they chew when they took on the skanks. Yeah. Well, you know, Mayor Lansky, he, in New York, he organized a bunch of Jewish guys to attack these German-American supporters, the German-American people. I wrote that book, Gary. Oh, you did? Oh. Gangsters versus Nazis by Michael Benson. Oh, you did. Okay. I don’t know if I actually read it. Well, I always wanted to do that. We need to do that one. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. If Mayor Lansky and the Skank brothers ever got together, they would, they would get along so well. And, you know, because they just wouldn’t say, well, you’re filmmakers and I’m a gangster. They would all be, we’re Jewish men who came to this country and we did good. Interesting. Well, Michael Benson and Craig Singer wrote this book, guys. Moguls, the life and times of Hollywood film pioneers, Nicholas and Joseph Skank. Skank. Got that right? Very good, Gary. Appreciate it. I’m a quick learner, man.

[29:08] Especially when it’s easy to pronounce. You just figure out the right way to pronounce it. It doesn’t look like skank. Well, yeah, thank you so much, Gary,

[29:13] for giving me an opportunity to talk about them. We really do enjoy letting the world know who the skanks are because they deserve it. I think so. Like I said, it reflects social movements in the United States. It really helps us make more sense of our own history. I think it’s all reflected via bar movies. It’s the best U S history I ever had a part in. I believe it. All right. Michael Benson. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much. All right. Have a good one. You too. Okay. I’m going to do another little stick. So thanks a lot for coming on. I’ll get in touch with you about some of these other books. I just have gotten into you guys and, and I had appreciate it. All right. Have a good one. Bye.

[29:58] Well, hey, guys, that was a heck of an interview, and he’s a really interesting guy and a great writer. I’ll tell you what, this guy is really a good writer, and he does those other books, True Crime, about the mob in New York with Frank DiMatteo, whose dad was a mob guy with the Gallo brothers. So we’re going to do some more of that. I did one recently, and this story had a little bit of mob stuff in it, had a lot of really interesting Hollywood history that I’ve heard about but didn’t know that much about. We learned a real story guys we were in the real story about the death of superman george reeves which i thought was fascinating because i’ve been discussing that with friends ever since we were kids i guess whenever he died i was probably in early teens so don’t forget i like to ride motorcycles so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street and if you have a problem with ptsd be sure and go to the va website

[30:51] and get that hotline number and if you got a problem with drugs or alcohol. Angelo Ruggiano is down in Florida. He’s a drug and alcohol counselor, and he has a hotline, I believe, on his website. And if you have a problem with gambling, there’s 1-800-BETS-OFF.

[31:06] And I have stuff for sale, and I’ve always got stuff for sale. I just finished my second book from the podcast stories. The first one is out there now. Actually, the second one’s out there now by the time this gets released. The first one is the Windy City Mafia, the Chicago Outfit, the second one, Stories from the Five Families, the New York Big Apple Mafia, the Stories from the Five Families. And so they’re both out there on Amazon. They’re both out there as Kindles and paperbacks. And I even made a hardback out of the Chicago book.

[31:40] And I’m now trying to work on my life story. It’s really difficult to do. So many of the things that might be interesting, I don’t really want to tell anybody. I don’t want my kids to read it. And so I don’t know. We’ll see. And I got movies and stuff. So just go to Amazon and run my name or go to my website, Gangland Wire. If you’re on YouTube, be sure and like and subscribe, but also be sure and share it on your YouTube channels. Thanks a lot, guys.

Born in 1909 in Illinois, DeStefano’s criminal career began early, leading him from street gangs to the infamous 42 Gang and eventually into the Outfit ranks. His path to power was paved with violence, intimidation, and a sadistic pleasure in collecting debts through extreme methods. From his days as a political fixer to his reign as a feared loan shark, we uncover the chilling techniques he used to maintain control, including stories of his soundproof torture chamber and psychological manipulation of victims.

We also explore his relationship with Tony Spilotro, the mentee who would eventually play a role in his demise. As DeStefano’s erratic behavior and grotesque acts pushed him further into instability, his allies turned into enemies, sealing his fate in a brutal execution.

Join me as we revisit the twisted legacy of Mad Sam DeStefano, a man who thrived on fear but ultimately fell victim to the same violent world he helped create.

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Transcript [0:03]Introduction to Mad Sam DeStefano [0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers, welcome back to the studio of Gangland Wire. I have an old show that I did like seven or eight years ago, a long time ago, and I haven’t retouched this guy since. So I went back in and looked at it and did some new stuff and re-edited it. So I have the story of Mad Sam DeStefano, who was a Chicago outfit loan shark collector. I’ll tell you what, wait till you hear this guy’s story. A lot of you may have heard of him. He’s pretty well known, been pretty well reported on. But this guy is, he is what we call affectionately a piece of work. So settle back and listen to the story of the life of the most brutal loan shark collector and loan shark that probably ever was that I know about. He liked to torture. This guy is Sam, Mad Sam DeStefano. And I’d heard of Mad Sam. Of course, all you guys up in Chicago know about Mad Sam. He was kind of the guy that taught Tony Spilotro all the tricks of the trade on being a gangster. He was one of the first guys that Spilotro was given, was sent to his crew or Spilotro joined his crew. But Mad Sam, we’ll tell you a little bit about the history of Mad Sam. Mad Sam was born in 1909. [1:21]And he would go on to become a big-time loan shark and a political fixer and a sociopathic killer for the Chicago outfit. I heard of, there’s a guy a lot of you all know, a Chicago, former Chicago-based FBI agent named William F. Romer Jr. He wrote several books on the mob that a lot of people cuss and discuss and argue about whether he was telling the truth or making stuff up. But regardless what you think of Bill Romer, he did know Chicago Outfit better than anybody. And he considered DeStefano to be the worst torture murderer in the history of the United States. He said that this guy was a mentally unstable and sadistic person that was used by the Outfit as an enforcer and a juice loan collector. Sam, Mad Sam, was born in Streeter, Illinois. [2:09]His father was a laborer named Sam DeStefano Sr. His mother’s named Rosalie. Both of them had been born in Italy and immigrated to the United States in 1903. So Mad Sam was a citizen. He was born here in 1909. His dad was kind of an up-and-comer in a way. He started out as a laborer and worked in a coal mine downstate in Heron, Illinois. They had some labor-related turmoil, but I looked it up. It was the Heron Massacre. A bunch of union members killed a whole bunch of strikebreakers down there, And then the company brought in some thugs to beat up the union people. So he just got out and went up to Chicago and moved into Little Italy on the west side of the loop down there and around Taylor and Western, I think. Looking at Mad Sam, one of the earlier reports about his criminal activity was in 1926. He would have been about 17 or 18 years old. He was arrested and turned over to the Niles Police Department, which is a suburb of Chicago, as being a fugitive for breaking out of jail. He joined a gang. It was called the 42 Gang. [3:19]1927, July the 1st, several hundred of these West Side gang members showed up threatening violence against a police sergeant for arresting DeStefano and for shooting DeStefano’s associate, Harry Casgrove. So he had established a reputation by the time before he was 20 years old, really, and had people following him and looking up to him. Started out with a charge of rape. [3:44]Early Crimes and Rise to Infamy [3:45]Best I can gather, DeStefano and another gang member, Ralph Orlando, had lured. Actually, they had waited outside a movie theater and found a 17-year-old girl walking home alone. And they forced her into an automobile and drove her to a garage where she was sexually assaulted by several other gang members. [4:05]Orlando and DeStefano were found guilty of this crime. Now, he got a lighter sentence because the police, for somehow the police were called. I don’t know how, some neighbor must have heard the girl screaming or something. Police were called, and they burst in, and they arrived before DeStefano had the opportunity to rape the girl. So he had a much lighter sentence. He only did three years. [4:28]He was a member of the 42 gang sometime during this time, which was the junior varsity, if you will, for the Chicago outfit. Many young guys in Chicago graduated from the 42 gang to join the outfit. And one of the most famous ones was Salvatore Sam Giancana, or Momo. They call him Momo. [4:46]The press coverage that the 42ers had gotten for all their different crimes had captured the attention of the outfit. And particularly Al Capone, they were used to do burglaries and fence their property for them and help in the bootlegging. They need a lot of people to drive trucks and guard truckloads of beer and help establish enforcement around speakeasies and set up speakeasies and gambling games. They’d hire them for runners and truck drivers. They were a little bit out of control, all these young guys, but they did have their uses. It was probably one of the more highly skilled of these young guys. And he had a reputation as a, his early reputation was a skilled wheel man. And I don’t mean a motorcycle officer. If you remember, we had that whole conversation about whether you’re the getaway driver or you’re a motorcycle officer for the Kansas City Police Department. So he was not a motorcycle officer. He was a getaway driver and he was known to be calm under pressure. He quickly became a protege of Tony, Joe, Anthony, Joe “Batters”Accardo and Paul the Waiter Rica, who were some of the early bosses after Al Capone and Frank Nitti. Giancana would bring a number of his 42 gang members, like Mad Sam, into the outfit, and he would go on to become actually the boss of the outfit by 1957. [6:06]He will later kind of have to abdicate and travel to Mexico, and he will eventually be killed, but that’s a whole other story. He’s the one that brought Mad Sam DeStefano from the 42ers into the big time. [6:18]DeStefano himself soon became involved in bootlegging and gambling. In 1932, he was wounded by a policeman during a grocery store robbery. Later that year in August, after that, DeStefano appeared at a hospital in Chicago’s west side with bullet wounds, which refused to explain. So he was getting around, but this was, he was in his early 20s in 1933. He must have been part of a robbery crew because in 1933, DeStefano was convicted of a bank robbery up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, and sentenced to 40 years in the penitentiary. Well, the political fix must have got put in because within eight years, his sentence is commuted by the governor, and he’s released in December of 1944. [7:04]DeStefano returned to prison in June 1947 for possessing counterfeit sugar ration stamps. During the war, they had to ration tires, gasoline, and sugar in particular, and I think meat was rationed too. What these guys would do, DeStefano was working, And when he got out of the joint in 1944 at the end of the war, he was working in a place where they did printing. And we had access to printing facilities and started printing up counterfeit sugar ration stamps and selling to people. He got popped for that, went back to the penitentiary. And this was a good penitentiary term for him. He was sent down to Leavenworth, and there he met outfit members Paul, the waiter Rica, and Louis Campagna. When he came out in 1947, he must have got their attention, and he probably made sure everybody was safe, and he was kind of a bad actor, so he was a tough guy. After he was released, he immediately got a civil service job with the city of Chicago in the garbage dumping foreman. And by 1952, the fix for him getting that job must not have stuck or he probably created a lot of trouble or wasn’t showing up or something because city officials discovered that he had omitted his criminal record from his application. They didn’t prosecute him, but I think he lost his job at that time. [8:22]Loan Sharking and Political Fixes [8:23]During the 1950s, he went on to be a full time outfit loan shark operator. He started out using stolen money from his days as a bank robber and loaning out money at loan shark rates. He was really a businessman. He started investing in Chicago real estate. If we’d invested in Chicago real estate in the 1950s and just hung on to it, we’d have done pretty good. That was his thing. By the 50s, DeStefano really became one of the outfit’s main political fixer. He found city officials, judges, policemen. He was paying off. He would brag that there wasn’t any case he couldn’t fix and started offering his services out to the other mob guys. [9:06]His fees, I understand his fees for doing things like fixing a robbery case was $800. An assault case, he charged $1,500 for. I guess he was like a lawyer. He had a flat fee. You know, if you come to me for a traffic ticket and you tell me it’s, you know, like in Kansas City, I say, okay, that’ll be $150. And then I’ll give me in the fine. I’ll tell you what the fine is as soon as I go down and get the ticket reduced to a non-moving violation. So I guess it was $1,500 to fix or take an assault case on. He actually, actually, it fixed first degree murder cases. He did one for $20,000. I think this probably came out later in his life, probably when they did Operation Grey Lord up there. [9:45]DeStefano’s arrangements with the police were so routine that sometimes corrupt police officers would just take their suspects by DeStefano’s house and then he’d pay off the cops. The suspects would then, even if they didn’t have any money, they would be put on, that would become a juice loan. And then DeStefano would have them on the hook for a juice loan, a high interest loan rate. Say if he paid off the cops, gave the cops a thousand bucks and they’d owe DeStefano a thousand bucks. Plus they’d have to pay him about, you know, like 300% interest every month on that. You know, that just extended his loan sharking activities. And by the 1960s, he was known as a leading loan shark in the Chicago outfit, which is that Chicago is a pretty big place and they have a huge, big outfit. By the 60s and 70s, really, Chicago had the biggest organized crime family in the United States, single family. Now, if you put all five families in New York City together, you would have a bigger family. [10:49]Brutality and Torture Tactics [10:44]But Chicago is a single family with a single boss, had the largest one in the United States. His loan shark’s victims were not only these criminals and small-time criminals and some larger-time criminals that didn’t have any money, needed money, also politicians and lawyers. He was charging 20% to 25% a week in interest. He would accept any high-risk debtors like drug addicts or businessmen who had already defaulted on other debts. [11:09]But it’s claimed that the reason DeStefano would do that because he enjoyed it when they didn’t pay on time. He had a soundproof torture chamber built into his basement, and he liked to bring those guys down there. So don’t be borrowing any money from Mad Sam, a guy called Mad Sam. If you do, don’t go over to his house. Don’t pay me. I like that because then I’m going to put you down in my basement and torture you for a little bit. That’s why I’ve got that acetylene torch down there. You don’t want to know what you do with the torch. We’ll get on to the vice later on. He’d been known to kill debtors who owed him small sums just so he’d scare others into paying their debts. And this guy, here’s another thing. This guy was canny. This guy was really canny. He would give his loan shark victims, or shall we say, clients, his debtors, he’s the creditor and his debtors, or loan shark victims as the law enforcement would call them, he would give his debtors presents, like a gold watch with his name engraved on the back of it. If he ended up killing the victim, accused of it, he could say, well, no, why would I kill him? Look how close I was. He was wearing this gold watch that I gave him, and it’s got my name inscribed on the back of it. That’s how much he liked me. Guy was devious, wasn’t he? [12:23]He was kind of an interesting looking guy. I’ve seen pictures of him. He wears black, thick black horn-rimmed glasses. Kind of looks like a high school teacher or something. A nerd, you know. People believed he couldn’t see without him. But in fact, those were just a cover. I mean, this guy was, he just lived a criminal’s life. Seemed like it was more than just business. He got a certain amount of pleasure out of it, it would appear to me. [12:48]Normally, the outfit would not have probably had anything to do with a guy like this. He was, and he earned, here’s the thing, is he earned them a great deal of money because every time he made a score, Giancana and Tony Accardo made a score and they even invested some of their own money into his loan sharking operations. You see, that’s, that’s one thing that they’ll do. They’ll say, Hey, you got some money. Let me put it on the street for you. You’re the loan shark. And I got an extra 10 grand, 10 grand. I’ll give you 10 grand. Then you, at your job, you’ll know these different people that loan money. And you’ll, you’ll say, okay, this will, I’ll give you 10 for 15. [13:23]I’ll give you, you know, 20 for 30. And the understanding is you got to pay the next paycheck in a week or so. You got to give me back 30 bucks. And so then you’ll pay me. You’ll take a little piece of that for making the loan. And I put up the money and then I’ll get the bigger piece of the bigger, the interest rate on that. What Jim kind of was doing with him, they were putting, you know, $50,000 on the street and he’d have to keep track of that separate. This guy, he knew the, he knew the about sending a message. We got a story a little bit later that’s unbelievable that what he did. He even went after newspaper reporters. There was a Chicago Tribune reporter named William Daughtry who wrote a negative story about him. And DeStefano laid in wait for him outside when he got off the paper one day and he assaulted him. He chased him. He had a gun in his hand and he threatened to shoot him and threatened his family. And when Daughtry ran away from him, he broke the windows on his car. That’s when he started getting his name of Mad Sam. [14:23]The Bizarre Life of Mad Sam [14:23]And everybody on the streets that were around him, knew anything about him, had knowledge that he was bizarre and crazy. And it just kind of keeps getting worse. Called the Lemon Law of a bad car. It keeps going bad and they can’t fix it. Well, he bought one of those. It’s a brand new car. Rode all over and said, this is a lemon. So everybody would know that this car was a lemon. And he also hung grapefruits all around it. I guess lemons weren’t big enough. So he hung grapefruits on it and wanted everybody to know. But this is a mob outfit dude who’s doing that kind of stuff. I can’t believe they didn’t go ahead and kill him early on. Here’s another thing he does. He likes to pretend like he’s a lawyer. And he always wants to be his own lawyer. One time in the early 60s, he was arrested with another fellow for forgery. And at their trial, he acted like he was a lawyer for both of them. And he demanded to know the names of all employees in the state’s attorney’s office and the sheriff’s office so they could be called as witnesses. He liked to represent himself and make all kinds of crazy demands. Another time, he was so confusing that nobody in the courtroom even knew what he was talking about. He’d do stuff like he walked up to the jury and he says, have you ever seen an elephant? He turns to the judge and he says, I plead guilty. And then he turned back to the jury and he said, Something’s come to light that I had not known before. [15:50]It was a disorderly conduct case. It was a small-time case. He might not have represented himself. It had been something with some serious jail time as disorderly conduct. So the jury found him guilty and fined him $100. Some of the people around him claimed that he would tell his compadres that it was his dream in life to own a pig farm so he could feed his victims to pigs. He claimed he even drove to pig farms just to watch them for hours. I mean, this guy, he was, as I said before, a half a bubble off a plum, or probably a whole bubble off of plum. [16:22]Hogs, are they vegetarian? Maybe they eat slop. Here’s another. There’s an informant who will end up going in the program and talking about DeStefano, and he claims that one time DeStefano got mad at his wife. Her name was Anita. He took out his gun. He put the end of the barrel in the mouth and then told her to reach out and pull the trigger, and she wouldn’t do it. And finally, he just started laughing and then would go out and tell his, [16:53]FBI Encounters and Public Antics [16:48]mob buddies over and over again, this same story about how he would, how he did that. This Bill Romer we talked about, FBI agent Bill Romer. Agents often would just show up at these mob guys’ houses, just knock on the door and just say, how you doing? Just stop by and talk to them just to see, you know, shake them up or maybe somebody would have some trouble and they’d be there at the right time. They’d say, okay, here’s my lifeline. I’m in big trouble and here’s my lifeline. But anyhow, he was assigned to go to DeStefano’s house periodically or go find DeStefano and talk to him and just question him a little bit. And usually those guys just say, you know, I’m not talking to you. He’d go over to the house and DeStefano would walk down the stairs in his pajamas, but he would have his penis hanging out while his wife was serving the agents coffee. [17:38]And another interesting thing, the agents would remark that coffee had kind of a funny taste to it. They didn’t really like the coffee, Sam claimed the coffee was made from special Italian coffee beans. Rover claims that he found out later just to find I’d been peeing in the coffee before they brought it in to the agent. When I was a policeman in uniform and I was around people that were giving me anything to eat, I wouldn’t take it unless I saw him do it. I saw him fix it. Like, I did not go into a restaurant and just order a meal. I never, ever would, unless I knew the people that were working there. It was kind of the, they put the dysfunction and dysfunctional relationship, didn’t they? [18:18]Or the dis and dysfunctional relationship, man. It’s amazing what people do to stay married. Sometimes he was in a little drug dealing caper with a bad Chicago cop named Tommy Dorso. Dorso started telling people that he once saw DeStefano roll around on the floor with spit running from his mouth. And he was yelling and begging Satan to show him mercy, screaming over and over again. I’m your servant, command me. So he was even like, that’s one, another rumor about him. He was a Satanist and worshiped Satan. So he was possessed by the devil. I don’t know. I mean, this guy was, he was a piece of work. Here’s one of the worst ones, one of the craziest ones, the stories that I found. He was mad at his wife. He went out and he’s in his car and he sees a guy walking down the street. He kidnaps a guy. He forces a guy into his car at gunpoint. He takes a guy to his house and he forces the man at gunpoint to have sex with his wife for some imagined or real grievance that he had with some problem he had with his wife. Afterwards, supposedly, the man went to the nearest police station, reported the incident. But I don’t think anything happened over that. I think probably they wouldn’t even believe him. And if they did, it was Mad Sam. So what the hell? He was described as a highly emotional. What do you think? Highly emotional, temperamental individual. The FBI reports the extremely egotistic and concerned with his own personal appearance. [19:42]He’s a total nutcase. The walls of his home were lined with mirrors so he could continually watch his reflections in those mirrors as he walked around. He said he could be crying in one minute and laughing the next. He used to like to say if he hadn’t been framed for that rape when he was 17, he would have been the president of the United States. He brought his brothers, Mario and Michael, into the business. Mario was a good mob guy. They said he was almost as sick as Mad Sam, [20:17]Family Ties and Dark Secrets [20:10]But he was and we’ll find out some about Mario later on to let you know he is a sick dude. But his brother Michael was kind of soft and he ends up being a heroin addict and and weak and can’t do anything. And he knew too much in the outfit. Some probably a card over probably Giancana called got a hold of Mad Sam and said, you know, you got you got to do something about your brother. He’s he’s weak. He’s a heroin addict. He’s an embarrassment, and he knows too much now. And September the 17th, 1955, Chicago police got a call about the location of a fresh, what we call a fresh body. It hadn’t been sitting there for a long time in a car’s trunk. [20:56]They make the call, and when they find it, they find Michael was shot in the body but not in the head. And what was interesting in the autopsy, when they started looking at the body had been recently bathed and cleaned up and some of whoever the anonymous caller was made sure that the body was found before it went into any kind of decomposition. So the supposition, of course, is Mad Sam did this himself and he wanted to preserve, make sure the body wasn’t all messed up. So when they had the funeral, they could have an open casket funeral for his family. One of the two most famous crimes that he’s suspected being involved in, and one is pretty well known, there’s a loan shark, weighed 300 pounds. His name was William Jackson. They called him Action, Action Jackson. Jackson was up and was called by the FBI to come up to Milwaukee. You know, Milwaukee is just a hop, skip and a jump north of Chicago. And he had to meet with the FBI up in Chicago, or up in Milwaukee. I guess he didn’t tell any of his mob bosses he was up there, and someone happened to see at the federal building, and they were assuming that he was sneaking off to start ratting people out, and he knew a lot. He was a loan shark under our boy, Sam DeStefano. DeStefano used somebody else probably and called Mr. Jackson to the Chicago meatpacking plant, and he was met by a crew who then took him into custody, shall we say, hung him up. [22:23]With a meat hook impaled up inside of his rectum. And they started working out on him. They kept this guy alive for three days. They smashed his knees with a sledgehammer. They worked over his body with a blowtorch. They beat his genitals with a, and they used an electric prod on it. And finally he died from his injuries and they stuck him in the trunk of a Cadillac car. [22:46]You know, a Cadillac Eldorado was maybe the only car that was big enough to [22:51]Infamous Murders and Tortures [22:49]put Action Jackson in and hold him. There are several famous photos out there on the internet of this and there’s one of that show his his shall we say his testicles and they’re just swollen up to the size of of grapefruits hanging down there between his legs it’s probably the meat hook was on a winch that came down closer to the ground and then they could hook it in there and then then pull it up man i tell you what the and 300 pounds all hanging on that just that right there’d be enough to kill you and you know the the the sad thing about this he didn’t he didn’t he wasn’t ratting anybody out he wasn’t snitching they killed him for nothing really unfortunately they did unfortunately for mr jackson he he’s wishing he would have snitched and gone into witness protection program so to get for being a stand-up guy i guess that might have been what happened is he finally just okay i did hoping they’d go ahead and kill him and then then they got madder and continued to torture him mad Sam was just getting off on it more than likely. Now remember the movie. [23:50]Casino. And at the very beginning of it, the Joe Pesci character has got a guy’s head in his vice and he’s screaming at him to tell him something and he’s tightening the vice on him. You remember that? Well, see, the Joe Pesci character, God, I can’t all of a sudden, I know that name as well as I know my own, but he was, the character was based on Tony Spilotro, who was in Las Vegas at that time. And back in the early days when Tony Spilotro got going, if you remember, I said last time that Mad Sam had taken Tony in and mentored him. And he was one of his juice loan collectors. And there were two guys, the M&M brothers, they called them Billy McCarthy and Jimmy Moralia. And they were tough guys. Well, these guys, the M&M brothers, they both owed juice loans to Mad Sam. So Cardo reaches out to Mad Sam and says, okay, you know, these guys, you got to do something about them. He had the three collectors working for him at the time. and Mad Sam gave them the job of taking care of this. Charles Nicoletti, Phil Alderiseo, that’s Milwaukee Phil is what they called him, and Tony Spilotro. They found Billy McCarthy and kidnapped him. They started torturing him to find out the name of his accomplice. I think they already knew it, but they wanted to verify for sure it was Jimmy Moraglia. [25:06]Spilotro put his head in a vice. He truly did this. I think maybe Frank Culotta even has, he wasn’t there, but he helped set him up. Tony Splilotro told the story to Frank Culotta later on, and Frank told the authorities whenever he’d went in the witness protection program. And Spilotro actually helped set one of them up to got him to go meet some of these guys someplace. While Spilotro’s got his head in the vice, he’s asking him who his partner was. A lot of that, one of his eyes popped completely out of its socket. And at that point in time, he told his accomplice’s name. Now, shortly after that, they found Jimmy, the other of the M&M brothers. They found Jimmy and just immediately killed him. Now, it’s known on the streets that Matt Sam was not happy about that. He wanted to bring him in and torture him for a little bit. Spilotro did tell people about it, and he told this to Frank Cullotta also. He said, boy, he said, Spilotro was impressed by Nicoletti, Charles Nicoletti’s reactions. as Spilotro’s cranking the vice tighter and tighter. And when the eye pops out, he tells his buddy Frank Cullotta about Nicoletti’s reaction. He said, man, this is a heartless guy. He said he was eating pasta when Billy’s eye popped out. And this is a tough world, man. [26:27]Cullotta also told the authorities after he came into witness protection about a time he was with Mad Sam. [26:37]The End of Mad Sam [26:32]And Frank wants to go talk to a lawyer who he doesn’t think is doing right. And Mad Sam goes along with him. And all of a sudden, Mad Sam just goes crazy and starts yelling and screaming at the lawyer and said that if you don’t take care of the guy on this case like he said he would, he said, I’ll do it. Then he started calling him names and grabbing him and threatening him. And then he zipped down his pants and just started peeing on the lawyer. The lawyer’s like shaking his boots by them. And Mad Sam stops and Colada says, the lawyer actually says, thanks for not killing me as they walked out. There’s another one where he didn’t kill the guy, But he humiliated the shit out of him. One of his collectors, a guy named Peter Capoletti, ran off with $25,000 that was actually, he got it from a loan shark victim from a debtor. He got to $25,000 and he’s supposed to take it to Mad Sam and he ran off with the money. He wanted to go farther than Wisconsin. He went to Wisconsin. Yeah, it’s kind of a hideout for those mob guys in Chicago as it’s so close. They don’t want to get too far from home. [27:35]Mad Sam, he sets up a deal. There’s a restaurant. He chains him to a radiator in the back of this restaurant and tortures him for three days. He likes that three-day thing. There’s a banquet. At the end of this three days, there’s a banquet going on out front with a bunch of this guy’s relatives out there at that banquet. And Capaletti is in the back, and he’s begging him, said, kill me, please. [27:58]And supposedly, he said, I’m on fire. And DeStefano said, OK, we need to put that fire out then, don’t we? So he had a couple of his guys drag. He’d been using the blowtorch on him. He dragged a severely burned Capaletti out in the dining area where the man’s family was at this banquet and then forced them to all pee on him in use in it in order to put the fire out, shall we say. Following the banquet, authorities report that the family paid back the $25,000 in stolen money. Well, November 1963, the year I graduated from high school, actually, DeStefano has a violent argument with a guy named Leo Foreman, who’s a real estate agent, and one of his collectors. He works for him. Foreman won’t take any crap off DeStefano, and he physically throws him out of his office, but then he knows he’s in trouble. So he goes into hiding. He gets Tony Spilotro and another one of his loan collectors. [28:54]Thugs that are working for him, to go get a hold of this Leo Foreman and said, you know, boss said bygone let bygones big bygones and and come on back all’s well let’s kiss and make up so he gets taken in by this and sam’s brother mario if you remember i mentioned the one brother that killed michael but mario was a pretty decent uh outfit guy himself was tough enough was up for the job and he was he was up for several jobs they used his home and foreman went to his home thinking that he was gonna meet up with bad sam and they were gonna patch everything up, But once they got there, they got him down in the basement of Mario DiStefano’s home. He was grabbed and Mario and a guy named Chucky Crimaldi and Tony Spilotro tied him up and they started beating him up to soften him up a little bit. They knew Mad Sam was on the way. Of course, they they beat him on the head and knees and nuts and everything with a hammer. And they but they didn’t want to kill him. And finally… [29:58]When Mad Sam got there, he used an ice pick and stabbed him about 20 times. Crimaldi, who was a witness of this and later turned government witness, said that Di Stefano screamed and giggled as he told Foreman, I told you I’d get you. Greed just got you killed. Foreman was pleading for his life, and finally Di Stefano shoots him repeatedly in the buttocks. He didn’t shoot him in the head or in the heart or vital organs. He shoots him in the buttocks just to cause him more pain. Crimaldi said that DeStefano just watched, and the rest of Spilotro and Crimaldi watched this. Crimaldi was the one talking, watched Foreman bleed and whimpering for a while. And then they started torturing him with a butcher knife. They started cutting chunks of flesh out of his arms until finally he dies during this time. They turned this Chucky Crimaldi, and so Tony Spilotro and Sam and Mario DeStefano were indicted for the murder of Leo Foreman. [30:54]Crimaldi’s going to testify against him. You know, there’s a co-defendant testifying against you. Mad Sam’s making a circus of the proceedings, acting as his own attorney as usual. This is one where he has some kind of an operation, like a hernia operation, and he pulls up his shirt and shows the jury all his stitches and scars and stuff. He is just goofy as hell. No statute of limitations on murder, and they didn’t turn Chucky until 1972. It’s kind of how that works. More than likely, when they turn like that, they figure that they’re next up on the hit list, so they better go in. Well, by this point in time, even the outfit just says, you know, this guy’s too nuts. We got to do something about him. They end up getting out on bail. When Sam comes into court, some of the preliminary hearings, he would demand to speak through a bullhorn. [31:44]He would appear at the courtroom in pajamas. He’d have them hauling men on his stretcher. He would do long-winded rants. He would do things like try to, he would yell stuff like the investigators that are doing this are colluding with Joseph Stalin. And of course, he was alienating the judge and the jury. And that was a huge, really a high-profile event. And Spilatro and his brother, you know, he was hurting them because they were also on trial for this whole deal. With the approval, it had to be with the approval of Giancana and Anthony Accardo, his own brother Mario and Tony Spilotro devised a plan to keep him quiet for good. You know, this Chucky Carmaldi has gone in the witness protection program and he’s testifying against him. And without Chucky Carmaldi, they probably will walk on it. Sam, they all got a case. Upfit says, this guy’s acting so crazy and drawing so much attention, they’ve just had enough. And they’re saying, we got to do something about him. [32:41]So if you remember, we suspect Mad Sam killed his other brother, Michael, or had him killed and probably killed him or took part in it. Now his own brother, Mario, and Tony Splatro are making plans to kill Mad Sam. Because they said, you know, it’s been reported that this Mario was, he was just as mean and cruel and sadistic as Mad Sam. He just wasn’t crazy about it. They tell him that they found where Chuckie Crimaldi is being hidden by the authorities that they paid off the policemen who are guarding him. Sam was ecstatic. He was thinking about the fun he’d have exacting some revenge on Mr. Camaldi, the stool pigeon. Mad Sam and Mario, his brother Mario and Tony Splatro all get together and the time comes, they tell him they’re gonna come and pick him up and they’re gonna go, they know where Chucky is being held. Mad Sam is out in his driveway in his garage waiting for him to come up. [33:38]Mario drives up in the driveway with Tony Splatro. I walk up to him and into the garage, and as soon as they get close to him, Mario steps aside, and Tony Splatro’s got a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. He’s been hiding underneath his coat. He just pulls up and fires both barrels at him. First shot blew off Mad Sims, one of his arms, and the second one hit him full on the chest, and he was dead before he hit the ground. April 14th, 1973, Mad Sam is no longer, but his skills, of course, were passed on to Tony the at Spilotro. [34:15]Now, Spilotro and his brother, Mario, ended up getting acquitted in this Leo Foreman murder trial. And after that, the rest is history with Spilotro. I’m not sure what happened to Mario, the other brother. Mad Sam gone, Crimaldi might have laid everything off onto Mad Sam and minimized on Spilotro. You never know how these deals come down. Plus, if this was the case I’m thinking of, Tony Spilotro and several other Chicago outfit people were acquitted in murder trials in Chicago because they just bought off the judge. Here’s what the judge would do. Spilotro’s attorney would ask for a bench trial, not a jury trial. Judge would approve that. The prosecutor can’t ask for a jury trial. If the defendant doesn’t want one, he wants to be tried by a judge. They bought off the judge, and Tony Spilotro bought off the judge on at least one murder trial. This may have been the murder trial that he bought off on. I was thinking it was a murder trial on killing the M&M twins, [35:11]Legacy of Violence and Warning [35:10]but it might have been this one. Or maybe he bought him off on both of them. Anyhow, that’s the story of Mad Sam DeStefano. And this isn’t a serial killer, but he’s damn close to it. He’s no Bob Berdella. He didn’t hold them for three days and stick carrots up their butt. [35:26]But he held them for three days and beat their genitals and stick. Well, he did. Actually, he sticked a hook up that one guy’s butt and hauled him up and held him up there. So he is just as bad as Bob Berdella. For money, there is no explanation for a family like this or people like this. You imagine what their childhood must have been like? I’ll bet their dad was one mean sucker. All right. Gets us to the time when I’d make my public service announcement. If you have a friend or relative who has a problem with drugs or alcohol, make your first call to First Call. Call 816-361-5900 or go to their website, www.firstcallkc.org. Vincent Salano. I’m the advice of my lawyer. I respect where you choose to answer that question. As my truthful answerer may tend to incriminate me. May tend to incriminate me. May tend to incriminate me.

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Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there. Good to be back here in Studio Gangland Wire. I have an author today, some stories about the mafia cops, the mob cops in New York City, Caracapa and Eppolito. Those two guys were bad dudes. So I have Michael Connell. Welcome, Michael. Hey, it’s great to be here. Thanks. Thanks. Great to see you again. Yeah, you too. Yeah, you’ve been on the show before, haven’t you? I have, yes. For my previous book, I guess that we were here together three or so years ago. Was it that long? Was it Abrellis? Was it Abrellis’ book? It was Abrellis, right, exactly. Yeah, that guy’s a character. Abrellis, also known as Kid Twist, who went out the window of a hotel in Coney Island.

[0:48] Nobody knows exactly how he went out, but one thing’s for sure, it wasn’t voluntary. The canary could sing, but he couldn’t fly, right? Exactly. So, guys, I know you all know me, but I’m retired intelligence unit detective Gary Jenkins, Kansas City Police Department. Got this show, Gangland Wire, and we deal with the mafia almost every week. So this story is blood and the bads, the mafia, two killer cops, and a scandal that shocked the nation. I know you know some of y’all will know this story about Steve Caraappa and Lou Eppilito I want to tell you what Joe Pistone who everybody knows is Donnie Brasco, said about this book “Cannell pulls back the veil to refill law enforcement’s most lurid chapter an entwined tale of decorated detectives on the mafia payroll a true account of police depravity unearthed with intensive reporting. And it really was. I mean, these two guys, Michael, they were unbelievable. They were depraved, depravity. I think that’s a really good word to say. They were like mafia people that went undercover on the cops, I would say, wouldn’t you?

[2:04] Yeah, I mean, the story essentially is that these two decorated detectives in the NYPD were on the mafia payroll and on the Lucchese crime family payroll in the late 80s and mostly the early 90s. And Louis Eppolito, who was really kind of the main guy, was born into a mafia family. His father was a Gambino Capo known as Fat the Gangster. And his uncle was a Gambino Capo known as Jimmy the Clam. And so Louis Eppolito was born into a prominent mafia family, but he rebelled against his family and joined the NYPD. And he became a detective, mostly working in South Brooklyn. Slowly but gradually, his family drew him back into the family business. And his patron in the mafia was an underboss known as Gas Pipe Casso. And so Louis Eppolito and his friend and partner, a man named Stephen Caracapa, were feeding Gas Pipe Casso sensitive police information. Who was under surveillance? Whose phones were tapped?

[3:30] Most importantly, who was an informant? Who was a rat? And so…

[3:40] What did Gas Pipe Casso do when he found out who the rats in his ranks were? Well, he hired Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa to facilitate the murder or assassination of the rats. And in at least one case, Eppolito and Caracappa pulled the trigger themselves. So they were bad guys. You know, among the detectives that I interviewed and that I got to know and got to be friends with in the course of interviewing this book, many of them said that they considered this to be the worst case of police corruption in the history of New York. And, I mean, I don’t know if I would make that claim myself. I’m not sure that I’m qualified to make that claim. But certainly this is among the worst cases of corruption in the country’s history.

[4:34] There’s no doubt about it. I saw that documentary about the 7-5 about all the corruption of more street policemen against people who were dealing narcotics on the street level. And that was pretty widespread corruption among a whole precinct. But these guys, they were targeted and against the higher echelon informants. How were they able to find out names of informants and things like that? Now, where did they work? You have to be, you have to work certain places in the police department to be aware of a lot of this information. You’re just Joe Blow street cop out there doesn’t know a lot of what’s going on. Where did they work that gave them access to this kind of information?

[5:16] Well, for the most part, the way they found out was that Stephen Caracappa, Louis Eppolito’s partner, worked in what was called the Major Case Squad. So the Major Case Squad, of course, was working on the most prominent cases and made a real effort to work on organized crime cases. And Caracappa, he had worked it out so that in the Major Case Squad, he was a kind of point man for all of the paperwork. People would report to him. They would call him every morning. They would file their updates and information to him. He would compile them, and then he would send them along to the higher-ups. So Caracapa was uniquely positioned to know exactly what was going on, to know what everybody was working on. And not only that, but he had access to FBI and DEA information. So whenever this information crossed his desk, he would send it along to the Lucchese crime family. And for the most part, this information was accurate. In one tragic case, he passed information along to Gas Pipe Casa, the underboss.

[6:32] And Casa ordered the shooting of a young man named Nicky Guido. The shooting occurred in Brooklyn on Christmas morning. Nicky, who was 26 years old, came outside with his uncle to show his uncle his new car, and he was shot to death there. The problem was that it was the wrong Nicky Guido. It was a case of mistaken identity. The Nicky Guido that Gas Pipe Casa was seeking, same name, also lived in Brooklyn, but lived in an adjacent neighborhood. So that was a rare case of the information being faulty. Years later, when Casso was interviewed about this on 60 Minutes, he said, these things happen. He brushed it off. He dismissed it.

[7:22] Wow. That’s, you know, those, that’s Karakapa being, getting himself in a position where all the paperwork went through him so he could see everything was going on. A few years later, Gotti’s people will develop an informant in the intelligence unit. He was actually an injured detective, a guy named Bill Peist. And that’s all he did was handle the paperwork and he had all this information. So he was really valuable to them for a period of time. So that’s really interesting because you’ve got to be in the right place to get any kind of decent information. Right.

[7:54] Go ahead. Go ahead. You know, I’m just going to say it’s worth remembering that all of this is taking place at a time when Rudy Giuliani and other prosecutors were using the RICO laws to bust the mob. The mob bosses were desperate. They were desperate for information. They were desperate to find out who was under investigation. The days when they could more or less do what they wanted in New York were coming to a close, and Giuliani was rounding people up. These two cops working for the Lucchese-Quine family were kind of a lifeline for the mob. Gas Pipe Caso referred to them as his crystal ball, and that’s really what they were. They were like a crystal ball. I wonder, did it become known among other mob guys that they had this source of, or Caso had this source of information? Did they like, I was coming bug gas pipe about, hey, find out about this, find out about that?

[8:53] Yeah, I mean, people knew that gas pipe had a crystal ball, but they only knew this people as the crystal ball. What happened was that Casso never, strange as it may sound, Casso only knew the identity of these two cops late in the game. And the reason for that is that these cops were brought to him by a drug dealer, a kind of exalted high-level drug dealer named Burt Kaplan. And Burt Kaplan had arranged many financial schemes with the mob. And Burt Kaplan acted as an intermediary between the mob and the two cops. And he kept everybody’s identity secret. He was the only one who really knew who everybody was in this kind of chain of information. And the reason that he did that, of course, was he wanted everything to be secret in case somebody, somebody became an informant. He didn’t want anybody to be able to inform on anybody else. He wanted to keep things safely compartmentalized.

[10:06] Interesting i think there’s a couple cases where i know there’s one case where they delivered a guy to casso to kill and by picking him up on the street and put him in their trunk can you tell us about that case and i think in the end that’s the one that that brings him down.

[10:24] Yeah i mean what happened was that and it relates to the story about nicky guido that i just told you. The real Nicky Guido, not the one that was shot, the real Nicky Guido and a young man named Jimmy Heidel pulled up in front of a strip mall in Brooklyn, and they had been assigned the job of assassinating Gas Pipe Caso. Well, they shot at Caso, who was eating an ice cream cone in his car. They hit him. They injured him. Caso runs into a restaurant and runs downstairs and hides in basically like a meat locker or refrigerator. And he eventually gets away. So he devotes the next couple of years to trying to track down the people who assassinated. Jimmy Heidel, of course, was at the top of the list. He sent the two cops, Epolito and Caracapa, to look for Jimmy Heidel. They went to his family home in Staten Island and they went to his family home.

[11:45] Jimmy Heidel’s mother comes out of the house and confronts them. They flash their police badges. They say it’s police business. Of course it isn’t. And they drive to Brooklyn, and they pick up Jimmy Heidel in Brooklyn. Now, they were very happy to kill Jimmy Heidel, but that’s not what Casso wanted. Casso said, I want you to just abduct him. I want you to bring him to me. And so they drove to a Toys R Us parking lot right by the Bell Parkway along the edge of southern Brooklyn. And they delivered Jimmy Heidel to Casso. Casso took Jimmy Heidel to the basement of a friend’s house. And I mean, I think the only word you can use is tortured him. He tortured him and shot him, shot his, you know, his four limbs and demanded to know who else was involved in the attempted assassination at that strip mall. Casso gave it all up. I’m sorry, Jimmy Heidel gave it all up. He begged for one thing. He said, when I die, throw my body in the street. And that’s because he wanted his mother to be able to get the life insurance money. He didn’t think his mother could get the life insurance money without the body.

[13:09] Casso never dumped the body in the street. In fact, that body has never been found. There are some theories about it lying underneath a mall development, but the body has never been found.

[13:25] Crazy, crazy, crazy.

[13:30] Now, trying to remember, these guys went about their day-to-day business all the time. And Eppolito, he had these close family members in the Gambino family, but yet they end up working, getting introduced to Caso Lucchese by a drug dealer. I wonder, how did that work? Did his Gambino relatives not know about his double life or?

[13:55] Well, what happened was that Burt Kaplan was a degenerate gambler. His criminal life on the outskirts of the mafia involved crimes, originally started as crimes that could be used to pay off his gambling debts. He could never be a part of the mafia, inducted as a made man because he was Jewish, but he made deals with the mafia and he acted a little bit the way Arnold Rothstein acted in the 1930s. He was sort of a money man and a facilitator and a schemer. And he went to jail in the 80s and his best friend in jail and his companion was a man named Frankie Santora. And Frankie Santora happened to be Louis Eppolito’s cousin. And so when Burt Kaplan and Frank Santora got out of jail, Santora said, my cousin is a policeman.

[15:02] He’s an NYPD detective, but he’ll help you out. If you need help, he’ll do what you need. At the time, Kaplan didn’t like the idea. He didn’t like the idea of being in some kind of arrangement with a cop. But not long after Kaplan got out of jail, he had hired a diamond dealer to sell a stolen treasury bond in London. And when that diamond dealer, whose name was Israel Greenwald, flew back into JFK Airport in New York, Customs grabbed him, the FBI questioned him.

[15:50] And so now Burt Kaplan was worried that Israel Greenwald would become an informant. What was he going to do about Israel Greenwald? Well, Bert Kaplan, of course, thought about his jailhouse friend Frankie Santora and Santora’s cousin. And so he contacted Santora and said, is your cousin, the policeman, still willing to do some work for me? And so Israel Greenwald was driving home from the Diamond District here in New York one day. He was pulled over by a police car. There was Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa.

[16:34] And they said, you are implicated in a hit and run. You’re going to come with us. He did go with them. And he ended up buried underneath a parking garage in Brooklyn. Now, this part of the story had nothing to do with, gaspite Casso. But now Bert Kaplan had a relationship with these two dirty cops. And so Bert Kaplan eventually brought them to gaspite Casso and said, these detectives can be very helpful to us. He must have been in bed with Casso on a lot of different things that he would give up that kind of a valuable source to him.

[17:19] Right. Casso originally went to the Lucchese crime family for loans because of his gambling problem. And he got into real trouble with the Lucchese loan sharks. It just so happened that Bert Kaplan’s father-in-law was a retired cop and he knew the Lucchese members. You know, it was all very cozy in those days in Brooklyn, and incestuous. So the father-in-law takes Bert Kaplan to the 19th Hole Bar, which was a Lucchese hangout. And they go in and they make an arrangement for a favorable arrangement for Kaplan to pay off his debts. Kaplan eventually went from being a customer to being a co-conspirator. And he helped the mob and Gas Pipe Caso in particular with all sorts of illegal schemes. Well, it’s funny how it works sometimes. Those guys are so intertwined with each other. And there’s always another scheme where you can use people and use people for this, use people for that. They’re always looking for that guy they can use and somebody that’s hurting in some manner or they can manipulate them and get control over them.

[18:44] Right. I mean, absolutely the case. I mean, in this case, Bert Kaplan was desperate to pay off his debts, but really over the long run, he was sort of running the mafia rather than the way around because he was such a master manipulator and such a schemer that they really relied on him for his abilities. Who else? Was there anybody else that they gave up or anything that you Do you remember particularly that these guys gave up? That was a store. I mean, they gave up a lot of people. I will, you know, before we started here, we mentioned, very briefly mentioned Otto Heidel.

[19:23] There’s just a fascinating story about a bank robbing crew in New York at the time.

[19:33] It seems like they were straight out of Ocean’s Eleven, straight out of that George Clooney movie. Oh, yeah, the bypass crew. I read that in your book, The Bypass Gang. That looked really interesting. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, The Bypass Gang. They would wait for a holiday weekend so that they have plenty of time.

[19:51] Yeah. They would drill into a bank or a jewelry store or a luxury goods store, and they would make a weekend out of it. They would bring in food, and it was almost sort of like a holiday weekend for them, and they would take their time. And they were very sophisticated about disarming the alarm systems. And they were segmented into different types of crews. One was responsible for disarming the alarms. One was responsible for the physical job of breaking into the bank or luxury goods store. And then one was responsible for monitoring the police scanners. And they employed a man named Otto Heidel, not really a gangster. I mean, not a hardcore criminal, but he was part of this crew. And he was arrested one day for the FBI caught him stealing some material. And he had a beautiful wife who looked like Marilyn Monroe. And he was terrified that if he went to jail that she would not be faithful. And so for years, Otto Heidel remained a member of the bypass gang, but he worked as an informant for the FBI.

[21:10] And when Stephen Caracappa caught on to this, he passed Otto Heidel’s name along to Gas Pipe Caso. Now, Otto Heidel one day was.

[21:28] Coming back from playing racquetball or something in a, in Marine Park in South Brooklyn. And he came back to his car and there was a flat tire, which I’ve come to understand was a, was a common mafia ploy when they were going to assassinate somebody. They couldn’t get away if their tire was flat. And Otto Heidel, I think must’ve known that because he’d lay down on the street to replace the flat tire. He placed his pistol by his side, but it didn’t help. He was shot there. He managed to get up and run up a street. The shooters, the assassins followed him up this one-way street, driving against the traffic and finished him off. But Otto Heidel was really just one of many.

[22:21] Boy, boy, boy. So Tommy Dage, you got to know Tommy Dage pretty well, and I’ve heard of him before. He was a pretty active investigator and well-known detective in New York City. Now, if I remember right, he’s the one that maybe uncovered this whole situation, the first guy that got onto this. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, I mean, it’s just what I’ll say about this is that Gas Pipe Caso, who we’ve been talking about, spent a lot of years using Eppolito and Caracappa to kill informants. And then Gas Pipe Caso himself became an informant. He had been hiding out in a girlfriend’s house in New Jersey.

[23:13] The FBI tracked him down there largely because he was using one of the early model cell phones, and they tracked him down that way. And he became an informant. And the prosecutors thought, okay, now we have the insider. Now we have an insider. Well, first of all, I should say he told them all about Eppolito and Caracappa.

[23:39] So the prosecutors thought, now we have the insider who can testify against Eppolito and Caracappa. The problem was that Casa was kind of a loose cannon, and he started to badmouth some of the other informants, including Sammy the Bull Gravano.

[24:01] Who had testified in other cases. At that point, he became kind of radioactive. Yeah. Because the prosecutors thought, we can’t put this guy in the stand. Because if he starts shooting his mouth off, it’s going to cause a problem for these other cases. Yeah. And so they just sent him to Supermax. They ended his cooperation agreement, and they send him off to Supermax. And that was the last that anybody heard of gas pipe cast out. So what does that mean for Eppolito and Caracappa? The feds just really let them walk because they figured better not to endanger the other prosecutions, including the prosecution of John Gotti, than to pursue Eppolito and Caracappa. Eppolito and Caracappa. Let me explain something here to my guys out there now. And this happened in Chicago, particularly with Frank Culotta. When you get an informity and a good storyteller, and he’s going to be testifying against these other mob guys and the higher echelon mob guys, you have to be able to take him in his word. So then what they do is they start trying to denigrate that guy and try to make him out a liar. And so when the Lucchese guy, you know, when Gaspar Casso.

[25:20] Starts telling some lies here and there, and the defense attorneys find out about it, then they’ll be, they’ll like start bringing all that up. And is bad-mouthing Sammy the Bull? Well, they don’t want Sammy the Bull to be bad-mouthed any more than he is because that’ll destroy his testimony. And they’ll, you know, they’ll bring Caso in and say, hey, what about, you know, this time Gervano lied or that time Gervano lied or this time this guy lied. And so the feds are one more murderer, set of murders, let go to protect Sammy the Bull Gravano, really, because his testimony was so valuable to him. So it’s kind of interesting. Exactly. The minute Gas Pipe Caso was going to call Sammy the Bull Gravano a liar on the stand, you can be sure that Sammy the Bull Gravano’s lawyers would ask for a retrial. So Gas Pipe Caso, I know this is complicated, but Gas Pipe Caso goes to Supermax. And the case looks like Eppolito and Caracappa are going to get away with all this. I tell you what, that’s Kafkaesque, isn’t it? Just stick him down at Superbac. He can’t tell anybody anything in order to protect this other case. That’s amazing because the prosecutors knew what Eppolito and Caracappa had done. Yeah. But they made a kind of deal with themselves, which is that they weren’t going to pursue them. Now, what happened next? Deal with the devil. Deal with the devil. Exactly.

[26:43] So what happened next was that Tommy Dades, a New York City detective, had decided to retire after 9-11. He worked in the intelligence division in the NYPD, and he had been working on mob cases for a long time. And after 9-11, the emphasis shifted to anti-terrorism. He had worked for more than 20 years, and he figured it was time to retire. And he was winding things down.

[27:14] And then one day, he gets a call from a woman named Betty Heidel. So Betty is the mother of Jimmy Heidel, the man that we discussed earlier, who Eppolito and Kara Kappa uptrended. Abducted and delivered to Gas Pipe Caso. Betty Heidel had seen the cops at Bledon Caracappa when she came out of her house that day, when they were looking for her son. Louie Eppolito had published a memoir. And that was a bad idea. And so Betty Heidel happened to see Eppolito promoting the book on the Sally Jesse Raphael show, the daytime talk show. And she recognized Louie Eppolito and she went out and bought the book. And there in the book is a photo of Eppolito and Cara Capa with their names in the caption. So now Betty Heidel knows the names of the man who abducted her son. So what is she going to do with that information? She called Tommy Dades. Tommy Dades.

[28:32] Had come to her house when her other son was killed, was murdered. Now, Tommy Dades is a special guy. Tommy Dades was raised by a single mother in Brooklyn. And throughout his career, he had a very special relationship with the mothers in the cases, the mothers of the victims and the mothers of the perpetrators. And I think he developed this relationship or friendship with them out of a really sincere desire to help them. He explained to them how the judicial system worked, and he sometimes sent them Christmas cards and sometimes helped them out with various things, drove them places.

[29:19] Betty Heidel trusted him, and so she called him and told him that she now knew who had abducted her son, Jimmy Heidel. Now, Tommy took this case to Michael Vecchione, a prosecutor in the Brooklyn DA’s office, and they developed this case. Tommy locked himself up in a room in the Brooklyn DA’s office and did an enormous amount of research. He went through all the phone logs and all the search logs from the major case squad where Stephen Caracappa had operated. And they began to work with the FBI and with the federal prosecutors.

[30:09] And eventually, this became a federal case. The expectation was that the Brooklyn DA’s office would prosecute the homicide part of the Eppolito and Karakapa case, and the feds would prosecute a RICO case. But it didn’t work out that way. The whole case ended up going to the feds. It’s a point of some bitterness. Eppolito and Karakapa were tried and convicted. And, Without giving too much away here, I will say that that conviction was thrown out by the judge on a technicality. And so it looked as if they were going to get away with it again. The conviction was eventually reinstated and they did go to prison. Wow. There’s a lot more stories in this book, guys. There’s a lot more stories in this book. It’s just a trip through the seamy underbelly of New York City in the 1970s. And these guys are famous. Eppolito was in two or three movies, most notably, I guess, The Goodfellas. And they retired and thought they had it made when Tommy Dates dropped the hammer on them. They thought that they’d gotten away with it all for reasons that we discussed. They went to Las Vegas. Eppolito went to Las Vegas first.

[31:35] Caracappa moved into a house directly across the street from him in a subdivision. So why did Caracappa live directly across the street? I think the answer is that he wanted to keep an eye on Caracappa. Caracappa was kind of a loudmouth, a bully, a guy who boasted a lot. I think Caracappa was nervous that Eppolito was going to get them into trouble. And of course, he did by publishing that book. So, Tommy Dades was working on this case. He made contact with a DEA agent in Las Vegas who put Eppolito and Caracappa under surveillance. Mm-hmm.

[32:22] They sent an accountant who had been indicted. They turned him into an informant, and the accountant had many meals with Eppolito and Caracappa wearing a recording device. Oh, really. As you mentioned, at this point, Eppolito thought of himself as an actor and a movie maker. He had had bit parts in movies, including Goodfellas, as you mentioned, but he wanted to produce, he wanted to direct, he wanted to write screenplays.

[33:00] The accountant acted as if he were going to help Eppolito find backers, find funding for these movies.

[33:13] At one point, the accountant asked them about buying drugs. And Eppolito helped the accountant track down some drugs. And that was the precipitating event that led to their arrest. Get that one thing, you could make an arrest for it and like drugs and go in and serve a search warrant on the house. And hopefully you can dig up some more corroborating information, evidence in those search warrants. So interesting, I tell you what. And this has got to go down in history, as Tommy Dates said, you know, the most corrupt two policemen in the entire history of the New York City Police Department. And that is saying something, isn’t it? Well, before all of this came to light, and when Gas Pipe Casso was telling the feds about these two corrupt cops, that they had fed sensitive police information to the mob, that they were implicated in a dozen murders, and they were implicated in a dozen murders.

[34:21] That information leaked to the press. It was on the cover of the Daily News.

[34:28] Tommy Dades went to a Dunkin’ Donuts one morning before work to get some coffee. And there was the newspaper.

[34:40] And Tommy tells me that he just couldn’t believe it. I mean, there were a lot of corrupt cops. There was a lot of corruption. People knew that Eppolito and Caracappa might be kind of dirty. But to work for the mob and to actually kill for the mob, it didn’t even seem believable. I can imagine. That’s just, it is, it’s still unbelievable today, even with all the evidence that’s been unearthed about these guys and everybody that’s talked to them. I think, I think Kaplan even ended up turning on everybody too, didn’t he? Well one of the real ironies of the story is yes caplan who was so obsessed with keeping things secret caplan who’s told the authorities over and over again that he would never be an informant he would he threatened to kill himself to over medicate himself to commit suicide in jail he was not going to become an informant, but he eventually did. And he was the one who really put Eppolito and Caracappa in jail. Without his testimony, the feds really would not have had a case. They lost Gaspipe Caso as the insider, so they used Bert Kaplan as the insider instead.

[35:59] Interesting. Well, Michael Connell, this has been great having you on and having you on again and telling the inside story on this particular show. I’m going to tell you guys a little bit about Michael Connell. He’s got the book that he was on my show before, A Brotherhood Betrayed, The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder Incorporated, which is a story of Abe Rellis, Incendiary, The Psychiatrist, The Mad Bomber, and The Invention of Criminal Profiling, the limit life and death on the 1961 grand prix circuit and i am pay mandarin of modernism now you kind of you go from modern art to the bob bob in the 30s even yeah i’m all over the place you’re all over the place what that means is you’re a great researcher too and you develop relationships with people that know these inside facts and that can write it down that’s the key to being a good writer, isn’t it? Yeah.

[37:00] So anything else you want to share with us? No, I just, it’s a great, it’s a great pleasure to be on here with you. And thank you, Gary, for your, for your interest. It’s a, it’s always a pleasure, a great pleasure to talk to you. You’re so knowledgeable about all of this and I appreciate it. All right. Thanks for coming on, Michael. So guys, don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website and hand in hand with PTSD, you know, our friend Angelo Ruggiano, former Gambino prospect, I think a proposed member is, he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida, believe it or not. And he has a website, a YouTube page, and he has a hotline on that. So if you got a problem with that, go see Angelo Ruggiano. And if you have a problem with gambling, there’s one 800 bets off, I know. And don’t forget, I’ve got some books of my own out there on my website or just go to Google or run Amazon Gary Jenkins. You’ll find everything I’ve got, a couple of documentaries, a couple of three documentaries actually to rent for only $1.99, cheap at twice the price. So thanks a lot, Michael. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

[38:16] Thanks, Gary. Fun to be here.

We start with a behind-the-scenes look at the FBI’s surveillance methods—how agents installed covert microphones, maintained secrecy, and penetrated the Mafia’s inner circles. I share a striking Kansas City case where a courtroom revelation exposed a long-hidden bugging technique, shedding light on the FBI’s relentless efforts. Ian provides his expertise on Boston’s organized crime scene, detailing how law enforcement’s meticulous strategies put pressure on the Angiulo family’s gambling empire.

Ian also introduces us to The Big Dig, his previous podcast exploring Boston’s controversial tunnel project and its ties to corruption and organized crime. This leads us to the heart of today’s episode—Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo, the underboss who controlled the city’s illegal gambling operations from the North End. We discuss his rise to power, his strategic avoidance of violence, and the FBI’s elaborate efforts to bring him down through surveillance and legal maneuvers.

As we unpack the Angiulo family’s criminal enterprise, Ian shares gripping details of the FBI’s wiretaps—how agents captured Jerry’s conversations, exposing the inner workings of Boston’s Mafia. We also explore the broader impact of these investigations, including the tensions within the organization and the shifting landscape of organized crime in the city.

Ian previews his upcoming podcast, Scratch and Win, which explores the Mafia’s transition from controlling underground gambling to the rise of state-run lotteries. It’s fascinating how organized crime adapts to new realities while continuing to operate in the shadows. Join us for this in-depth discussion on one of Boston’s most influential Mafia families and the law enforcement strategies that ultimately took them down. Don’t forget to subscribe for more true crime stories from organized crime.

Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here! #TrueCrime #BostonMafia #OrganizedCrime #GanglandWire #AngiuloFamily #FBI #Surveillance #MafiaHistory

Ted recounts how a family member introduced him to the trade, starting with a seemingly simple marijuana operation. Before long, he found himself entangled in a dangerous underworld, rubbing shoulders with major players in Miami’s drug scene. As a bodyguard for a notorious trafficker, he balanced his life as a kickboxing champion with the risks of organized crime, struggling to reconcile these two identities.

The stakes escalated when law enforcement finally caught up with him. Ted shares the harrowing details of a dramatic police chase and his courtroom battle to reclaim his future. His firsthand insights into the legal system, the pressures of incarceration, and the turning points that led him to change his life make for a compelling narrative.

Ted has now dedicated himself to a new mission—helping at-risk youth break free from the cycle of crime. Through his foundation, he provides educational opportunities for underprivileged children, believing early intervention is key to keeping them off the streets. His story of transformation, resilience, and giving back is inspiring.

Ted’s book, Three Times World Champ, chronicles his extraordinary life, with all proceeds supporting his charitable efforts. Tune in to hear how one man went from the depths of the drug trade to becoming a champion for change.

Buy the book click here Three Times World Champ Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here! Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretapers, welcome back here in the studio of Gagland Wire. It’s great to have you back. I have a very interesting character, if you will, a guy that’s lived more lives than you could believe. You know, I’m Gary Jenkins, a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, and I have this podcast now, and I’ve been putting out these shows for about seven or eight years, guys, and I really appreciate all you guys that have been with me from the start. There’s several of you I know and I’ve gotten to know been with me from the start. So go on to my Facebook group or make comments on my YouTube page. And let me get to know a little more about each one of you, because I always respond to any kind of a comment on that or the Facebook page, Facebook group. So we have Ted Pryor. Ted, welcome.

[0:48] Thank you, Gary. Thanks for having me on. Now, guys, Ted’s written a book. You know, I get a lot of authors on there. Saves me doing the research, Ted. I have to admit, it saves me doing a lot of research. You guys know your stuff. The name of the book is Three Times World Champ, the death-defying true story of a kickboxer turned drug smuggler turned business icon. And believe me, guys, that is J. Ted Pryor. What a hell of a story from the middleweight kickboxing champion of the world to world champion marijuana smuggler down in South Florida and right in the heart of drug smuggling territory, which is, you know, really carved out a niche down there. But later on, businessman and a chef. And I just don’t know, Ted, start telling us about yourself, kind of how you got going and where you’re at.

[1:37] Gary, it’s interesting that you were in law enforcement and you retired as a detective. And, you know, I was in law enforcement my whole life as a young kid. I used to be, I used to be, when I was training, I became a black belt and started training to become a world champion kickboxer. And I used to train all the police departments in West Palm Beach.

[1:58] And I was a tactical commander, teach them how to search and seizure, teach them how to cuff a guy, put him in a till cold without killing somebody. So I was very influential with the police departments in all of South Florida. And then I started teaching the DEA, FBI, Secret Service through a guy named Joe Hess, who was the heavyweight champion of the world.

[2:18] So I was in law enforcement most of my young life, I would say from 17 to my mid-20s.

[2:26] And as I was doing that, I got into the pot smuggling business.

[2:33] I noticed one thing in your book, you became Elvis Presley’s bodyguard for a period of time. Yeah, I did. And I got that through Joe Hess as well. Interesting story. I was working at the police academy. I mean, I was number five in the world kickboxing champion in my division, which was a super middleweight championship.

[2:50] Elvis Presley, Shelton Parker was a martial artist. And Elvis Presley did a little bit of martial arts when he went to the service. And not that he was good at it, but he just loved the martial arts and karate. And he liked the aspect of it. He became an honorary black belt. Shelton Parker was a big martial arts guy. And Elvis said he wanted the best. He wanted the world champion. So he reached out to Joe Hess. And I just won the world title as well. And he wanted us to bodyguard him so we had the privilege of bodyguard him for his last year of his life and it was fantastic because you know i was like 20 years old and i was the last of the defense me and joe for the women to get to him and it’d be a stage and i’ll tell you tell you a funny story is we’re at a concert and mostly women gorgeous women and we’d have about 20 guys in the front anybody that got past those guys had to come up to me and joe and we would put our arms around their waist and lay them down. And, you know, this one particular time, this girl had Elvis’s scarf and put it around my neck and started choking me as I was bringing her down to the floor. It was, you know, she was beautiful. I laid her down and she left the scarf on my neck. And I still have it to this day. And Elvis goes, how’d you get that scarf? I go, one of your fans tried to choke me. He goes, well, you earned it, keep it.

[4:09] But it was a You know, we did it for about a year, and then we got a phone call one day that he passed, and it was kind of bad. But, you know, it was a great experience, and he was a great guy. And he was in his, you know, later years. He was very overweight, and, you know, he didn’t even like to be touched because he was perspiring so much. But overall, it was a great experience, and, you know, it was one of the most fabulous times of my life. I can only imagine traveling with the— All the beautiful 20-year-old women. And he had all the beautiful young girls and what they call his mafia.

[4:44] Mafia, exactly. Elvis’ mafia, all his buddies, his entourage. He’d have a hell of an entourage traveling with him. And he bought everything for everybody. Hell, I understand he would go into a town. If he liked some cops, he might buy some cop a brand new car because he loved cops. Yep. It was nuts. Very generous guy. And he gave so much faith and so much trust in his manager. As we all know, he pretty much took all of his money and gambled it all away. And he was just a generous, beautiful person. So, Ted, how did you end up in the drug dealing business? I see. Well. I’m reading through this, and I see you started out at a young age. As many guys do, somebody said, hey, man, you want to make a run, make some really good money for just a little short run? Too good to be true. Yeah. So as I was training, I was working at a correctional counselor and guys coming out of state prison. I was called the CC1. And basically, they’d come out of prison. I’d find them jobs. And it was a work release camp. And it was getting them to basically get themselves back in and not just throw them on the street and have them go back to crime.

[5:52] They had got a job. So I was a counselor. And now that was a counselor, my mom was like 47 years old and she had cancer, pancreatic cancer. And my brother and my sisters, they all smoked pot. I never did. When I found my brother’s pot, I’d throw it and flush it down the toilet because I was like a mini law enforcement guy at that point, guy in my life.

[6:12] And my mom would get really sick with the chemo and stuff. And the only thing that would help her, and I’d stop hearing her moan and cry all the time, is when my sister and my brother gave her a joint and she’d smoke it and it took the chemo pain away from her. So one day, my brother-in-law said to me, he goes, hey, Ted, you’d like to make $5,000. I go, well, yeah. I go, I make $7,000 a year in the law enforcement. He goes, well, you make $5,000. That isn’t 1977, 78. And everybody knew what Florida was becoming. And he goes, you’re just going to drive this car from Hollywood to Naples across Alligator Alley. He goes, in fact, take your girlfriend with you. So her name was Tanita. I put her in the car, took the car to the other side of Alligator Alley and came back with another car. And I had like 500 pounds of pot. I didn’t know what it was in there. I kind of figured, but I dropped it off, came back with maybe $50,000, $60,000. And I got $5,000 a month. So that’s how it started.

[7:15] And I did that probably once or twice a month. Next thing I know is I have a safety deposit box stashed with $50,000 or $60,000. Now I’m 20 years old. That’s like $5 million to me today, right? And I’m like, I’m thinking I’m the cock of the block. I’m rich with $50,000. And so I’m working at the workplace center, and I’m getting ready to fight for the world title. And I win the world title. And, you know, well, let me back up. Before I won the world title, I started buying boats, and I started running pot myself, me and my brother. And we bring in a couple thousand pounds at a clip. And that’s how I got started into the business.

[7:58] Well, I get all marijuana marijuana. Yeah. And I guess I’m always interested in the more, the details of how these things work, how, you know, I see your brother-in-law got you to haul that one load and he probably told whoever he’s working with, you know, Hey, this guy’s Tad, Tad’s okay. You know, he could trust him. He did this. He did it perfect, did it well. And so then you get introduced to another guy who, who wants to offer you a little more opportunity. Is that kind of how it worked yeah this next guy who was this next guy the next guy was named little ray thompson and he was the king thing of the cartel of miami and fort lauderdale area and this guy would bring in you know 10 000 pounds of pop and he’d have five 58 foot hatteras but he he knew i was getting ready to fight for the world title and he didn’t want to ruin my reputation he goes i want you to be my bodyguard. And I says, okay, I’ll be your bodyguard. So I was his bodyguard and he wouldn’t let me get involved with anything.

[8:58] Nothing to do with the pot business at all. And I knew all the people that he didn’t think that I knew and I would do it on the side. He would know it. And I’d do my little runs and I’d make my little money. And he thought I was keeping me clean. And then one day, uh, you know, he was like one of the biggest pots mongers

[9:15] in the, in the country at that point in time. One day he called me up and he says, Ted, he goes, that you know i’m giving you an opportunity i go what’s that he goes i need you to drive this van out of the boatyard he owned his boatyard called amity boatyard and there’s about 35 000 pounds of pot there he goes i need you to take a van and drive it to a certain location it’s 1500 pounds and you’ll make 20 000 bucks i says okay i’ll do that so i get in the van and my brother-in-law is the security guy he gives me a wave go ahead and go i go pull out of the garage of the marina and this Camaro comes flying behind me and I’m going oh boy it’s not good and I make a right I make a left I make a right and this guy’s on my bumper and I’ll never forget it was on Davy Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale changed my life it was 1981 June and I pulled over and all of a sudden I said ah something’s going on all of a sudden the blue lights come on cops come over pull me over.

[10:12] And these guys were just rookies and they just joined just came out of the police academy that I train these guys, you know, and they open the van and they go, it’s Ted Pryor. He can’t get against the man. They can watch him out. He’s dangerous. He can kill you with his hands and feet. And they got a gun on my head. I go, guys, I’m okay. You got the wrong guy. No, we got you, Ted. We got you. Don’t move. And they cuffed me and they put me in the back of the car. And, you know, they’re just, they’re all in shock. There’s like 20 cops at this time. And every one of these guys went through the academy at some point in time in the last five years. And, you know, they were kind of devastated. This is Joe Hess’s boy. You know, he was our commander and tactical commander. He trained all of us. He went bad. So they bring me to the police station.

[11:02] And, you know, this is right out of like Dragnet or, you know, the show’s good guy, bad guy. In your case, Miami Vice. Yeah, right. Miami Vice, right. So they got me in the interrogation room and they have my feet shackled, you know, with Ziploc. And then they have me tied behind the chair with a Ziploc. And there’s another guy, it’s a Sergeant, Peter, I remember him. And he’s hitting this phone book and he’s going, Ted, I hate to do this to you. And I go, listen, I know what you’re going to do with that phone book. There’s going to be a problem. And I stood up with my hands tied behind a chair with the chair on my back. And I said, if you think you’re going to hit me with that phone book, we’re all going to be grappling here and someone’s going to get hurt. I had no idea how I was going to defend myself. And I was shackled. And I talked to them. They knew how good I was that they said, Ted, sit down. We’re not going to hurt you.

[11:56] And I says, OK, put that book down first. You put that phone book down because

[12:00] that phone book is going to go across my head because it didn’t show any marks when they hit you. You know, because they don’t have any battery and stuff. so you know and they said what were you gonna do like that and i go i have no idea i said but we’re all gonna be grappling and get hurt somehow yeah but that was that was the first encounters i had with you know my friends and you know it was kind of ups and downs moments because i was in law enforcement yeah and here i here i become you know i’m a guy smuggling pot and it was kind of uncomfortable and you know obviously i didn’t have my job anymore at the police academy but you know a lot of guys still stuck by me, believe it or not.

[12:40] And now everybody thinks I got a real soft sentence because I knew a lot of people, possibly true, but not with the judges. And, you know, I had a lot of references that I was a good guy and made a mistake. And so, you know, it was a usual experience, but, you know, terrible for my family. And for me, I was, I wouldn’t come out of the house for about a month because I was embarrassed, you know? I can imagine. Yeah.

[13:05] I guess you had enough money to hire a pretty good lawyer too, and that always helps. And then with your connection background, first-time offender, young guy, been working with the police department. Hey, it’s pretty easy to sell that story. He made a mistake. He needs a second chance, right? Yeah, exactly. It was an interesting ride. And when I got arrested by the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, There’s a thing called motion suppressing evidence. I’m sure you know what that is, but most of the viewers wouldn’t know it. But basically, when you read the story, you’ll see that they have to have probable cause to be able to pull you over. And actually, the judge I had was Stan Kaplan, who was a, they called him the hanging judge. He was really tough. He was in a wheelchair most of his life.

[13:47] But he followed the law as it was written in the law, and it didn’t vary off of it. And basically if you made a clean bust you know you’re going to get the maximum sentence well the bus when they busted me with the van they actually lied and they said the bumper was dragging on the van and that was your probable cause and basically in court i had a great lawyer like you said and we’ve proven when we got the van out of out of the compound from the police we loaded up with 1500 pounds of uh of weights and the they said the bumper was dragging on the ground and it didn’t move a quarter of an inch yeah and when we got the judge for the motion to suppress the evidence what happens is the judge says well you said the bumper was dragging on the ground the prosecutor says yes sir the police officers say yes sir and he says well how can this be the same band with the same amount of weight and it didn’t move a quarter of an inch he goes so you guys were lying because it’s impossible that you pulled him over and now you’re lying to try to bring this man in front of me he goes this.

[14:51] Is i’m throwing this out because you guys lied and you tampered with evidence and the probable cause you know you should have told us the truth but you’re lying so he threw it out yeah and what what they probably had was an informant that they were trying to protect they had they had an informant that they were trying to protect and they should have used that informant and i would have gotten the full maximum term which would have been 15 years at that point in time so judge kaplan threw it out and then he knew my background of becoming a professional fighter i was getting ready for the world title fight i didn’t win the world title at that point that was 81 so i was free.

[15:30] To go. And I fought, became a world champion. I was in the newspapers all the time, Fort Lauderdale News. I was on a TV show called PM Magazine, which is very popular in the eighties. And Judge Kaplan seen me turn my whole life around. And then all of a sudden knock on the door, the feds come in and they want me to cooperate. And I said, no, I’m not going to cooperate because I think I’m, I’m, you know, I think I’m God now because I, I won. Right. And didn’t realize about, you know, double jeopardy. And it wasn’t, they just gave me a different charge. They called, you know, they hit me with conspiracy to import marijuana. I was looking at five to 15 years and the federal government, you know, they, they charged me with conspiracy. And then what happened was Nancy Reagan and Reagan just got into office and she just says, say no to drugs. And I was the largest seizure of the United States history, 1981, 32,000 pounds. After they busted me, They went back to the boathouse and they got a warrant and they got 32,000 pounds. It’s the largest seizure in United States history. And they got one guy and it’s me. And I got off. So those feds put the pressure on him because Nancy said, just say no.

[16:38] And they got it overturned. I got to go back in front of Judge Kaplan. And he says, you know, Ted, he goes, I think you’ve done an incredible job with your life. Turn it around. 1982, you become a world champion. You’re in the movies. You’re flying all over the world. He goes, I made the right call. He goes, but I got overturned by the appellate court in the state here. And it had something to do with the federal government. And I made the right call. I made it in the law. And he goes, other people have other agendas. He goes, and I got a sentence here. So he gave me the minimum sentences, which was a year. And he gave me a year. And he said.

[17:13] In the courtroom, John Sayles, he used to be Julie Rudiani’s right-hand guy. He actually was one of the lawyers that got Nixon out of the White House. So he was with a federal prosecutor. He was a very, very influential guy. And the judge said, I’m going to give you a year and a day in state court or 18 months in penitentiary. So John Sayles says, we’ll take the 18 months. And I said, excuse me, Your Honor, can I talk to my lawyer outside? Because I don’t think he knows Matt. He goes, sure, Ted. So I go outside. I go, John. 18 months is a lot longer than a year and a day. He goes, well, the judge doesn’t know. If you go to state court, you get a day off for every day you do. He goes, I’ll have you out back in your work release place in nine months. I says, okay. So I go in, I tell the judge, I’ll take the 18 months. So sure enough, three months I was on work release. And where I go is right back to the place that I actually started, you know, helping convicts coming out of state prison. And my dear friend who I started with is now the chief.

[18:11] And his name is Barry Arringer. and he’s the chief of police he comes in he goes head you messed up your life look at you you’re a convict i go jerry i go barry i don’t need to hear this from you i know what i did wrong i go i’m i’m just want to get my time and get over it get and he goes look i know you’re too stupid to get a job because you bring you can have you know your volkswagen car come here and you can go do what you want he goes i’m gonna give you a beeper five o’clock you make sure you’re back here by five o’clock every day and don’t you screw me, Ted. I go, Barry, have I ever screwed you before? He goes, no. He goes, but you went bad and I’m giving you a chance to go ahead and just be back and, you know, not five o’clock. Well, during I was in the penitentiary at this point in time.

[18:59] You know, I was still working in the business. My brother had a boat and he was continuously running marijuana runs. And, you know, I never ratted him out. And a lot of my other friends, I didn’t rat him out. I just kept it to myself. So as I’m on work release, I get a call from a friend of mine, Dennis McGuire, and he was very close with Governor Graham. And basically he says, I need you to come meet me at my restaurant called Crackers in North Miami. So I said, sure, I’ll come meet you. So I come meet him. he walks in with a briefcase and my brother told me that we did a run and he comes in with the Miami Herald. He goes, you want the good news or the bad news? I have a beeper on my side. I want a work release.

[19:40] I says, give me the bad news. He throws the Miami Herald on the counter. He goes, Ted Pryor, champion, indicted with 30 other people, biggest marijuana drug smuggling ring in the country. And all of a sudden my beeper goes off and he goes, what’s that? I go, that’s my beeper. He goes, who’s beeping? Yeah. I go, that’s Barry Aaron’s. It’s the chief where I’m at at the workplace. He goes, you’re one crazy effed up dude. He goes, here’s your briefcase. He goes, you want to count it? There’s a million bucks in there. I go, no, I trust you. You never screwed me before. So my beeper’s going off because I’m out of here. So he leaves and I got a million dollars in a briefcase and my beeper’s going off. It goes off once, goes off twice.

[20:21] So I go to a pay, you know, back then they didn’t have cell phones. So they have like a little rodeo phone, you know little pay phone so i go in the back put a quarter in and i call up barry and he goes ted the fbi the secret service dea he goes the treasury department the whole effing government’s here where the hell are you i go barry i go you tell them that you just talked to me i’ll be back in three hours he goes three hours my ass i go i got a little bit of an accounting problem i’ll be right back i made the next call i made was to my brother i said get me some pvc pipe meet me at the townhouse because we got to bury some money and i i did that i went back to the work release center and five of my friends that i smuggled with are there with me and they sent us to this really really tough prison which was called bell glades it was a state prison and it was tough it was like you know i think i was like maybe there was 10 white guys in the whole whole penitentiary and everybody else were either cuban refugees and all you know really like murderers and it was really a tough, tough experience. But three months in there, But that was just one of the stories that I wanted to tell you about while I was, between my friends that gave me a little bit of lead way and I came back and thank God he didn’t get in trouble.

[21:42] Yeah. They put you guys in that prison in order to try to soften you up a little bit, try to get somebody to break. I know that. Exactly right. Yeah. And when they put me in that Bell Glade one, Gary, it was, you know, I got there and the first month I was a recreation ref, a recreation guy.

[21:59] And, you know, and it was a big, huge, you know, guard tower, maximum security. And through my connections, I got a job at the recreation department.

[22:10] And Mercury Morris, football player in the Miami Dolphins. So he was there with me and we would run every day. And there was a guy named germany who was a big big badass black guy and he was a boxer, and there’s a white guy there named joe and joe was a mafia guy and he goes ted i bet on you you’re gonna go in the ring you’re gonna fight the german and i go listen man i just want to do my time and get out of here he goes no it doesn’t work that easy he goes you little white boy running around there he goes all the black guys they want you to be their bitch and i go i’ll handle that myself he goes no you won’t he goes you gotta you you gotta work for me here and i go he goes i pulled the strings and he was a mafia guy and he knew the guy ray thompson i worked for and he goes i know little ray he told me that you’d do this for me he goes i’m the kingpin here you gotta do it and i said i’m not doing anything the day before he wanted me to you know he kept pressing me to do it i kept telling him no i just want to do my time and then all of a sudden right in front of me a guy gets shanked kills him because he cut in line guy’s dead i’m like holy shit and i’m like turning white then i get to the mess hall and i see him i’m sitting next to joe sorrentino his name was and he’s sitting there he has a big beautiful steak you know like something you’d eat in a steakhouse right mashed potatoes eating really good my food i look at my food and i see my potatoes my potatoes are moving and i’m going what the hell is this i look at that it’s maggots.

[23:39] And I’m going, I’m not eating this shit. I’m not eating this shit. And he goes, you want to eat meat like me? I go, yeah, I’d like to eat like you. He goes, get in that ring because you’ll eat just like me and you’ll be a king.

[23:51] And I said, set up the fight because I was starving at this point. I have a bite of your steak now. He goes, I’ll give you a bite of my steak. So he gave me half of the steak, but now I had to fight the Germans. And so he says, two days, you’re in the match. So he made a big betting match. Yeah. So big black guy against a little white guy. And I wound up fighting him. It’s in the book, three or four rounds. I knocked him out of the ring, knocked him out on conscience. All of a sudden, about 10 black guys came running in, grabbing me. And Joe’s screaming, German. German gets up. He goes, don’t you touch that white boy. Anybody touch that white boy? Your ass is mine. He says. He goes over. He puts my hand up. He goes, this white boy, he won fair and square. He’s a badass. And so I started training him. And he told all the guys, because 90% of it was a black, you know, it was like the Black Panthers. They were really tough, badass guys.

[24:45] And the experience was like, I was the white hope there. And then, you know, what happened was the government found out that I had it really easy going there. And that’s why they couldn’t break me. I’m sitting in my bunk the first night the first my first experience I was in a double bunk and and this place is so dangerous they have the guard in a wicker and I’m sure you know the wicker but the the viewers don’t it’s a cage where actually the guard is in the cage he’s actually the prisoner and we have a dorm with bunk beds with 300 guys that are murderers and the average guy doing time here is you know 30 years to life and here I’m doing a nine-month sentence and they’re trying to break me. First thing I see, you know, I’m sitting on my top bunk. I’m like 20 years old. I hear this moaning and groaning. I’m seeing this guy do these horrific things to this other guy. I’m like, oh God. And I’m getting little tears on my eyes. And I say, I can’t let anybody see this. 10 seconds later, a guy comes running by.

[25:44] My bunk on fire he stole some pot from some guy they put lighter fluid on him threw a match on him and you can smell the flesh and this is my first night in this prison right oh my and they finally they spray the guy he’s dead on the floor choco you can smell it it was awful so then after i fought the german they put me on the chain gang and they wake me up at four o’clock in the morning take me out to the sugar cane fields and i’m in a bus we’re all shackled about 30 guys shackled handcuffed to shackles, just enough to be able to swing your blade. Because I’m with guys that are doing, they’re all like murderers and they’re like rapists and they’re really, really bad guys. And here I’m, marijuana. I have a nine-month sentence and these guys are there for life and the feds are trying to break me. Well, they broke me. I was swinging that little blade in the sugar cane, 10 o’clock, you go underneath the school bus, you get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, drink some water. It was awful. I did this for about, I called John Sales every day at the payphone. John, you got to get me out of here. If you don’t get me out of here, he goes, I’m not going to make it, man. He goes, they’re trying to kill me. He goes, Ted, you know what you got to do? You got to tell them your side of the story, just your side of the story. I go, John, I’m not doing that. Just tell him what you did. He goes, you just got to tell him what you had to do for Ray.

[27:04] About two weeks went by and I just said, John, make the call. Get me the hell out of here by Friday He goes I don’t know if I can get you out by Friday But I think I can get you out by Monday So he got me out and then the feds took me to federal Penitentiary in Miami.

[27:19] But that was the toughest time of my life in prison. That was a real, you know, hey, William, go shut the door, please. It’s cold. Sorry about that, Gary. So, you know, that was the toughest time of my life in state prison. And then I had a whole new challenge with the federal prison system after I got indicted by the feds. Well, you guys have to read the book to find out about the federal system.

[27:42] But there’s good stories in there about that. So I tell you one story I do want to hear. And that’s the story of Jimmy Biggs down in Jamaica. This is a hell of a story, guys. I tell you what, dude, you have been to hell and back. And I don’t know how you did it and survived to be talking today. But tell them about Jimmy Biggs down in Jamaica.

[28:04] Yeah, I’ll tell you about Jimmy Biggs. Let me tell you one real quick story about one of the famous guys that I went to prison with in England Air Force Base. I was sitting on my bottom bunk and this old guy comes in about 72 years old and it’s Aldo Gucci. I don’t know who Aldo Gucci is. I’m saying, who the hell is Aldo Gucci? Well, you know, he’s a famous designer and they got him for tax evasion. And so I said, Hey pop, I go, you know, I’ll go up top. You stay on my bottom bunk because you can’t get up here. And then I found who Aldo Gucci was and I protected him. And Aldo Gucci was such a nice man. When we both got parole together, I was walking on Worth Avenue with my wife, Danita, and he was working in his Aldo Gucci store in Worth Avenue, which is one of the most glamorous places in the world. And I walk in there with my wife and he says, Ted, this guy took care of me. He goes, anything you want, you take. So I said, now you don’t have to do that. But my wife walked out of there with purses and shoes. I’m embarrassed to say it was like a down payment for a house. She must have had like $40,000 of purses. And he says, take it all. Don’t charge him anything. And it was just one quick story before I try to tell you that story. Yeah, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. Thanks for sharing that one. That’s a good one.

[29:18] Dump. Dump. Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you about the Jamaica story. So my friend, Patrick Bill, he was a young guy who was my partner. And we were doing these runs and we had these boats. They were hidden holes and we’d hide like 3,000 pounds of marijuana into a hidden hole, which the dogs couldn’t smell it. No one could see it. Only the captain knew where it was. But long story short, before I got involved with him, one of his captains was getting a load back to Jamaica and it actually sank. And it caught on fire and sank. and Patrick said to me, he goes, you know, the boat sank. Jimmy Biggs wants his money. I owe him 300 grand. I go, Patrick, you got the money, pay him. He goes, no, I’m going to go over and negotiate a deal and get another boatload and pay for the first one and the second one. I go, Patrick, it don’t work that way. I go, listen, man, you’ve got to just pay him. You have the money. You blew it, just pay him and then get your next load and make up for it. He goes, no, I’m going to go over. He goes, will you go with me? I goes, Patrick, it’s not a good idea. I said, all right, listen, man, I feel bad for you. I better go with you because I don’t think this is going to be good. I said, I’ll go with you. So we jump on the Learjet, and him and I fly over to Jamaica. Now, Jimmy Biggs is the second guy in command underneath the prime minister. He works for the Jamaican Defense Force. He was a general. So we land in this Learjet.

[30:40] And all of a sudden, I see these jeeps come up with machine guns on them. And I go, Patrick, this is not a welcome. This is not good, brother. He goes, no, no, it’s fine. I go, it’s not fine, man. I go, I go up to the cabin, to the pilot. I go, keep going. He goes, I can’t. They got me boxed in. He goes, I go, oh man, this is not good, Patrick.

[31:01] So all of a sudden, it’ll be fine. I go, no, you’re out of your mind. It’s not going to be fine. These are guns pointing at this plane. They’re saying we don’t want to go. We’re captured. He goes, no, you’ve got it all wrong. They opened up the door. I was right. They cuffed us and they took us to Jimmy Biggs’ place, which is a little stash house among his million dollar compound that he had you know millions of dollars compound and they take us there and we’re in this little room and they’re they’re they’re guy his guys are there and jimmy biggs there he says i want my money where’s my money patrick says i can get you your money i want to come here and negotiate and get another boat the boat’s here you can check on it it’s this logic too you know i have another boat ready for a load to take it in and i’ll give you your money because no man doesn’t work that way i need my money you get sent in here now and so i said you know we can get the money but we don’t have it we have to call somebody to get it he’s i’m not going i’m not you’re not calling anybody and these guys that are watching us now they’re really high and they have these machine guns and we’re in this little room and first break of the day we got we they took our our zip lines and they let them put it in front of us. So we had our zip lines like this in front of us. No, I had no shackles on our, on our legs. They didn’t know who I was.

[32:16] And Patrick and I are there and there’s three guys, Jimmy Biggs leaves, and they have machine guns and they’re really high. And I look at Patrick, I go on the count of three, I go, I have this pen, ballpoint pen. I take the pen off of it and I had just a point when I say on three, I’m going to lift the table up and I’m going to stick this pen in one of those guys’ throats and get the guns and we’re going to get out of here. Well, he’s so scared because there’s three of them. Now, they were so high that I think a five-year-old could have beat them up. So it was pretty easy for me because I knew my angle. I said, you just sit here and just make sure no one comes in that door.

[32:53] He goes, he’s got a pen. He’s got a pen. All of a sudden, they came over. They sent the pen in my hand, and they hit me on the back, you know, in front of my head with an M16, and it kicking me. And my eye was shut and bleeding and stuff. And I was not happy with Patrick. And, you know, that goes right up there with saying, hey, he’s got a pillow, right? He’s got a pen in his hand. I said, because Patrick was scared that we were going to get killed. Make a long story short, I’d get that shit beat out of me. And then a couple days later, Jimmy Biggs came in. And I said, Jimmy, I said, look, if you want the money, I can get my brother and my friend Scott to bring the money here. But you’re going to have to let them come here, let them come in to the country and go to a Marriott, something that’s universal that the United States owns so they have security. He goes, I don’t know. I go, it’s the only way you’re going to get to $300,000. You want us or you want the money? He said, I want the money. I said, let me make the call. So he lets me make the call. I call my brother. I says, listen. And they’re on the other line. I go, get $300,000, get Scott. And we’re captured here. Jimmy Biggs, you can fly into the hotel. They’ll take you to us, bring the money, get us free.

[34:03] I hang up. It’s in motion. So now Scott and my brother flying in on the Learjet. And they give him comp launch. bring him right to the Marriott. Scott was an enforcer. He had a couple of guns. He smuggled along with the money, came into the Marriott hotel. And now I got to convince Jimmy Biggs that I got to get the money and bring it to him. And he’s got to release Patrick when I bring the money to him. So I go, Jimmy, now these guys are here. You got to let me go get the money. He goes, no, man. No. He goes, we go get the money. I go, no, it doesn’t work that way. We are not going to be captured. And then you kill us and you have the money too. I’m not going to kill you, man. I go, I’m not trusting you. You got us handcuffed here for, you know, four days. I go, that’s not happening. The only way you’re going to get your money is I got to get it. When I come back, Patrick comes with me. He goes, okay, you can do it. He goes, you guys go with him. I go, no, no, I want my own car. You guys can follow me, but you’re not coming with me. So I convinced him to do that. So we get to the Marriott Hotel in Jamaica.

[35:05] And I get there and Scott, my brother there, so on a piece of napkin, I’m showing him the ground, showing him where everything’s at. They have big sugar cane fields, and I said, it’s a big compound. And I’m telling Scott, we’re drawing him up on that, And we come up with a plan that we’re going to go to the house. My brother is going to have the 300 grand in the car, which we did. Scott and I are going to be in the back of the car. And we got close to the compound. We jump out of the car and we run to the house while my brother drives up the driveway. And we told him to give us like five minutes because we had to run about a half an acre to get to the back door.

[35:41] And I told him, beep your horn, beep your horn. and then when you get close and they open the front door i just keep driving back and forth thinking that you’re scared so that they think you’re scared and gives us time to get into the house so my brother gets here a little bit early the last thing scott says to me he goes whenever you do don’t shoot now i go i’m not gonna shoot i go you’re the one i’m worried about shooting i go shoot he goes the defense force is gonna be all over this is jimmy jimmy’s you know this is this territory so i hear this car bb i go shit we’re late so we’re running to the back door and all of a sudden we see this other guy tony his name is he’s a jamaican dude he comes out the back door and scott bing takes a shot at him i go what are you doing so we keep going and all of a sudden i reach the back door and i hit the guy and knock him down i could i tie him up he’s done and i hear my brother going back and forth i hear another guy saying come on in come on in so my brother just stops in the driveway and me and Scott get into the, to the house and we’re start clearing the whole house. I got somebody, I got the guy around his head. He got a gun to his head and I’m looking for Patrick and Patrick’s not there. And I’m like, where’s Patrick? So Jimmy Biggs wife’s there and Jimmy Biggs there. And I go, Jimmy, where’s my friend? He’s not here, man. I go, what do you mean he’s not here? So I clear the whole house, his wife’s there.

[37:04] And I said, okay you gotta get take my brother to him with your wife and go get patrick and we’re getting out of here the 300 grand is in the trunk of the car he goes show me the money i go you’re not in a good position right now i go i got a gun to your head you don’t know what that means he goes yeah it was the same thing you did to me now it’s the other way you’re not in charge now i am so as we know we don’t know what’s going on there’s a big a kilo of cocaine on your dining room table it’s Probably about 20 straws in there. And I’m like going, what’s that, Jimmy? He goes, well, and all of a sudden I hear a knock on the door.

[37:38] So Scott’s there. Scott’s a fugitive now for the feds. And he’s looking at 10 to light. He’s still in prison, by the way. But so he’s drinking a little bit to search, you know, just calm himself down a little bit. And all of a sudden, I open up the front door. There’s a guy and a girl. I put him on the floor. We zip line him. In 20 minutes, we have 20 people laying on the floor. He’s throwing a party. He’s throwing a party. And I go, how many more people are coming, Jimmy? And, you know, we’re hearing knocks. So we’re just thinking that the defense force is going to come, right?

[38:11] So he goes, there’s only 20 people. So Scott is grabbing the cocaine and he’s throwing, goes, here, you guys, you want some cocaine here? He throws more on top of these guys and he’s throwing cocaine all over the floor. I’m going, Scott, knock it off. And he’s drinking vodka street and he’s throwing the Coke on him. I’m going, Scott, knock it off. I go, it’s not funny. And all of a sudden you start seeing three of these guys with zip lines on and they’re crawling and they’re snorting their stuff off the floor. And I’m laughing. I’m going, boy, these guys are desperate guys. And Scott goes, yeah, you came here for a party. Here, have some more. And I’m saying, Scott, knock it off, knock it off. So finally, I get Jimmy Biggs’ wife and my brother. I go, go get Patrick. And I go, bring him back here right away. And he says, and if you don’t get back here, I says, Jimmy, your husband’s dead and I don’t think you’re going to do well yet. She goes and gets my brother and come back in about 10 minutes, maybe five, come back. And we take Jimmy Beggs, keep everybody handcuffed, zip tied. And we have to get off the island now. So we radio to Eddie. We called him Captain Crunch. He’s our captain. We had a 36-foot fishing boat down there. And that was our escape. So we called him to get close to where we were because the mansion was right on the water. We were about a mile off of the shore. So when…

[39:34] We radioed him in. He came in. We have the boat waiting for us. Now we got to get off the compound. And when you go off the compound, there’s security. Because Jimmy Biggs is the head of the defense force. He’s protected.

[39:47] So I got Jimmy Biggs is in the back seat. Scott’s on the right. I’m on the left. My brother’s driving. His wife’s in the middle. And Patrick is on the passenger side. And Scott has his .38. And he’s got the gun inside of Jimmy’s side. And he goes, you move.

[40:03] I’m gonna blow your your your guts away and i go hey scott can you do me a favor he goes what did you put that in his belly instead of his ribs so it doesn’t go right through him and hit me he goes oh yeah good idea yeah so he puts it in his belly has a coat over it and we got to go through the defense force as in jimmy you don’t say the right thing i go you go first your wife goes second we better get past this guard gate so he goes hey jimmy jimmy goes we’re good you’re okay yeah we lives is true we get through i tell my brother that you know just floor it and go right into the bay because like a little clip about probably about you know 10 feet high my brother floors it we get the car goes into the bay the doors fly open the roof comes there was the dumbest thing i told him to do you know the car landed onto a sandbar right and the trunk’s open and i go to my brother i think jimmy biggs and they go leave him here i don’t know he’s coming with us We got to get the international waters. Thank God I was smart enough to take them. So I’m taking him with me. I got him cuffed in front and, and he’s able to paddle out. So I got him by the neck and I said, I’m a brother go, Tony, get the money. And he’s going like this swimming. I go, stand up. You idiot. I got this three feet of water in a sandbar. Get that money. He started laughing. He grabbed the money. I grabbed Jimmy Biggs and we swim out to the boat.

[41:20] We get Jimmy Biggs on the boat and we have them ziplined in the front, ziplined in the top. And I got them on the top of the bow and we’re flying out. And I says, Eddie, you got to get into international waters. I go, cause if we don’t, we’re done. Sure enough, we’re about a mile from international waters. And all of a sudden you see two, two cutters and your Jamaican, your Jamaican task force. And they go, you know, like those big machine guns across your bow. The defense force, hold your water. So we stop, you know, we just stop a mile from international waters.

[41:58] In other words, I bring Jimmy Biggs on top of the bow and I put the gun to his head. And Eddie tells him, he goes, the next time you shoot on this boat, he’s done. Then you hear, this is the United States Coast Guard. A helicopter comes flying over. And it says, if you fire on that U.S. vessel again, we will blow you out of the water. And there’s a Coast Guard cutter in the international waters. And this thing’s got, you know, cannons on it, all kinds of crap. And they said, repeat, you shoot on that U.S. vessel one more time and we will blow you out of the water. You let that boat come into international waters. It’s a U.S. Vessel. Now, there’s no smuggler in the world that wants to start at any point in time. But this was a blessing because all we had was money on the boat, right? Right. So, with that, we started going inching across, and I brought Jimmy Biggs to the back of the boat, and I clipped off his stuff, and I kicked him off the back of the boat, and he swam in the defense force, got Jimmy Biggs, and we got to the Coast Guard. We threw the guns overboard. We kept the cash on the boat. I have no idea why.

[43:05] And it was probably a good thing. So, when we got to International Waters, we didn’t know this, but the Coast Guard, if they’re International Waters, they can’t bring you to the United States. They got to bring you to the closest country that they’re in when you’re international warriors. And that was the Cayman Islands. So when they brought us into the Cayman Islands, I says, we’re, we’re good. They go, what do you mean we’re good? What are you kidding? I says, cause yeah, we’re going to let them take the boat, let them take the cash and we got our freedom. Well, it worked. We got over there and they said, you know, what are you doing? I says, yeah, we had some cash in the boat. You can have the boat. You can have, you know, you can have the boat and the cash and the Caymans gave us the boat and gave it to them. And we were free. We got back to the United States, But obviously, you had to co-scred, they had all of our names, and they were watching us very closely. So that was an interesting story, and one that I luckily got away with alive.

[43:54] One of many, guys. I’ll tell you what, guys. This book, Ted Pryor. Got lots of good stories. It’s got lots of great stories, guys. You need to get this book. I didn’t read it word for word, but I read through it looking for stuff, and I found several stories just like that. That was probably the most dramatic maybe of all of them, but that was a good one. That was a really good one. Ted, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Is there anything else you’d like to tell people?

[44:24] No, I just want to let you know that the book is three-time world champ. My life now, for the last 35 years, has always been children in my life. When I used to have my karate schools, I taught kids from a very young age. And I’ve always compelled. I got into, when I got out of prison, I had some car washes. And then I got into child care.

[44:44] And I’ve been in child care for 35 years. We’re the seventh largest child care provider in the country, Children of America. My son runs the company for the last six years now, doing a fantastic job. We started the Prior Foundation, and the Prior Foundation is for children that are left behind like I was left behind. I barely got out of high school, couldn’t spell college, and so I was that kid left behind. So anything, proceeds, whether it’s a movie, whether it’s a miniseries, buying the book, all the proceeds go to the Prior Family Foundation, and all that money goes into unprivileged children, children left behind like I was. We help children we pay for their tuition we give them free tuition the family foundation all the money goes back to the kids but the kids that can’t afford to come to our schools we want them to have the same privilege as the kids the parents do have the money to be able to give them good educations so and we’re in like 15 states right now we’ve got about 70 locations all the proceeds go to children and their families that that need help and that don’t have the privilege of being able to put their child into a a good preschool to get them

[45:49] a good education a good head start Yeah, that’s immensely important. I understand that whole Head Start program the government did. They found that for kids to succeed later on in life, that early education before they actually go in the first grade is huge. And, you know, three meals every day. I’m sure your school does that. Make sure everybody’s fit and rested and learning. And so that’s a great program, Ted.

[46:14] Yeah. If you go on the back of the book, there’s a QR code. That’s the family foundation. My daughter’s on there. She’ll explain a little bit. There’s also things in there about Children of America. So it’s a great organization and it’s all about the children. And I don’t want children to have to do what I had to do earlier on in life. I want them to get a good education so they stay away from the bad problems that I did. Yeah, you’re not the only one that’s entered into a life of crime because they didn’t have any opportunity. I mean, when you’re young, you’re strong, you’re bright, you’re smart, but you don’t have the education, you don’t have the opportunities just to handle it to you. You don’t have anybody’s shoulders to stand on. Crime and organized crime is

[46:52] really a way to go and a way to use your talents and make money. So it’s a good, you can’t even think what I call it, a good program, if you will. And I’ll have links to it, guys, at the end of my show notes, and I’ll have a link to Ted’s website. And then you can get his book there if you want to and learn more about the program.

[47:10] Yeah, I appreciate your time, Gary. It’s been a real fun talking to you about this. And I just want everybody to know that, you know, all the proceeds go to the children. That’s what it’s all about. And changing one child’s life. I know I’ve changed thousands of them and I’m very proud of that. And I’m thankful to this day to God. I’m very blessed to have the lives that I have and be able to give back and take a negative and make it into a positive. And a lot of federal government prosecutors and Secret Service guys and guys that know me, you know, some of them said that I’d never make it. And now they’re all calling me, texting me, saying, we are so proud of you. And I’m glad that they actually gave me an opportunity to be able to change my life and make it into a positive instead of a negative. All right. Great, Ted. Thanks a lot. Thanks for being here and sharing your stories and sharing that beautiful background behind you guys. I want you to notice what’s behind Ted. And in the book, the house is in there too, Gary. It’s one of the most important things is I had to do a lie detector test. You probably don’t know this, but I had to do a lie tech test to get this house. It was the first house I bought when I won the world title 40 years ago, and I was able to keep it. They wanted to take it, but I was able to keep it. Guys, I know about this. I know about that seizure. Back in those days, law enforcement would pick people just because they had a lot of assets and try to make a case on them in order to get those assets.

[48:37] Yeah, that’s for sure. You were lucky to hang on to that house. It’s the only thing I got out of it. Everything else they took. I can promise you that came from money that wasn’t earned through the drug business. Well, this is my world title fight. I used to run up here five miles from the ground, and that was my world title fight. And I was able to prove that I made the money to buy this house. It was $180,000 back then.

[48:59] But some of it was mixed with the drug smuggling money. But when you read the book, there’s a part there about the federal government wanting to attach it and not give it to me. And you’re going to love that story in the book, too. All right, great. Well, guys, you know, if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service particularly, go to the VA website and get that hotline number. And with PTSD, many times you have problems with drugs and alcohol or compulsive gambling. So, you know, our friend Angelo Ruggiano, who was a former Gambino proposed memories, dad was a made guy, is a drug and alcohol counselor. And he has a hotline number on his website. and there’s 1-800-BETS-OFF if you have that problem. So those problems affect a lot of people, myself included, and there is help out there. So don’t forget that I have a book or two out there for sale on Amazon and just go to Amazon and search Gary Jenkins and Mafia and you’ll find everything that I’ve got out there for sale. I’ve got two documentaries that you can rent for $1.99 and learn about my career and about the Kansas City Mafia family. And I think that’s all I got to sell, Ted. And we sold some stuff for Ted and sold some stuff for me. And Ted, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Well, I’m going to buy a bunch of your books.

[50:18] I didn’t know you were in law enforcement. And it’s an honor. My heart’s with you guys because I was a law enforcement agent. And I wouldn’t say I went bad. I would say that I thought that I was helping my mother, but it was really pure greed. But law enforcement is very, very important in this country. And I still have a lot of good friends that stuck with me and God bless you guys like you keep us safe every day all right thank you Ted.

Throughout the conversation, Eric discusses how perceptions of mobsters have shifted over the decades. In the early 20th century, gangsters were often seen as vital community figures. They provided services like gambling and liquor during Prohibition—illegal but in high demand—and were viewed as filling a societal need. By the 1970s, however, that image began to unravel. Organized crime became a symbol of decay, corruption, and violence, far removed from the Robin Hood-like aura it once carried.

Eric brings to life the stories of legendary mob figures like Meyer Lansky, detailing Lansky’s surprising role during World War II. Lansky, alongside other organized crime figures, worked with the U.S. Navy to prevent Nazi sabotage along the East Coast. Eric explains how this alliance complicates the narrative of mobsters as purely criminal; during wartime, they were sometimes perceived as patriotic contributors to the national effort. Their involvement underscores the ambiguity surrounding these figures, who operated in both legitimate and illegal spheres.

As the conversation moves into modern times, Eric discusses how organized crime continues to influence political and business landscapes. He points to figures like Donald Trump, who openly acknowledged the realities of navigating a business world shaped by organized crime in cities like New York. Eric also examines how presidents such as Reagan, Nixon, JFK, and Joe Biden managed relationships with organized crime—relationships that, while morally complex, often played a role in advancing their careers and shaping American politics in lasting ways.

This episode offers a compelling look at the intersection of crime, politics, and history through Eric Dezenhall’s sharp insights and years of research. By sharing stories of infamous mobsters and pivotal historical moments, Eric reveals a side of organized crime that is often forgotten: its influence on the nation’s leadership and its occasional alignment with patriotic causes. It’s a conversation that challenges our assumptions, blending history, politics, and crime into a nuanced and captivating narrative.

Ger Eric’s books. See other books by clicking here.

  Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, welcome, all you wiretappers. Glad to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective, a later sergeant, and I have in the studio today a prolific mob author and a guy that’s written with, I know you guys know, Gus Russo and the outfit book in Chicago. Well, this is a contemporary of Gus Russo, Eric Dezenhall. Eric, I really appreciate you coming in and sharing your stories about the wise guys in the White House with my wiretappers here. Thanks very much for having me. And I won’t say too many things about Gus, given that I talk to him every day. And I don’t want to have to face him. So I’ll be kind. Yeah, he’s a good guy. I interviewed him once. I got to get him back on. You know, there’s a lot of new books coming out all the time. But I need to get him back on because he’s so knowledgeable. So we’re not here to talk about Gus Russo. We’re here to talk about wise guys in the White House, which is probably kind of topical right now. The White House has been more topical in the last, what, eight years or so than

[1:03] it’s ever been in my entire 79 years. It’s just crazy. But first of all, Eric, tell the guys a little bit about your past writing. You have a whole bunch of books. And so tell the guys a little bit about your story through the last 10, 15 years.

[1:18] Well, I’ve written 12 books. This is my 12th.

[1:22] My fiction tends to deal with organized crime. My nonfiction deals also with organized crime. My last book actually was with Gus Russo called Best of Enemies, and it was the true story of two spies, a CIA guy and a KGB guy, who were assigned to flip each other, but they ended up becoming best friends and bringing down the worst traitor in American history, the FBI’s Robert Hansen. I had done a historical novel. I’ve known some of Meyer Lansky’s family much of my life and had access to a lot of his records. And I did a historical novel called The Devil Himself about his role with Luciano during World War II. and I fictionalized it, even though it is a factual story. I used the basis of fact to tell the story of Lansky because of so much of what I learned about what he emotionally wanted out of the World War II project, as well as the Navy commander. I mean, I’m not really a creature of the mob, even though I grew up around it. I’m more of a creature of Washington, where I’ve lived for 40 years. And what was interesting to me about the World War II story was not just the mob, but the naval officer who took the risk of working with the mob. And it’s one of those things where classic Washington story, you take a risk, you’re told to win, and when you win.

[2:49] Then everybody goes, oh my God, this guy worked with mobsters, which they knew, and then what happened to his career, which was devastating.

[2:57] So I’ve been very interested in the myths and realities of World War II. And the new book, Wise Guys in the White House, this has been cooking for about 40 years. I was a young aide in Reagan’s White House. Yeah.

[3:11] I tell the story at the beginning of the book where on one of my first days i told my boss she said where do you live where you’re from and i said i’m from cherry hill new jersey there was a big mob war at the time uh when angelo bruno had been killed in march of 1980 and my boss said uh oh cherry hill that’s that’s big mafia and i said well yeah the gambinos lived there they were my neighbors and uh but muhammad ali lived there too and she and one of the people said well you know the mob killed JFK. And I said, what are you talking about? Oh, they run the country. I said, we’re 20 feet from the Oval Office. Where are you? Do you know these guys? Where are you getting this? And it’s stuck with me for 40 years. And finally, enough files came out, enough people were willing to talk that I thought I had a book in the history of the presidency in organized crime, what really did happen, what didn’t happen, what people think happened that didn’t happen. And the bottom line is there have been extensive dealings going back to the FDR administration with organized crime. But it’s not like the president at three in the morning is inviting mobsters

[4:25] into the Oval Office and then they’re tiptoeing out. It’s much more attenuated, but it’s very, very real.

[4:33] Yeah, it’s it’s much more sophisticated or or like so many different cutouts. The president never talks to, you know, Carlo Gambino or John Gotti or any of these guys. But these guys talk to their local politician who then has a connection to the larger party, maybe on a state level. And then on a state level, then they end up maybe up with the with the attorney general or something. I think the Chicago, uh, the, the, uh, Chicago film, uh, scandal where the, the Chicago outfit guys, Paul Reek and some of them got out of prison early out of Leavenworth early with Harry Truman’s help. Right. With, with his, his, uh, uh, uh, attorney general, Tom Clark’s help. And Truman had to know that that was going on, but Truman was owed his career to Pendergast. So it, in, in a, you know, indirect way. So it’s, you know, that’s, that’s just how it works.

[5:31] That’s right. And we, you know, with Harry Truman, I mean, a lot of people, everybody knows that he came from a political machine, but they don’t know that it was a mafia controlled machine, not just a political machine, the Lazio family. And you hear you had a person who was selected by a mafia machine who ended up becoming president of the United States. And of course, dropped the bomb on Japan. Did the mob have anything to do with that? No. But it’s amazing to think that history turned on a president that was, in fact, selected with the help of organized crime. And Truman, interestingly, is not unlike Trump in the sense that he admitted that to a large degree, his dealings with the mob. And I think one of the things we’ll talk about is the extent to which some people, everything was about the appearance of respectability. Nobody cared if they did business with the mob. They cared about it coming out. And Truman was oddly candid over his career about it. He wasn’t completely candid. And I think one of the things we’ll get to is what’s been interesting about Donald Trump, as only Trump can do, he will come out and openly admit on national TV repeatedly to having dealt with organized crime. And then somebody will say, well, did you deal with organized crime? And he’ll say, no, I would never do that. But that’s Trump.

[6:57] And that’s kind of built into his stock price. Yeah, that’s for sure. Yeah, that I think another thing, Eric, I’d like to get your comment on this. It seems like the 30s, 40s, and 50s on up to the 60s, it finally started changing in the 70s.

[7:16] Politicians, local politicians, and even society as a whole did not look upon the mafia as this evil thing. They looked at them more as part of the culture, part of society. You know, the fact that, you know, they provided gambling, you know, liquor during prohibition and gambling when all the states, all the country people want to to deny people a chance to gamble. The city people wanted to gamble and a lot of country people did, too. But they always were part of it. And as opposed something happened, I don’t know exactly when in the 70s, about the time I came along and went in the intelligence unit. It’s like all of a sudden they’re this evil thing that we have to totally eradicate. Before, it was not like that. You see it like that?

[8:06] Well, I think that there’s a lot of truth to it. I mean, look, gangsters have always been gangsters and the idea that they were members of the community. I mean, if I hear one more time that they kept their neighborhood safe. Well, yeah, they kept their immediate neighborhoods. They kept their immediate neighborhood safe, but they also pumped drugs into the community. I mean, I remember one of the stories I heard as people in my family got older, one of my grandfather’s business partners in the liquor business was someone who I didn’t know until I was in my 20s, had been the Don of the Philadelphia, South Jersey area. And he had been one of the people, I don’t use his real name in the book, but he had been one of the people arrested at Appalachian. And one of the things my dad told me long after everybody was gone is how mortified they were at being arrested and being identified as gangsters. Because a lot of these guys didn’t see themselves that way. This man who we called Uncle Vince was actually in the car with Vito Genovese at Appalachian. And, you know, you think in the movies, it’s, yeah, you can arrest me, but I’ll be out by dinner.

[9:17] The stories that I heard was there was such shame and embarrassment because Uncle Vince saw himself as a member of the community. He was a gambler, but they were not into drugs. And a lot of it that I get to in the book, a lot of these guys very much saw themselves as Americans. What was interesting to me about Meyer Lansky is his biggest motive for getting involved with the World War II program was personally the thing that meant the most to him was being a real American. I had his certificate of naturalization, and Meyer worked very hard to become

[9:56] naturalized and try to convince Luciano to do it. But Luciano thought it was stupid. But with Lansky, I mean, he went to volunteer to serve in the army. Given what was happening to Jews in World War II, he was turned down because of his age, because of his height. He was 5’4″, soaking wet. But a lot of these guys, it was very much about being an American. Even Albert Anastasia served in the army. What began to happen…

[10:26] Later, I think that part of the problem is the newer generations, you had narcotics, and you didn’t have that ethic of we at least have to appear respectable. We have to appear to be members of the community. And look, this is assimilation. I came across as saying what the son seeks to forget, the grandson seeks to remember. And there are people in my family saying, why do you have to rehash this stuff that happened before you were born?

[11:03] You know, it’s so long ago. You were so far removed from it. And the fact is, is I am very far removed from it. But I became fascinated by what the people before me did. And it never occurred to me that anybody would ever accuse me of it. But all the people I know in my family and our neighbors wanted is they wanted their kids to go to Ivy League schools. I mean, the idea that one of my uncles or grandparents would sit me down and say, you know, Eric, I really want you to get a good education so you can become a really good extortionist.

[11:37] And, you know, one of the things people say about Meyer is, oh, do you think that they made him an honorary member? It never would have occurred to him. What he was looking for was to become Walter Annenberg. well, Mo Annenberg, Lou Wasserman. He wanted to become a very big, legitimate businessman. The idea, at least with the Jews, that he would become the boss of all bosses, he viewed gangland activity as a means to an end. And one of the themes of wise guys in the White House is the obsession that all of the players had with respectability. And the more you could fake respectability…

[12:16] The more power you got. And interestingly, the people who ended up with the success and the power in this country were the people who used the mobsters, not the mobsters themselves. And in the end, one of the things I concluded is the politicians and the businessmen got the better end of the deal than the mob. Because the mob guys at the end of the day, I mean, Meyer’s partner, Jimmy Alo, used to say, we were still burying tin cans in the backyard. Everybody said we were controlling legitimate businesses. We wanted to, but we couldn’t pull it off. Yeah. Interesting. You know what? TJ English, I just interviewed him and he said, he’s wonderful. He is. He said, these guys just wanted the American dream. That’s all they wanted

[12:58] was to live the American dream as they assimilated into American society. And so that’s what you’re saying here, that they wanted legitimacy and they put on the appearance of legitimacy and getting involved with politics will give you some appearance of legitimacy and also give you a certain power to you can help out your fellow man you could get jobs for people uh you know on the police department and the fire department you know.

[13:23] Different city jobs or account state jobs and so that’s that’s what they wanted so let’s let’s talk about tell us one of your your early stories here out of the book, Well, one of the things I start with is Americans have always done business. American politicians have always done business with thugs going back to the political machines. But one of the first stories I tell isn’t a mafia story. It’s how when Andrew Jackson was dealing with the War of 1812 and he ran into trouble with the British in New Orleans, he tapped the pirate Jean Lafitte to go and harass the British. And what Lafitte wanted of the deal is he wanted leniency from prosecution.

[14:11] Even he wanted to be respectable. So I talk about that’s a pattern. But really the first story that I deal with is World War II. And there’s a lot of mythology around what happened. I mean there are two extreme schools of thought. Both of them are wrong. One of them is that you hear the story that the mafia helped save the country in World War II. You left Lucky Luciano stormed the shores of Sicily, waving a banner, and the mafia came. That never happened. But the other school of thought is that it was all a scam, that the mob did nothing.

[14:45] It’s really somewhere in the middle. The fact is, is what you had is there was sabotage. The Nazis were sinking tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, of tons, rather, of materiel in the Atlantic, including in the Hudson River. Roosevelt hadn’t declared war. He couldn’t declare war. Nobody wanted the war. And things were disappearing. The theory was a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, this ship blew up at the port of New York, the Normandy, a French ship that was being converted into an American troop ship. and it blew up. It sank. And the theory at the time was that it was Nazi sabotage. It probably wasn’t, almost certainly wasn’t. But it was, you know, a month after Pearl Harbor. Who knew? The Navy goes to the docks. They say, we need your help. And they told them to go to hell. You know, the kinds of guys who you’re dealing with tough Italians and Irishmen, you go in with a uniform and say, we work for the government. They’re not going to cooperate with you. And one theory was, were they loyal to Mussolini? They really weren’t. But the fact is, is they didn’t want to cooperate with the government.

[15:56] They ended up approaching a Genovese, what is now a Genovese family, a Luciano member, a guy named Joseph Lanza. And he said, well, you know, we could help you on the docks, but you need Luciano to help you. And if you want to get to Luciano, you got to go to, you got to talk to Meyer Lansky because Meyer Lansky was famously patriotic as a Jewish man. He was very concerned about what was happening in World War II, even in Eastern Europe. And Lansky was approached by a commander, Hoffenden, of the Navy with the help, by the way, irony of ironies, of prosecutors in New York. were the ones who made the connection.

[16:43] Prosecutors that came from the Tammany Hall machine, which was dominated by Luciano and Frank Costello. So it was the prosecutors who brought in the mob. And Lansky listened and he said, look, I’ve tried to, I mean, the Navy knew that Lansky had been naturalized. They knew that he was tutored privately in American history. I mean, Meyer Lansky in the evenings, he wasn’t going out gambling with the guys or having an affairs. he was hiring Tudor. I mean, I have the notes and I see the notes that he made. I mean, there’s one of his notes in his, you know, you need to better understand Benjamin Graham, who was Warren Buffett’s hero. You must look up Thucydides.

[17:26] A lot of interest in history. And he was turned down to be in the army. And he went up to Luciano, who he hadn’t seen in seven years. Luciano was in prison up at the Canadian border, upstate New York, where he had been away on a 30 to 50 year vacation for pandering, Luciano said, look, I’m happy to help.

[17:51] I don’t like the, I don’t love the idea of working with the government. And frankly, if they deport me, how will it look that I helped in the war effort against Italy where I’d end up being deported? And Meyer said, I’ve got a plan. You know, we want something in return. This is not out of the goodness of our hearts. I mean, some of it is patriotism, but some of it is, the idea was to spring Luciano and get leniency in sentencing. So what ended up happening is word was put out by Luciano that he wants the people on the waterfront to cooperate. It’s not seen as ratting. And a lot of what Lansky and his people did, it was really two things. Number one, they reported on suspicious behavior on the waterfront.

[18:42] Unbelievably, one of the people who Franklin Roosevelt designated as his New York area sabotage czar was his best friend, a man named Vincent Astor of the Astor family fortune. So here you had an Astor who was his best friend and who helped him when he had polio recuperate was the guy in charge of working with the Navy and making sure that the New York area ports were safe. Do we know that Vincent Astor personally met with mobsters and then went back and told Roosevelt? We don’t know. But then again, those type of files wouldn’t be kept. It is almost certain that Roosevelt was aware of this. Also, Walter Winchell, the most powerful columnist in America, was Roosevelt’s top guy on propaganda.

[19:36] Who was Walter Winchell’s neighbor in the Majestic House in New York City? His neighbor down the hall, Meyer Lansky. And he used to tell Meyer Lansky where the Nazi rallies. I mean, it’s hard to believe in this day and age, but there was a major pro-German, pro-Nazi presence of all places, New York City. And Winchell would say, these people are meeting at this particular location. And Lansky would send his crew and beat the living crap out of them. And so you had both this process of reporting on activities around the docks, but also boats going around with both gangsters and Navy people around the New York area, spotting submarines and reporting it. One of the things that happened was that eight Nazi saboteurs came ashore on Long Island and in Jacksonville, Florida.

[20:33] And J. Edgar Hoover ended up with all the credit for catching them. And he deserved most of the credit because one of the guys turned himself in. But what also happened was the unions, the waiters’ unions in hotels, were listening to…

[20:50] And reporting to Lansky and Joseph Lanza if there were suspicious people, which ended up leading to the capture of some of the New York Nazis who ended up coming ashore. Other ones really did just turn themselves in. But you have this ongoing historical tug of war where you have Lansky saying, I got them and turned them in. And you have J. Edgar Hoover saying, no, it was crack investigations that did it. Who are you going to believe? I think that there’s truth to both of it. I read a book about that when I was a kid. And I saw nothing about the mafia and these guys. It was all the intrepid agents of the FBI. I was in trance with that kind of stuff, of course, as a 12, 13-year-old boy. I was, too. I was, too. And by the way, I mean, there is reason to believe that Lansky exaggerated some of his role. But so did J. Edgar Hoover. Yeah. But we’re never going to know because all of the records weren’t kept. But the bottom line is the mob did play a big role. And then later, when Patton was planning the invasion of Sicily, they needed contacts in Sicily. And Lansky brought them into the headquarters for, by the way, what was called the Ferret Squad or Operation Underworld, was none other than the Hotel Astor, controlled by the Astor family and who was Roosevelt’s best friend, Astor.

[22:17] So Lansky brought in all these Sicilians who would say, no, the beaches are soft here. Don’t go here. Go here. And when you get to this particular place, see Vincenzo.

[22:27] The Italian naval intelligence officers, American intelligence officers, were the liaisons when they got to Sicily and were very, very helpful in the

[22:39] taking of the island when the invasion happened. So that’s really the World War II story. From what I could see from what you said, Eric, how the cutouts, you know, the president didn’t get a call from Mayor Lansky, the cutout that his friend.

[22:53] Jacob Asser or the Astor family, somebody he designated then was a liaison and somebody else was a liaison. And then they got this Navy commander to do really the down and dirty work right on the streets. So the government works about like the mob sometimes, don’t they? Well, that’s exactly right. I mean, we’ll get to the story of Lyndon Johnson. When Lyndon Johnson had passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the three civil rights workers disappeared right after that, and also another civil rights leader, a man named Vernon Dahmer, was killed by the Klan. And what ended up happening in the movie, in the movie Mississippi Burning.

[23:40] An FBI agent tortured a Klansman, held a razor to his privates and said, you know, give up the location of the bodies. What really happened is they sent, as LBJ said to Hoover, and this is on tape, I don’t care what you have to do. Do what you got to do. And Hoover’s going, well, I don’t really care about civil rights, but I have the president breathing down my neck. And they had just turned a man named Greg Scarpa as an informant of the Colombo family, an absolute psychopathic killer. And they sent Scarpa down, and Scarpa played a role, some role in finding the three civil rights workers, but he really played a larger role in finding the killers of the civil rights worker Vernon Dahmer a couple years later. So the point here is not that Lyndon Johnson sat down with Carlo Gambino or Joe Colombo. Of course he did. What he did is he said to J. Edgar Hoover, do what you got to do. And Hoover said, I have to produce because I have a lousy – I mean, Hoover didn’t care about civil rights, but he had to do something. And what did he do? He went to the mob. So that really tells you the kind of attenuated, staggering layers with which it works. But the bottom line was the mob was very active in World War II,

[24:59] and they were very active in other programs as well with presidents. Got something about Ronald Reagan and Lou Washerman. I’d not heard this story before. Tell us about that.

[25:10] Well, you know, my friends, I was a kid. I was 22 years old in Reagan’s White House and not all my friends. I tell you that because I don’t want to make it sound like I was some important person. I was there. And so my old bosses are not thrilled that I did a Reagan chapter, but how could I not? Reagan, his career mentor was Lew Wasserman, who was the powerhouse behind MCA. We know it more as Universal today. And Reagan’s career was going nowhere. And Lew Wasserman saved him. He saved him by getting him the contract to host GE Theater, which was a big TV show at the time. And it saved Reagan’s career. It gave him experience going around the country and talking about issues. And it took Reagan from kind of a no-account movie star into America’s living rooms where he was talking to them every week and introducing movies and other things.

[26:10] Lou Wasserman’s career, I mean, the MCA was built on the back of Mob Muscle because it was founded by his then boss, Jules Stein, in Chicago. And they had deals to book bands. And so what it was is, yeah, we’ll help you book bans in our locations, but you got to give us a cut. So this goes back to the beginning of MCA. Lou Wasserman’s best friend was Sidney Korshak, a name I know you know, the attorney for the Chicago outfit and the primary link between the mob and labor and legitimate business and government. And so Lou Wasserman, the way he got things done and assured there would be labor peace was he built Sidney Korshak into the cost of doing business. And one of the questions that always comes up is, was the Chicago outfit shaking Wasserman down? Well, that’s not how Wasserman saw it. Wasserman saw it as he was paying for a service. You know, if you’re trying to shoot TV shows and movies and some, it’s worth a lot of money to make sure a strike doesn’t happen. That’s what Korshack brought to it. And so the Chicago outfit was compensated in that way. What does that have to do with Reagan?

[27:27] Well, Reagan was, and Lou Wasserman were very close. Reagan wasn’t close to Sidney Korshack, but they knew each other. And one of the things that Reagan, that Lou Wasserman got out of the deal is there was a time when you couldn’t both be in the movie business and the TV production business. And Reagan gave Wasserman, when he was head of the Screen Actors Guild, a waiver to allow him to compete in multiple worlds. Yeah.

[28:00] This is something that while there’s no proof that the mob per se ordered this, here you have a future president of the United States, very close to someone for whom everyday dealings with organized crime was a very big part of it. Later, during Reagan’s presidency, interestingly, it turned out that there were Gambino family members working inside of MCA, but the prosecutorial attention toward them wasn’t as intense as Reagan’s prosecution of other mobsters. It would be incorrect to say, oh, Reagan didn’t prosecute the mob. He prosecuted the mob in a very big way. That’s when the commission trial was. But Korshack’s people out in L.A. And to some extent in Chicago, the teeth were not sunk as hard into them. And so, you know, if you talk to some of the prosecutors, as I did, they will tell you that word came on down high from the Reagan administration. You don’t want Korshack. You don’t want that crowd.

[29:13] And it was really quite interesting. I mean, my friend Dan Moldea has written very effectively about this. And one of the things that I heard from some of the people who were willing to talk to me years later is, you know, Reagan was protective of his friends. Nobody ever had to give an official order or threaten somebody. But I think that it was understood at high levels of the Justice Department that we really don’t want to make trouble for Reagan’s friends.

[29:42] And while I wouldn’t say Reagan made no trouble to the Chicago Corshack world, they definitely got off way light. And the former prosecutors feel very betrayed by it and were horrified by that. And it all comes back to the Wasserman-Reagan connection. I mean, Wasserman saved Reagan. Going back to Chicago, there’s all these stories about the outfit and JFK, and we don’t want to go into the murder,

[30:16] the assassination of JFK, I think. But the whole thing about his Joe Kennedy and Sam Giancana getting the votes for Joe Kennedy, and then Joe Kennedy is supposed to be some quid pro quo. So I know you touched on that. Yeah, let’s talk about that. But, oh, I talk about it a lot because I think that one of the things you always hear is the Kennedys and the mob.

[30:41] Like the Kennedys are one unit. They were not one unit. Joe, Jack, and Bobby were three very different units. Yeah. So when you hear the mob and the Kennedys, a lot of the reporting on this is really kind of histrionic and overly Oliver Stone for my taste. But here’s what I do believe happened. What I do believe happened is that Joe Kennedy knew that his son would need labor support. Joe Kennedy, most likely through an intermediary, went to Jimmy Blue Eyes, Vincent Alo, Meyer Lansky’s partner. And I’ve known Jimmy’s family for many, many years.

[31:22] And Jimmy said to Joe Kennedy, and by the way, I’m grossly oversimplifying this for the sake of storytelling. telling. But Jimmy said, look, I don’t want to get involved with elections.

[31:35] We’ve gotten burned with that before. Contrary to popular opinion, Meyer and Jimmy Alo were very, very skeptical of doing business with national politicians. And so was the Chicago outfit, by the way. Giancana’s decision to help Kennedy out was not universally loved. And so Alo said, talk to Sinatra. So Joe Kennedy talks to Sinatra. Sinatra makes some kind of introduction to Giancana. And the deal was very simple. We’ll help your son. We’ll help him get some votes. But we hope.

[32:13] And he’s been a pain in the ass to us in these prosecutions. I mean, JFK was, you know, a part of the committee that was prosecuting, looking into the mob in the Senate. Bobby, we certainly know about. And even though there is no evidence that anybody ever said that Giancana said, we will only do this if you do that, it doesn’t need to be said. Joe Kennedy knew what was implied. And here’s where I think history gets a little confusing. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Kennedy did receive the help from Labor, Illinois, West Virginia, and other places. But the idea that this necessarily turned the election, I think there’s a lot of doubt there. I mean, JFK probably would have gotten Illinois anyway. And so the point is not whether or not the mob won the 60 election for JFK. It’s that they were asked for help and they received the help. Now, there was a big fight between Joe Kennedy around that time and his son Bobby, who he said, you can’t keep going after these guys, Hammer and Tom. And Bobby Kennedy, he was a purist.

[33:34] He wanted to go after them. And there’s a quote that I used in the book where one of the Kennedy family’s top aides said Jack’s hair would have turned white if he had any idea what his father, the extent of what his father was up to. So here you have a situation where Joe Kennedy unquestionably looked for the labor support, but there’s no evidence that Bobby and Jack did anything other than benefit from it. And one of the things I talk about in the book is one of the great things about being a rich kid is you don’t have to know. And did they know? They knew. But did they know?

[34:14] No, not in a provable way. And that distance actually matters. I mean, you could say, well, you know, that doesn’t make them any more pure. Well, maybe not. But it does protect you to some degree to have that level of insulation. And then we get to the challenge of Fidel Castro, where one of the things you hear people talking about is, you know, LBJ famously said, my God, the Kennedys were running a murder incorporated in the Caribbean. Well, let’s look at the facts. The fact is, is the campaign to kill Castro did not start with the Kennedys. It started under Eisenhower. And there is a big question mark as to how much Eisenhower knew. One of the point people who did know was none other than Richard Nixon. He didn’t know everything, but he knew that the effort was afoot.

[35:12] So the mafia, Johnny Roselli, Giancana, Santo Traficante, they were activated under the Eisenhower administration, not the Kennedy administration. When the Kennedys took over, Bobby, for someone who’s gone down in history is so peace-loving, was absolutely adamant that Castro was killed. But he preferred that Cuban exiles would do it. And somebody ended up telling him, J. Edgar Hoover being one of them, that the mafia was being used. Bobby was not happy.

[35:51] And the idea that Bobby was enthusiastic about using the mob,

[35:55] not true. But basically, the CIA said, all right, so this is how it is, Bobby. You want Castro dead, but you want us to use the nicest people to do it.

[36:07] Is this where we are? And so, you know, among the quotes I use in the book were people around Kennedy who said he knew, but he wasn’t thrilled about it. And so, again, we have the scenario of they were aware of mob involvement. They benefited from it. But did they know the details? Probably not. Yeah, I think people don’t really understand sometimes the power of a wink and a nod and say, okay. Well, you know, it’s funny because, I mean, I won’t get into current politics, but I mean, in any big way. But my investigative reporter friends were obsessed with the idea of Russian collusion with Trump. And I said to them, look, I’m not going to take a position pro-Trump or anti-Trump, But I will take the position that you are assuming that collusion means Putin snuck into Trump Tower and passed over a briefcase. No, in all likelihood, it was Putin said, boy, I hate Hillary.

[37:09] This Trump guy wants to do business in my country. Let’s throw a little his way, and maybe he’ll throw something back our way.

[37:17] That doesn’t require breaking the law. Now, was a law broken? Not that Mueller could find. But it gets to the point I think you’re making, which is critical, which is it doesn’t require there to be intense conspiracies. And this is what made Watergate so interesting, because you had the president who was actively involved in the cover-up. And that’s not what you do. I know. He didn’t understand the power of a wink and a nod to his underlies. You just look at him and say, you know what? You just got to do what you got to do. See you later. Take care of this for me. Well, that’s right. And here you have, and I talk about in the book, Nixon on tape going, we need you to break into the Brookings Institute. We need to do it on a thievery basis. It’s on tape.

[38:09] Which uh speaking of nixon what about that did he take a million dollars to let jimmy hoff out, well you know probably i i think that the bigger issue than nixon the nixon campaign taking the money and by the way you know it’s not clear whether it would have been nixon taking it or the Nixon campaign taking it. But the thing that they really wanted was there’s this process that began during the Kennedy era of turning labor from Democrats to Republicans because the argument has always been, why would labor go to Republicans, you know, given that Republicans are pro-business? Well, one thing that happened is Bobby Kennedy went after Jimmy Hoffa.

[38:57] And that was an opportunity. And one of the things that a friend of mine who was very senior to me in the White House said is we knew, Reagan knew, They couldn’t win over labor on economics, but they could win over labor on culture.

[39:13] And that the Reagan people began to notice that, first of all, they couldn’t stand Carter. The labor people couldn’t relate to him at all. But showing up to Reagan rallies, you’d have guys, labor people in cowboy hats and sidearms. And culturally, they liked the Republicans more. And a lot of what Nixon was looking for was labor support. And I think that the deal was Fitzsimmons had taken over when Hoffa went to jail. The mob was very happy with Fitzsimmons, especially when Hoffa started making noises. This is my union. I’m going to come back. I’m going to blow the whistle on all you guys. Not good.

[39:54] And the deal Nixon taught was not a pardon, but for Hoffa’s sentence to be commuted, provided that he didn’t run for office for a certain amount of time. And he ended up with Fitzsimmons in power. Fitzsimmons threw Teamsters’ support behind Nixon. Nixon got what he wanted. The problem, of course, is this set in motion, Hoffa’s desire to return to power, which is not something that the mob wanted. And if he had been willing to retire, he would have lived to a ripe old age. He wasn’t willing to retire. But in terms of the wise guys and the White House theme, no question, Nixon did a lot of work with the unions. They were controlled by the mob, and he benefited from it. He also benefited from deals in South Florida with some mobbed-up characters, some land deals. I mean, Nixon, you know, it’s funny.

[40:55] Nixon, you always hear that he was paranoid. Yeah, he was paranoid, but these people really were out to get him. And he didn’t help himself by always having his hand out for money and getting involved in some deals that he shouldn’t have, including with some banks that were heavily mob-connected. Yeah, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody’s not out to get you, right? Yeah. Well, yeah. And the mistake Nixon made was not being paranoid. It’s that the actions that he took, um, he could have said, look, these people are out to get me, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Let me just go and win the election, which of course he did in a landslide, which is why it’s so tragic. He didn’t have to do any of that stuff.

[41:40] Great. Eric, this has been wonderful. This is a, I tell you guys, you got to get this book. You want to crack beyond some of the myths that you see on Facebook and from your friends sometimes you want to become the definitive expert on some of these things, get this book, Wise Guys in the White House, Gangsters, Presidents, and the Deals They Made. Let me tell you, let me read you one little thing here. Ronald Kessler, who is a New York Times bestselling author, said, Wise Guys in the White House is an eye-opening, authoritative, remarkably detailed expose of the interplay between organized crime and our presidents. Shockingly revealing how close we have come to mob rule. So there’s a lot in this book, guys. You got to get it. And Eric, I really appreciate you coming on the show. And you’ve enlightened me. I’ll get around to reading this book now for sure after talking to you. I just hadn’t had time. Well, Gary, my final point, just something to cause people to lose their minds is, no, the mob didn’t kill JFK. So that’s my concluding remark. Okay. All right. and guys we didn’t even get into the Biden and the Trump White Houses so you got that to look forward to when you get that book as a little teaser for you right.

[42:52] Exactly there’s a lot on trump and the thing to know about trump is he was oddly honest all the way across about having done business with the mob that’s what’s so hilarious well you can’t do construction in manhattan without doing business with the concrete club right the window well that’s that is why trump built trump tower with concrete not steel there you go guys uh i really appreciate y’all listening and uh i hope you get this book and don’t forget i like to ride motorcycles so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there in your cars and if you have a problem with ptsd and you’ve been in this service go to the va website and get that hotline number and if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol which is hand in hand with ptsd why uh anthony ruggiano a former gambino prospect a possible member is a drug and alcohol counselor down in florida and i’ll go figure that but he is i had him on the show once he’s a really nice guy and he has a hotline on his website and uh 1-800 bets off i think for gambling problems and and that’s enough uh social uh promotion today i guess it’s not promotion but uh uh dealing with those kinds of issues which you know we all have to a greater or lesser extent i think at least i have in my past don’t forget to look at my find my books they’re on amazon just go to amazon and search Gary Jenkins and Mafia, and you’ll find more than you ever wanted to know about me. So thanks a lot, guys.

[44:19] Thank you, Eric. Thank you.

Additionally, Gary Jenkins asks for your help with his new and captivating book inspired by his podcast episodes. Big Apple Mafia: Stories From the Five Families delves into New York City’s organized crime scene, beginning with legendary Mafia detective Joe Petrosino and key moments from his remarkable career. As with his first book, Windy City Mafia: Stories From the Chicago Outfit, Gary handpicks some of his favorite stories, crafting a compelling ten-chapter collection. Readers will explore tales of Lt. Petrosino and the Black Hand, Frank Costello—The Gentleman Gangster, the notorious Crazy Joey Gallo, the ruthless Tommy “Karate” Pitera, and Gary’s personal favorite, John Gotti’s Mole, and five more. Written in his signature direct and engaging style, this book is a must-read for true crime enthusiasts. Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

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Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, Gary Jenkins, Kansas City Police Intelligence

[0:04] Unit Detective in the past. I have been at it again. I have written my second book based on my podcast episodes. My second book is called Big Apple Mafia, Stories from the Five Families. Now, I’m going to tell many mob stories from a podcast.

[0:20] Big Apple Mafia is going to be a little bit longer than Windy City Mafia, the Chicago outfit. It’s got 160 pages. So my best stories, I really love a lot of these stories. like the one about Gotti’s mole, the New York City policeman who was feeding him information all the time in that investigation, how they uncovered that guy. And really everything from the overview in the early days, Abe Rellis, the canary that could sing but couldn’t fly, and all those old stories. So this new book is only $2.99 as a Kindle. And remember, the reason I’m doing this is for Amazon to put that book out on other people. When you go to Amazon, then if you’re a mob book reader, then we want this book to be put in front of all those mob book readers, whether they’re podcast listeners or not, of course. And if you want to help me with that, I kind of game the algorithms. It seems to work a little bit. They monitor the purchases or the pages read and the reviews, so give me a review also. So, and this helped out immensely with my Chicago book. So once again, I’m asking you for basically a small $2.99 donation and you’ll get the book in return, the Kindle book, or it’s a little more for the, I can’t remember how much it is for the, for the, uh.

[1:40] Paperback and, and so anyhow, don’t forget to give me a review and as reward for listening to this little sales pitch, here’s a great story about Greg Scarpa senior, AKA the grim reaper, or as I’ve learned, the name he really preferred was a killing machine or just km this guy was a real piece of work man i mean he was a real piece of piece of work he was he played chess while everybody else was playing checkers it seems to me like so listen to my story and don’t forget go to amazon and click on you know search gary jenkins, mafia books and you’ll find my books and buy that 299 kindle book and give me a review on it it’s called uh not windy city mafia one of my it’s called big apple mafia stories from the five families so listen up guys you know he’s got the usual thing as a young thug he ended up doing truck hijackings and the mob guys saw that and that’s where you fence your property if you do a truck hijacking large amounts of property.

[2:42] In 1960, FBI agents arrested him for hijacking. And another one hijacking, when they arrested him, they served a search warrant on his house and they found several cases of liquor taken from a more recent hijacking. Well, it was during that time in August of 1960 that the FBI opened their first informant file on him. And, you know, think about this, this is three years before Valachi does his testimony. He got that three years before Bellacci talks. I mean, Bellacci has come in by now, but this is three years before he actually gives his public testimony and people know about him. Greg Scarpa Sr., who’s going to get into the Profaci, then Colombo family, is talking to the FBI. And they dismiss the charges on the first hijacker. And then they drop him shortly after that because his brother was involved with this and and he won’t talk about his brother which is pretty common you know that’s that’s a bit much to ask of a guy but you know i noticed in the book i was reading about this is a really good book about this uh the greg scarper and his whole life that the charges were never refiled.

[3:52] The book says agents kept dropping by a social club where he frequented and and all the time and they tried to talk to him all the time. And so much that guys started to talk. And he finally, they said he begged the agents, you know, you got to stop this. Guys are starting to talk. Oh, that book, by the way, is Deal with the Devil. There it is. It’s thick too. It’s a big, thick book. Peter Lance. I think it’s really good now. Now there’s another book about him that mentions him a lot by this FBI agent, Len DiVecchio.

[4:23] And DiVecchio was one of his.

[4:26] Two guys that we know that ran him as an informant and i tell you what he i in my opinion from what i’ve read they were playing he was playing those guys all along well he did work for him i mean he did do work but he he was using it to uh to get himself promoted in the mob and and earn more money and and all that and and in 1962 they actually early on they gave him top echelon informant status, which is a pretty big deal. And what they said, there was a Profaci-Gallo war going on at that time, and they said he could furnish information on that. They really wanted to know about that. That other liquor hijacking case was dismissed during that time. In early 1962, there was an FBI report in which an unidentified agent describes Scarpa as a reliable and emotionally stable person, and that he has never furnished any false information. And the subsequent memos that they started writing early on his information was much better and more detailed and more about crimes than anything joe velacci ever talked about joe velacci got in there and talked to old history and and he explained a lot that that they didn’t know you know like the the capos and the bosses and and the families and how they were separate and and how they they They worked together and all those kinds of things. The induction ceremony, Scarpa was reported on current events.

[5:55] Bureau at that time calls him a capital regime. Now, he’s a little bit young for that. I think they wanted to boost him up a little bit and make him look like he’s more important. But they did say, and this turns out to be true, he was really close to the profetiae.

[6:08] Family concierge, Charles LoCicero. They also claimed that Scarpa Sr. Was a bookmaker and a gambler and nothing else, no kind of truck hijackings or murders or loom sharking or anything like that. He was just a bookmaker and a gambler, clean money. And they said that he agreed that he would advance in the Profaci family if they asked him to. So he was like, right there, he tells them, I’ll do this. I mean, I’ll go on in the family and try to get in to a higher position and into more mafia activities, but if you want me to, I mean, just think about this guy. He was good. He was always asking for money to cover old debts, and he wanted a regular stipend. Now, I did learn that they paid him $125 a month, but they often gave him large amounts, like there was $3,000 in one case, and this is 1962-63, and that was for some old debt that he owed, supposedly. But he was constantly asking for money. But he did report on all the inner workings and the plots and the relationships within the Profaci organization. Nothing, not that actionable intelligence yet that you could go set up a surveillance and then catch somebody in the act. And it kind of looked like to me reading that book and they had a bunch of the, what they called air tales or the reports that they were sending about.

[7:31] Scarfa, that he was really dropping information to try to manipulate agents into getting more money and never really putting himself in a position where he’d have to testify or even be exposed at all they wouldn’t have to go act on it and believe me the j edgar hoover was really really happy with this real good inside information uh you know like there’s a mob murderer he’ll come in and say well here’s what i hear nothing you can act on but i heard that this guy did it and this is why you know get that kind of stuff otherwise you’re just sitting on the outside twiddling your thumbs going I don’t know I don’t really know what’s going on and Bureau didn’t like that no law enforcement organization as you go up in ranks they never don’t want you to say that you don’t know they want you to come up with something, So they could then tell their friends or tell their boss that here’s what my

[8:20] guys learned. That’s just how it works. Following those different FBI reports in that book, Deal with the Devil, you can see that he was always thinking ahead and always preparing kind of the way for his own rise as would justify anything that he did in this Profaci and then later Colombo family.

[8:40] And the early one he was ratting out is a guy named Charles LoCicero or Charlie the Siege. I never could figure out what that Sidge was supposed to mean. I don’t think, I couldn’t find it in the book if it said that, but anybody knows, let me know. I’m curious. He told them how Los Cicero was really important, but he’s a guy that often got crossways with Profaci.

[9:02] And that way he was always like, you know, Los Cicero is a really important guy, but yet he’s in trouble. Because I think on down the road, we’ll see why. He said Los Cicero was one of the top gangsters in Brooklyn during these years, the early 60s. One story he told about Los Cicero was that he had assisted a gangster named Ralph Whitey Tropiano, who was up in New Haven, Connecticut, and he had some problems with some outlawed gangsters up there that were encroaching on his territory. And I checked on this Whitey Tropiano, the Tropiano in St. Louis, but he was a really valuable mobster, and here’s where he became valuable to the families is, A few years before, there was an old man, older mobster, and it was, I think he maybe even was a boss, Willie Moretti. And he was getting old, and he was going senile from untreated syphilis, and everybody was afraid he was going to talk. And Lo Cicero and a couple other guys, Lo Cicero was the most important one, set him up and killed him on the street. So one way, he starts out really denigrating Lo Cicero and showing that how, you know, Somebody might be angry at him and kill him off, or he might be out. He said he’s really tight, tight-fisted.

[10:19] He’d squeeze a nickel to see the buffalo shit, if you ever heard that expression. He gave one example in which Los Cicero’s son, Michael, was getting married. The old man said, I’ll pay for the wedding, but all the cash envelopes that are going to be given to you at this wedding, it was one of those huge weddings, got to be given to me. And then I might get the money repaid to me for putting on the wedding. Well, he got all that money and he gave his son $500, which was, believe me, he got paid a premium for putting on that wedding from those envelopes that all those gangsters brought in for the lucky young couple. This is 1963 by 66. Scarpa is claiming that Los Cicero is down and out as far as his mob activity is concerned. He rats out Los Cicero’s grandson and his couple of his sons, be this kid’s uncles, about a negotiable stocks ripoff. That used to be a big deal. They had negotiable bonds and stocks that you could steal. And they had ways to get rid of those with crooked stockbrokers. Or you take them and get a big loan in a bank and they hold them for collateral. You get money that way. And so anyhow, it was back then before computers, that was a pretty good way to make a lot of money. And it appeared to me, they never did say exactly, but it looked like Scarpa was going to fence those stocks. And then this Richard Los Cicero.

[11:48] Uh, his, his kind of his mentor, the first man that brought him in the family is murdered 1967 and never could tell what was the happening. These stock certificates, other than it looks like, uh, Scarpa ended up with him because he was supposed to fence them. Um, and it was during some of these years, there’s the agent named Tony Milano was his control and Milano wrote a book called brick agent. And in this Brick Agent book, Volano uses a fake name to identify his top echelon informant, Greg Scarper, throughout that whole book. You might want to get that book, Brick Agent.

[12:25] And I tell you what, Edgar Hoover, during this time, he just loved those reports. I mean, they would, like, tailor those reports with Scarper’s information and send them to Edgar Hoover, and he just loved that. You know, Edgar Hoover always loved knowing the dirt on somebody or knowing what other people didn’t know, as we all do, really. Villano retires in 1975. He stopped giving the FBI any good information, and they put him on the shelf until this Len DiVecchio dug him up and started another long-term relationship with him. And what’s interesting is Scarpa will refuse to meet with any other agents or have any other agents present when he meets with these control agents. And during this unprotected time, he did catch a little bookmaking case. The grandson of Charlie Los Cicero was killed after his uncle’s, Los Cicero’s sons, went to jail for their stolen stock certificate job. And then the old man, Charlie Los Cicero, is murdered. And this really paves the way for Scarpa not only to get in good with the FBI and denigrates the guy and he serves up the son.

[13:39] Michael, because of the wedding night, the old man scammed him, he tried to make it look like Michael did the killing.

[13:47] So this guy is a piece of work. It was common knowledge during this time that 1964, the FBI sent Greg Scarper Sr. To Philadelphia, Mississippi on a civil rights case. If you remember the three civil rights workers, two white and one black down in Philadelphia were murdered by the Klan and they buried their bodies in a pond dam that was under construction and burnt their car. And from the Mississippi Burning movie, that’s pretty much true. He kidnapped the Klan leader, threatens to cut his balls off until a guy reveals where the bodies are. And that’s all they really ain’t told him. We just want to know where the bodies are. And then a couple of years later, it’d be 1966.

[14:29] They send him back down. He did such a good job there sending back down to jackson mississippi there’s some clan guys had had attacked a man named brennan dahmer’s home one night when he had done he had been providing a place for voter registration at his home so they attacked this guy’s home and started shooting into it his family ran out the back door and end up and and he was trying to hold him off so his family could get away and they fire bombed it and he ended up killing this bernard dahmer and so he used he was brought back down there they pointed out the clan later who they thought was probably at least there that night forced him to confess and that’s how we know you know all this had happened i don’t know exactly what happened but this guy was he was brutal he was vicious and he would do anything to get ahead and like i said he was playing chess while everybody else was doing checkers so here’s a one one more little kind of more modern story joe clumbo was shot in 1971 you You know, remember Alphonse Alleyboy Persico was really on the rise during that time.

[15:34] And he’s going to end up taking over the Profaci family. And now, Allie Boy was quite a dandy. He looked and lived like a movie producer, a record executive or something. He had a white Rolls Royce, and he dressed in $1,000 white suits. So he was quite the dandy. So after he rises to boss the Colombo family, one day, it’s 1984, Allie Boy sees a beautiful Italian

[15:57] girl standing on a Brooklyn street corner. And he stops and flirts. And she’s hip to the game. She’s not going to just fall for any, you know, line of bull, but she kind of likes this guy.

[16:09] And he ends up getting a date with her, finds out she’s a former Miss New Jersey. Her name is Mary Mary, M-A-R-I-B-A-R-I. They go on a whirlwind relationship. She becomes his Gomar. She fell madly in love with him, really. And she’s never going to leave his wife. And he took her on trips out of town to Las Vegas, typical places, Las Vegas, Hawaii, and Florida. And bought her furs, of course, and expensive jewelry. He had a pet name for her, was Peach, and she got a tattoo of a peach on her butt. And he took her everywhere. I mean, it was like, you know, this was just Alley Boy’s girlfriend. This was Alley Boy’s girl. Greg Carpenter, in this time, he is managing Persico’s money on the street, collecting the big, giving out beatings whenever it’s necessary, doing the loan sharking things, the heavy work. And the feds are closing in on Alley Boy, and there’s a warrant’s been issued, and he learned about it, and he went on the lam.

[16:58] He did not want to go to the penitentiary. Some of his other underlings went to Mary’s home and demanded all the expensive jewelry that he’d given her back, which is pretty cold, man. And she didn’t have a job. She’s just been living this kept woman kind of life for the last couple of years. And, you know, they get worried about her. They hear some things about her. Allie Boy hears that she’s dating somebody and it’s somebody in law enforcement. And he’s hiding out up in Connecticut and she knows where he is. And so he’s definitely afraid that she’s going to give him up. One evening, September, she got all dolled up. Because a guy named Carmine Sessa, who had a club that was in Bay Ridge. I don’t remember the name of it. Occasions, I think, was the name of it. It was in Bay Ridge. And he’d offer this bartending job, and he sends a guy. He said, okay, I’ll send somebody for you. Come on over and check it out, see what you got to do here, and see if you want to work here. Some guy named Tony Muscles, they called him, just one of the young little hangers-on mob guys. So he picks her up, brings her in, and when she gets there, She walks in, she sees Greg Scarpa Jr. And Sr., as well as several other men there. And we know this because Greg Jr.

[18:11] Later on tells about this. Greg Sr. never talked about it, of course, because, you know, this was something that he didn’t tell anybody about at the time. The FBI, no matter how lenient they were, they could not approve of this if the organization knew it. However, if the agent knew it and he kept his mouth shut, which is totally bad, totally wrong, you just don’t do that kind of stuff. But what Greg Jr.

[18:38] Said, and I think somebody else turned eventually and testified to this or told about it. Greg Jr. walked up and greeted her, and she thought, oh, this is all good. All my friends here, all the Persico family, and I never did become Persico family, I don’t think. But all his underlings were there. So she moved in, you know, to get the kiss on the cheek. He grabs her and pulls her down, push her down on the ground. And Greg Scarpen has a gun and he pulls it and pumps a bunch of bullets under her body. And, you know, they take her body out and just unceremoniously dispose of it under an elevated train. So it’s found pretty quick. Now, there’s another person that tells this story. Linda Shuro, who is Greg Sr.’s longtime girlfriend. Him tommy dades i believe is a new york city detective he gives some information that he’s learned about this lindy vecchio anyhow they put a the feds put a case on this fbi agent lindy vecchio and he testified or she testified lindy shiro testified in court against de vecchio.

[19:42] That one day de vecchio came over to their house and told scarpa senior that hey man you got a problem with this mary berry and you know gives the the nod and he knows what he knows what that means uh de vecchio of course will deny that vehemently in an interesting twist of events de vecchio writes a book and in the very beginning he tells about mary berry and the murder of mary berry and he he fictionalizes and he talks about like he knew what she was thinking and feeling and when she went into there and, who all was involved and but it’s all fiction because he you know he can’t cop to that because this was you know when he was he was running the guy and you know he couldn’t have known about at the time let alone told him that she he had a problem with mary barry you know the the cops she had told her relative where she was going the night before she was killed to this club when it was going to this club the club cops show up the next day and and they really don’t uh Sessa, his name is Sessa, he kind of stonewalls them, and they leave, and then later that day, he cleans the club from floor to ceiling. Gangsters will be telling stories about this murder, kind of talking out of school. What happened is say, you know, they’ll probably go to hell for that one.

[21:09] Greg Sr., I mean, he’s talking about it, he’s bragging to people about how one of his shots blew her ear off, and he thought that was kind of funny. Greg Jr. Verified all this, and he also verified that his father told him that his FBI

[21:22] friend, who he called Dee, told him that Mary was going to be a problem. So there’s like two people said that Mary told, said DeBecchio told him Mary was going to be a problem. During Scarfa’s trial, Scarfa Senior’s trial, Linda Shero got trapped in a lie, and it made it, and so her testimony was pretty well, you know, kaput after that. and DeBecchio gets a not guilty. Another person that testified in that trial was Scarpa Underling Larry Mazza, who’s out here, around here now, doing podcasts and stuff, I believe. And he testifies that Scarpa told him these same details about the murder. You know, what’s interesting, that same year, the FBI agents found Alley Boy hiding up in West Hartford, Connecticut. Now, she may have told him where to look and they just hadn’t gotten around to look at it. I don’t know. I know I couldn’t find anything else about who this man was that she was dating if he was law enforcement or not. That’s a little story about Greg Scarpa Sr., the killing machine. I always call him the, what is it, they call him the Grim Reaper. But I think he liked, what I read, he liked the KM or the killing machine.

[22:30] I’ve got other stories I’ll probably go through and do some more stories. It’s so interesting. I wanted to look a little more into this relationship with Dubecchio. It’s just one that captured my attention right off the bat, and i wanted to do this podcast for you guys to try to sell my book uh big alpha mafia stories from the five families and and you know just for 2.99 it’ll be a great help for the podcast and you’ll get the book so thanks a lot guys i really appreciate y’all tuning in don’t forget to like and share and give me your uh make some comments at the bottom ask me questions or something i think i brought up something i asked about in here if you know any more about this if i got anything wrong way let me know in the comments keep coming back thanks guys.

The episode also explores Mark’s interactions with John Gotti, offering a unique glimpse into the infamous mob boss’s life behind bars. Mark delivered meals and kites (messages) for Gotti as a prison orderly. He tells about the stark contrast between Gotti’s outward bravado and the signs of stress and resignation from solitary confinement. Mark Black became Gotti’s “eyes and ears” in the prison outside his solitary confinement.

Tensions rise as Mark delves into the story of a proposed hit on Nicky LaSorsa. He recounts the volatile dynamics of trust and betrayal, particularly involving a convicted drug kingpin, Jose Reyes, who sought to manipulate alliances and set up John Gotti Jr. and Greg DePalma for an early release from several life sentences. Mark’s role as an intermediary in these dangerous scenarios highlights the precarious balance between loyalty and treachery that defines the mafia lifestyle. Through these gripping accounts, Mark offers listeners an insider’s view of the unyielding nature of mob loyalty and the ever-present risks of living by its code.

Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here!

Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you Wiretappers, welcome back here to the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Sergeant, and I have an interesting guy. He has a book, of course. You know, a lot of my guys have books. Where’s that book? Oh, The Last Days of Gotti. You might want to check that book out. It’s very well written. I’ll assure you that. Mark D. Black. Mark, welcome. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Well, thank you, Gary. Now, Mark, as I’ve gone through this book, you you’re like my friend, Steve St. John, who I have some other shows with many of my regular fans will know that name. And you were an orderly down in Springfield and the federal hospital and the prison hospital down there. Now, how did you even end up in the federal prison system? I guess is my first question.

[0:51] Well, I was charged with drugs and firearms violation, and I got seven years in state and then the feds. And then when I got done with my state sentence, I went to the feds and did some time at El Reno in Oklahoma City. And then when I was timing out, they decided to send me to Springfield Federal Medical Center to work to take care of the sick inmates.

[1:17] Yeah, they have a bunch of those guys. I’ve seen pictures of old Tony Ducks Carollo and fat Tony Slerno. And there’s these old guys are just sitting there in their wheelchairs and they can’t really get around. They can’t do anything. So, so you were the guy that helped them out. Yeah. Well, Greg Palma, that’s who I knew at first. And that, that was what happened the first day, you know, I was an orderly on his unit. He asked me to push him to Catholic mass. And so I pushed him to Catholic mass and he asked me to, push him to the back and there was an old man sitting back there also in a wheelchair, and they talked through the whole mass uh the catholic mass the whole time and it was kind of disrespectful but you know everybody just let him do it and then when he got out he told me that that was tony ducks corella that he was talking to and that they had been really good friends and he said that they uh tony had had some problems with john at one time but all was forgiven and they were friends uh and then i’d see him i’d see him with uh tony at mass every once in a while but tony was on another unit so so you got to know greg de palma pretty well as my if i remember right.

[2:29] Yeah. When I got on the unit, I was on his unit for quite a while, like almost a year and a half. And one of the ways that we got to be friends is that I was a gopher for the guard there. And I had a schedule down and he wanted and I would take smoke breaks in the bathroom. You weren’t supposed to do that. But Greg DePalma asked me if he could ride in the car.

[2:53] So we started doing smoke breaks in the bathroom on his unit. And uh when that when i knew the guard wasn’t available and we got to know each other like that and he started you know after about a couple of months he started telling me stories about uh about himself so he’s this is a guy that is born and bred in the new york city mafia and you know he rose to a pretty high level and he lived that life so how did that translate inside the penitentiary system did he have you know where he had guys other guys that were there that gave him a certain respect did you see that you know if you think about the well one of the things you know when i first met greg you know i was an orderly there and he said that i could put my my belongings in his room that nobody would steal him and he was one of the guys would leave his cigarettes laying out on his bed which showed that like he had like a lot of respect and people kind of feared him in there but not he didn’t really you know i was when i first got there i started playing chess with this guy named Curtis and he was a pimp. And he also knew Greg from the outside, but he told me that Greg really didn’t speak to anybody besides I was the first guy that he had ever really spoke to, um, uh, and hung around with besides his mafia friends.

[4:12] And so Greg, he was pretty secretive, uh, until, until I met him and he didn’t really talk to hardly anybody. Did he bring the, he brought the kind of the mafia code into the penitentiary. Could you see that?

[4:26] How did that play itself out?

[4:30] Well, you know, one of the reasons I wrote this book was because, uh, um, you know, I didn’t really think about too much when I first got out, I was trying to rebuild my life. But one of the things that when I was looking up the stuff he had told me, he told me that he dated Elizabeth Taylor, which I didn’t believe. Um, you know, he had talked, he’d talk about, uh, his time at the West Chester premier theater that he ran. Um one time he came down the uh the hallway waving a newspaper rag that had frank sinatra you know him uh i guess big paulie and some of the other friends and he was telling me that that was his baby and then he and he and he told me that kind of stuff like that and then one of the things when i started looking this up i found this uh interview by jack falcone and he was a fbi agent that had infiltrated Greg’s crew. And, you know, he made him to look like a kind of a bumbling, comical character, which just didn’t sit right with me.

[5:29] Greg, it was kind of like, you know, Tony Montana in the movies where he said, all I’ve got is my word and my balls, and I don’t bust them for anybody. And that was Greg De Palma. And he lived that life fully. He was fully committed to the mafia and this thing of theirs. And he was loyal to a fault. I mean, all these guys that I hung out with, they, they were, they were fully committed to, uh, this, uh, this thing of theirs is that’s what they called it. Did they seem to express any regret for getting all this time? No, they didn’t actually. They, they saw that that was part of the part of doing business. One of the, you know, some of the regrets that, um, that Greg had, I heard that, uh, Sam Cagnini told me when he, you know, like I said, I played chess in the orderlies.

[6:17] Common area. And I got to know Sam Cagnetti through Greg because he wanted to play me chess. But Sam told me that Greg’s wife was always busting his balls over his son, but he didn’t really elaborate. The only thing that he really regretted was that, I guess, Sammy Gravano, with who ratted him out, he said that really broke his heart, John’s heart. And he said that, you know, that he would have taken a bullet for Sammy and he called him a cocksucker. I mean, everybody, anybody that he didn’t like you was a cocksucker.

[6:50] And he said that, you know, that Sammy just didn’t rat John out. He rated, he ratted a whole bunch of people out, which I didn’t really know anything about that. When I first went, I didn’t know anything about, I didn’t even know who Greg DePalma was. I’d heard about John Gotti from the newspapers and, and all that, but I didn’t know anything about the Gambino crime family. I didn’t know who Greg De Palma was and, uh, or, or, uh, uh, uh, Sam Cagnini, who Greg introduced me to because Sam played chess too. And he was a very secretive guy. He never came out of his room. The only time he came out of his room was to cook his own meals in the, at the microwave. And he wore these big yellow pajamas. He was like about a 300 pound dude. And he said that he was a police officer at one point too.

[7:40] And, uh, he said he could read people pretty, pretty well. And that when Greg DePalma was talking about killing Nikki, He, he told me, he said, I used to be a cop. And he said, I said, you know, I could read people pretty good. And he said, unless you’re full of shit or just stupid. He said, uh, I know that, you know, that something’s going on with Greg.

[7:59] And so just cut the crap. And so, uh, Sam Cagnetti was just a kind of a no bullshit guy. He, he actually reminded me of the guy that plays, uh, the penguin and the Batman or the penguin story. That got the Colin Farrell plays. I mean, it was kind of that kind of rough, no nonsense, straight shooter. And I like Sam. I like Sam a lot. Now, I understand he was out of the Traficante family down in Florida. So these guys, wherever they’re from, they’re mafia. Then they get together. They know each other. Yeah, they knew each other from a long, they knew each other. And like I said, Curtis was this pimp that I used to play chess with. And he told me that, you know, like that’s all Greg didn’t even hang out with anybody. But, you know, like I said, when I started hanging out with Sam, we started playing chess. He he asked me if I could get him some ingredients for spaghetti dinner. And since I worked with the orderlies, I had connections with the orderlies that worked in the kitchen. And so I got him to meet. He had a whole list of ingredients that he wanted. And I, I got those ingredients for him and, uh, he started making spaghetti dinners, uh, you know, once, uh, uh, about twice a month.

[9:14] And then, uh, through my other connections, uh, uh, you know, throughout the prison, we got some prison wine to kind of drink with it. And that’s how I got to know Sam. And so we started, you know, communicating quite a bit after that. Yeah, it’s interesting. That’s, that’s the scene right out of the Goodfellas where they’re, uh, the Ray Liotta character, Henry Hill runs around like you runs around and gets a different ingredients and brings them back. And then, uh, big Polly, uh, Paul Vario, the character, I can’t remember. I think they called him big cup Holly in the movie. And he’s like slicing the garlic really thin and, and making this big, fancy Italian meal with some wine and everything. So it, it, well, this was, this was prison wine.

[9:58] I mean, it wasn’t like outside wine. I mean, I think these guys, I never really saw how they made it, but one of the guys that I was buying it from, he said they were, they were putting it inside the walls of the prison you know so they so the guards couldn’t find it and uh sam like i never really saw him make make it but like what he’d do i i would uh go down i would give uh an orderly his list and then i was one of the orderlies that would go down and bring a food carrier up to the uh the unit and then i would hand out trays to to the inmates and i and he stuffed it inside this food carrier and so sam would be sitting on his bed and i just grabbed this big old bag and just throw it at him as we went by and the guard was kind of in front of me and Sam would catch it like a football and then uh later that night he’d have everything ready it was just me and Greg and uh Sam uh that uh uh ate the spaghetti dinner like I said what twice every month till I left.

[11:00] Really? Now, if I remember writing your book and from what you’ve, uh, your notes that, uh, Sam would share a few mafia stories with you, can you relate any of them that, that Sam would share for the guys? Yeah. Um, some of the stamp stories that he told me, um, he told me that he was a cop. And like I said, I told him that he told me that he could read people pretty good unless I’m deaf, dumb and full of shit. He knew that I knew what was going on. And he was another guy that did like did not like sam sammy gravano he said he was uh uh you know that uh john was uh gonna wear it to the end with his chin up and that he was proud that he’d never read it out and he said not like that sammy fucking kind gravano so sam didn’t like him either he also told me that how he got caught uh was that he used to buy different houses that were next to each other and he would build a tunnel from the house to house. And he said, it was kind of like a whack-a-mole. The cops would come in to bust him, and he’d put a tunnel underneath the washing machine. And he would have guys build a tunnel to the next house. And so when the cops came in, he’d just get in the tunnel and go over to the next house and watch them going through the house, trying to find him. And they never found him. He said that the last time the tunnel wasn’t built, they came in to get him and he said that he opened up with his thompson 45 and uh they fired in tear gas.

[12:26] And that was the end of his story and he said now i said.

[12:35] Quite a storyteller yeah what what were his crimes could you tell what what his kind of main no he never he never talked about he never talked about his problems you know one time he he’d always like kid me every once in a while. Like I said, he was kind of no nonsense guy. And one time we were playing chess or something. I forgot what’s happening. He asked me if I’d ever killed anybody. I, you know, I was kind of shocked. I said, no, I’ve never killed anybody. And he told me about some guy and I’m not even really sure who it was. I mean, but it was somebody that he had shot in a telephone booth, but he never really talked about his crimes or really the Trompeau family. He was a pretty.

[13:14] He was a pretty secretive guy. I mean, and every once in a while, he’d kind of let loose with a couple of stories. But, I mean, nothing that I think that would hurt his family. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. So I have to ask you this.

[13:29] My friend who was down there, they made jailhouse nachos. Did you ever make jailhouse nachos? Yeah, but Sam and them didn’t ever eat that. They always ate Italian food. But when I first came into Springfield, they processed you through, put you in a little jail cell. And I was in this guy, his name was Rick Randall. And you were talking about Leavenworth. He told me they were moving all the military inmates out of Leavenworth throughout the system. And he was a special forces operator. He was in there for actually, he told me that he was in New York City.

[14:05] Some guy tried to, he was with his wife and his kid. Some guy tried to hijack him in this in in new york city and he took the gun away from him after the guy put it to his wife’s head and just shot him executed him out in front of the car and he got 20 years i guess the military frowns on that when you’re when you go into the the prison system the mafia is just one gang of like very a minute many i mean they’re not even the most dangerous So, I mean, the ABs, the Aryan Brotherhoods are dangerous, but I got to be friends with some of the Mexican cartel, and they would make those nachos. And they would also make these fantastic tamales that I would buy, and I would share them with Rick. But they would take a bag of Fritos and crunch them up and get some meat down from the kitchen, and then they’d roll up these tamales. And that was really a big thing on the unit, too. But Sam and Greg, they never ate that kind of stuff.

[15:06] Yeah. Interesting. So now talk, let’s talk about John Gotti. You’ve mentioned him a couple of times. You knew when he can’t tell the guys, you know, how did you know that Gotti came and, and did, did you work with him? Was he in solid? He was in solid before, I believe, but they was in solitary. Tell us about John’s last. I didn’t really know about too much about what had happened to him. But you know, like I said, my friend Curtis, he had his ear to, he had like a lot of people like singing to him, I guess, you know, telling him what was going on, but he told me John called, uh, some black guy, a nigger where he came from and he got punched in the face.

[15:44] And, uh, and then, uh, Greg told me, uh, he just said one day when we were taking smoke break, he goes, Hey, my friend, uh, John is God, he’s getting ready to come to, uh, Springfield. And he said, I want you to help, help him out while he’s here. And since I was an orderly, I was one of the only people that could get back into solitary confinement. But when they brought in Gatti, I was just mopping the floors. And all of a sudden, the guard said, everybody in the room and all the orderlies face the wall and don’t look at the prisoner that’s coming in. And I’d never seen that happen before. I mean, the whole time I’d been in prison, I’d never had anybody tell me to face the wall and not, you know, just all the orderlies just, you know, face the wall. And here comes this guy. You can hear him coming off the off the elevator and he was in chains and I heard him say as he’s going down the hallway oh so this is my new fucking home.

[16:42] And then they put him in solitary confinement and solitary confinement there’s like a it’s kind of roped off it’s got a line and if you cross it’s got a big sign that says any inmate that passes this line will be put in the hole and you know your commissary will be taken away and blah blah blah and then pass that line there’s a.

[17:02] Uh a big steel bars that go all the way across the the uh the hallway and then once you go inside that there’s two iron doors with bean holes in them that are embedded in the concrete and this is uh the uh the solitary confinement that they put john in but when i first met john gaudy i was delivering uh his meal to him and uh actually Greg had wanted me just to give him a kite and I’m not sure if you know what that is but it’s kind of a little messaging system it looks like it’s a little looks like a little paper football people write messages on it and it’s the only way that John can communicate to the outside and people to him is by an orderly giving him these kites and so So Greg wanted me to give him a kite. And when I went in there to deliver his meal, the first time I saw John, he was like in this 6x12x9 cell. He was painted this drab yellow. The bed was bolted to the floor. He had like a combination aluminum sink and toilet and a little mirror on top of that. And it looked like he had his family pictures around the mirror. And then he had like a little 4×4 window that like was dusty and had bars and steel grate over that where he could look out into the yard.

[18:29] And you could tell by his, my first impression of John is like you could tell that he was like, He was stressed out. You could see it etched in his face. And I kind of sensed, you know, a sadness and the realization of his acceptance to this, for, to his grim fate that he had been given to. Cause like I said, but he, but he still kept an upper lip.

[18:54] And when the guard went to check across the hall to look into this other cell, I threw the, I put his food tray down on the, on the bed, pulled that kite out, threw it on the bed and he didn’t even hesitate. He just like pushed it off to the side and he kind of got that cocky, you know, confident grin that you see in the newspaper. And he, and he extended his hand and he said, uh, my name’s John Gotti, a pleasure to meet you. And, uh, I told him my name was Mark Black and I, and I wish we were meeting under different circumstances. And like I said, when we left the guard, uh, said, uh, Hey, that was John Gotti back there. And, and I said, that’s what everybody keeps telling me and the guard said god damn work travels fast around here so that was that was the first time i bet it so that you continued to have did you continue to take kites to him periodically from uh greg i don’t guess you ever opened one of those up and looked at it did you no i never did that uh well one time i’ll tell you one time i greg uh later Later on, you know, just before I’m leaving, John’s sending kites out to Sam wanted to send a kite to Greg or to Gotti, too. One time when he opened it up, it was just a bunch of betting slips because I don’t know if you know this, but these guys bet on football games and everything else in there. And Greg said that Gotti would bet on a cockroach race if he could.

[20:19] And that’s what he was sending betting slips to Greg so he could make bets for him.

[20:25] And, and then he sent me, uh, he, he sent me a couple of kites too. When I don’t, I used to send the kites, but he had like a little trash can, because I had to have to go in there and clean up his room and I’d pick up the trash. And then on the bottom, he’d leave kites to Greg. Um, and then to me, and he just, you know, told me he really appreciated what, you know, I was doing for him. He actually told me, he said, when I got out, he was going to take care of me, but I, I didn’t accept the phone number that Greg was going to give me when I left because I I just wanted to go home at that point. And these guys were too hot. Even Sammy said, that guy is hotter than a Thompson 40 machine gun. And he said, you just need to put all this behind you and go home.

[21:10] And this guy named Jose Race, who was trying to get John Jr. To do this Meet His Hitman. Sam told me, he said, unless you’re willing to cross certain lines that… He said, no, he told me, he said, Jose is willing to cross certain lines that

[21:24] you’re not even capable of. So you just need to go home now. But like I said, we’re kind of skipping around a little bit. So you mentioned John Jr. Remember when John Jr. Came down to visit his dad? Yeah. Yeah, I do. I was getting ready to go visit my own parents. And just before I did, I was on the unit handing out meals and I handed the meal to John and he was already dressed up. And when you go out to meet your visitors, you get your best khakis on and you have someone press them. John said that his son was coming down from New York to see him. He really loved his son. I mean, he thought his son was just the whole world. He said that he even told me one time that his son was the only person that understood this thing of theirs. And I said, well, I’m getting ready to go see my parents today. And he said, well, tell them John Gotti said hi. So we’re sitting out there in the visiting room and, and, uh, my, I told my dad, John Gotti said, hi, my mom, and he starts talking about mafia movies and stuff. And, uh.

[22:26] The Godfather, you know, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and all of a sudden, you know, I see John jr. Come in. He was like, uh, uh, he had all the confidence in the world. He looked like a mafia guy. He was all dressed in black. He had like a little gold chain on. He looked like somebody that would give you a, uh, uh, you know, keep his word or give you a fist, whichever one, you know, was needed at that particular time.

[22:51] And John, he couldn’t come out to the, where everybody else would, uh, the, the, uh, the main visiting room, uh, he could, and then the main visiting room, you can actually sit with your, your people and like, give them a hug when you first see them. And John didn’t get that. He had to see, uh, John Jr. had to see him behind a glass. Um, I found out later and they had to talk through a glass. John Jr. came out about, about 15 minutes or later, uh, he was completely broken. I mean, he was holding his hand up, you know, trying to, you know, shield as anybody from seeing him crying. And I mean, uh, it just, it just devastated him just to see his father like that so you had let’s talk about uh you mentioned a guy named jose there was a there was a lot of drama that was around this guy we’ll kind of go back to where yeah where you were and there’s a lot more guys there’s a lot more about gotti and everything we don’t we can’t give away everything out of his book so but there’s a lot more about his relationship with john gotti in there but let’s talk about this jose and there’s a power play and this curtis dude what tell us about that That was

[23:57] that got a little bit dangerous. It sounded to me like a little bit tense. No, it was, it was very dangerous. And then, like I said, there was a cut.

[24:04] Curtis was feeding me information about this guy. And also he got into a beef with Rick Randall’s one of his friends. When the orderlies that I worked with was one guy was a guy named slim and he was a gangbanger and he knew stoop dog. And another guy was a guy named called the crazy Cajun. And he was another military inmate. I was playing a game, uh, a chess with, uh, Curtis and, This guy just rolls up in a wheelchair and he’s got his hair slicked back. His khakis were pressed. I mean, usually, like I said, nobody even does that until they go out on a visit.

[24:36] He had his fingers manicure. You could tell that somebody was taking care of this guy and he just demanded a chess game.

[24:44] And he just said, I, he goes, I want, I want, I’m next. He goes, I want a chess game. And Curtis, who I’d never seen, you know, any fear in his face at all. Uh i got really really scared and he just stood up turned over his queen and and and walked off the unit and i and oh he and oh yeah this guy said his name was jay at first he introduced himself as jay i beat him in chess and i could all i could tell that he was like a very sore loser he wanted another and i told and i told him no i got things to do on on the unit and i i don’t maybe we can play later now he was he was a cartel guy right who was he why was he No. Well, Curtis told me, I really didn’t know. Like I said, I didn’t know any of these figures at all, except what I found out in prison. Later on, Curtis told me that he used to work for a guy named Chocolate in New York. they sold heroin. And when Chocola went to prison, he took over the operation. And he had a pit man or a guy that worked for him named Freddy Krueger. And he was like his assassin. I guess he paid him like $1,000 a day. And he’d just light up whoever Jose told him to light up. He said that This guy was so brazen that he went after a fellow gang member on a bridge to.

[26:07] In full traffic, uh, with an ache, this guy got up on the hood of a car with an AK 47 and opened up on a taxi, uh, with an AK 47 to kill this rival drug, drug dealer that Jose didn’t like.

[26:22] And then he told me that his real name was Jose race. And that he was, uh, and then after, uh, and then he was bringing about $240,000 a day to start selling cocaine. And, uh, he said that, he was killing so many people that Curtis told me he killed one of his friends and killed two of his girls that was working for him. Curtis told me that he thought that Greg knew Jose from the outside because he was buying cocaine from it. And I’m not really sure if this is how you mentioned the guy’s name, but he said that, well, when Gotti was under Della Croce. Yeah. Della Croce. Is that his name? Della Croce. Right. Della Croce. Well, he said that when he was, when he was, when he was underneath him, he was, he thought that he was buying cocaine from Jose. Um, and they were selling it. And then when he said that once, uh, big, uh, once, uh, Della Croce died, they actually passed Della Croce over for big Polly. Nobody liked big Polly. Cause they, they, they, he didn’t pay his dues or something like that. Greg had told me one time that when, uh, they decided to go after big Polly, that everybody got on board and nobody looked back. This guy right here, this Jose Race, Curtis told me that he was in there for seven murders. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. And he was doing two life sentences.

[27:43] And he had like this, he was always wheeling around trying to get close to Greg. And he was always reading books like Machiavelli. He’s always like had a Sun Tzu, The Art of War. He’s always reading that. He started trying to get around Greg all the time. Uh, but Greg would really wouldn’t have anything to do with it. And then one day, and I’ll just go ahead and get into this. But one day where, uh, Curtis came and got me, he said, Hey, De Palma’s on the war path. He said, look out. And so I, I’m, I’m standing in there taking, and I looked in Greg’s room and

[28:18] he’s like cussing to himself. And I, I said, Hey, Hey, Greg, I’m getting ready to, um, take a smoke. You want to, you want to go? And he just kind of waved me on. And when he came in there, he started talking about this guy named Nicky. How dare him not pay him his money? And who does the fuck does he think he is? You know, if he thinks he can rip me off while I’m in prison, you know, that fucking cocksucker, I’m going to show him a thing or two. I mean, you know, one thing about Greg and even Sam said that he that was one of his big faults. He had a big mouth. Later on, after we got through smoking a cigarette, I had left my lighter in there.

[28:52] And I went back to get it and Jose was sitting in there and he wanted to always know about Greg, you know, what he couldn’t understand why I was Greg and Sam were hanging out with me and not him. And all of a sudden you could hear Greg down the hallway on the phone. And he was going, you motherfucking son of a bitch. He said, I’m the one who made you, you, you can’t do this. He said, you’re going to pay me my fucking money or I’ll have you fucking whacked. And I mean, just, and all of a sudden Jose wheeled around and said, oh man, I got to see this.

[29:24] And, uh, and I walked down there too. And Greg is just like, I mean, I mean, just out of control. I mean, you know, cussing at this, uh, this Nikki guy and telling him that, you know, he’s going to have him whacked and you know, that, uh, if you think I’m in prison and you’re not going to pay me my money and blah, blah, blah. And, uh, and even the guard came out, he was so loud that the guard came out and said, Hey, DePalma, he said, uh, uh, you’re going to have a heart attack. He said, you do know these phones are tapped, right? And, uh, and then he wheeled and he just kind of looked at him and just fumed off down, just slammed the phone down and fumed off down the hallway to his room. There’s Jose race, you know, sitting there looking at him. This guy, he, he didn’t know a lot of the people who he was talking about. And I didn’t know if I was talking to him, I was just interviewing him. So I go back and check after we get done with the interview. And I find out that Greg De Palma did want a Bronx car dealer whack named Nicky LaSorsa because, first of all, LaSorsa was collecting $2,500 a week from somebody else. And then he was supposed to pay it to De Palma and then he quit paying it. In the meantime, Greg De Palma’s son, Craig De Palma, had testified about Mikey Scars Di Leonardo in the Atlanta Gold Club racketeering case.

[30:42] And so people were like, you know, they were like distancing themselves from the De Palmas. And so they’re going to get Junior Gotti. They’re going to try to rope Junior Gotti into this deal later on down at the prison. It’s a heck of a story. So keep listening.

[30:55] And this Jose Reyes, he’s a, I couldn’t find any pictures of him or the guy, his hit man. They call him Freddy Krueger. His name was Francisco Medina. They caught a bunch of cases of really bad, bad people. But Jose Reyes is going to get involved in this thing.

[31:13] And then Reyes is going to turn around and rat him out. So this is one heck of a story. Thanks, guys. Just keep listening. I was just fascinated by this guy’s story because he’s like this guy that, you know, Joe Blow that just is pulled into this world. And he doesn’t even know any of these people. And he transitioned it somehow. I don’t know how they got out alive.

[31:34] And if you keep listening, you’ll find out that he became really important to John Gotti. By the end when i when i went down to play sam a game of chess i was walking down the hallway and i heard greg yell out i want that fucking cocksucker dead you hear me and then in a and then in this calm voice jose saying uh listen i’m down for this but you guys need to get john jr involved to meet my guy to to have nicky guy assassinated he said if i if john jr can’t meet my my guy i don’t think i can get this to happen and greg said well i think i can i can get that that to happen and that won’t be a problem and then you know and greg was just saying who the fuck does he think he is and and uh and then he said and then sam came up and he said are you sure your guys uh uh can take care of this thank you god and okay i remember he’s a gentleman i think my record speaks itself from that day on he said he said he said as personal favor uh to you uh Mr. De Palma, he said, I’ll make sure my guy torched Nicky before we blow off his low-life wig. And Greg De Palma actually said, no torture. We’ve got rules.

[32:47] And he said, you can kill him, but you can’t. He said, yeah, he said, he goes, no torture. Nicky may owe me money, but he’s not a fucking rat like Gravano. He said, we do have fucking rules. You know, I was just looking that up. that that’s probably Nikki LaSorsa who, uh, who Greg did make. And one of the things he had gotten De Palma’s table at Rao’s, a really nice restaurant in East Harlem. And it said that when De Palma heard his regular table had been violated, he was recorded on a prison telephone saying, I hope it ain’t Nicky. I’m going to stomp him. When I left, he was so jealous of me and everything I did. He was a nobody. And I brought him around. I gave him his name. So I bet that’s who it was. And he ends up getting charged in a murder plot against La Sorsa in the end. Oh, yeah.

[33:37] Jose told Greg, he said, don’t torture him. You can kill him, but you can’t torture him. He said, we’ve got rules. He goes, well, suit yourself. He goes, but I’d sure like to be there when he gets whacked. And Sam laughed and he goes, they all look the same. They just walked in after you caught them fucking their wife. And he said, with their best friend. He said, believe me, I’ve had the privilege of seeing both. Uh so that was sam’s sam’s uh thing on that but um man that’s cold that is cold that was a lot of dropping you were a party to or a witness to other man whatever happened with uh reyes.

[34:18] Jose reyes oh did you just when you left was he still there yeah he was still there when i left him and greg had become like really good friends and actually greg kind of like started distancing himself from me became pretty buddy-buddy with Jose Reyes because there’s like this scene that I’ll go ahead and tell you. I don’t know if you can use it or not, but Greg and him became really buddy-buddy. And just before I left, I sent the kite to John Gotti and I told him that I did not trust Jose Reyes. And because I had heard he wanted John Jr. to be involved with this. And I told John about it in a, in a, in a, in a kite. And he told me that he wanted all the information that I had on this guy. You know, um, I will say this, um, John told me, you know, that he needed me to be his, his, uh, eyes and ears on the, on the unit that he thought that they were going to fuck him over and his son one last time. And I told John, you know, what, what I was seeing on the outside, Greg went out to, uh, to talk to John to get an okay for this hit. Cause Jose race said, look, you got to get John Gotti involved. You got to get his son involved. And I told, and I wrote a kite to John and I said, look, this guy is not trustworthy.

[35:36] He’s trying to get your son involved in this, in this hit on Nikki. And Greg basically shot Greg down on, on all of this. John, John shot Greg down on it.

[35:48] Yeah. You know, like I said, you know, I didn’t really even know who these guys were when I when I went into prison. John, John told me, he said, look, I want you to give me all the information that you got out there. He said, I can’t. You’ve got to be my eyes out there on the unit. He said, I can’t see what’s going on. So you’ve got to, like, tell me what’s going on. And I told him, I said, they, this Jose race is trying to get John jr. To meet with one of, uh, Jose race, his friends on the outside to hit Nikki. And, um, um, and he wants John jr. Involved. And, um, and I said, I don’t trust him. You know, this is what I put him in a little kite. And I even asked Greg one time, because I didn’t know, I said, who’s in charge here. You or John. And he said, you know, that John was in charge and that he mentioned something about Big Pauly. And he said that once John made his decision to move on Big Pauly, that everybody had thrown on John’s side.

[36:49] And he said he’d never looked back. He said, John’s got the last word. He went up to Greg’s window. See, here’s another thing, too. The only way that Greg could talk to John Gotti was there’s like a, uh, outside, there’s a running track and some, some, uh, some tables, picnic tables that you can sit on out there. And then where John Gotti was called the hole and those units kind of like jut out into that area. And so Greg DePalma could go underneath John’s window and talk to him. And he was trying to get John to, uh, uh, to okay, a hit on, uh, on this Nikki character. So did, uh, did John finally act on your, your warning, I guess, if I should say, uh, call it that and not order Greg did not allow his son to get involved with this. I will go ahead and say this too. And I don’t know how much you’re going to like, you know, I’ll let you go ahead and cut it out. But one of the things that he, he was using, uh, Greg got mad about was that, that he was going to use Jose’s, this hit on, uh, Nikki, but also kind of move against the Albanians who I guess were.

[38:04] Sitting at John’s table at some restaurant or something like that. He was going to try to talk John into if we could get, uh, Jose to, to whack Nikki, that, that we can, we can start moving on these Albanians after this. Greg was really pissed off because he thought John was just letting all these people walk all over them. And, um, and he told Greg that he wasn’t going to let his son meet with, uh, any of Jose’s friends. And that Curtis was telling me that like, you know, the feds will, you know, work with the scum of the earth in order to take these guys down. This guy has these four or five life sentences. He’s looking at, you know, life, no doubt about it, but he, he obviously has a lot of money hidden away on the outside.

[38:49] And, and now he’s wanting to make sure that Gotti and Gotti’s son are involved and he’s gonna send somebody to do a hit but i’m really not for greg palma but really at for gotti because gotti he’s bringing the gottis into it that’s the kind of currency that you can trade to walk from two or three live sentences if you can deliver up john gotti’s son especially at this point in time yeah you were right on that i i have no doubt in my mind that dude was trying to set him up to buy himself uh getting out of the penitentiary yeah Yeah, yeah, Jose, you know, was doing like two life, I think two life sentences. And, you know, and he had to get Greg, he was trying to get Greg to get Gotti to get his son involved to okay this hit. And then he actually said, Curtis, who I played chess with, there was a guy that was cleaning a cell next to Gotti’s cell. When Greg went up to Gotti to try to talk him into this, and he was trying to use this hit on Nicky as a stepping stone to take care of some of these Albanians that I guess were moving in on John’s territory. I didn’t really know that much about, you know, the Albanians and all that kind of stuff, and Greg never really talked to me about that, but his friend that was cleaning out the cell said he was trying to get John, to get John Jr. to make.

[40:18] This hitman that was a friend of Jose to take out Nikki and that this would be, and he was trying to talk him into, this would be a stepping stone to take out the Albanians too. Yeah. It’s a pretty bold move to, to join with some Hispanic hit men, Hispanic drug dealers in order to take out. I think, I think the Albanians are like an Eastern block. Yeah. Oh yeah.

[40:43] Group. Yeah. Group. I mean, I think they’re kind of Russian. Yeah. And they’re strong. They’re strong in New York City. I’ve read about them that they really have made a lot of inroads into what normally had been the Italian mafia’s territory. So he was right on that. But it’s just such a, you know, I think it’s very dangerous to try.

[41:01] I think you can move in with some Hispanic drug dealers to do something like this. I think it was ill-advised at the best. I think Gotti was right, correct, and not getting his son involved in that. Well, I told them, oh, here’s another thing too, that I, you know, and this is one of, like I said, I, all this, my stuff, all my stuff is kind of in chronological order, but Curtis, and this is like a very important part of this. And this is why Gotti shut him down, because when I was talking to Gotti, Curtis had told me that Jose Race in the physical therapy room, and it was a physical therapy, because you had a lot of sick inmates there, and they do physical therapy. And Curtis told me that one of his homies was in there cleaning out the back. Uh, the back, uh, closet and he had headphones on and he didn’t hear the guards come in there and tell everybody to get out. He said, when he did come out, he said, Jose race was sitting there with two guys in suits. I told John, I didn’t really know what it meant, but he said, Hey, look, don’t leave me, leave me hanging.

[42:10] You know, don’t let me stand here with my deck, hanging out. You tell me everything you fucking got right now. Tell me that I’m trying to save my son. This is very important. He said, don’t let me, don’t let me down on this. And he said, I swear to God, when you get out, I’m going to let Greg give you a number. And I, I, I take, I take care of the people who’ve helped me out. And he was very adamant about trying to save his son. So I went ahead and told him that, uh, I wrote him a kite. Jose Rex had been seen talking with two guys in suits. The guards had run everybody out of the, uh, physical therapy. And one of his Curtis’s homies were, uh, uh, back there and had his headphones on and didn’t hear it. He’s listening to his music. And when he came back out there and they looked shocked, he said that, uh, Jose race kind of looked up and, and oh my God. And the, and the guy, the guys in suits called the guards and moved him out. And then when I told John Gotti that, um, he knew that they were trying to set his son up. Yeah. Yeah. But Greg wouldn’t hear anything about it. Yeah. Greg, Greg, Greg wouldn’t, uh, you know, I, I try to tell Greg, you know, this, He didn’t want to listen to it. He wanted Nicky dead. I mean, he was so adamant about killing this guy that he was beyond reason. So in the end, Greg ends up kind of mad at you. Yeah. Like I said, when I sent John that last kite, I can actually tell you what I wrote to him. I wrote a kite to John, and I detailed everything that I observed.

[43:36] Jose was mad for John pulling the plug on John Jr., the mysterious men that were seen with Jose in physical therapy. And anyway, Jose’s hostility was just kept on amping up on me every day. He was trying to like run me out of the. Out of the scene with Greg and Sam. But Gotti, when I gave him that kite to tell him that Jose had been seen with these guys in suits and physical therapy, before I left his room, he said, Mark, I know you’re leaving in a couple of days, but I feel I’m running out of time.

[44:13] And I cut him off and I pointed to the trash can. I said, there’s a kite in there. You need to read it. And once he read that, um, he, uh, he gestured, uh, when, before he read it, before I left, he looked up on the mirror and there was a picture of John Jr. Up on that mirror with all his family around the mirror I was talking about. And he said, that boy’s my heart. He said, he’s one of the only kids who ever really understood what this life was about and what it meant to me. And I’m starting to think these cocksuckers might be used that love to stab me in the back. And I looked at the waste paper basket one more time and I said hey there’s the kite in there you need to read that and then I went and then I then I picked up his tray cleaned up his room a little bit picked up his trash and all that Greg shot him down uh Gotti shot him down when Greg talked to him like I was telling you about a while ago and Greg even said uh he said uh you know all this personal feelings aside I just want you to fucking know Nicky’s not the only one spitting in my face he’s spitting in everybody’s face he’s making us look weak and he explained all this but But I, you know, I, I would always ask him, so who’s in charge? You or John? Where’s our, where’s our loyal loyalty like? And I told him about, uh, Curtis telling me that his friend saw Nikki with these two or not, or Jose race with these two guys seat and suits. And he, and Greg just cut me off and he goes, he goes, what the fuck are you talking about? May and Mike. I go, this might, this might be a setup. He goes, he goes.

[45:41] He goes, if I flinched every time those words were mentioned, I’d never get anything done. And he said, and that can’t be true about Jose. He wouldn’t even listen to any reason. He wanted Nicky dead. He said, I don’t want to hear another word about it. You understand me? And I could sense like I was being cut off and he wasn’t going to listen to anything about it. And I apologized. And I said, and Greg just went, forget about it. You know, he said, I know you talked to John, but I know, you know, that you guys, you know, have something going on. He said, but just, you know, he said, but after he talked to John, after he was at the window and John shot him down and he told him that he wasn’t going to let his son meet Jose race’s, uh, hit man. And I was sitting out there watching him talk to John, and I was sitting out on a little picnic bench, and I saw Greg talking to John. And you could tell he was like a man with a hat in his hand trying to get this hat done on Nicky. When he rolled back up to me, I said, well, how’d it go? And he goes, well, you fucked me again.

[46:46] And I apologized to him, and I said, you know, I’m sorry. And he, Greg held up his hand. He says, it’s okay. John’s the boss. And you’re right. You did what he asked him. We’re proud of you. Yeah. And, uh, and then he said before, and to show you that there’s no hard feelings, I’m going to give you a phone number. John wants me to give you a phone number, uh, when you get out and, uh, I want you to call this phone number. And, and I, I told him that I did artwork and stuff like that. And he said that he knew some big galleries in New York city and he was going to set me up and all this. But, uh, uh, but everybody told me not to take that phone number. Yeah. And even Greg, when, when he, Greg tried to give me the phone number, I go, I think I just want to go home and I want to be done with all this. And he goes, what are you a fucking snitch? I go, come on, Greg. And he goes, Oh, I’m sorry, dude. He said, I, I overreacted. He said, I said, I know you’re doing what you think is right. But he said, he said, but that Nikki fuck still got to go.

[47:50] So well in the end i see in your notes here that at the end the prosecutor’s star witness on a, case against sammy and and greg de palma about killing nikki la sorso was jose ray is who ends up getting out for his yeah helping this so yeah he got he i didn’t even know that he got before yeah and actually before we had this interview i kind of looked up uh jose race just to kind of get an idea where, everything was and I’m not even really sure if this is him but I think he got busted again for cocaine oh another thing too.

[48:27] Gigante I think the guy’s name was Gigante but Sammy told me that That, uh, they had told Jose race that, uh, Gigante was going to set him up with some stuff when he got out, like a house and some money and all this stuff. And to come to find out Gigante had been dead for years. And so they were going to fuck Jose race too, because Sam wasn’t really sure who he goes, you know, until I can figure out what the fuck is going on here. He goes, uh, he goes, you just need to go the fuck home. Uh, and he goes in and we’re playing games with Jose race too. And so I guess, you know, when I actually, I read about it, about the court case a little bit after they had gotten out. And, um, I guess the jury found story that I’m telling you so unbelievable that they didn’t correct. They didn’t convict Greg or Sam, Sam and Sam, uh, ended up getting out, I guess, spending in his last days with his family. Greg, of course, got caught up with Jack Falcone, busted Greg, and that was where Greg spent the last of his days in prison and died in prison.

[49:42] Interesting. All right, guys. Black Truth, The Last Days of Gotti with Mark Black. This has been Mark Black with us. Mark, this has been a fun interview, great stories. I mean, you’ve got some great stories out the penitentiary there i mean it’s just unbelievable you know i’ll just tell you, what Greg told me when I, when I left, uh, when I, when I left Greg, you know, he’s, he told me that he was sorry that he’d got such hot headed on me. And then of course, you know, he’s going to follow John to the end. He said, once they whacked big Polly, uh, he threw all his chips in with John and he never looked back. And he said, and John’s the boss and whatever he says goes. And he said,

[50:24] and he said, we’re proud of you. And he said, and to show that, you know, there’s no hard feelings. John wanted me to give you a number. And I said, I don’t want to take it. Cause what are you a fucking snitch? And I is Jose rates because Jose race was always trying to make me out as a snitch. And I, and I, and I said, no, I just want to go home and be through with this.

[50:43] And then his parting words was stay out of places like these, but he didn’t take his own advice. All right, Mark, I really appreciate you coming on the show guys. Be sure and get this book it’s it’s a really interesting insiders look at what that life is like for mobsters in the penitentiary i mean and you can see their their little shenanigans and their games continue on whether they’re in or out you know it doesn’t make any difference and make it didn’t make any difference and and it’s talk about you know deception betrayal you know demanding trust of people but yet you know it’s okay if you betray somebody here as long as it’s for me and it’s just uh it’s just a crazy crazy life isn’t it mark yeah one of the things that curtis told me he said the guy that he and curtis knew god he or uh greg de palma uh outside and i’ll just go ahead and tell you a little story about that before we go uh uh i asked greg about curtis and he said yeah he said uh, He said, I bought a $10,000 mink coat off one of his friends, one of his crackhead buddies for 50 bucks. He goes, where the hell can you get a deal like that in New York City? He said, I gave it to my wife. Boy, was she happy.

[52:00] But yeah, it was all about the life. But I really like Greg. I mean, Greg was like a really good guy. And I really respected him. When you’re in prison, there’s a lot of guys who will rat you out in a second to get their freedom. That was Jose Race that was doing that. These guys, Sammy and Fat Tony, or Tony Carolla, and Gotti, and Greg DePalma, they never snitched out on any of their friends. Not intentionally. I mean, Greg had a big mouth, and that’s kind of what got him in trouble. And then he had a big ego. And like I said, he said, I want that motherfucker dead. Do you hear me? I want him dead.

[52:48] And that kind of like pushed him over the edge in order to let his guard down. But I’ll tell you that Greg had a big mouth. I mean, he just did. And he’d tell me stories about him hanging out with Sinatra and Dean Martin. And he had quite a life. He had quite the colorful life out there. And he was a good guy. And I respected me and I looked at him as a friend. Well, guys, that was a great show, wasn’t it? Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street, even though it’s starting to get winter, I’m not riding it so much now. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you have been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website and get the hotline number. If you have a problem with drugs and alcohol or gambling, any kind of addiction.

[53:33] You know, our friend, Anthony Ruggiano, who was a Gambino prospect, if you will, a proposed member, supposedly, has gone out of that life, and he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida now, and he has a hotline on his website. I think it’s reformedmonsters.com or something like that. But anyhow, find my book. You know, I wrote that book about the Windy City Mafia stories from the Chicago outfit, and I’m working on one about New York City mob guys. It’s a bunch of chapters of short stories taken from my podcast. They’re easy to read and a quick overview of the entire Chicago outfit and a quick overview of the entire five families and the structure. And then with a whole bunch of stories behind it that are, you lay it down, you can read one chapter, lay it down, read another one, one chapter, maybe only two or three pages long, but you can really get well-versed in the mafia and those two cities. I have a movie or two out there, Gangland Wire and Brothers Against Brothers. It’s on Amazon. Just go to Amazon and research or search for Gary Jenkins Mafia, and you’ll find everything I’ve got in my books and movies and everything. So thanks a lot, guys. And Mark Black, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Oh, I really appreciate you having me. Thank you.

This show covers his involvement in significant events, such as the assassination of Paul Castellano and the tensions with the Genovese family. I reflect on the violent and tumultuous nature of his life, culminating in his murder in 1991, which highlights the inherent dangers of organized crime. As Borrello’s story unfolds, I delve into the themes of loyalty, betrayal, and power dynamics within the Mafia, offering personal insights and humor.

This will be the last episode until February. The next episode will host Mark Black, who tells about his life in the Federal prison hospital in Springfield and his care of John Gotti as he battled cancer and other mobster’s plots.

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[0:00] A little story about Bobby Boriello, who was a Gambino soldier and a big moneymaker

[0:05] for the Gotti family and the Gambino family. You want to call it the Gotti family or the Gambino family? It never did become the Gotti family, did it? Much to John Gotti’s chagrin, I’m sure. Anyhow, this is going to be the last one for the month of January. I’m going to take some time off. I’m going to take a little vacation. And I’ve been working pretty hard at doing my books. And I’ve done a couple of books, a New York book and the Chicago book. And I’m getting set for the next year, doing some other things this next year. So I’ll get back to putting one out at least every week at the last of January. I know the one I’ve already got it set that we’re going to come back into like, I think the last Monday or Sunday in January is going to be a guy named Mark Black, who was in the penitentiary in Springfield, the hospital, federal hospital down there. With John Gotti and some other guys. And he got all embroiled in some.

[1:02] Some mafia drama, carrying messages from one person to the other. And, and so anyhow, it’s a really interesting story. It’ll be a great one to come back to. So I hope you guys all had a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. I’m not very good at wishing people all that kind of stuff before I forget about it. I just put out podcasts. That’s all I do. You know, me, I’m just a plain guys. Guys, come on back in February. Hey, all you wiretappers out there. Glad to be back here in the studio. Glad to have you in the studio with me. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective and now podcasters. Most of y’all know. If you don’t, why keep listening. You’ll learn who I am

[1:43] and what I’m about. I have a lot of fun doing this. Going back to New York today, guys, going to Bobby Borrello.

[1:50] Bobby Boriello was a gaudy guy, if you remember right. He probably is one of the trigger men on the Castellano hit. Now, going way on back, he grew up in South Brooklyn, and he grew up in a neighborhood that was dominated by several mob families, Gambino, Genovese, and the Columbo crime families. He was surrounded by mobsters from, you know, from the time he was a little kid. His younger brother, Stevie, was close to Crazy Joe Gallo and Albert Gallo and Frank Ileano. Um steve played a role in getting gallows crew uh really ensconced in south brooklyn and and their rackets down there and he brought bobby in and he was really he was a big kid and he got a reputation pretty quick as an enforcer within the gallow gang but he moved on beyond that Now, between 1967, 1972.

[2:49] His rap sheet grew considerably. He was arrested six times from weapons possession to assault, larceny, gambling, the usual stuff, you know. No matter what, he didn’t go to jail, and his criminal career advanced. Didn’t go to jail. Bobby Boriello didn’t go to jail because he became important to different mafia guys, and they got those political connections. By the 1980s, he will become a made man in the Gambino family.

[3:18] And what’s interesting is Mikey Scars DiLeonardo will talk about being inducted by Sammy the Bull Gravano with Junior Gotti, and because John Gotti did not want it to look bad, did not want him, he to make his own son, he didn’t think it looked good, Bobby Borrello will be inducted in that same ceremony with Mikey Scars and Junior Gotti. He really will have strong ties with all these guys, John Gotti, Sammy the Bull, Nicholas and Jojo Carrozzo. Borrello will be seen with Gotti quite a little bit. They were like friends. They’ll spend weekends on Long Island gambling and partying and going to performances and just, you know, general social things as well as the business. Bobby Borrello conducted most of his business as he got, you know, after he became a made guy at the one over a golf club. It was in Carroll Gardens in New York. It was a social club. It was operated by a paraplegic gangster named Joe Pitts. It’s Joe Pitts Corneliaro. This dude was involved in loan sharking and gambling. He’ll eventually be killed. These guys, there’s constant danger surrounding them. Constantly, they’re in danger. During his early years in the Gambino family, and even before, he was suspected of being involved in more than one murder. That gives him a hell of a reputation out there.

[4:44] Uh, other criminal activities are extorted, the usual extortion, loan sharking and drug trafficking. And, you know, he really had a good solid status within the Gambino family. He could take care of business. He could make money. He could do what needed to be done. And, you know, the Gambino’s under Gotti, they didn’t mind dealing.

[5:02] They didn’t mind taking that drug money. You know, he was also part of junior Gotti’s crew when John Gotti promoted his son to Capo and Sammy, the bull wanted that done for some reason this crew had some guys jackie cavallo charlie cornelia tommy twits cassia polly and dominic fat dom borghese he was involved you know all over new york city and particularly south brooklyn worked with anthony toto anastasio and some other guys like that you know he was involved with the eventually become involved with the trucking construction loan sharking because that’s what gambinos do they were in trucking construction and loan sharking as well as gambling and hijacking and all the usual things late 1980s he got into the world of strip clubs like i noticed in kansas city they did the same thing later on they started getting into strip clubs there’s a guy named steve kaplan who was paying tribute to him and junior gotti for different strip clubs all up down the east coast so he really and And, and, and Michael.

[6:09] Mikey scars was involved in that one down in, uh, extorting money from that one down in, uh, uh, Atlanta, Georgia.

[6:16] So these guys, you know, really reached out with their strip clubs as he rose up in the ranks, his most powerful ally was junior Gotti.

[6:24] And, and he was actually junior Gotti named him a boss over some other guys and his crew and December, 1990, after John Gotti senior was indicted, he created a five man ruling panel over the Gambino family and Junior is part of that. Bobby Borelli, you know, is operating alongside of him and operating his rackets out of his Brooklyn Social Club. John Gotti.

[6:48] Ordered Borelli to eliminate a guy named Louis De Bono, who was a Gambino soldier who had gotten a really lucrative contract to install fireproofing foam in the Twin Towers. After De Bono’s death, Borelli takes care of Louis De Bono. Sammy Gravano, Sammy the Bull, takes over that business and kind of a lot of tensions in the family over that. Borelli tried to kill a Genovese crime family associate named Preston Geritano in Brooklyn on the street. The hit failed. It led to like a kind of a negotiation between the Genovese and Canvino crime families, which they do that. And in the end, Gertano was allowed to live, but he can’t try to get revenge against Borrello, Bobby Borrello. Bobby Borrello’s luck will run out April 13th, 1991.

[7:43] Killed him right in front of his house in Bensonhurst. Now, go figure that one. And that’s not really, but guess who did it? It wasn’t a Gambino that had this done. It was a Lucchese, a big Frank Lasterino, chimed twice in the head and five times in the body.

[7:59] Anthony Casso, Gas 5 Casso, ordered this. He had gotten the information from his NYPD officers, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracoppa, about where to find him. They had done a little surveillance on him, knew where he lived. Just getting into his 1991 Lincoln town car, wife Susan, their two children were inside the house, unaware that their husband and father had been killed just outside. You know, when he was killed, he was under investigation by multiple federal agencies and the Kings County District Attorney’s Office for this cocaine trafficking conspiracy and for his suspected role in the murder of Paul Castellano. A guy named Dominic LaFaro had identified Bobby Borrello as one of the shooters, And he also claimed that Bobby Brello was, uh, one of the Gambino’s family’s most, most, most accomplished hit men. So this guy was a bad dude. It was a career, lifelong career mobster came up under Joey Gallo, uh, which, you know, that makes sense and, and live the life. He lived life. I wonder if he’d be running a podcast today, if he’d gone in and then came back out, I didn’t seem like guys trying to podcast, but you ever thought Sammy, the boat would run a podcast.

[9:15] After Bobby Borrello dies, his brother, Steve Borrello, has been a gangster all along with the Gambino family, and he’s managing loan sharking and gambling extortion rackets in Brooklyn and Staten Island. And he’s still, to this day, he’s out there doing the deal. So Bobby Borrello, he had a life in the mafia that was, you know, really typical of a guy that came up in the family,

[9:43] stayed in the family, whatever family he was around and died in the family. You know you live by the sword you die by the sword this is a place a life where loyalty is important power is important and betrayal intertwines in around all this loyalty and power so you just never know what’s coming next and and very few escape either they spend the rest of their life in the penitentiary they go into witness protection or they get killed hardly anybody goes on the shelf as they say so that’s the story of bobby borrello a gambino soldier who uh who was a moneymaker and an important guy that john got his rise to become the boss of the gambino family.

[10:31] Thanks a lot guys and you know i like to ride motorcycles so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there and if you have a problem with ptsd be sure and go to the va website if you’ve been in the military and get that hotline number and if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol you can get a hotline number off of anthony uh rugiano’s website another gambino guy.

[10:52] Uh he’s in not witness protection but he’s he’s out of the game now and he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in florida you maybe go down there to florida and be in his treatment center however however that works let me know if that ever happens uh don’t forget that i i’ve got a book leaving vegas about the wiretaps that we ran in las vegas and in kansas city to uncover the skim uh i have a couple movies about kansas city mob activities gangland wire and and brothers against brothers the sabello spiro war you can rent them on amazon and keep coming back and don’t forget to like and subscribe and tell your friends about us and get on my youtube channel or my facebook page i got a lot of people on it we have a lot of interesting discussions right now i’m building a on youtube in the community tab i’m learning all kinds of stuff here in the community tab we’re we’re now building our second fantasy family we built one between new york and chicago who would be the boss the underboss of consigliere it’s just a fun thing that we do and now i’m doing the uh midwood three midwest families cleveland kansas city and milwaukee who should be out of those three who would be the best boss who would be the best consigliere who would be the best uh underboss who would be a good capo come on back guys and and we’ll have some more fun with the Mafia.

RJ challenges the romanticized portrayal of mob life, focusing instead on the stark realities of leadership within the mafia. Together, Gary and RJ draw parallels between the underworld and legitimate organizations. For example, RJ discusses the principle of “using skilled men to your benefit,” a lesson that applies across industries—including Gary’s experience in law enforcement. Both mafia bosses, police commanders, and corporate leaders face the challenge of navigating human dynamics, where the rules of engagement can make or break their success.

Throughout the conversation, RJ shares captivating stories of mob bosses and their relationships with underlings, shedding light on the nuances of leadership. The discussion touches on the importance of appearances, with RJ explaining how a leader’s presentation can shape perception and loyalty among followers. He emphasizes the delicate balance of being approachable and authoritative to maintain command—an insight that resonates across fields.

Please tune in to this thought-provoking episode to uncover the leadership lessons from the mafia that can inspire and guide us in our endeavors.

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To subscribe on iTunes, click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here! Transcript Speaker1: [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there. Good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective and later sergeant. I’m back here with another guest, an author and a fellow mob podcaster, RJ Roger. Welcome, RJ.

Speaker0: [0:17] Thank you for having me, Gary. And I mean that this is not just camera stuff. I always wanted to have a discussion with you. I remember reaching out to you on Twitter once over before I even started working with Michael. And I just, as a respecter of what you do, because you have an elegant, classy podcast and in what we do, it ain’t the norm. So I’m a major respecter.

Speaker1: [0:41] Well thank you thank you i i kind of back i didn’t understand that twitter thing back there but i have some vague memory that i don’t know anyhow well finally we meet and we just had a nice little discussion about mutual mutual woes in the podcast industry and personal uh personal things to get to know each other a little bit and guys uh i assure you rj knows what he’s talking about and he’s a true gentleman and he has a great podcast you know uh you know i’m the one i have to take credit for this, RJ. I’m the one that got Mikey scars or Michael D. Leonardo on the air the very first time by happenstance and luck in a way I find out, but then I knew it was, it was just a lucky just somehow he just felt a certain way one day and he said, yeah, I’ll come on your podcast. And now RJ has Mikey scars or Michael D. Leonardo on his podcast regularly. So you want to check that podcast out. Uh, tell us just a little bit about your podcast, RJ, so guys can find it

Speaker0: [1:40] But you are right i always get i always take the credit i brought michael scars out of the shadows yeah and i got that line from um coast of notion news that was like his headline he said rj roger brings michael de leonardo from the shadows and but the truth is you were the first guy to have to do a discussion with him i just so you took the

Speaker0: [2:03] the ball up the field and i took it over the you.

Speaker1: [2:06] Took it over the goal line

Speaker0: [2:07] Um so as far as the show with michael and i i was a original was doing a solo mob podcast and i made a production i made a show on michael and it made its way to him through his son he liked it he reached out to me we became friends so that’s a fast forward very fast way of how we met and for the first several months We were just friends. I met him in person. I flew out to see him. We spent some time together. And we were kind of… Talking about some different things. And eventually we came together and made an agreement on working together. Took him a while to want to come out and do like a long form show. But, but again, it wasn’t our relationships, not a business relate. It wasn’t a business relationship. We were friends that started a show. We wasn’t business guys that became friends. We were friends first and then started the show. So we’re at, we’re on YouTube.

Speaker0: [3:07] You can search Mikey Scars Find our show Our YouTube show We’re primarily on Patreon now Same name, Mikey Scars We do 8 shows a month on Patreon And it’s been We’ve done a lot of really good stuff We talk about a lot of things in his life And he goes back In my opinion, the last live and made, Major Five family figure that’s out there His name goes back to Sicily over 100 years He has a long, long history He’s three, four generations deep inside of Cosa Nostra. So it’s been fun to talk with a guy who has so much understanding of the life in a more nuanced way.

Speaker1: [3:47] Yeah, he really does. And he’s articulate enough that he can really, as you say, a nuanced way, he can tell the story. And so, you know, now you’ve done this book here, The Don, 36 Rules of the Boss.

Speaker1: [4:03] R.J. Roger. Now, is this your first book? I’m not sure. I can’t remember.

Speaker0: [4:08] Yes, it’s my first official book. That’s a major release book, traditional published book, first one.

Speaker1: [4:16] Didn’t you tell me that you also used some stuff from Michael in your book to help explain some of these rules of the boss? Because he’s got firsthand knowledge of that. That’s not like just reading it from somebody else who got it from somebody else. He’s got firsthand knowledge of working with a boss.

Speaker0: [4:35] Now, the first, the 30, so what I had done, I wrote the 36 rules before I even met Michael, years and years before I met Michael. That was really, I had this theory on 36 rules of a mafia don, of a boss, just a boss, not a captain or underboss. I looked at, you know, the history of the American mob bosses in the five families. And I’ve researched their whole life, like the social behavior study, essentially. And I didn’t look at the mafia for what they claim to be. We’re honored society. We only kill our own. We don’t deal in drugs. We don’t touch a boss. You’re untouchable. You can’t kill without permission. All the stuff that they claim to be, that’s not these 36 rules because a lot of that is.

Speaker0: [5:22] Fluff. It’s not real. So I looked at their actual behaviors. Like what did they actually do? How did they actually treat people? Were they truly an honored society? So I looked at their history and what I found is 36 common things that you could find among the leaders of the five families. So I wrote that theory. That theory that I completed was what I was taking around. Michael didn’t, I didn’t even know Michael yet, that theory. And then when I met my agent and producer, he said, you know, we need to do more storytelling and give more examples so readers can understand how these rules are applied. So we began to re-edit the book and re-craft the book. And that’s what you have here. And some of Michael’s quotes and a couple of things he said, I used in some of the historical narratives that I put in the book. But largely, I met Michael late down the line. I was done with the book, really. I put a couple of quotes and things in, but I met Michael when the book was already completed. Even this version of it.

Speaker1: [6:26] You know, I’m looking at some of these rules, like use a skilled man to your benefit. It’s kind of like as a sergeant in the police department, I had a tax squad or had an intelligence unit. I would try to find skilled people to bring them in and then use them to my benefit, if you will, because I’m the sergeant, I’m the boss here. I get the credit and then my captain gets the credit, too, because you have this really skilled guy. So a lot of these rules are just what somebody in business would use, it appears to be.

Speaker0: [6:56] Well, I’m glad you said that because I’m not so into the mafia. I like to read about the subject a little bit and watch the movies, but I wouldn’t have spent 12 years of my life working on a mob book necessarily

Speaker0: [7:11] that has no moral value or something that’s not beneficial to people. A regular working Joe, a guy like yourself, a guy that’s a police officer or a guy who’s working in some kind of legitimate business. So the concept behind the whole thing is exactly what you said. People all people are not gangsters but gangsters are people and there’s a particular way in a capitalistic society a society that respects capitalism and has a hierarchy structure of you start at a entry level and through your your service you rise up within it and you.

Speaker0: [7:54] In that type of model, the rules are kind of all the same. So in the mafia, you start as an associate and you have to prove yourself and become more skilled to rise up to the head of it. And that’s the same thing if you’re coming out of college and you get an entry level job and through service, you rise up and you prove yourself to be worthy of maybe being the CEO one day or the president one day. And a lot of what you find, that process, it’s the same. It doesn’t matter who’s rising in. You can be an illegitimate enterprise or something that’s illegit. Either way, the rules are kind of similar. So if you look at this book in a figurative manner, you’ll find, you know, that we’re all kind of operating in a similar way. I believe you can test these rules against Donald Trump or an American politician, against a CEO of a Wall Street firm, against somebody in the high academia who’s running Oxford or Harvard or something that’s really big and profitable. You’ll find these rules. You can find them in how and how very achieved and accomplished and ambitious people rise.

Speaker1: [9:19] Interesting. You know, and talking about the kind of the early days of the mafia, I have I know I know on Facebook one time I had a guy comment, a local Italian guy who’s kind of connected. He made a comment when he saw my picture with some other guys. He said, well, there’s a guy in this picture that writes bad things about Italians. And so I was talking with T.J. English not too long ago. I interviewed him and we were talking about this. And he’s examined Irish when they first came over and paddywhacked and Cubans in three books now. And we’re talking about immigrants when they come to the United States. You know, they want the American dream. that’s what they they come here wanting the american dream some of them uh you know original black handers came here as brought their uh gangsterism and their their criminal behavior with them but most guys just came wanting the american dream and when you first get here in america you’re you’re held out you’re you’re pushed out of any early jobs you know the irish time the italians got here the irish already had the police and the fire and the government jobs sewed up and a lot of businesses. And so you got bright young guys,

Speaker1: [10:30] That are looking, you know, to live the American dream and their prohibition came along and it’s illegal, but there was a way for them to achieve the American dream. And so that’s why it is, it really is the mafia organization that started with young immigrants trying to achieve the American dream. Would you agree with that?

Speaker0: [10:49] Oh, 100%. That’s why I don’t have these harsh opinions on immigrants that we see that’s being really pushed by the media, Because I do understand that most people who come over to this country, it’s not the guy that you arrested for doing a crime. He’s not reflective of the mass amount of people who come here. A lot of them are just trying to have an opportunity for a better education, a better social standing, you know, a way to buy a little piece of land, a piece of property or something, put the kids in a good school, get an education. That’s what most people come here for. So even if you look at even with the mafia, you know, I think Joe Bonanno, one of Joe Bonanno’s kids said this on Chris Wallace that, you know, by even all FBI standards, there was never more than like 3,000 made members in America at any given time ever. When you have millions of people come over from Italy, you know, and if you really think about how many were in the criminal element, it’s like not even 1%. So you can’t, but all the Italians, when they came over, they faced unending scrutiny. They were accused of taking American jobs, being dirty.

Speaker0: [12:02] Being gangsters, being, you know, they were diseased. And they were all these things that they put all these words on a whole group of people that really most of the people that came over just wanted opportunities for their kids and a better job and a better way to live.

Speaker1: [12:23] Really. And so as they organize and they move into this business of prohibition, basically, and they have to really organize, you know, from the top down in order to make it work, you know, they have, you know, they develop these business rules that you talk about in here. I was looking at this one, Mixed with the Soldiers.

Speaker1: [12:43] Now, that’s one that Paul Castellano forgot to do, and it cost him his life at the end. Is that a good example for that, Mixed with the Soldiers?

Speaker0: [12:54] And if you look at the legitimate world, if you’re working in policing, so let’s say you’re a captain, the police captain or the commissioner or something. If he’s on the floor coming down he knows your name hey mr jenkins how you doing it’s good to see you today while he’s making his coffee he goes hey how how are things going out on this you know is anything i can do more for you you okay no i’m okay thank you but it’s good to see you and thank you for taking that time to speak with me but if you have a lot of grievances as a policeman and you have, you never see your boss to voice them to, but every time you do see your boss, he just has something bad to say like, Gary, you forgot to load your clip or something. I don’t know. Um, you know, it gets to a point that this other guy is making his way, this new guy, you’ve been seeing this new guy coming up and he always comes up to you and he’s bringing you solutions to your problems and he’s helping you and he’s on the scene with you.

Speaker0: [14:01] You will start to unify the large group. Remember, the boss is only one person. The captain’s just one person. The commissioner’s just one person. These seats are occupied by one, but desired by many. So when you don’t mix with the soldiers, you end up like what happened to Frank Costello, what happened to Paul Costolano. When you put yourself far distance from what you’re leading, you will cause the people who are following you to think he doesn’t care about us and they’ll turn. So what I have found is the bosses that held on to their families versus the bosses that maybe lost their family or were usurped.

Speaker0: [14:46] You can find the difference was those bosses were there, hands on. John Gotti was very good at that. He was at the rave at night. The associates, the soldiers could kiss him. They could see him. Carlo Gambino had a home right there where everybody was at. You know, he purposely stayed there. But then Paul goes in this big mansion and just distanced himself from everybody. And Costello was doing the same thing. He was just wanting to be around legitimate people. And that’s what made Costello, that’s what made Vito Genovese so attractive. It was, he was here with us. I’d rather follow the guy who’s here proving he he respects us than being following an order from a guy who looks down on us. And it’ll be the same thing you’ll find in the leader of a political party. You know, if you’re the head of a political party, but you don’t even know the members or anything that you’re leading, they will turn and elect somebody else out.

Speaker0: [15:44] They will vote you out when you seem distant from the people who you’re leading. So you got to mix with them to keep their loyalty.

Speaker1: [15:51] I think we don’t need to look any further than the most recent election to see how that plays out for sure.

Speaker0: [15:58] When you see, if you take Donald Trump, for example, when you see Donald Trump show up when the political, when the media is really beaten down on the Republican Party, let’s say, for not passing a certain thing or not doing something. And they’re taking a lot of abuse, the Republicans in Congress, let’s say. And then Trump shows up on Capitol Hill and stands in front of all of them and takes a picture and poses the picture. They like that because they’re saying, we’re not alone in this. Trump came and he stood here with us and said, guys, we’re going to stand together on this and we’re going to get through it. It makes them unify behind him or anybody. But when your leader just leaves you out to rot, you start saying, forget about this guy. You start wanting somebody else.

Speaker1: [16:54] Yeah, interesting. Look at some of these others. Let’s talk about breaking the rules, breaking the rules in a way that makes people muddy. Would that be? Give us some examples of breaking the rules. Can you think of any?

Speaker0: [17:08] Well, that’s the funny thing is that the people who follow the rules, they’re more linear type of people. They just, the rule is this. I follow the rule. Life is a little easier if you can just follow the rules. You don’t have to.

Speaker1: [17:21] It is.

Speaker0: [17:23] But following the rules remember rules are put in place to protect the person who is in power, but the guy that got into power he did not get there by following the rules rules are purposely in place to limit you and protect the guy who set them so you will never make it to boss if you think that your boss is not allowed to be killed because the rule is you can’t kill a boss. But most of the time, the boss killed his boss. That’s how he became a boss. So he broke the rule to make the rules, you know? So I find that, The people in life that challenge the rules are willing to go around the rules, circumvent the rules.

Speaker0: [18:12] Those are the people who set everything that the general public is following. You don’t get there by following the rules. So John Gotti broke the rules. He’s the popular example. I use John Gotti because everyone knows his name, but the purpose of the book was more studied with the older guys. But a lot of the guys, Lucky Luciano broke the rules. He killed multiple bosses, right? He killed Mazzaria. He killed Maranzano. And he came in and he broke rules to become what he became.

Speaker1: [18:47] He brought the Jews there. He brought Jewish people in too.

Speaker0: [18:50] I mean, he- There you go. And that wasn’t common back then. Yeah. That’s where the use the skilled man to your benefit comes from. Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel. These were Jewish. Bugsy Siegel was very good with a pistol. He could kill very good. I need him on my team. Mario Lansky, well read. Understand he understood finance. He understood markets. He understood Frank Costello was very good with wooing politicians, with courting politicians, getting them on the side. Lucky put all these people around him and used what they were very good at to his benefit. But Lucky was in drugs. He really was in drugs. and the mafia was not supposed to be in drugs. But a lot of bosses were in drugs. They were always into drugs, right? But they would tell certain people in the family, you can’t deal with drugs or you die. So the rules are for, it’s a particular type of a personality is all I can say. A boss has a different mindset than a captain or a capo regime. A capo is a capo because he doesn’t have that ability to…

Speaker0: [20:02] Be a boss. If he was, he wouldn’t be like, I can’t do that because my boss told me no. Bosses don’t think like that. I always say, I don’t mean to belabor the point, but Neil Delacroach, he wasn’t a boss. No matter what everybody says, he was too loyal. He was too loyal to the rules to be the boss because anybody else would have, Neil Delacroach should have just clipped Paul and took over the family, broke the rule, took over the family, like all the bosses historically have done in the Gambino family. John did it. John had the boss capability. Clearly, Neil didn’t, because if Neil did, he would have went in and been the boss. But he followed the rules.

Speaker1: [20:45] Yeah, well, when old man Gambino died and, you know, he said, my nephew here is going to be the boss, Neil just says, okay, you know, I have found nothing where he ever expressed any dissatisfaction with. He just, okay, the boss is the boss. I mean, the famous line when he’s talking to, what is it, Ruggiano, you know, the boss is the boss is the boss. I mean, you’re right. I never thought about it quite like what you’re saying, but that is really interesting insight you had,

Speaker0: [21:16] RJ. That makes him a very great underboss.

Speaker0: [21:21] You want that a boss, he looks for new qualities in his underboss. He wants a guy who loves and respects the culture and the society and the rules because he doesn’t have to worry about, remember, a boss’s greatest fear at night is what is my underboss thinking? Because remember, to be a boss, you were first an underboss or very close to that, right? So a boss knows how everybody in the family is thinking. He knows what the associates think. Man, I got to get on record with somebody and prove myself. He knows what the soldier’s thinking after he’s made. Oh, one day I really want to be a captain. He knows what the captains are thinking. I’m so close to the top, I can almost taste it. So the boss knows how everyone’s thinking. But the captains, the soldiers, the underboss, the consulier, all of them, none of them know how a boss is thinking. Even if they think they do, you don’t know what a boss is thinking until you’re the boss because now you’re in a cul-de-sac. There’s no way out. Boss is the top place you go. And it’s very scary to be at the top because you got everybody in your family who wants what you got.

Speaker0: [22:38] But Neil, like I said, is a great, he’s a perfect underboss. He’s not going to usurp you. He’s not going to kill you. he’s not going to let the captains galvanize against you. We heard him on tape. He was trying to talk John Gotti and, Quack off the ledge. That’s why you guys don’t understand Cosa Nostra. Cosa Nostra means that the boss is your boss. You understand?

Speaker1: [23:04] I’m going to tell you, if you two ever bothered me again, I can’t in the rest of my life. I ain’t giving them credit. I can’t. They might tackle him. She would have to cut the line on them, say. Now he’s a boy. You have to put the money in college in there. You see, that’s why I’m so confusing for you. You know what I’m saying? I’m going to be honest right to you. I lost you a million for a boy since you’re a boy.

Speaker0: [23:27] He was trying to, you guys have to respect this man. That’s your boss. He’s your God.

Speaker1: [23:35] Yeah. I didn’t realize he was talking to a rebel guy that will break the rules. He thought everybody was like him, didn’t he?

Speaker0: [23:46] There you go.

Speaker1: [23:48] You know, I see this one dress dapper. And I tell you why I’ve said something about this is I have an FBI agent friend, Bill Owsley, who was a case agent on the straw man case and was the most famous agent in Kansas city, probably a certain era FBI is probably one of the most famous agents in the United States with the, uh, cause he was a case agent over the, uh, uncovering all the skimming from Las Vegas. And, and he made a comment one day. He said, you know, he said, these guys, these modern mobsters, he said, you know, they used to wear, you know, expensive, you know, tailored suits really dress nice. He said, And now what he got, they got guys running around in track suits.

Speaker1: [24:29] He said, no wonder the mafia is going down. So dress dapper and John Gotti did do that. I’ll say that using, keeping on the John Gotti tracks. And it’s such a great example, but he did dress dapper and all those older guys did for sure.

Speaker0: [24:44] You know, people in general are very weak in what they, from what they see. Our eyes lie to us all the time. And very achieved people understand that the human is very easy to seduce. The human brain is very easy to seduce. You know, that’s why I read about this before, but blind people typically have more…

Speaker0: [25:13] Like a stronger intuition and things like that than people who can see because they’re forced to be able to read your sincerity and things like that, a handshake and things. They’re better because they don’t have the luxury of the eye. So young children are very perceptive before or a baby, a newborn that doesn’t even understand words yet.

Speaker0: [25:44] When your child is laughing and playful, and then somebody just walks in and the kid goes and looks at them and starts crying and gets very, everything changes because they’re sensing a certain energy and things like that. So dressing the way we appear is an easy way to trick a person. Very easy. You come, when you come looking shabby, looking down, that’s not an inspiring look. We love to see a person come in looking very astute and strong and powerful and acclaimed. And it almost makes you want to follow that man because you want to be like him. You want the whole room to stop and look at you. You want people to follow you. So now you need more than just your appearance, but the way you appear really does draw people in. And if you want to be a boss, you’re going to have to look like one also. You have to present yourself as one also. So you’re not inspired by a man that you see in tattered clothes.

Speaker0: [26:54] You ain’t inspired by a man that comes in looking like he works on the back of a dump truck. And I don’t mean nothing disparaging towards anyone that does these professions. I’m just saying we are inspired to follow what looks achieved.

Speaker1: [27:10] Yeah. Yeah. I know when, when I was a sergeant in plain clothes, I always tried to dress just a little bit better than the best desk detective that I had under me.

Speaker0: [27:22] And that’s, and that’s how I’ve always been as a professional. Like, I never, I will go into, I talk about in that section of the book, you can be, the boss can have a meeting in a pissy alleyway. It reeks of urine. But he still arrives for the alleyway Bensonhurst meeting, chauffeured in a suit. He walks in that alley. And even though the guys he’s meeting with have on denim and or a track suit, do you know who walks away feeling ashamed? The boss doesn’t walk away feeling like, man, I came overdressed. The guys in the track suit said, fuck, we should have had a suit on. And I always invoke that as a professional, personally. I always came… One step ahead of dressed appeared better than anybody else. This interview, I had on a black hoodie when I came here.

Speaker1: [28:21] I keep dress shirts in my office. I quickly changed a dress shirt and put my hat on before I walked in here.

Speaker0: [28:28] Well, there we go. So you’re respecting the art of dress dapper. So I’m not wearing this shirt all day today. I keep collared shirts in my office. And I came in here with, I mean, you might think, oh, he probably has on some nice dress pants. But if you really look, I got on some blue sneakers.

Speaker1: [28:48] I’m not even showing you my pants.

Speaker0: [28:50] And I got on some cargo pants with a buckle. But what you see me in is I know I should appear with a nice collar shirt and look presentable for the guy who’s watching. And that’s how we should be in general. You should appear in your best if you

Speaker0: [29:09] want to be respected as your best.

Speaker1: [29:11] Really i tell you what guys out there i’m speaking to y’all out there you know just get this book just for tips on how to conduct your own life if you want to have success in your own life in your own work whatever you do there’s you just follow a lot of these tips now you don’t want to kill the boss i think we have a a chapter here called kill the boss but and we’ve talked about that a little bit but no hold on yeah when you’re killing politically i’ve seen that happen well that’s

Speaker0: [29:39] What i’m talking about so you’ll see um if you look at the presidential campaign trump had to quote unquote kill the boss he had to present a case on this biden guy is not for you.

Speaker1: [29:54] Yeah i

Speaker0: [29:56] Gotta take he’s not physically gonna shoot him but he has to take him out of power that’s the theory behind kill the boss, Take you out of power. If you’re in middle management, your boss is the boss. And you want his job. You want to be the vice president of sales and marketing. Right now, you’re an outside sales guy. You want his job. You’re going to have to maybe politic a little bit and do little things. And his boss is the president of the company. Maybe you’re doing little things going to the guy above him, trying to get him eliminated. You know, he’s not showing up to meetings. I don’t want my name to be involved in this. Like you start doing little back. I’m sure you see it in your line of profession.

Speaker1: [30:42] You saw people.

Speaker0: [30:44] There you go. So you see people politicking to take what you got. So kill the boss in a figurative way is just saying. You are going to have the rule is don’t talk against Gary. Gary’s the boss. Don’t walk around because Gary’s going to fire you. If he finds out John Gotti is going to kill you. If he finds out that you’re talking subversive as Sammy claimed Louie, Louie, Louie was, right? Yeah. So, Hey, he’s talking subversive. He’s talking a little talking subversive about me. Yeah. I mean, you know, and then the boss. Who’s you and your line of work. If you find out that you got people underneath you who are. Talking subversive, trying to come for what you got, they’re end running you, they’re creating lies about you. You’re going to say, write them up, sit them down, call HR. We got to get this figured out. And in your head though, you’re just taking a professional approach to killing him. You want to get him out of the company. He can’t work for me. I don’t want him under me. I can’t trust him. But what that guy was trying to do was take you out because he wants what you got. And you see that a lot in the legitimate world where people politic on the side against their boss. They talk against their boss, but laugh in his face and, hey, Mr. Jenkins, would you like a cup of coffee? How many sugars do you want in it?

Speaker0: [32:10] And they brought the coffee back perfect. And you drank it and said, wow, that boy makes a great cup of coffee, two creamers, one pack of sugar perfectly mixed, but you didn’t know he spit in it.

Speaker1: [32:21] Yeah yeah oh yeah i’ll tell you what happened to me this is a guy that used to work for me as my last job in the intelligence unit where i retired and i didn’t retire out of it because this guy he had i wouldn’t let him do something he wanted to do and he had retired and he was still around and so he one day plays golf with the colonel over intelligence unit that’s like two steps above me and, but he plays golf with him and he denigrates the shit out of me and, and trying to get his buddy who wants to be the Sergeant in there. And I find out later that all of a sudden the Colonel sends word down, you know, Hey, I want Jenkins out of there, you know, and this is who I want in that, you know, in a military paramilitary organization, that’s, what’s going to happen is I’m out back to dog watch and central or Metro patrol, uh, on the streets, uh, driving a district car. I was still a sergeant, but you know, I had to go from having my own personal take-home car to going to work at dog watch at a, uh, uh, inner city station. So it’s, uh, I know how it happens, man. It happens. They just didn’t kill me like they do in the mob.

Speaker0: [33:30] And would you agree that, how long were you in a position of leadership professionally? I’m just curious. Like, how many consistently?

Speaker1: [33:37] I guess 84 to 96. So 10, 12 years.

Speaker0: [33:43] All right. Now, so you know, and I’m sure you’ve talked to people who were doing it even longer than you. And I’m sure what you have learned is when you can sit there for 12 straight years, you start seeing it all. You start learning. And have you, did you become, when you first came in, were you like, let’s galvanize everybody, be friends, be family, everyone worked together as colleagues. And then in time you learn that everybody, did you become less trusting as you moved along? More suspicious of people?

Speaker1: [34:16] I don’t think I was that trusting from day one. I understood the game. I understood the game that I can’t, they’re not my friends. I’ll be fair to everybody, but they’re not my friends. And I made a great effort to not drink with them after work or do anything personal with anybody that worked for me. I was, you know, I was there at work. I made calls with them and I was friendly at work unless, you know, we had some kind of a problem. And then I was just professional, but I had never made that mistake of thinking that they were my friends because I knew they weren’t.

Speaker0: [34:49] How old were you when you got to that position?

Speaker1: [34:52] Oh, I was, how old was I? 26. I must’ve been 38, 38 or 39. I said, that’s about 40 years old. I wasn’t, if I’d have been 26, 27 years old, I would have thought they were my friends. I really.

Speaker0: [35:04] There you go. So you got that time taught you being a little older and seeing more or, yeah, that’s why, you know, a boss can’t be a boss at a very, very young age. And it really isn’t, you just need some grooming. Like the book can only, books can only take you to an intellectual place, but it doesn’t take you to a practical place. So I was a lifelong reader, not lifelong, but I really got into books a lot when I was.

Speaker0: [35:30] 19 or so. And I read nonstop. And when I got out of college, I realized, man, I have a lot of, you start to learn how the book is only as practical. It’s only as good as your practical abilities and dealing in the actual profession. And you can read all about people until you’re dealing with them. That’s the real training. 25 years old, 26 years old. I just don’t think you have enough dealings with people to understand how they are. So a 26, 27-year-old, they can read 100 books, but you really don’t understand how a guy can look you in the eyes and lie right to your face when you’re 20. But when you’re 39, you’ve seen it. You’ve had guys you trusted who have betrayed you. You’ve had your heart broken. You’ve had some financial problems you’ve seen bad contracts written you’ve seen how the system kind of starts to work and right around that time 35 to 40 is when it’s probably you’re probably had enough experiences depending on how you were living for your first 10 15 years in the work uh the workforce you can understand how people are because you probably would i agree with you 26 27 25 you would say Hey guys, let’s all go out for a beer afterward. But 39, 40, you understand people take kindness for weakness in this world. They really do.

Speaker1: [36:57] Yeah, they do. There’s no doubt about it. Used to use that on the street every once in a while when I was a young street policeman. It had to be nice to somebody. And I’d say, but I went down and remember my friend, do not take my kindness for weakness. So it’s a, that’s a pretty good thing to have. I see something here in Pooh’s

Speaker1: [37:15] harsh rules. Can you talk about imposing harsh rules? Now, we know in the mob, you know, you might get killed, but you don’t have any hierarchy of rules, any, you know, written reprimands or anything like that. So talk about that a little bit, RJ.

Speaker0: [37:31] You know, when you see that the mafia was able to survive as long as it did, I don’t know that any criminal organization has lasted as long as the mafia. We just talk about America, which this book is only based on the creation of the five families only. No other family, just the five in New York So every rule comes out of the heads of the five families But when you see how long they have lasted.

Speaker0: [37:54] No other organization could do it. The rules in the mafia are very different. There’s not two penalties, three, four. You die if you break this rule. You break rules, you get killed for them. It’s such a harsh penalty that it really keeps people on guard to a certain extent. Um you learn that i say in the book that the bullet keeps a soldier honest the bullet burns leaves a gruesome scar the soldier only learns through the burn of the bullet he doesn’t learn through rhetoric i write that in the book generally speaking soldiers the soldier is the low rank position of the mafia.

Speaker0: [38:41] These are those 25 year olds, those 23 year olds that think they can play you. I can get Gary to drink the coffee, but they don’t know that Gary took the cup of coffee and tossed it in the sink soon as he walked away. Cause Gary knows you spit in that damn coffee. I know you people, you know, the soldier is that guy who thinks he’s, he’s like that kid at home that doesn’t know that dad knows I took the extra cookie, but you counted the sleeve of cookies before you left and you know he took you know so the soldier in life is that guy that if you you can’t give him a lot of leash you got to keep him got to be tight and strong with these people these as you get up in life you learn you have to be straight with people.

Speaker0: [39:32] As a captain, you know, talk straight to the boss. As an underboss, you know, talk straight. Don’t try to bullshit him. Don’t do any of that.

Speaker0: [39:42] Bosses usually struggle the most when dealing with an associate or a soldier. And in life, high people in the company struggle with dealing with the bullshit at the bottom. That’s where the hierarchy comes from. You put people in place that can deal with these jackasses because you have lost your patience for dealing with them, you know? So, but you need harsh rules to keep people in line. If you don’t have a harsh rule, people get all out of line. They do whatever they want. Humans naturally want to break rules. Kids will run all over the house unless, and when mom’s home and then when dad comes home, they stop. Why? They’re the same child because dad’s going to whip my ass and mom won’t. And it’s the same in life. When you got that boss who you know ain’t going to do anything, the boss that ain’t going to kill you, when you got the manager that’s never going to write you up, that’s never going to sit you down, and you know they’re a little intimidated by you, they just walk all over you. But a new guy comes in and it’s a whole different respect given to them. You’re respected for the rules that you set.

Speaker1: [40:54] Yeah, really. That’s, uh, I had, I had, when I first got promoted to sergeant, I had a guy and who, who, who never should have been a policeman. And so I started out trying to work him like he was street guy. I was trying to run a little surveillance on him and catch him dirty. And then I thought, no, let’s just make him adhere to the rules and, and all the standards real closely. So I backed off from that. And then I watched his productivity and watch his time on calls. And then I’d call him in. I put him on a monthly evaluation program. Oh, he hated it. He hated it. Every month he and I’d sit down together. And, and I, the best I can say is I, I kept him from probably hurting somebody out there because it was the kind of guy when he, if he showed up at a scene and there weren’t any sergeants there and it was any kind of mix up at all, somebody, somebody got hurt and it was, he was in the center of it, but nobody would ever talk about him. And so he actually ended up quitting after about six months and by just riding him and holding his feet to the fire, every time any little rule break came along, I’d make him write it up and we’d sit down and we’d then increase the penalty each time. So you got to sit on people. You got to sit on people.

Speaker0: [42:09] And you know the worst type of leader, or let’s say boss, it’s the boss that thinks his soldiers love him. It’s the when you because there’s telling the weakness about you you have some inner need to be approved of or liked or respected i mean um it’s some it’s a weakness in you because everybody hates the boss because they want the envious of the boss your soldiers always blame the boss for everything that’s gone wrong in their life you always just look up people very rarely look inward. We look outward. That’s the problem with having eyesight is we can always find something to blame. So when a soldier doesn’t have any money, he can’t feed his family, he’s late on the rent, he blames the guy who he’s following, who’s giving him direction.

Speaker0: [43:04] Why aren’t you paying me more? He has a million reasons to blame you for every inadequacy in his life. Being a boss is a thankless position. If everything’s going good, well, it’s supposed to go good. You’re the boss. You know, if everything’s going bad, what the hell does this boss do all day? So it’s like, you’re never thanked for the position that you’re in. It’s a very thankless job. So a boss has to be able to thank himself and know what his value is. I keep people safe. They don’t see it. I kept that bad cop off the street because I knew he was going to hurt people. But no one sees that you did that. That’s just expected of you to be able to do that.

Speaker0: [43:45] So yeah, it’s a really, but the boss that needs approval is.

Speaker0: [43:52] Will trip over himself. He will be tricked and misled and by the people who he’s leading because he thinks they like him. He thinks that they approve of, of him, but they don’t, they don’t like him. They’re very nice to his face, but they gain say behind his back. They, they talk against them in his ear. He’s a stupid, this he’s every problem that exists is your fault in their mind.

Speaker1: [44:23] Blame everything on they yeah they won’t let me do this they won’t they won’t let me do that every time i use the word they i catch myself like oh who’s they

Speaker0: [44:34] Ultimately what you know what a boss of a really great boss when i say boss i just mean a person who has you know authority over their life and they’re living their life by their standard and they have met the, they have risen to boss for the purpose of this book is applied to who, to what your personal greatest desire is. So if you’re six years old and your desire is to become a principal of a school or you’re 10 years old and you decide or fifth, whatever, and you decide, I want to be a principal one day and run a, or run a school, or I want to be a school teacher.

Speaker0: [45:11] And you rise to that place. That’s your personal boss. You made it to where you want it to go. You wanted to be a boss. I mean, to you, the greatest success for you was to be a school teacher. You made it there. And there’s a process that you’ll have to go through to get there. Going through school, passing your tests, passing the boards, getting, you know, passing your interview. And you did it. You’re the boss for yourself. You made it to where you wanted to get to. If your personal thing was to be a police sergeant or a captain, and there’s a process. There’s a process to becoming a mafia don, a mafia boss. If you were, Michael Scars said that his goal since he was seven years old was to become a captain of the Gambino family.

Speaker0: [45:56] He didn’t want to be a boss. He wanted to be captain of the Gambino family. He knew since he was seven years old. He used to say it to himself all the time. I’m going to be the captain one day. When he got promoted to captain for himself, he rose to boss. These 36 rules apply to Michael getting to captain. You can apply these 36 rules to get yourself to be a school teacher, to become a sergeant in the police department. Where do you want to go? There’s a process. And if you get there, for me, I wanted to do this. I wanted to become a Manhattan published author and do a real book and have it in stores around the country. I don’t really have much more that I feel like I have to do. I wanted to do this, but I don’t need to. This is my version of my boss. This is Don RJ, you know? So yeah. Don Roger.

Speaker1: [46:52] Well, yeah, it’s interesting. You know, when I was a kid, I just wanted to be a cowboy and have a horse and a rifle and a six shooter and go out and save people. and I became a policeman. They gave me a Plymouth Fury and a shotgun and a Smith & Wesson 38. So I achieved mine back then. Everything since then has just been gravy. So this has been great. I mean, guys, you got to get this book. If you care about your own personal success, you know, get this book. If you like the mob, you know, get this book, but you can apply all those rules to your own life. I can see that right now. I know I look as I read this and talk with R.J. About it, you know, they worked in my life and they’ll work in your life, too, to live your life like it’s suggested in this book.

Speaker0: [47:41] Let me ask you, did you ever, like when you, let’s say, I’m just going to grab one at random, speak the language of a soldier. So when you were in your highest position in police and policing, what’s what, you said you were a sergeant?

Speaker1: [47:55] Sergeant, yeah.

Speaker0: [47:57] So do you speak, is there a different, when you speak with the cop on the beat, you understand, I’m guessing, because you might have been, you’ve been, to be a sergeant, you’ve been where the guy is at who you’re leading. You understand there’s a different conversation from you and your boss than it is you and him. Do you adjust a bit when you’re speaking to the people that you’re leading? To understand where.

Speaker1: [48:25] It would depend on the boss i i will you know with with guys on the street that were working for me especially that worked directly for me that would see you know every morning every night when they’d go out and come back in or then maybe make calls with or do some be part of a surveillance team or something with uh why uh you know i was i was more uh more of a peer, but yet, uh, I was the peer among peers with them. And with the captain, it would depend on the personality of my captain. You know, I had one guy for a long time that was, was more like my friend, but I was never a guy that would take advantage of that. And, and, and so we spoke more peer to peer, but if I had somebody, I didn’t know very well, then it was much more formal. And I was all, and I watched what I said to him. I was real careful about what I said to him. And then if like I went back to patrol and I didn’t know anybody that worked for me for a long until I figured out the guys and who I could talk to more frankly and, and who I had to stay totally detached from and professional with. And I would talk differently with them, but it’s a, it’s a constant adjustment. And I’ll bet, I bet all these in the mob world, I bet it’s a constant adjustment depending on people.

Speaker0: [49:38] Exactly. And that’s so in the mob world, that’s what Paul started to not do. He spoke, he was reading the Wall Street Journal. He was talking about, he talked like a banker. He’s reading. But you got these guys that dropped out of school in fourth grade, fifth grade, and they’ve been on the streets doing hard knock crimes and their cargo hijacking and selling drugs. And you’re coming down saying, you’re talking in a way they can’t understand. They don’t understand this stuff you’re talking about. Michael always says Paul wanted everybody to own a butcher shop. He wanted everybody to be a businessman. He was speaking in a way that the blue collars, the everyday guys could not understand. They didn’t want to follow a guy like that. What are you talking about a butcher shop, Paul? Let me stop the market. We could put some money in this. What are you talking about? Paul didn’t adjust himself enough to the street dogs, the street animals like John Gotti. And the Bergenhunt and Fish crew, people like that, they didn’t understand. What’s this guy talking about? What are you talking about? We’re going to, this union thing that we could get 500 million. What are you talking about? Paul should have adjusted his speak better when I’m talking to this guy versus talking to that guy.

Speaker0: [50:55] And you have to know who your audience is in life, in general. And no matter what profession you’re in, you have to, I can promise you, the way trump i keep bringing up trump because he’s just a popular example but the way he talks to the american people where he speaks right at your yeah you know who he’ll speak in a way that i know because because again as a kid he walked around on the construction site picking up nails for his father his father was sent him to pick up rent from low-income people you know in queens and stuff so he was he was around people as a young he was a rich kid but around poor people and work in people a lot when he was younger. So my thoughts are maybe he developed a little understanding on how people talk on a construction site. How does the guy, he heard the guy say, hey, after work, let’s go get a six pack and let’s have a few beers. And he knows what the everyday blue collar guy was doing after work and things like that. But I can promise you the way he talks sometimes where I think it’s a little, whoa, I can’t believe you’re saying this stuff as a president. But why do so many people resonate? I don’t like that kind of conduct, personally. I believe in decorum. You carry yourself as a gentleman. Always. So I don’t agree with the way Trump represents himself. But millions of people like it. He’s speaking to the soldier. He’s speaking the language of a soldier.

Speaker0: [52:22] I can promise you, though, in my suspicion, when he’s sitting down with world leaders.

Speaker1: [52:28] He’s not talking like that.

Speaker0: [52:31] He’s not. He’s adjusting himself.

Speaker1: [52:34] Yeah. When he’s talking to his friends at the country club down there and playing golf with those guys and that kind of thing. He’s, he’s a different person. We all have to adjust depending on who we’re with. If we want to be successful in life, that’s for sure.

Speaker0: [52:47] Yeah.

Speaker1: [52:48] All right. Anything else you want to, any other one of these topics?

Speaker1: [52:52] There’s a lot more of them, guys. Any other topics you’d like to go over, RJ?

Speaker0: [52:58] No, anything you, I mean, and just in general, if you want to learn, it’s a twofold book. in many ways. If you want to learn about the psychology of a mafia boss, the social strategies, the social behaviors of a gangster, of a mob boss, great book for you to read because you’re going to, so if you just love mob history or mob psychology, which I don’t think anyone’s ever wrote about the mob psychology, the psychology of a mafia boss. You got it. It’ll be a book that you’ll find some interest in. But if you want to read it in a more allegorical or a more figurative way, where you have some fun and like, oh, in a way, this relates to me. It’s a fun book to read for a guy who’s, you know, like a lot of people read Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. And in The Prince, Machiavelli says, essentially.

Speaker0: [53:51] You know, after your boss has trained you, I mean, after your, you know your master has trained you to be a you know great swordsman or have taught you how to be a great on the battlefield or something and you have no more for him to gain, you just behead him cut his head off and take everything he got because you can’t gain nothing else for uh from him it’s the same as kill the boss you know after your boss has mentored and guided you and gave you everything now now he’s just in your way and you’ll it’s just so in a way the way people read Machiavelli in business schools, the way you read like these Sun Tzu, The Art of War. These are war strategies, but you can apply them in a figurative way in your life and in business. So you can read the book in that same kind of concept. You can read the book in a business way, in a personal development way, and you’ll find interesting. So anybody can read it, really. It’s a book for anybody to read. Yeah.

Speaker1: [54:49] Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And what I always used was it better to have people fear you than love you. That’s a Machiavelli. That’ll work everywhere in management circles, as we’ve discussed many times. All right. RJ Roger. I really appreciate you coming on the show and guys, I’ll have a link to, uh, to his, uh, YouTube channel and Michael, Michael scars, Michael D. Leonardo. You know, you need to call him Michael. You don’t call him Mike, call him Michael.

Speaker0: [55:18] He doesn’t like the name Mikey scars. And, uh, there’s nobody that ever has no one ever called him that to his face.

Speaker1: [55:24] Oh, really? I’ll be darned.

Speaker0: [55:26] No, no.

Speaker1: [55:27] You can, you can say it in general, but not call him that. Interesting. Uh and and a link to the book uh and uh i don’t know i i it’s really good to have you on there and finally meet you rj i’ve watched your show several times and uh not not a lot i’ll have to admit because i only got so much time no

Speaker0: [55:48] I’m the i’m the same way it’s very few i really don’t watch mob content at all to be honest i.

Speaker1: [55:53] I don’t watch either just to see what people are doing

Speaker0: [55:57] It’s not of no interest to me to watch it i don’t watch and it’s not a attack on anybody but I really don’t watch any of the shows. I just, I will sometimes watch a certain guest or I’ve been studying this stuff my whole life. So it’s not that interesting for me to watch it. So I read like Malcolm Gladwell and theory books and Robert Greene and I read like Jordan Peterson and stuff. And I watched Rogan and Lex Friedman and stuff. Like I don’t, I don’t, I have no, I read nothing anymore really about deep historical studies from writers that you probably never even heard of i just read not long ago michael kreitschley’s book um and it was just like historical book on the the creation of the mob and um in america and it was a fantastic book but it’s not something anyone would even read it’s like a textbook yeah it’s like it’s like a textbook it probably sold 200 copies but i have no interest in it either to like to read about it um because i just spent my whole life doing it so interesting Seed.

Speaker1: [57:02] All right. Thanks a lot, RJ, for coming on. And guys, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. And if you have a problem with PTSD, go to that VA website if you’ve been in the service. And if you have a problem with drugs and alcohol, which goes hand in hand with PTSD, why our friend, Mr. Ruggiano said that Angelo Ruggiano has a hotline number on his YouTube channel, and he’s a drug and alcohol counselor i think he still is i’m not sure he is is he still one okay good well i try to find him down there in florida and take your treatment with him then come back and come on the show and tell us all about it no i know i know you won’t do that but uh it would be interesting to have him as your drug and alcohol counselor and and don’t forget i’ve got some stuff out there for sale on my website and on the amazon just go to amazon and search gary jenkins and mafia and you’ll find I got two, three, I got one mob book and two books about Civil War things. And then I’ve got three documentary films about Kansas City Mafia that you can rent for like a buck ninety nine.

Speaker1: [58:07] So thanks a lot, guys. And I really appreciate you listening to us. And RJ, I thoroughly thank you for coming on. This has been a fun show.

Speaker0: [58:14] Thank you, brother. I really appreciate the invite. And it’s very nice to be able to finally sit with someone such as yourself. So thank you.

As I analyze the shifts in power dynamics and the emergence of new figures, I point to key players such as Carmine Galante, whose ambitions peaked when he returned to the scene following a lengthy prison sentence. I provide insights into how the old guard of Mafia leadership began to decline, making way for fresh ambition and new strategies, particularly in narcotics. The interplay of rivalry, loyalty, and the ever-present financial machinations within the families illustrates the complexity of Mafia politics as they sought to adapt and thrive amid evolving criminal enterprises. Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

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Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, glad to be back here in Studio Gangland Wire. I’ve got a little bonus episode, I think. I don’t know how long it’s going to be, but not too long. Steve Popkin, the fan of the podcast, sent me a link to a New York Times article. Actually, it was out of the New York Times archives. They have an archive that you can access. It was dated March 21st, 1976, and the title was Five Mafia Families Opened Rosters to New Members. Well, this is back when they opened the books, finally. We hear a lot about that. The books were closed. The books were opened. They opened the books in 1976. There’s a lot of guys who were made right after that.

[0:43] It’s hard to figure out who they all are. It’ll take a lot of time, but you all know who was made in 1976, 1977, during those years would have been right after the books were opened back up. They had to get the commission to approve of that, and there was five families

[1:02] on the commission at the time. I assume Chicago probably was, but since it was a New York deal, they probably just kept it within New York mob bosses to vote on whether they would open up the books again. Now, in this article, I bet when they read this, some of these guys read this article, they were about to shit because here’s their business right down on the street. And I know they read those articles. I’ve got a wiretap where Nick Savella is reading an article or actually Tuffy DeLuna is reading an article to him where the, I believe it was the Wall Street Journal, was saying that Iupa was moving out west and moving into Las Vegas. And Nick Civella says, oh, boy.

[1:49] And anyhow, so, you know, I know they read this stuff and they pay attention to it. And to see this out on Front Street like this, I don’t know. Anyhow, the article said that each family had been given permission to initiate 10 new members.

[2:04] And they were instructed that they had to get these, take these guys from proven moneymakers within their own family, people that they knew. because, you know, they know that they can be infiltrated. So they want to make sure that people that didn’t have any legal problems faced them at that time. Now, you know, you’re going to get some legal problems eventually. So you just have to, you know, people whose family members you know or maybe you’re an extended relative of your own, if you’re a maid guy or you’re a boss, you want somebody that’s proven their loyalty. Somebody’s gone to the joint and kept their mouth shut before. I mean, a guy that goes in, does a tray or five years or whatever. Somebody does 10 years. I know a guy here in Kansas City, my friend, Steve St. John, he did 10 years. Now, he wasn’t involved in a mafia crime, but he didn’t talk. And he’s the kind of guy that, you know, people will look out to, you know, to hold up to this higher standard, to higher and high esteem in that world. And, you know, he does not commit any more crimes. Would he be a guy that you would want to commit a crime with? Bright guy, and he didn’t talk, and he could have. Believe me, he knew stuff, and he could have talked, and he wouldn’t do it. The books were closed in 1957 after Joe Valacci started testifying in 1962.

[3:27] He talked about the different—he described the ceremony for the first time, the whole pricking of the finger, burning of the hand, the loyalty oath, which has been reported by other people that have come in angelo uh leonardo reported it i found that one he really did it in detail and they even taped one in boston area in the patriarchy family here in the last several years so they shut down the books they were so scared of infiltration and.

[3:57] Finally, the heads of the fine families met and they opened them up, given these kind of certain restrictions, if you will. Each guy can get 10 people, select proven moneymakers and that kind of thing. They still take the oath of silence.

[4:15] And there’s no doubt that it was going to be tightly controlled by these mob families. As the FBI at the time said, they reported in this article says they’ve been holding initiation ceremonies in New York for the past month. My boss reads that. He said, come on, what’s up with this? This agent said that these ceremonies have been held in the homes of underbosses and selected family captains, not in the homes of the bosses because they think they have too much surveillance on them. Apparently, he said, the initiation ceremony they were using at that time was still really close to what Bellacci had described. The guns, knives laying there, the oaths of silence, the whole thing. And some of them that were initiated at the time, and I’d be curious, you know, get a hold of me or comment on the Facebook or on the YouTube. Who all was made during this time? This report indicates a guy named John Russo, who was a driver and a bodyguard for Frank Thierry, who was supposedly the boss of the Vito Genovese family at the time. He would have been kind of a new boss. It’s another thing. There were some new bosses at the time. I think that’s one reason they got this through. Benaro Magano. He was the guy known as Benny eggs. I’ve heard of him. He’s a very successful bookmaker and loan shark Salvatore franchise. He was, uh, He ran all the gambling operations for Sonny Franchise, who was a captain in the Colombo family.

[5:38] Kind of the article surmised, and probably they got this from an agent, this kind of shows the decline of Carlo Gambino, his lessening of his influence in some of the newer mob, like I said, some of the newer mob bosses were coming in at the time.

[5:55] It also kind of showed the emergence of Carmine Galante. He had come back out of jail and he had like assumed he was going to be the boss of the Bonanno family uh just spent 15 years in jail kept his mouth shut you know he felt like he was owed and he was owed and of course we had time Rusty Rustelli was inside at the time and and he was supposedly the heir apparent I believe but he really led the fight to open the books now if you remember he was trying to bring in the zips he was bringing these Sicilians to pump up his family and get into narcotics. He knew those guys, you know, first of all, they didn’t really speak the language. And if he brought them over, they would be so loyal to him that he could trust them to be loyal to him. And he wanted to be able to make those guys, you know, at the time they had a pretty new boss, the Lucchese family and Tony Duck, Tony Ducks, Anthony Corralo was a new boss. He came from Queens, the Queens faction of that family, Carmine Persico. So he was in jail at the time, prison for a period of time during this time. But he had just come through the Columbo Wars and taken over. And, you know, he orchestrated the hit on Joey Gallo and finally ended that whole mess there. And everybody got out the mattresses and went back home, I guess. Now, he was in prison. He had appointed his brother, Alphonse, to run the family.

[7:17] Galante’s argument, according to the article, was all the mafia families were declining. And the old guys were getting older that’s what happened here in kansas city when everything went to shit on them after the skim trials but they were all like 80 years old all the main guys except for a couple were 80 years old gotta get some new blood in we gotta get some money makers in we got people get into new rackets of course what he was thinking about was getting into narcotics being made is you you guys are all students of this and most of you know probably more about it than i do And there’s like real deal made guys out there, people who have been or people in witness protection. I hear from different people that obviously are a lot better, more connected than what you might believe. They wouldn’t pay attention to a podcast like this. But, you know, they call themselves a good fellas, you know, the book title, good fellas. And they have the right. One thing you get is a good fella. You have the right to a sit down. If there’s no disagreement, you can have a sit down with another boss or maybe a boss of another family or some respected consigliere or somebody who would settle this dispute.

[8:30] Now, if a dispute was with a non-member, somebody that’s close enough that can get this sit down, he has to be represented by somebody who’s made. And he really doesn’t have a very good chance of getting the decision in his favor.

[8:43] Made members do not trust people outside the family and particularly gangsters, probably more than gangsters, other gangsters than anything. Old P, old Mustache Pete’s like Pete, Carlo Gambino, not a Mustache Pete. I’m just kidding about that. But the older guys realized that this special relationship was really important. And if you were to induct somebody who was an informant already, it really makes all the families vulnerable. Because then they get in on the whole structure and can testify firsthand, which eventually they got people to do. But at the time they hadn’t testified firsthand you know as to the structure and who does what there had been a few initiations during the last 20 years when they were closed but only when they were absolutely necessary one of them i mentioned uh the persicos well and the colombo wars so there’s all kinds of colombo wars so many people were wounded and in prison and hiding and and And they needed a boss during that time, and they made Alphonse Persico was made just to lead the Colombo family in that war, particularly against the Gallo guys, Gallo boys, Joy.

[10:02] And Albert, Kid Twist, and the whole Gallo family, the Gallo brothers. During this meeting, that newspaper report said that Stefano Magadino had died and other ally who was a member of the commission, Joseph Zarelli, was the boss in Detroit, and those two didn’t even come. So it turns out, I guess I was wrong when I said it to start, that only New York guys are there, but they would have had the biggest stick in that. It was in deference to Gambino that they limited this to 10 people per family. Once they get 50 new members of the five families get 10 each.

[10:44] Then they can maybe kind of ease up for a while or at least not make anybody for a while. But if this starts working out, they may want to make some more. Again, Valachi described this, gun and knife are placed on a table in front of him. And he said in front of him, and that’s what Angelo Leonardo told him. Said that this represents that you live by the gun and the knife and you die by the gun and knife. You don’t live by the gun, live by the sword, die by the sword. That came from somewhere. Then you got to make a cup of your hand and put the paper in it, set it on fire. Said this is the way I will burn if I betray any of the secrets of this Cosa Nostra.

[11:25] And then they’re assigned kind of a godfather to, you know, a mentor, a sponsor during recovery.

[11:34] Assign somebody to watch over for you and kind of introduce you in and and it’s usually the guy that sponsored your membership in the first place now have you ever heard i did a story on this from the book peter diapolis who was pete to greek he was a bodyguard at joseph gallo he was sitting there the night that gallo got killed and uh because he and and his woman had been out with joy gallo and his wife and kid i think and celebrating his birthday he claimed that the Joy Gallo told him that the burning paper custom wasn’t anymore. He just said that the new member just swears an oath of silence. You know, it won’t burn like the saint’s card. So I don’t know. Pete the Greek said that the godfather of the sponsor is really important in new members’ life. He said, because until a new guy establishes his own trust, his own relationships, he has to go through his sponsor and all dealings with any family bosses.

[12:29] Peter Greek claims that when a mob member makes his first big score, the first one after becoming a member, he’s got to take it to his sponsor and lay it out and then let the sponsor divide it up and then cut him back a little bit. And he said the sponsor would usually cut out a third for the boss and a fifth for himself and give the rest back. The more money a new member brings in, the stronger his position is. I mean, money talks and bullshit walks. He also said in in regards to the sit-downs i mentioned a big money maker rarely loses a decision in a sit-down way you know like i said money talks and bullshit walks if he’s bringing bringing in a lot of money the boss ain’t gonna make him unhappy he said he he gave for example matthew ainello matty the horse who had all the horn and all that stuff down around 42nd street, and was a huge moneymaker. And he said, really, nobody liked the guy. Nobody had any respect for him, but he’s strong because he has so much money and he earns so much money.

[13:35] He said, money is power in the mafia, just like everywhere else, like I said. So there’s a little story about when they opened up the books, and I’d be curious to hear who was made during that time.

[13:47] It’s kind of hard to figure that out but i got this whole huge big cadre of people out there that like i said no more than i do know so much especially about the new york families that in the comments below may well make a list of all the people were made right after the books were opened back up it seemed like uh gas pipe castle was i remember reading something about that but anyhow so thanks a lot guys uh don’t forget i like to ride motorcycles and i uh if you have a problem PTSD, be sure and go to that VA website and get that hotline, drugs or alcohol, get hold of Anthony Ruggiano. He’s down in Florida, former Gambino guy who’s not in witness protection because he’s using his own name, drug and alcohol counselor down there. I see this 1-800-BETS-OFF. If you got a gambling problem, there’s that wait at 1-800-BETS-OFF.

[14:40] I’d like to do some public service announcement before I sell something. If you would like to read the inside story about how we got on to the skim from Las Vegas and read the transcripts and listen to some of the audio from that investigation, well, get my book, Leaving Vegas, and get the Kindle version because I have links to the actual audios in that. I’m working on another book. I’m going to start doing some short books, I believe. I’ll see how this first one goes of podcast episodes. I’ll just take the transcripts and convert them into more of a story and then go back and rewrite that so it’s a little more readable and throw it out there in a Kindle book.

[15:25] It’s a little more work than I thought, but I’m getting there. So it’s kind of what I’m up to. What are you all up to? Let me know join the gangland wire podcast facebook group or join the subscribe to the podcast of course subscribe to the youtube channel and make some comments there and keep coming back and keep coming back so thanks a lot guys.

In this episode, we learn that Vinnie Teresa was an early mobster in the FBI’s vaunted Top Echelon Informant program. In the end, Vinne Teresa was caught in an act of perjury when he tried to implicate Meyer Lansky in a criminal conspiracy.

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To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here! Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio, Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective and now podcaster, documentary filmmaker. And I am here with my good friend and periodic co-host, if you will, Amulus, Camillus Robinson. Cam, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Gary, I always have a blast. I mean, you and I, you got me started in this and anytime I can come on, we just love to. We have a good time getting together, don’t we? Yeah, we do. So oh you know a little aside i was just researching some old stuff on chicago or newspaper clip and i saw there was a grand jury about gambling in gary indiana see cam used to live up by gary indiana and we did a show about the gary indiana family that’s right.

[0:49] Ran by chicago of course hell chicago ran everything some people even say they ran kansas city they didn’t really but they had a lot of influence down here kansas city next savella did not do much if he thought iupa wouldn’t approve he wouldn’t do it he he got iupa’s approval on any major things outside of kansas city for sure they had a swung a big stick didn’t they absolutely savella wasn’t the kind of guy who answered to people but i think he was smart enough to know who were the big fish in the pond yeah he was smart anyhow we’re going to talk about Vinnie Teresa. Vinnie Teresa is one of the earliest mob books I ever read. I’ll never forget, Kim. I was in a library in the junior college. I must have been taking a class and I was just poking around. I found this book about the mafia. I wasn’t into organized crime at the time. I started reading this book about this Vinnie Teresa and all the stuff that he talked about, which is pretty controversial. That first one was My Life in the Mafia in 1973, which he wrote with another guy. Do you remember that book? I know you’ve referred to his testimony in his books.

[1:56] Absolutely. I learned a lot about what you can pick up from a lot of what Vinnie Teresa is just the inner workings and the day-to-day sort of scumbaggery that these guys, the scams and the cons and the, and ripping people off and how they lean on people. It really, it being so early, people didn’t have a friend reference except the Godfather. And yeah, that book really, really opened my eyes to a lot of things.

[2:21] Interesting. You know, his, his second book, he documents his life during his time in witness protection. And that was in 1975. Then later on, 1978, he wrote actually a fictional novel called wise guys. And I don’t, I don’t, I’ve never read it. I’ve never heard anybody talk about it. So I don’t know what that’s about. Um, My mother told me when his stuff first came out, people didn’t believe it could possibly be true. It was like we just said, it being so early, people just didn’t have a frame of reference on what the mob was and certainly nobody coming in from the cold. And she said, I remember people talking, oh, he can’t, none of that can be true, can it? Can that be really how these guys operate? Now, he was, his grandfather came from Sicily, who was a mafia member in Sicily and bootlegger during Prohibition. So he comes by it, honestly, being in the mob, shall we say.

[3:18] I gave him a lot of gravitas with some of the old foot in the door. You know, every one of these guys we’ve ever done anything about their whole life, that would start out, you know, they get caught by burglar doing burglaries and robbing stuff as teenagers. And he got expelled from school for violence against the teachers and all that kind of stuff. He was in, according to what I read, he was an inveterate gambler, he was a degenerate gambler. Total degenerate. Early age. He goes in the Navy for, everybody had to go in the service back then. I’m talking like right after World War II, if you were of a certain age, even all the way up till, I don’t know, 1970s till the end of Vietnam. Everybody did two years. If you didn’t go to college and get married and have a kid, you went in. And he went in the Navy, but that didn’t last very long. Bad conduct discharge. So. Roly poly fellow too. So I can’t imagine him doing his PT too effectively. I don’t imagine he was real gung ho on doing those pull-ups and running the obstacle course. Let alone all this just runs. Yeah.

[4:31] So of course he gets married and as they all do and start getting jobs and he gets caught stealing from his employers i mean it’s a usual deal but you know he’s got mob connections so with the patriarchy family so now he you know guy a good thief like this what’s he gonna do they’re gonna see him and they’re gonna pick him up and he’ll start getting involved with them Remember much about his early days with Patriarcha family? You know, I know that, you know, as I said, because of his family connections that entered him in with a Patriarcha, the guy, one of the guys who predated Patriarcha, Joe Lombardo was sort of like the old man, sort of like the, some of the older guys who would be around Kansas City that, that Civella would go and, and, and pay his respects to and seek their counsel. Joe Lombardo was that kind of guy in Rhode Island that patriarch would always go and seek his counsel and sit with him as an equal in a way. And because Teresa had those, he worked for Joe Lombardo in some limited capacities early on as a youth, sort of cartage theft and trucks and different things. But he really, because he had that pedigree, that was what really gave him, he got to skip a couple of steps when it came to getting in with the big names. And he was a sharp guy, really was a good earner, just like you said, he just degenerate gambler.

[5:55] Yeah, it’s an interesting life. These guys, they’ve got this history and this background. They take a man, he starts making connections with him. He was kind of a white collar crime guy from early on because he was a big gambler. Gamblers are always going to be white collar crime guys. One of his early things he did was insurance jobs, getting a business building, doing an insurance gig. From then on, he starts making money for people and it’s a no brainer from then on. And he even gets involved with taking gambling junkets to Las Vegas. Back in those days, you had to go to Las Vegas. And so they’d come up with junkets. We had one in Kansas City. That’s what they use as a cover to bring the skim money back out of the Tropicana. The gambling junket by a guy named Carl Caruso. Well, he started running gambling junkets from the New England area to go to Las Vegas. And even I also went to England down the Caribbean where they’d gamble at casinos.

[6:48] Teresa went to Haiti and he, per his account, had some stuff. Ties to Duvalier and the leadership of Haiti. I think the idea of Junkets is kind of not known today what exactly that was and what kind of, it was basically like a mafia travel agent, you know, and you would book a tour and the hotels would give kickbacks and they would give a percentage and the money lost. And there were different ways to make money, but you’d get a bunch of guys together and fly them out into the Caribbean or fly them to Cuba or flying to Haiti or flying to Las Vegas. And it was just a gambler series of gamblers seeking the mob as a travel agent and then get it knowing that they would then have a good time because they’re going out there with the mob who run Vegas anyway. And there was a minimum you had to.

[7:34] Gamble with so much money. I don’t know the exact details of it, but you had to gamble. I think here it was, man, this is back in the middle seventies. It was like $2,500. I think at the minimum, you had to be gambling with $2,500. And you know, most guys will end up losing a couple of grand, 20, maybe lose the whole thing. It’ll be one that’ll win of course, but most of them will lose most of their money. And you know, if you were high enough better back in the old days, people kind of long for those old days of the casino business where you would get comp rooms and free meals you didn’t pay for anything you know if you were a good enough customer you didn’t even have to pay for the junket the newer guys would pay for the junket pay for the airfare and everything and so it’s you know it was just a constant every week this guy would in kansas would advertise in the paper and he probably did there too and he’d fill out a plane about every week and go out to Vegas for about three days and then come back. And I bet he was doing exactly the same thing there.

[8:37] He was earning a lot of money for him with the gambling and he was doing some loan sharking. Some people, you know, they claim that he even became one of the more powerful members of the patriarchal family and earned millions and millions of dollars for him back in the day and selling stolen securities, which a big deal back then. And you don’t ever hear that anymore, but they had these barrier bonds and he would be a guy that could make connections with bankers and maybe up into canada or over in switzerland because he was going international and would take these stolen securities and sell them to somebody else or get big loans on them and then they didn’t care because they weren’t going to pay the loan back and he was a true thinking man’s criminal he really wasn’t he hit per his account because this was free.

[9:22] You know, whatever went into the witness protection. Vinny Teresa says that he never committed a murder and he wouldn’t have committed, he wouldn’t have copped one because he wasn’t charged with one. And I think that things were still getting balanced out as far as how immunity worked out. If you look at some of the wiretaps, there is a conversation between Patriarca and one of his other bosses. I can’t remember if it was Henry Tolomeo or Jerry in Boston.

[9:47] But they say, And Jerry Angelo. Angelo, yeah. Angelo, yeah. Thank you, sir. Thank you. And everybody knows I struggle with these vows, even though it’s my own people. So he gave him, they say, give that job to big. And then the FBI transcribed it as Big Benny.

[10:02] Well, there’s no Big Benny that I could ever find in the Rhode Island or Boston family. But what it looks to me, I’ve always suspected in my paranoid thinking mind that the FBI, By knowing that they had this guy and that he probably had committed murders, they sort of altered the transcripts a bit to read from give that job to Big Vinny to give that job to Big Benny. And then so when people would review, they’re like, oh, look, nobody ever gave a murder to Vinny Teresa. They never talked about it. But there is talk of a guy named Big Benny committing a murder on behalf of Raymond Patriarcha. I always found that little tidbit kind of interesting. you know did they alter the record so they could say they didn’t help a murderer or was there some big benny that nobody’s aware of except for uh patriarch himself that is interesting i could see that happening because if he’s going to testify for you if he’s a murderer then you got to take a look at that murder and he also has to admit to it and he obviously didn’t admit to it when they brought him in and they do not want to attribute it to him because it’s going to decrease his credibility that’s the thing with frank culotta when they all that chicago outfit they just worked like hell to to try to take away any credibility that frank culotta ever had in order to keep to keep him from being a credible witness so that’s a yeah that’s an interesting uh uh thought process sir cam you may have something.

[11:26] Well, if you look behind the curtain a little bit, you’ll pick up things that maybe it’s something, maybe it’s not. But you’ve seen plenty of little details like that throughout your years doing this, Gary. And it’s like, is that what really happened or is this what was in the record and sort of to a little slight of hand trick? You know, the FBI records are replete with things like that. And it’s interesting to try and draw comparisons with what went on and what the FBI was trying to put out.

[11:50] Yeah, I like the ones. I’ve seen two of them here recently. uh, Jimmy ice pick in Donino and in Chicago and, uh, John Curley, Montana, the one in Cleveland, they, they listed them as informants and documents, but they never really were informants. There’s nothing else to back it up. A guy goes out and talks to him a couple of times, comes back in and said, Hey, you know, I got him. I got him. So they put him in as an informant, maybe even give him a number and you never talk to him again, or he’ll never talk to you again. But that agent can say yeah yeah i got i got that guy man we we flipped him give me the gold star another thing i noticed and looking at benny the fat man he was in lewisburg for a while for this yeah transporting conspiracy and stuff stolen securities and transporting stolen securities and and of course he was on mafia row he would have gotten to know gaudy and hoffa and carmine galante there’s a lot of big time guys there and that is 1969.

[12:56] A lot of guys make those connections with other cities where you can get somebody you can call, you can trust out of the penitentiary because they, you know, they get grouped together, get housed together in the same general area. And so then when you get back out, you’re looking for somebody, a connection to do something in, you know, in Kansas City, you know, you were in prison with Tuffy Luna and Jimmy Duarte. And so you get hold of them, say, hey, here’s what I got going. And, you know, who can you, can you direct me or help me here with this? So that’s.

[13:28] He talks about being in prison with Lilo Galante and he talks about connections he made, certainly not in prison, but just in Miami and just going down to Miami where all the gangsters lived with playing dice with a cardo and the cruel pranks they would play on the hotel staff who then couldn’t fight back because it was the mob. But he talks about gambling with Ricardo and laughing and throwing $100 on the table and saying, you go ahead and roll, Joe. One of the interesting things to me is that he was absolutely Lewis Berg and he got to know Nego Galante and talked about how powerful a guy he was and he could take it all over. He also got in really tight with Velocci. That’s later. We’ll get into that in a second, but he got very close with Joe Velocci. He was in that special Velocci unit. And he talked about he and his wife and cooking dinner for Veloci and Veloci cooking with them and the whole sort of a merry scene of these ex-killers and gangsters and drug dealers and just the two of them getting so close. And Veloci is just a fragile old man at this time and very frail. And I believe he said that he shed a few tears when Veloci died.

[14:36] Interesting. Well, that is really interesting. I didn’t know they ever took them together like that. And my research showed me that he probably began cooperating with the government as early as maybe 1958 or 59. And they gave him a CI number in 1961 or 62. So he was talking to him for quite a while.

[15:04] As we’ve said, a lot of the smarter guys at that time really did have, whether it was Chicago or whether it was in Cleveland or Kansas City, anywhere, a lot of the sharper guys would shark their competition by giving just trickling a little bit of information about what their competition was doing and protecting their own rackets. That was kind of Danny Green’s deal. We know that Bulger didn’t participate to the extent that he’s been credited by John Connolly in later years. We know that he did help out a little bit with Jerry Angelo in taking out the competition. And that was a tool that the FBI made themselves available to me. They sort of offered these guys inadvertently that we will slim your competition and increase your earning power. Just give us a little bit of information.

[15:50] And when you look at the sort of the veil of dishonesty these guys operate behind, that’s just not a tool in their belt to talk to law enforcement and say, well, this guy over here, you might want to show up at the corner of 7th and Grace. And see what’s going on there i just found out his number was assigned in 1962 and that was around the time that that wiretap or bug was put in patrick’s office that i there’s a whole bunch of transcripts out there i i don’t remember how you find them i’ve seen them and i haven’t looked for a while yeah the fbi the patriarchy papers patriarchy papers he and his name is his number is mentioned in her BS, a 12 CTE, which means TE is top echelon and BS is Boston. So, you know, he was flipped around that time and probably helped out with explaining a lot of that.

[16:44] And maybe where to plant the mic in the coin-o-matic there on Atwell Avenue in order to best record Patriarca. You know, it’s a strange coincidence that Vinnie Teresa gets a CI number in 62. Later on in 62, they plant that mic in the coin-o-matic there in Atwell Avenue and start recording what was going on with Raymond Patriarca. It just, you kind of got to wonder, as close as he says in the book and as high a rank as he achieved for not being a made man per Teresa, the timing of that microphone and Teresa’s participation are very suspect.

[17:21] Yeah and velacci was testifying by that time one thing i read said it was probably quite likely the fbi was grooming fat benny to come on behind joe velacci once they’d used him up they knew eventually you know they’d be able to have him and he was a good storyteller and he would be pretty photogenic for the you know congress or whoever they wanted to trot him out in front of to to start telling great stories about the mob so yeah, and i think a lot of ways teresa would have been a much better than valachi who was kind of a street guttural guy and he was mostly muscle and he would repeat the things that they would sort of tell him but teresa as you just commented on was a charismatic guy and a good storyteller that book came out in 73 and you read that book and he seems like a guy you’d kind of want to laugh around with. And, you know, he’s awful. But the way he laughs about the stories and the cons that he ran, there is… I hate to say it. There’s kind of an endearing quality about it. I think he would have been a much better long-term witness than Vlatchi was capable.

[18:33] Yeah. One of the stories I dug up was what might’ve been what brought him in, or he was maybe kind of doing it. He was part of a pistol whipping of an owner of what they called the state spa in Somerville, Massachusetts. and two other guys were arrested and robbed a guy of $2,800.

[18:52] And the third guy was probably Vinnie Teresa, but he was never even charged. So this is 1958. And, you know, the Bureau back then would have covered up crimes. It’s really, you got to be really careful today. I know that even up until the 70s and 80s when I started getting involved, you got to be really careful. But back then they would have covered up a crime in a second. He offers a lot of good insights. Speaking of FBI and crimes, and I know that there are different takes on Paul, the FBI agent who was charged with rigging evidence. I know you did a really good show on that with a few alternate takes on it. But the Willie Marfio murder and the guy’s name was Red, who testified against Patriarcha and said that he wanted killings and he’s really just a low street level guy. But Teresa offers a good timeline of what happened when Talameo and Patrick went into prison and what all led up. And then later on, Peter Lamone and a lot of the circumstances with Joe the Animal and what led up to Patrick’s imprisonment, what was going on in the street when he was in, how Patrick was continuing to run things, and how Barbarossa kind of flipped everything on his head. And a lot of the interactions with Joe the Animal Barbarossa and what he wanted and where he was and who he was afraid of, even though he was the chief psychopath.

[20:16] There’s a lot of insight into that whole drama and how Etriarch was kind of set up to take a fall for a murder from a guy who he never would have even known who he was. He testified against him. But there’s a lot of insight into the intrigues of what happens when the boss goes to jail in that book.

[20:36] And Benny, talking about being a storyteller, I guess at one time he even told the FBI that Patriarca had been approached by the CIA trying to kill Castro. Now, somehow he heard about that other story going on, and he spun that into making him have this high-level information about Patriarca and this crazy stuff like that. Well, all the time he was out being involved with these stolen securities behind the Bureau’s back in the late 60s. He was involved in millions of dollars in stolen securities. He describes himself in the book as being the number three guy in the patriarchal family behind patriarching Tana Leo. And that would have put him ahead of Jerry Angelo. And he and Jerry Angelo hated each other. He said Angelo was out to get him, and he just was minding his own business and didn’t know what accepted. A lot of guys didn’t like Jerry Angelo because he made his money gambling, and he sort of bought his way in when Patriarch came after him. But as we know, Angelo was a sharp guy. He just, you know, he was a moneymaker. He would have come to the mob one way or the other, but there was a little bit of animosity between Teresa and Angelo. And Angelo is sort of downplayed, even though the wiretaps from that time show us that Patriarcha held Angelo in pretty high regard.

[22:00] So it is interesting. If you want to know, besides just seeing the day-to-day cons that a guy puts out, a lot of the drama and the intrigue and the day-to-day happenings of the Patriarcha family are pretty well documented in that book in a way that they haven’t been elsewhere. Yeah.

[22:18] Interesting. I read something where the quote is, he could blend truth with fiction in a way that just was, I didn’t remember those guys. They were storytellers and they could throw a little bit of truth in there and then go off into some fiction. It’ll leave your head spinning. And he was one of those guys. Great con man, beautiful con man. And you and I have experienced these guys through the years. You get a good con man who really knows the deal and knows how to tell the stories to get the money. And there is an art to it.

[22:58] I’m just reading about his. When he went in, witness protection. Government spent over $10,000 to relocate his wife and her kids. He was up at Lewisburg at the time. He got his sentence reduced from 20 years to five. With immediate parole, as long as he testifies, wife is getting $700 a month. So he was somebody asking about his girlfriend. If she was also in witness protection, if she got money and he said, nah, she’s got to go to work now. The poor kid. If I recall correctly, he talks about going on vacation. He’s got his wife at one end of the street and his girlfriend down at the other. And he’s gotten forth and back and forth. And you’ve seen him. He looks like a kickball of a big kickball of a man. And he seemed to have no problem with the ladies. And I guess that speaks to the life, you know? Well, there’s no accounting for taste sometimes, I guess. Yeah, he did seem to love the ladies. No, she’ll have to get a job, poor kid. Yeah. In that world, you know, it’s a little different world what we live in.

[24:18] I guess he talked about beating cases because he was paying off judges. So he gave up judges during those years. When he first came in, he talked about the Lamontina brothers been trafficking heroin in Boston for a long time. But he didn’t really give up enough to do anything about him. it might’ve been bogus. Yeah. It was incredible. The control that Patriarcha had of things in that, in his little fiefdom up there between Boston and especially Rhode Island, it doesn’t get as much notification. You just don’t hear about it as much because that’s a smaller family. And I’ve talked to guys who specifically follow that family and just the insights they can offer into just how much control of the municipal, I mean, you know, Patriarcha getting a pardon by the governor when he was, you know, just a young kid, I think Teresa did give up a couple of judges. I mean, it was really, they just had that place locked down. Yeah.

[25:19] And they claim he or he claimed he don’t earned as much as six million dollars in stolen security stocks, bonds and credit cards and loans and different white collar scams. And he was just, you know, he was like gold for the FBI is extremely successful Bobster that now was talking for them. But he did stuff like he testified that a guy caught in his name, he called Butchie McCulley, who I don’t know if it’s a real guy or not. Supposedly this guy had a mob hit squad and worked for carlo gambino and was kind of like the mafia police would go around and do enforcement actions at different places and he did know a guy named bushy and they were involved in stolen bonds together so i tell you the other one i thought was really interesting he’s really creative is he claims that he once gave a cadillac car to a guy named Papa Doc Duvalier, who was the boss, the prime minister, the dictator, whatever, and I guess it was to expand gambling down into Haiti. I’m not sure, but that’s, that’s, that’s exactly right. He was, you know, he went straight to the top. He tried to make those connections in Haiti because there was such a, and he’s been so torn apart by world politics and that, but that was a place they wanted to replace Cuba with you know and it just was what they weren’t able to really dig in as much as they wanted to but you know.

[26:49] For a guy who was making – and I have no doubt Teresa was making a ton of money. When you look at the kinds of scams he was running, he was ahead of his time in a way as far as the white-collar stuff like you said. He’d never had two nickels to rub together. He just – that gambling, he just – that’s one thing he talks about in his book is he can never put together any cash. He had local community people, and what he would do is he would say, hey, I’m a loan shark. If you want to give me some of your money, I’ll put it out on the street, and we’ll put a number on it, and I’ll give you a percentage. She was like playing stock market with loan sharking and people would give him the money and they’d come back to him and say, Hey, what, and doctors and lawyers. And, and he’d say, what money? What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get the hell away from me. They just rip them off. Yep. That’s what you get when you go into business with the mob and they play by their rule. Forget about it. They’re nothing but take your money. I’ve had guys say, oh, you ought to make a deal with Michael D and Mikey Scars or Sammy the bull. I said, you know, I’m not going into business with those guys. They got their own rules. I played by society.

[27:53] I’m going into business with them. I know better than that. You’ve spent your career learning better than that. I mean, but going into business with somebody like Fat Vinny, you know, and I’ve seen that. I’ve seen it happen. You know, they play on your greed. He’s a con man. You know, that’s how a con man does. Yeah. He spreads out this feast that, oh, if you just like put up a little money, you’re going I’ll be able to participate in this feast on down the road. And, you know, they say, Ooh, wow. I can make a lot of money for, you know, no effort, just give him some money and he’ll take care of everything else. And, you know, then they come back to get their proceeds, their money back. And it ain’t there. That’s right. That’s what you’re going to do.

[28:35] He turned me in, you know, it just wasn’t done. That’s right. It’s like Joe Lombardo told Morris Shanker when he was threatening to kill him. He said, you know, what are you going to do? You’re going to put one guy in jail, me, you know, one guy, you know, there’s others out there. So, you know, they do not want to do business with the Bob. Let’s just take that as a warning guys out there. Don’t do business with the mob. I think y’all know that except for those mobsters who are out there listed too. There’s a few of them. So gangland wire, public service announcement. There you go. Now that’s one of these last cases. I think the Bureau, they really, they really overstepped their bounds on this last one with Lansky. You know, that story about the Lansky case where he said he could testify that would put $150,000 in Lansky’s hand. And that way they could get him for income tax evasion. And this was during those years when he was brought back from Israel. He tried to immigrate to Israel using the return law. And the Bureau burned him over there and they kicked him back out and they brought him back and then arrested him, indicted him on this income tax charge based on Fat Benny’s word that he had once given him $150,000, which you wouldn’t be able to explain.

[30:04] And then Lansky, they think maybe Lansky will cop a plea or something, and he won’t. And I know the prosecutor, I read something about the prosecutor. Prosecutor was really surprised. He said, you know, this guy wasn’t like a mobster at all. He was, you know, very articulate and charming. You’d think he was an executive of a big American corporation. And as he said, you know, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel. Bigger than U.S. Steel. And that was understating. Yeah, really. Significantly larger. But yeah, that famous quote. But yeah, trying to go after Lansky never really worked out for them in the end of that world. It just couldn’t prove it. Lansky had a good memory. He kept records, and he knew what he had done and where he was when he’d done it. Well, Benny Teresa had committed to a time when he put this money in his hand and a place. So Lansky doesn’t get on the stand to deny anything. He put his wife on the stand. Her name was Teddy. He called her Teddy. And she had receipts from a hotel that shown that they had been in Boston at exactly the same time when Vinny had testified that he had given him money in Miami. And as we all know, if a witness gets caught in a lie, everything else is just gone. No matter what else you got, everything is suspect after that. So he gets acquitted.

[31:31] Yeah, that was a big, you kind of got to wonder if that was when Lansky was at the end of his life and shortly after he was trying to repatriate Israel, how much of that was Teresa coming up with the money and how much was that him just MBSing and the FBI’s that are here, we want you to, and specifically bringing him out and say, so what do you know about Meyer Lansky? You really want to get Meyer Lansky. You got to know some about Meyer Lansky, right? And sort of having conversations like that, it stirred Teresa to say, oh yeah, I know Meyer Lansky. I think he loved the spotlight so much. He would have said and done anything to stay in the spotlight. I don’t think he really cared anything about law enforcement. He didn’t really have to do anything probably by then, but he had to be in there. I like being in that spotlight. I think you’re exactly right. And he loves telling tales. The feds moved him. I don’t know where he was during those years, but in 1978, they moved him to Tacoma, Washington.

[32:28] And he’d been importing exotic birds without a permit and not taking the proper precautions and everything. He had a bunch of birds die and somebody started working a case on that. They found out about it, started making the headlines. He got exposed in Tacoma because of this bird deal. And they wanted to move to Omaha and he refused. I think maybe Henry Hill spent a little time in Omaha and hated it, but he refused to go to Omaha. Now, he claims that the Bureau then put more pressure on Custom to make a case on him, which they eventually will on these birds. It was odd, these guys, Henry Hill and Vinnie Teresa and all, who just couldn’t keep their nose clean. They didn’t know, you know, witnesses. They’re just, they’re going to, criminals are going to criminal. And they go into the witness and the FBI paying them. And they’re still just coming up with these scams and they get exposed from town to town to town.

[33:25] We’ve had three that I know of right here in Kansas City. When they get here, they immediately, one of them just muscled a guy out of a business he had. And the other guy was out selling dope and trying to assert himself as a new mobster in town. And when all that came, he was just selling smaller amounts of marijuana. And that came out. We were trying to make a case on him. He just left town. They hit him. And the other guy, that really never came out. That victim, I just found out about him and it never came out. He just walked away from the business. And the other guy got in with a corrupt sheriff’s department over in the Kansas side and started a gambling game. And so, you know, they don’t, you know, Tiger don’t change his stripes. Come on.

[34:09] It’s like they have divining rods and sort of back and forth. And instead of looking for water, it’s like, oh, scam, you know, con, you know, they can just zero right in. I couldn’t find a corrupt sheriff’s department if I tried. I wouldn’t know where to look. I don’t know how to muscle some guy out of his business. But these guys, it’s just they’re in town for two days. And it’s like in my blue heaven. That’s how it worked. And that’s exactly like this deal with his Wyandotte County deputy sheriff that they are actually his dad was a sheriff. He wasn’t actually a sheriff. Everybody thought he was. And this Joey Cantaloupe moved to town. And next thing you know, he’s running a big, like a casino with long before casinos were legal, running a whole casino at a county park with using uniformed deputies to guard him.

[34:57] Crazy. Might as well go big. He’s relocated witnesses. And this guy, he was stealing hand over fist. His son was dealing in cocaine. And his son actually killed somebody during this time. He claimed he was just trying to earn money for his legal fees, but he got somebody to threaten the prosecutors on his son’s case. He did some insurance fraud. He and his other son stole some office furniture and equipment from a dentist who then filed a much bigger than normal claim for loss, $250,000 claim for loss. He was involved in this drug smuggling, this cocaine smuggling from Bolivia at the time, too. The dentist turned state’s evidence on him, so making a case on him on that. 10 years, again, at an elderly age for the mail fraud and some cocaine trafficking.

[35:50] There’s something so brazen about some of these guys that a lot of the listeners, thankfully, just get a kick out of this sort of total disregard and this antisocial part, just to the nth degree, just the ludicrous situations these guys end up getting into. Yeah and by the way after he goes to jail on that they end up putting together this whole case on smuggling endangered birds from asia and selling them to somebody back in pennsylvania with and all the rest of his sons the daughters and daughter-in-law and sons and a guy from indonesia were indicted for conspiring to smuggle a million dollars worth of rare birds and animals in the united states crazy how in the hell do you how do you get into smuggling rare birds how the hell does that get set up on your plate i don’t know and he did all that in witness protection so i don’t know well i’m glad they do that it gives us an endless fodder for the gristmill of mob entertainment. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

[37:10] All right. Well, he’ll die of natural causes shortly after that. The end of Benny Teresa, one of the early stars of the FBI top echelon witness protection program. And wit sec, as they call it.

[37:33] It was the early days, and that program has certainly done some mixed results through the years. It is funny hearing about some of the early hits and misses of it back in the day, guys like Cantalupo and Vinnie Teresa. Henry Hill. A guy, the guy that was here was Peter Savino, who was a white-collar crime guy. He was the one that really put the Windows case, the famous Windows case, really for the five families. Everybody shared on that. He worked for Galate, you know, the Chin. He worked for the gigante gigante peter peter sabino i’m pretty sure that was his name i ended up talking to one of his daughters here recently but it’s uh you know it’s a different life and they’re all over the united states today i don’t know it would be a great book, to put together of all these different crimes as they’ve committed and witness protection but it’d be so hard to find the information because it’s so secret even they’re protected yeah.

[38:36] That’s right you have to get a hell of a foyer yeah and even then you probably have to end up suing them to get records because i know how they are about that stuff they’ll just take a guy and wipe him clean you won’t be able to find anything about him and be like he almost like he never existed except for when he tells if he testified and they even like you’re not gonna find much on that either i think they get that kept out of the court files that are accessible.

[39:06] All right, Cam. So I think we’re probably pretty well done, Benny Teresa. It’s one that people should really look up if you want to see how the history of mob literature kind of came to be. You know, every guy and their brother writes a book nowadays, but Benny Teresa was the first. He was still sort of during the heyday of the mob just after Appalachian. And, you know, it’s a hell of a glimpse into what was going on, especially if you’re into the patriarchal family. We have a lot of insights that that book offers some true, some a little less than, but it offers a lot of great information. I got my copy on eBay years ago. They pop up. It’s definitely worth finding.

[39:45] I’ll have to get one one of these days. I’ll look that up. There may be, I don’t know how big of printing they had. Some of these books that they quit printing, went out of print a long time ago and to find them on eBay, they want a lot of money for them. Oh, well, you tell them, you know, I buy all those old books and all the Saturday evening posts. Articles and stuff and i’ve done some that’s right life magazine you know i’ve definitely paid a pretty penny for some of them newspapers and life magazine in particular and the post too they really used to cover the mob and cover all those cases and then yes some really good information out there oh beautiful beautiful coverage the chicago tribune is great too, oh yeah how often i’ve gotten whole stories out of a chicago tribune article that uh that kid up in chicago the chicago outfit news and comments or something like that i can’t remember the exact name of his facebook but i’ve gotten whole stories out of some of those articles that he’s printed or posts on his facebook page and they’re good those guys and those are reporters in chicago really covered the outfit up there.

[40:54] All right, Cam, so tell us about your book. I’ve got Chicago Swan Song with a mob wife story of Lisa Swan, the ex-wife of Frank Calabrese Jr. We talk about what it was like for the family, and she sort of protected her children in that world. How when they split up, the community turned on her. She grew up in Gale Wood, an Italian enclave in Chicago, and things that she observed growing up. She wasn’t in the know, but she sort of experienced what it was like if you’re a father or you’re a grandfather or somebody who’s a mobster. This really takes you behind the table at Thanksgiving dinner, and you see what it was like. And then the realizations have come when the family secrets trial came out, the things that she realized that a man she had stood up to through the years was actually Frank Calabrese Sr. who had killed 19 people, including a woman. So I think that it was important for me to tell a family and to tell a woman’s story from within. And I really, it turned out well, we’ve had a lot a positive perception of it. And I highly recommend it. It’s just different perspectives than what you get on typical mob stories.

[41:57] Yeah. And Cam, all guys, I’ll have a link to that book or you can get that on Amazon in the show notes. You know, I did my own book recently. You can see back over my shoulder here, the Windy City Mafia Chicago outfit. And that’s just a series of short stories. None of them are related that I’ve done stories on. So I just go back and look at my notes and transcript of my shows and for that particular story, and then rewrite it into a real easy to read short series of Chicago outfit stories. It’s ones I thought were interesting and weren’t real well known sometimes. And I’m going to do one on New York and I’ll do one on the Midwest families. I’ll probably keep doing this over the next year or two, just to keep having something coming out. I think it’s fun. I find it interesting to do. I think that’s a great idea. It sounds like something And it’s just kind of an easy sort of quick read. Nobody’s got the facts like you do, Gary. So I think that’s a great opportunity for somebody to really delve deep into some of the lesser known stories. Quick read. I think you could read it in one night. Certainly, if you’re a good reader, you could read it in two settings. And then go on. As I get a few out there, then you go on to the next one. The next one, you know. Some of us are attention spans aren’t as long as they used to be because of this damn internet. That’s right.

[43:14] I think a lot of guys out there will nod their heads and heads in agreement right now. Yeah. I don’t want attention span. I want to sit there and scroll YouTube shorts and believe me, I’m guilty. I’ve done it myself. That’s right. That’s right.

[43:37] All right, camp. Thanks a lot for helping me with this story. And don’t forget guys. I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. And if you have a problem, another public service announcement, if you’ve got a problem with gambling, there’s one 800 bets off. We got a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website. Got a problem with drugs or alcohol at the Gambino, Anthony Ruggiano of the Gambino family. I mentioned he was a member, but he wasn’t supposedly he was, he was a prospect. I think the motorcycle gang is called a prospect. I think it was a proposed member. His dad was a member. He’s a legacy member. He would have got in if he had lasted long enough. That’s right. Anyhow, he’s got a hotline on his YouTube channel and used to do drug and alcohol counseling. He may not have to work for a living anymore. He may just be an entertainer. That’s what I’m trying to do. I just want to be an entertainer instead of working for a living. I’ll have links to my movies and my documentary films that I’ve done. And the two books that I’ve done, one’s about Las Vegas and the Kansas City connection, getting the skim. And that was about Chicago. So thanks a lot, Cam, for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. All right. Great.

Mike shares the critical role of informants like Cookie D’Urso, whose cooperation provided the FBI with essential insights that brought them closer to Gigante. Together, we explore the meticulous surveillance and wiretapping methods used in the investigation, uncovering the challenges of gathering evidence against individuals skilled at evading law enforcement.

The conversation covers the evolution of the case from labor racketeering to a full-scale investigation into the Genovese family’s activities. Mike recounts the internal tensions and bureaucratic obstacles within the FBI and local law enforcement during this high-stakes operation.

We also dive into the theme of loyalty and betrayal within the mob. Mike tells stories of brutal retributions, betrayal, and hypocrisy in mob culture, where ambition and greed often overtake family loyalty. He highlights how figures like Cookie D’Urso and George Barone went from mob insiders to crucial witnesses, with their testimonies and recorded conversations playing a decisive role in bringing Gigante to justice—ultimately resulting in Gigante’s admission in court that he had faked insanity for years.

The episode wraps up with Mike’s reflections on the current state of organized crime, exploring how some tactics have evolved, yet the underlying nature of organized crime remains largely unchanged. This episode offers a gripping look into the strategy, patience, and grit it takes to tackle organized crime from the inside out.

Click here to get Mike’s book, Mafia Takedown: The Incredible True Story of the FBI Agent Who Devastated the New York Mob Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

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Transcript 0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers. Welcome back here in the studio of Gangland

[0:03] Wires. Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City police detective from the intelligence unit. And I have a FBI agent today named Mike Camp. And Mike Campy was a case agent of a huge investigation on a Genovese family. This is the case that they turned a guy named Cookie Durso. And that guy ended up talking about Vincent the Chin Gigante. And in the end, that squad that Mike was attached to figured out how to get enough information to get Vincent Gigante to admit in open court that he had been put on an act all those years. You know, if you’re not familiar with their story of Vincent the Chin Gigante, he was a boss of the Genovese family and he had put on an act and he was crazy. Wandered around Little Italy and Greenwich Village, wherever he lived,

[0:50] somewhere there in Manhattan, in a bath robe and talking to himself and all that. And he did it for years and years and really avoided a lot of a lot of heat when he was actually the boss of the genovese family and they put uh fat tony salerno out as the boss and everybody thought he was a boss and and so this is a guy that really ends up exposing that and he does this huge long investigation on the entire family so just sit back and listen to mike campy so uh we’re gonna talk about vincent the chin gigante today when When I was investigating, when my squad changed from labor racketeering.

[1:27] Eventually became a focus on.

[1:30] The Genovese organized crime family. Rather than being assigned, I wanted to open my own investigation. And we have control files that have historic information from cooperating witnesses and informants that stores the… So I went back and I reviewed the files from volume one up to the last volume

[1:51] to focus on who I wanted to open investigation on. And I opened on… The reason I opened the investigation on nicky the blonde frustaci was because he was well liked by many people both chin gigante because nicky was involved in boxing as was chin yeah but also uptown with fat tony salerno and nicky’s neighborhood was over by historic where lucky luciano over on first avenue on the east side with 11th street and so he was my focus and originally.

[2:26] But I had him, according to information, being placed by chin with Jimmy Ida, who was the acting consigliere, eventually became official consigliere. So the surveillance and all other topics, you know, tapped into Jimmy Ida being a focus with Nikki DeBlanc and others. And so it took a bunch of years because we had a bunch of problems with the title three reinstallations. They got caught a number of times, both PD and the FBI. But at some point right now, Jimmy Ida is doing life in prison as a result of that investigation because of his role as the consigliere in coordinating murders of various individuals.

[3:14] Sanctioned murders from the Genovese family. And I thought focusing on Jimmy Ida and Nikki the Blonde, because Chin was pretending to be crazy for all those years, that the likelihood of somebody maybe wanting to cooperate because they’re taking a hit for a guy who’s wearing a bathrobe, living the life, you know, as bizarre as it seems.

[3:38] I thought that that was a good possibility of getting cooperation. And that investigation resulted in the arrest and conviction pleas of the acting administration for the Genovese family to include Laborio Belomo, Barney Belomo, who’s the current boss.

[3:56] He was the acting boss. Mickey D’Amino Generoso, who was the underboss, old timer, never gone. I don’t think he ever went to prison, but for this case, and Jimmy Ida and a whole bunch of other people. But that said, we didn’t get the cooperation, but the investigation facilitated the cooperation of Mike, future cooperation of Mike Durso actually reaching out in coordination with his defense attorney to meet with me to facilitate his cooperation. And, This was all supposed to be just a six-month investigation. This was in 1998, June of 98. And we were trying to get to December to arrest the people that shot him in the head, killed his cousin, his best friend, at their social club. And these guys were involved. The one guy, Carmine Pizza, Carmine Pulido, I had involved with previous bank robberies. And so the whole thing was going to address that type of criminal conduct. But because of the recordings we made right from Jump Street, you can clearly see that Durso had a unique reputation with his mentors. He was proposed for induction. He couldn’t retaliate and kill the people that shot him in the head.

[5:25] Because, you know, there was so many different people cooperating between Al D’Arco, Sammy the Bull Gravano. They were like, you’d have to kill five of them. If you don’t kill five of them, somebody may cooperate. So this all, though, facilitated with recordings about Chin, his role in continuing to…

[5:47] Manage and be the boss of the Genovese family, even when he was in prison. I mean, we made recordings with Tommy Cafaro, who was Vincent Fish Cafaro’s son, and this uptown crew of guys that were with Barney Belomo, who was also in prison. And these recordings were just so specific and detailed over a three-year period that it caused other problems for the Genovese family, to include a historic figure, George Barone, cooperating. And George Barone was somebody that went back to Vito Genovese days.

[6:25] That he was the guy that the Genovese family utilized to really facilitate the

[6:32] control of the ILA, the Longshoremen’s Union, on a national level. And that’s during the process of when it went from manually loading ships to the containerization process. So it was just and they wanted durso towards the end when we took the case down to basically kill george barone and and that’s the part i the things i like to point out in the book about the hypocrisy of that life you know to where your criminal family is supposed to come before your blood family yeah and i’ll say you know numerous murders that are to me clear examples of the hypocrisy. You know, you’re joining a group of guys with a lot of egos and, you know, they’re treacherous and even they may say that they love you. It doesn’t really have any meaning because they’re the guy that’s going to shoot you in the head. So the whole thing with George Perón, which is a perfect example of how, The blood family in Chin Gigantes, it appears to have maybe come before the crime family. George Barone was owed a modest amount of money, 70 grand, I think it was, or a little under 70 grand. He made millions.

[7:50] This one individual owed George this money before George went to prison was a guy who was affiliated as an associate of the Genovese family. Chin was a capo at the time, I believe. when George was going to prison asked if George would facilitate a relationship between his son Andrew and this individual Bert Guido. And George did that. Bert at the time owed him about 68 grand. But Bert became a multi-multi-millionaire. And instead of when George came out giving him the money that was owed, Chin was now the boss.

[8:28] Andrew wasn’t even made, but they didn’t want to insult chin by having george paid the money that he’s owed because andrew is now the guy that is overseeing burke guido and they viewed it as an insult i’m looking at that as like if i was in that crew i would have given him the money out of my own pocket he absolutely provided falsetti kefaro and others with positions that generated huge money for them and you don’t want to pay george back money owed from a guy who’s a multi-millionaire because it would be insulting to the son of the boss it made no sense to me it was so juvenile but that’s an example of the hypocrisy of that life yeah and i thought the recordings were so phenomenal that i mean it was like okay.

[9:18] Let’s keep going. And the only reason we took it down was because of not only George’s murder, but that there was the five families in New York, and these are recordings, were talking about going and killing.

[9:32] Taking the five killers from each family, 25 total, and using them to kill the Albanian gang members in the various boroughs with fully automatic weapons. And that’s when it was like, okay, this is getting a little airy here. And, uh, they wanted to get the Albanians in a comfort zone. And it just was like, you know, and the bureaucracy, if you can imagine, I was bumping heads with some guys, bosses that it was like, okay, let’s, let’s, let’s put together our rest teams and take it down now.

[10:10] So you were picking up on your, I guess, first of all, is there any, any stories about making those installations that’s always kind of interesting to me and on doing those installations yeah i mean it’s difficult sometimes but i mean i remember one time the communication i guess it was misinterpreted because they tried to install it on a night that was particularly busy and it I was thinking the window of time, and I remember I had to just step away because you can tell the attempt didn’t go well because the social club was Little Italy. It was frequented by members of all five organized crime families, very active. And then all of a sudden, it wasn’t, you didn’t have the frequency of the same crew. A matter of fact, one of the funny stories when Durso cooperated, he was an individual that caught them breaking into the club once. They were inside the club doing the installation. It was probably like three or so in the morning. He was going up Mulberry Street. He saw the light on. So he just thought it was this guy. His street name was Tits Koro that was in there with a girl. So he pulls over goes to knock on the window and he could see the shadows running around.

[11:34] And he sees looks looks at the curb and again there’s nobody in mulberry street at that time of night he looks and sees a guy sitting in a car and he goes up to the guy i think and it’s law enforcement says you know what are you doing he goes oh i’m waiting for a friend he asked him who’s the friend because he knew everybody in the neighborhood a guy could come up with a name probably had an accent and it was like he immediately called to say that uh he thought he didn’t know who if it’s the pd or the fbi but he said they’re putting a bug in jiggly social club and so when we finally got the bug in one of the comical things the first recording that i heard.

[12:17] Was the two guys that just came in saying they thought the NYPD broke in last night to install a bug.

[12:24] And they proceeded in a recorded conversation to say, we know it’s not the FBI because I read that book about Paul Castellano. And those guys that they’re so sophisticated defeating Locke, it only takes 30 seconds. And my squad was a joint task force. So we got a kick out of listening to them. And you know it just amazing that they continue to talk yeah it was wild i was listening to a, wiretap here where they were discussing on the wiretap on the phones they were discussing the codes they were going to use for when one of them came in las vegas to kansas city and and they had to have a code yeah and they couldn’t get the code straight and by the end one of them said oh just just tell me like it is anyway.

[13:17] Well, that’s one of the things when we, uh, so when we did a few raids, you know, to facilitate conversations and stuff. Yeah. Tickle wire. Yeah. Tell him, tell the guys, tell the guys a little bit about that. Uh, your discussions about tickling the wire. That’s people will find that really fascinating. I think. And explain what tickle the wire means. Well, It’s like when I’m looking in and I’m doing surveillance and I’m watching my whoever it is I’m focused on and I see him walk with a new guy. You don’t know who it is. You want to identify that person because to me every day it’s crime related. And so once you identify people, the nature of their business, you’re going to be able to determine.

[14:02] All right, what are they doing? And in a tickle the wire scenario, there could be any number of things from a subpoena, an interview.

[14:11] I mean, there’s things where you go out and interview somebody like a fugitive. You know that the fugitive is affiliated with somebody and you got somebody remote and you just go up to him and ask him, hey, when was the last time you saw this fugitive? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never saw the guy in my mouth. He’s going to go to the mentor to tell him they’re looking for such and such who’s out in the street. And you’ll hear it with that warning call. I mean, that’s how Michael Coppola, I believe who was a fugitive for 10 years, we ended up catching him because we believed he was attached to a murder. This guy, uh, Larry Ritchie, who was in trial, all of a sudden it disappeared from trial and months later was found in the trunk of a car behind the diner. Well, that facilitated Michael Coppola’s arrest because it was like his murder being affiliated with Michael Coppola was like, okay, where’s, how did they get to Coppola? Because Coppola would have had to be involved with the sanctioning of the murder. And that’s what caught him going out and talking to somebody and tickling the wire, listening to how they talk, follow it down.

[15:24] And then boom, you get your guy or your evidence. Yeah, it’s because every day, every, every day is a conversation of crime. Conversations.

[15:35] Yeah, that’s why I think Joe Patone talked about that. They’re long, boring days sitting around the social club talking about these different scores that they might want to make this score and that score. And so it’s just the conversations are basically if they aren’t about family or some gossip about anybody, it’s about crime and doing some kind of a crime. It’s always so coded, it’s hard to figure out many times, but it’s going to be about a crime. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s to me, when I look at things like now the FBI, like some guys that I’ve been out now, you know, I left, uh, FBI in 2007, went to the corporate world and then, but I still had guys calling me, you know, for years about, you know, various things, but yet the FBI is not focused on it as though it doesn’t exist. And these guys who call me, they’re like, it’s back in the 60s, Mike. They’re meeting.

[16:37] The simplicity of headquarters not understanding historically the unions that they control, the industries that they control. It’s to me like the NFL. You get your football player, your quarterback hurt. You’re not playing down 10 against 11. You’re going to replace him with somebody that’s not as good. It may take a while, but they’re not stepping away from that money. And as I understand, they increased, you know, they made a lot of guys and they’re back in business. And it’s, you know, to me, it’s like, okay, what point do you then refocus? Really? If anybody thinks that they stepped away from dealing stolen property, trailer loads and truck loads of stolen property and jewelry and things like that, with that long history and all the contacts they have out in the community with these. Like a guy owns a you know individual owns a little grocery store well you know he he’s going to be you know a great retail outlet and then you got on the other hand you got these boosters and drug addicts out here that are stealing stuff like crazy so you know they’re going to make their money out they ain’t going to quit doing that those all those kinds of crime and gambling they’re not going to quit that even with all the legalized gambling they’re still going to have a sports book out there and they’re still going to have a loan shark and and they get a slap on the hand, you know.

[17:58] That’s the thing that, you know, you need, I think if you really want to correct removing the most treacherous people, and again, a lot of them have podcasts now, which cracked me up. Yeah, I’m sorry, that is a cracker. But to discourage that type of the criminal conduct involving, they’re not as, I don’t think you see the murders that you used to see in the past. That got smart. If somebody’s violating, that body may just disappear, which, you know, similar to Patty Ryan’s, never showed up when they got killed. But that said, you know, you do say you got a three-year investigation or something, and then they give a guy, you know, a three-year hit. Let him plead. You charge him with multiple crimes and the prosecutor gets it on his resume.

[18:48] In the Midwest, I think it’s a little different because you can have career prosecutors, but in the big city, New York, you know, they’re only going to be a prosecutor for three to seven years maybe and go into private industry to become a partner. And those bullets regarding the titles are, I guess, rewards for your success. But to me, maybe we should go to trial a little more.

[19:16] If you’re charging somebody with a murder, let’s prove the murder. Give them life in prison.

[19:21] Yeah. Prosecutors are pretty quick to do a plea. I’ll tell you what, I’ve practiced law and having a trial, full trial, that’s a hell of a lot of work, man. I can understand. You want to do it you want to make a deal yeah you’re overnight yeah you’re yeah you got to get in before before the judge to prep for the next witness and you stay after at night prepping for the yeah it’s a long day but on murders i think thing yeah so speaking of murders now you started off genovese family is you know really been feared they got this long history of being And one of the more fearsome families because of Vito Genovese. I mean, that guy was, he was a terror.

[20:05] And so you’ve got to persuade somebody to turn. And they’re not at the time. This is kind of, was this before everybody in the Bonanno family started falling like crazy? This is, I believe it was. And you got this guy, George Barone. Was that one of your first guys you got to turn?

[20:25] So george barone after durso cooperated and again part of the part of it was to include durso’s role, in participating in the murder george barone so before the case came down this is like almost three years into it durso accompanied patty falsetti to give george barone a partial payment of the money he was trying to get.

[20:52] And it was at a strip mall and I was in the parking lot, videotaping it. You could see Barone was a passenger in a vehicle and, or no, he was the driver, that had a Cuban. Now, George relocated to Florida and organized the Cubans down at the ports there. And these Cubans were part of his protection, ready to go to war against the Genovese family. So he gave him a portion of the money, and I believe it was Patty Falsetti, so Durso can see what George looked like for when they organized and coordinated the next payment in the city. Now, again, George being around Vito Genovese and participated in a bunch of murders. He was supposed to kill Frank Sinatra, too, back in the day. And so George was a great guy. George, when he cooperated, he realized the hypocrisy of the life, that all he’s done for them and they can’t pay him money that he’s owed by a guy who’s not in the life. He just found it ridiculous. And me and George hit it off because George, when we arrested him, because we arrested him and charged him with extortion, we allowed him to make bail. And this was when the first big indictment came down. I was there in Florida for profits.

[22:10] George didn’t know he was Italian until he was eight years old. He grew up on the west side of Manhattan, the Chelsea section, which was a big Irish community. And we sort of hit it off because my mother’s from Ireland. My father’s Italian. And I just shared with him a funny story of being a half-breed. And the next day, he said, I want to meet him again, meaning me. And the next day is when he signed his cooperation agreement. And he talked about the various murders he was used in as part of his cooperation. You got to get all the crimes. And he would describe how he would be negotiating shipping, you know, contracts, union contracts with shipping executives, you know, in the day and then be tasked with flying to Florida to kill somebody. He was a World War II vet, Navy. He was on four invasions, including Iwo Jima. I mean, he was just a very bright

[23:10] guy that knew the treachery of the life. He didn’t really care if he was made or wasn’t made. His mentor was a guy named Johnny Earl, who he described as the toughest guy.

[23:25] Johnny Earl subsequently, a few years later, was killed. And Vito released George to Fat Tony Salerno, who was a soldier at the time, not even the capo or the acting boss. This is back in the 50s. So George provided some critical information because he was with Vito Genovese when the Frank Costello shooting in Albert Anastasia, and that’s in the book. And what he described was how…

[23:59] You know, Albert Anastasia basically whacked his boss and consigliere, Vincent Mangano and Phil Mangano, and Albert was the underboss, and now all of a sudden he’s the official boss. That was 1951. That’s another example of the hypocrisy. So he said in 57, Frank Costello and Vito were bumping heads because they were both acting bosses at various times. And Costello got along very well with that. Albert Anastasia. And so Anastasia meets with Frank Costello and Michael Miranda, who is the consigliere for the Genovese at that family, to get Miranda to agree to their conspiracy to whack Vito. And Miranda, I guess being a very talented guy, says, well, let me sit and think about this for the next day or two. Immediately goes to Vito to tell him that they were planning to murder him. Vito asked, was anybody there else that observed the meeting? It was at a restaurant in Brooklyn. And guess who was there was Sonny Francis.

[25:09] So they call Sonny Francis. He corroborates the meeting and they arrange the shooting of Frank Costello.

[25:17] Frank Costello, after being shot and not killed by Chin, and apparently Tommy Ryan Eberle was the driver and the capo of the crew at that time uh he corroborates the conspiracy and so they basically he he tells them he won’t let albert know that his shooting was related to the conspiracy and you know a few weeks later anastasia’s killed and that facilitates then the, the Appalachian meeting to install Carlo Gambino as the boss to describe this violation of Omerta and to get caught by the New York state police with the Appalachian meeting. So a lot there, but George Verone was with Vito Genovese when that was going on. So so you got it you got really a first person account of those historic events and a little bit different now this book i’ll tell you guys you got to get this book mafia takedown you got to get it so tell us a little bit about cookie durso he was he was pretty important and and then tell us about how you got them in the court and then you got the chin hit the court so let’s Let’s go down that path. Okay. So, so Mike…

[26:44] Was a tough kid. He’d bench over 400 pounds. Young. He previously, as a young kid, he grew up in the Williamsburg Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Again, historic area where Sonny Francis and other gangsters were. He worked at Joe Zito’s restaurant. Joe Zito had a restaurant in Little Italy originally called Ruggiero’s. Gieros. And Joe Zito was indicted in the Windows case, the infamous Windows case where they had the families basically getting kickbacks from window installations in the low-rise apartment buildings and all that, low-income apartment buildings. So Zito was supposedly, Zito was acquitted at trial and he was offered the position of capo. He turned it down and said, give it to Ross, Ross Ganji. And Joe Zito stayed up in the Bronx with his brother that had like a out of key because he kept thinking as a result of being acquitted, he’d be a focus of law enforcement, the FBI, if he was a capo. Pretty wise. Zito. Pretty smart. Yeah.

[28:02] Zito provided. So, yeah, Dursa was under Zito, but since Zito was uptown, Sammy Meatballs Apparel, who was Little Italy, was the guy that mentored and who Mike was doing business with. So Mike originally borrowed money from Sammy to put on the street. He gambled. And again, he was making huge money as a loan shark, big money. And he and Tino had, as one of their clients and customers, Carmine Pizza Pulido, who was a degenerate gambler. And when I was on the wire, you’d see Pulido, Carmine Pulido with Allie Shades Malangon’s crew. Allie Shades Malangon was a very, at that time, powerful capo, had a tight relationship with Barney Belomo. and he was the conduit in the corrupt carding industry for the Genovese family. So Polito, on Monday nights, especially during football season, the social club had gambling going on, the football going on. Allie Shades would leave the club and go south on Mulberry Street to have dinner with his crew. Polito would accompany some of these guys, There’s baby Carmine Russo, Chinatown. Um…

[29:27] Uh, Jerry Goudagno. It all got down together as a crew. Polito, and I, you know, it was just, I’d have this on videotape. I’d have it on the surveillance logs because I was just sitting out there on Mulberry Street. And Polito wanted to get released from Durso and Tino to Ali Shade’s crew. And Ross Ganji was the capo that oversaw Sammy Apparo. They didn’t want to release him because he was such a great client he was a degenerate gambler he owed the money yeah and and so that process of not releasing him to this group was a thing that was i guess a bad taste and palito would gamble at the social club in brooklyn with durso and others and what palito did was he facilitated the murder using so the people sitting at the table at the card table included a kid named Rookie and a kid named Jingal. They were two cousins of Pulido’s. You also had a Mario Fortunato who had a bakery with the Fortunato Bakery in Brooklyn. And apparently Fortunato wanted Durso killed too because he.

[30:47] Carrying grudges, Fortunato apparently would abuse, when Mike was a young kid, Mike’s father, Durso’s father, at social clubs. He’d fart on him and stuff like that. So, as Durso got bigger, more confident, he slapped Fortunato.

[31:07] And Fortunato then carried this grudge over the years because he realized that Durso’s the real thing. And since the incident where he’s not allowing Pulido to leave and go to the other crew they designed a scheme to kill him to kill Tino first or to shoot Mike in the head first the gun was too close to his head so the round went right down his neck and then they shot and killed Tino and left not knowing that Durso came to shortly thereafter they thought he was dead and so.

[31:44] Sammy goes to the hospital, tells Durso, you know, they speak with him. They find out what happened. What happened was this kid, Bruno, who was also a neighborhood kid, Anthony Bruno, he comes in and Mike apparently assaulted him before he was sort of a junkie from the neighborhood and he agreed to shoot Durso in the back of the head. Polito and others have guns on him. And so he’d asked, I think, for, he comes up, Cherisulo, rookie, opens the social club door to let Bruno in, they’re all playing cards, and Bruno then shoots Durso in the back of his head as…

[32:28] Polito and others shoot, uh, Tina Lombardi. Then they all flee. And the funny thing is they find out after they said, I wasn’t there. I went home. Fortunato tells Sammy Meatballs and Joe Zito that he doesn’t know that Durso got shot, who shot him. He went home and he goes, Durso’s not dead. And that look of cotton. So after that, this whole scheme of how does Ali Shades and Ross Ganji, I mean, Ross, supposedly they want to retaliate, let Durso retaliate. And Ali Shades apparently has more power with Barney Belomo and the others, and they diffuse it and saying, put it on hold, just wait. And so the book has details of how Durso didn’t listen to that initially. He had a buddy that shot Pulido in the head at his pizzeria and he too didn’t get killed. He went to the hospital. And I used to joke that the reason that Polito didn’t get killed is he’s Calabrese and they’re known to have hard heads.

[33:31] Hard head meaning stubborn, but there’s a lot there in the book about the retaliation. And it’s, you know, I could understand the administration saying you have to kill five people in the likelihood. So put it on hold for a while. But we made recordings with guys that were saying, just go kill him. Because once Polito went to prison on a bank robbery, we had an overlap with a bank robbery investigation. He made friends with the Lucchese family, and they wanted to release him to the Lucchese. And Durso, we made these recordings. No, he’s here with us. And he He was winning that dispute that he couldn’t be released. And at that point we were making recordings saying, why don’t you just go kill him? And even though the, even though that the administration was saying you can’t, others were saying in powerful positions, just let’s go do it.

[34:26] So we obviously couldn’t let that happen. But Polito now is a capital in the Genovese family.

[34:34] And, uh, it’s crazy times. and the guys that we’re talking on recording about having Durso kill them are in the crew so that that really puts you guys in a ticklish position too you you don’t want to uh expose the wire but you can’t just sit back and let somebody get killed it’s uh it’s a really tickly situation it’s a good way to turn somebody sometimes you’re going to take a risk you’ll take them take that little bit of tape and say here they’re getting ready to kill you listen to this and see if you can’t turn them. It’s a way that you can turn somebody, but you’re really in a tickly situation.

[35:13] We had another situation where they wanted Dursa to kill a kid who was bipolar, and he was the godson of Sammy Meatballs, and he was threatening the mother. We were able to defuse that because it was—and the kid’s brother had a gun where I took the gun from him. I mean, we made recordings, but we had agents on the squad go out to the kid who was bipolar because he was off his meds and he was supposed to go back in and get on the meds. At some point, we worked with a local law enforcement who arrested the kid, took him off the street because he was a mess.

[35:55] And Durso obviously said, I don’t know where this kid is. They didn’t know that he was arrested. And it basically diffused the situation. but it was, I mean, there’s so many different things from a treacherous standpoint. It’s like walking between the raindrops, trying to ensure that you can continue your investigation and ensure that, you know, other things aren’t happening. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It’s a, people don’t understand that you got to be on the inside to understand that they, they think of TV, they think of TV, FBI agents, TV cops that will, you know, just maybe let somebody get killed or maybe even help somebody kill somebody in order to to further their investigation but it isn’t like that you’ll end up having to sacrifice the whole investigation just to keep it prevent somebody from getting killed no i tell you there’s a lot of there could be some comedies if it was tv.

[36:48] Yeah yeah a lot of great stories in this book guys you just you’ve heard of some of them here and there’s a lot more in there you really want an inside look at the genovese family and what eventually will take down the chin that when he’s putting on this act all these years tell us a little bit now was cookie durso was he like the the smoking gun that that really caused the chin to cop a plea what it was or like one incident or was it a series of incidents that caused him to actually come in and admit in court out in an open court that he’d been putting on an act So it was Durso was making recordings again with powerful people from the crew, Barney Belomo’s crew. Barney was in prison and they were, it included the dispute between George Barone and Andrew Giganti. And so I’m sitting there, you know, listening to making all these recordings and we’re doing stuff. And I realized, you know, we had nine 11 hit and we had to put things on pause to address this terrorism thing for a while. And Durso was still out there. And, uh.

[38:01] You know, one of the things I thought is, let’s get the prison calls for Chin. Because, you know, to me, he’s now in prison. It’s been years. We pull six months of prison calls, which is comical, because he’s talking like a normal guy. And he avoided trial forever. And we have, again, the dispute between Andrew Giganti with George Peron. So we have the evidence to arrest Andrew. But when I listen to, we listen to these tapes of the prison calls, they’re so specific that he called on 9-11. We have the recording of him calling his son, Vinny Esposito, in Manhattan to ask, is everything okay?

[38:48] Vinny Esposito doesn’t even know, or the mother, Olympia, that the planes crashed

[38:54] into the World Trade Center. They have no idea what’s going on and it’s chin in texas prison who’s telling him to put on the tv and so i when we took the arrest down with andrew giganti and others superseding arrest i arrested andrew giganti and you knew you know chin would do what he could to save his family so they worked out a plea agreement we charged chin with the obstruction of justice should have probably charged the money from a forfeiture standpoint of the cost of prolonging this for so many years but that was more a prosecutor’s decision yeah and and uh but it was comical watching you know him having the jury box of.

[39:43] The plea the day of the plea was filled with press and they were expecting a big conversational type of back and forth but chin just acknowledged that he faked it the whole time yeah uh when you look at rita the daughter she has a book out and she talks about you know the impact that he pretending he was crazy all those years had on the family you know you feel bad for the children in that life because nobody wants to hang out with them because of the father and all but at the end of the day uh the gigante family made a lot of money.

[40:20] I talk about that in the book. He posted that must have been 13 family members that had jobs in the ports, which paid as much as $400,000. They were paid 24 hours a day, seven days a week, never had to leave their house. Amazing. Yeah.

[40:38] You talk about a good provider, man. How much does a bathrobe cost? How much? Yeah, really. I mean, he was a hell of a provider. One last question, I think. I don’t know. You may not know this. There’s like a discussion out there about this among different Bob fans, kind of maybe on Facebook, that there was supposedly a conversation between John Gotti and the chin. And Gotti’s bragging basically about how he made his son, John Gotti Jr. He inducted him in as a made guy. And the story is that Gigante had never had allowed Andrew to be made.

[41:17] And so Gigante supposedly replies, well, I’m sorry for him or something along those lines. Do you know anything about that? I believe that conversation was had, and it was really, I think, an example of Chin’s sophistication. Why would I want to make my son and have law enforcement focused on him as a made member when there’s nobody out there that can corroborate him being made other than my son being my son? And he still has the power and money. So that made sense. And it really, when you look at things, it sort of protected him. When you look at like Carmine Persico, he got life in prison 120 years. And his son, little alley boy Persico, got life in prison for the murder, you know, the conspiracy to murder Billy Cotullo, who was the acting, you know, boss for the family. and they feared that he’d become official. So I think from a Chin standpoint, it was bright to do things the way he did to protect it. I mean, it reminded me, I think the brightest guy ever for the Genovese family as a boss was this guy, Jerry Katina.

[42:35] I mean, he was sort of beneath the radar. He made millions, and he stepped away and went to Florida, to live to be, I think, 99 years old, you know, as a multimillionaire. And he made huge money, and it was the type of thing he was low key. And he was a Jersey guy. But he was back in the days of Lucky Luciano. And I don’t think the FBI, we ever carried him officially as a boss. Yes, you had him in the administrative role, but it was George Barone when I went through with him, you know historically the bosses and stuff when he said jerry katina i said jerry was an official boss and he looks surprised mikey you didn’t know that i said no i i you know and he was surprised uh but he was an official boss for a period of time and then he was held in contempt and stepped away from it and i sort of think that’s extremely bright.

[43:33] Type of move, uh, for a sophisticated guy that’s got the money. I don’t need the aggravation. And you know, there’s a lot of envy for some of the other guys. Cause they look at you and think, well, you’re not as tough as I am. And that’s when you got that death sentence coming. Yeah, really? Yeah. There’s always envy. Yeah.

[43:54] There’s all in that life. There’s always envy. That’s for sure. That’s, that’s why you want to be careful and not show that you’re making too much money i i know a situation in kansas city where the guy started bragging about how he was making 10 grand a month from his joint and and you know and some other investments he had around his joints of parking and that leases and everything he had and man they started moving in on him because you know think heck he’s got all that money we’re gonna get some of it so you just keep your mouth shut act play dumb yeah you can even get an independent contract to come out whack kid for the money the three words you gotta run away from is i love you most of the words say.

[44:39] And don’t go meeting your best friend for dinner if you think you’re you’re uh uh something’s going on at all do not meet your best friend for dinner somewhere or go out at night in a car with them or anything like that it’s crazy how they do things the hypocrisy the hypocrisy of it all is it really brought him down in the end uh you know like michael de leonardo he goes to jail he’s going to come back out and he’s got all this investments in different you know loan sharking and that uh strip clubs and and they’re taking goddy jr’s taking the money and and he’s not taking care of de leonardo’s family and you know what’s a guy to do that that’s you know that’s that same thing with dominic saccali the banana with vinnie i mean the thought of it is just i I mean, and there’s so many recordings. One of the things I think that…

[45:32] And I point out in the book, is you’ll have somebody like a boss pay everybody’s defense attorneys. It comes across as though that’s a gesture of kindness. But the money given to the soldier to give to the attorney, the attorney reports to the boss to see if he lowballed him. But the other thing is, if the guy is considering cooperating, the attorney will tell the boss, which will identify him as a rat. And it’s the type of thing where, you know, even the consideration, it shows the weakness, which means you’re like the walking dead because the attorney represents the boss, the individual who coordinates with the mob attorney, you know, how to do things. And a lot of times they don’t want these recordings played in court because I don’t think they want their members and associates to realize the treachery and hypocrisy of the life they’ll approve a plea they don’t want him to go to trial yeah and that may have caused like somebody like larry ritchie that end up getting trunked during the trial that he was killed because they didn’t want him to go to trial i want him to take a plea yeah uh last last case we had here in kansas city they everybody took a plea immediately it wasn’t there was gambling sports gambling and there’s hardly any sentences attached to it, but everybody took a plea immediately.

[47:01] Yeah. The recordings though, can be embarrassing. That’s what I’m thinking. Even though it’s gambling, they talk about each other in a way that is, they have these egos and it’s not like he’s your brother. For some reason, he may have insulted you with a joke or something and you found it offensive. And so those are the things they just want to suppress. And some of you have you fbi agents will find it quite humorous that you’ll leave a little bit extra in that you didn’t really need to but but you leave it in there so they play it in court i know how you guys are.

[47:38] Actually, it’s the attorneys make the decision of what gets played. We transcribe it. I’d have more. It was really up to you. You’d have even more in there, wouldn’t you?

[47:49] All right. Mike Campy. This book is Mafia Takedown. The true, incredible true story of an FBI agent who devastated the New York mob. And that was Mike Campy. And guys, this is a really good book. I’ll have links to it down in the show notes. And Mike, I really appreciate you coming on the show. and we’re finally getting this done. That’s an inside joke, folks. We did this before, but things got changed around. So we’re going to finally get it done now. I’ll tell you the funny thing that delayed the release was I didn’t realize the publisher also did Melania Trump’s book. And they said, can we push your book back? I said, is she coming to the party? Oh, yeah. That’s right. No, she’s not.

[48:32] It’s done. Well, you’re running in high cotton. and they’re running with Melania Trump. I don’t think so. All right, Mike. It was really great talking to you. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Garrett. All right, guys. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles, so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website. And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, go see our friend Anthony Ruggiano, a former Gambino prospect, our proposed member son of a maid guy in the Gambino family he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida and if you have a problem with gambling uh 1-800-BETS-OFF you know we just got sports gambling here in in Missouri a lot of gambling everywhere and and you heard you heard Mike Campy talk about these degenerate gamblers that then end up getting killed or they they end up getting you know what some other family wants them and then the other family doesn’t want them to leave because they’re such a cash cow. Well, guys, if you’re a degenerate gambler, you want to get out of that, you know, go to that 1-800-BETS-OFF and quit paying those loan shark loans. All right. Thanks a lot, guys.

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Transcript [0:00] Welcome, wiretappers out there. I’m glad to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, Gary Jenkins. Gangland Wire is the show, and I know a lot of you guys already knew who I am, but I get some new people every once in a while, so I have a great show for you today. One of these guys, Frank DiMatteo, grew up in the New York families in Brooklyn and around the Joey Gallo gang. He’s got several books out, and Michael Benson is his co-author on this, and Michael Benson, prolific author. And between them, they’ve got books about the mob. I’ve got most of them already. I’ve got The Cigar. We’ve got The Buffy Hitman about Carmine DeBasse. He’s one of the killers of Joy Gallo. A more recent one by Michael Benson and somebody else about moguls in Hollywood. And there’ll be some mob connections. Oops, didn’t have the mob connections to Hollywood. So I want to get Michael on to sometime in the future to talk about that book and Hollywood and the mob, which we know a lot about in Kansas City because we’re so close to Chicago and Chicago are the guys out there in Hollywood and extorted the shit out of them. Anyhow, so welcome guys. Tell us a little bit. Maybe we start with Frank. Frank has this kind of colorful

[1:16] mob history and the way he was raised. Frank, tell the guys a little bit about yourself.

[1:22] Well i was born in my father you know got involved in this life about 1960 i grew up under the under the watch eye of larry gallo joey gallo and alba gallo my godfather is bobby bon Giovanni which is bobby darrow hit guy for the gallo family and my uncle’s joe chapani which was originally with Luciano and Costello and Adonis. These are the mentors and these are the guys that I knew and followed and listened to and picked up everything I had to pick up until I was old enough to move around with them. And when I was old enough to move around with them, I became the driver. I just grew from being a driver for my father and these guys to be more active in the life. Yeah. And I stood there with my life until about 20 years ago. We walked away after it was a big pinch with the last crew we were with. Everybody got arrested. We got some subpoenas. We wound up walking away. And I wound up making a magazine and then now writing with Michael.

[2:33] The magazine is called Mob Can’t Depot. Well, I am a freelance writer. I went to college to learn to be a writer. I was also born in 1956, probably one of the reasons Frank and I get along so well. I started out as a sports writer, wasn’t terribly good at it. I was a pretty good boxing writer. Turns out I was a much better fan than I was a writer when it came to sports. I switched to true crime. I wrote a bunch of books about psycho killers and innocent victims and became a little bit of a TV star doing evil twins and evil kin on the ID network. The market for true crime books softened largely because there were a lot of TV shows, whole networks dedicated to the subject. Books didn’t sell as well. Our editor, Gary Goldstein, found a book that Frank had written called Lion in the Basement. Frank wrote it all by his lonesome. It’s a little bit like a clockwork orange. It’s not quite written in English. It’s written in Frank.

[3:31] So Gary’s idea was to have me take a whack at it and add some new material. I talked to his mom and other people. We put some new things in there and fixed up the English, made the spelling uniform. The result was President Street Boys. And that started a whole thing. We did a bunch of mob bosses. We did a hitman. And then Frank had the idea of, hey, let’s do a book where the hero is the neighborhood instead of one particular mobster.

[3:59] So we start this book, Red Hook, back when the Europeans first arrived. It starts with the slaughter of the Lenape Indians by the Dutch. So, I mean, from the very beginning, the red in Red Hook is for blood.

[4:12] So that’s how Red Hook got its name. I think it has to do with the color of the soil, but it could have been named after the blood that was spilled there. Yeah. I just interviewed an Atlanta-based FBI agent about a case that he did on the Gambino Connected Club called the Gold Club in Atlanta. Michael DiLeonardo took a case, and the owner, Steve Kaplan, had a warehouse in Red Hook. He said, they told me it was in Red Hook. I said, where is Red Hook? I’ve never heard of Red Hook. It couldn’t be more out of the way.

[4:46] It’s one of the reasons it is the way it is because that’s where the docks are. So it’s always been mobbed up, but it’s also geographically isolated more now than ever with the Gowanus Canal, the Atlantic Ocean, the now the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. It’s a hard place to get in and out of. Interesting. And that’s what I noticed in the book, that Red Hook is the protagonist of this story. It is a character in this story. And you take the readers on a really colorful tour of Red Hook and white hand and black hand gangs, as you said, from the Indians and the white hand, black hand gangs. And those wars between the Irish and the Italians clear up the gas pipe, Casso and got his pal Shorty Masioco, Masioco. I can never get that name pronounced right. But anyhow, you bring them in. You know what? It evokes in me, one of the first mob movies I ever saw when I didn’t realize it was a mob movie was on the waterfront. I think that’s probably where that was set. I would imagine. And that was, that’s what it evokes in me. So yeah.

[5:52] Let’s, maybe we start talking about a little bit about this battle between the Irish and white hand gangs and the black hand gangs and Al Capone is what I’ve always say. I say a lot when I, especially when I give talks, I’ll give talks here in Kansas City about the mafia, this phenomenal. I’ll explain to people, the Irish and the Germans got here first, but then the Italians came along later. The Irish already have the good jobs. They’ve got the police jobs and the government jobs. The Italians come in and the already established Irish are going to keep them forced out. The Italians have to fight for everything they can get as an immigrant group. It just so happens that they brought this tradition of the mafia from Sicily with them. And that was a way to organize and help their own people get a foothold in this new country. You have to start businesses. You can’t get a job. You can’t get a farmer’s job because the Irish got that sewed up. They’re not going to let you in. You can’t get a cop’s job. You can’t get those kinds of jobs. Let’s start talking about that history in Red Hook. It really played out in that area.

[6:54] The Irish, like you said, were here first. They had older jobs. Red Hook was a ghetto. It wasn’t a good neighborhood. It was always a rough neighborhood.

[7:04] They ran everything, the docs, the stores, the cops, the lawyers, judges. They ran the whole thing. We never complained, but it was bad times. And we had to organize. And some guys that came over from Sicily knew what to do, started putting everybody together. They had to go against the Irish to eat. And they got stronger and stronger in the neighborhood because the blood of Red Hook is the docks. That’s it. That’s the docks. And then stores and restaurants and food markets to feed everybody. But the money was the docks.

[7:39] And we just got stronger and stronger. I mean, I always say the Irish lost because they drank too much. You know what I mean? They just drank too much. At the time, you know, they were comfortable and they were set in their ways. You know, we were on a mission. It was a little different at the time. Between killing themselves, we didn’t have to kill half them because they killed themselves. So it was pretty easy. And we just eventually took over the neighborhood and created that Longshoremen Association that we ran for the next 80 years and slowly moved the Irish off the docks. Pretty much, they moved themselves off the docks from killing each other. We took over, you know, and then we changed the neighborhood into an Italian-based neighborhood with all the Italian flavors to what it is today. You know, it was already Italian already. We had a small, very small Irish community, very small, big Spanish community, and an Arab community.

[8:39] Surrounding us. Now, Red Hook is on the other side of the tunnel because they split it. That whole neighborhood was Red Hook. Then they split it when they built a tunnel and a highway. The other side of Red Hook, Deep Red Hook, became more of a jungle,

[8:54] even in my days, growing up. You would go there. It was a drug haven, and we had some bars on that side. Then they’d build the projects, and that really destroyed the neighborhood. But on our side, it was more stores and it was bustling a lot more. And the Italian influence really, you could see that on that side with stores and food markets, restaurants and neighborhoods that stuck together. And that’s what I seen as a kid. And that’s how we took it over. We took it out of necessity just to survive because we were starving at the time. Men had a choice. They could either work on the docks or they could be a gangster with a shot at glory. There was no glory on the docks. You just broke your back and died.

[9:37] Um my grandfather was a longshoreman emily’s father was a longshoreman um tough life they were hard there you could see they were beat up by the time they were old they worked hard my grandfather’s legs were shot his hands were crippled emily’s father’s too they they fought for those jobs what about if you had to eat but again you had a choice either you do that or you go on the street and rob and and that’s what happened i think one of my favorite characters from the white hand section of the book is a woman named Anna Lonergan. We first meet her testifying on behalf of her mother at a murder trial in which the victim was her father. Mom gets off because dad beat mom until she eventually turned down and killed him. But Anna goes on to marry Wild Bill Lovett and he gets whacked. Then she loses her brother Peg Leg Lonergan. He gets whacked. So she remarries a guy named Maddie Martin. You got to wonder, is he standing they’re saying, I do what he thinks is going to happen to him. Two years later, he gets murdered. So she lost a dad, a brother, and two husbands. People stopped looking at her. She was the ghost of murders yet to come. When the second husband dies, this gives you an idea of the boys from the press

[10:49] back in those days and how soft hearted they were. She comes walking into the morgue to identify the body and they go, so you should be pretty used to this by now, huh?

[10:59] These are all white hand guys. These are all Irish white hand guys. The white hand gang. And it’s a game of King of the Hill. You get to be King of the Hill and the guy below you whacks you and you fall off and then he takes your place for a couple of months. It made the job much easier for the Italians that the Irish hierarchy were self-destructive. One of the more interesting characters is Al Capone. This is where he started his criminal career. One story I read was about him coming back from Chicago.

[11:28] Frankie Yale brought him back to kill one of these white hand gang members it was anna’s brother peg leg oh he’s the one that killed peg leg great nickname down scarface kills peg leg i can see the headline now it was coney island but he was in brooklyn and he got the scars it all came right out of red hook al capone came up there under the tutelage of frankie yale and those guys johnny torio was from there and they moved to chicago and create that whole thing in chicago it’s really the cradle of the modern american and Mafia, it seems to me, in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Al Capone was married in Red Hook.

[12:08] What do you remember about Machine Gun Jack McGurn, which was not his real name? He came from Red Hook. He was one of the killers in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, I believe. I recently did a story about Al Capone played golf a lot with Machine Gun Jack McGurn, a guy named Fred Killer Burke, great nickname, but, but machine gun, Jack McGurn started out in red, uh, Do you keep the machine gun in his golf bag? You know, the guy that was just wearing this was a caddy. And he did say that Al Capone had a gun in his golf bag because it went off accidentally and grazed Al Capone’s leg while they were playing golf. You know, McGarren came from Union Street, Al, for Van Brunton, Columbia. You know, he’s a Brooklyn boy. He came from the other side, but he’s a Brooklyn boy that wound up in Chicago. And he was Italian. and not a, he took on this name as a fighter. A lot of Italian guys did that back then. Yeah. Vincent Gavardi. Okay. That’s his name, Vincent Gavardi.

[13:12] Some old man, I call him grandpa, but he used to always mention Vincent. And we had no idea what he was talking about. We called him Vincent. We called him McGurn. And he wound up being a driver for Capone many years ago. And he was telling us about Capone. used to wear a shirt, never wear it again. He took a lot of the shirts. He wound up being involved in a murder there, and he beat it, and he wound up coming to New York. He came from Italy to Houston, to Chicago, to New York. And he used to tell us about Vincent all the time, about real tough guy. And we had no idea what he was talking about until many, many years later. And he was always talking about Jack McGurn, that he was with McGurn a lot at one point in Chicago, but met him in Brooklyn.

[14:00] Went to Chicago with him and he said he was a very bad dude, McGurn. Loyal as they come, but a killer, very talented, was a golfer, he was a boxer, a loyal guy. He had nothing but good things to say about him. And I never knew he was talking about Vincent Givaldi. We always thought, and it wound up being him. It was amazing, the guy telling stories about him and then finding out who he was. You know, firsthand, we… Knew that the Pops was in Chicago and did drive Capone. So we knew all this

[14:33] stuff. It was interesting. And then writing about McGregor a little bit, it was interesting. Also, going up into the 50s and those juvenile gangs, that’s where Carmine started out with the juvenile gangs. Many of these guys, Sammy the Bull, the Rapper Street, something, I can’t remember the name of it, but a lot of these guys and Gotti, they started out with these juvenile gangs. And so you get into that a lot and tell some of the roots of that and some of the colorful names of those juvenile gangs in Persico. Can you talk about that a little bit? What do you remember that you guys researched about those? Well, I know that Carmine Persico was the leader of the Garfield Boys.

[15:12] And there’s an argument that both West Side Story and The Godfather contain scenes based on Carmine Persico’s life because he was in the rumble. Happened to be in Prospect Park over by the boathouse, not in the playground. The rumble, just like in West Side Story, was over a girl. There was going to be fists. Somebody pulled a knife. Then somebody pulled a gun. Kid got shot in the belly. Next thing you know, they’re all running. The gun ends up getting thrown into the Gowanus Canal. Luckily for them, it sunk because at that time, Gowanus Canal wasn’t quite liquid. The gasoline petroleum jelly company dumped so much into the Gowanus that you could actually bounce things off of it. That scene later became the Romeo and Juliet finale for West Side Story. The loss of innocence when the kids of New York stopped using their fists and started pulling guns. It made rumbling a lot riskier. Really? And the other scene is the attempted murder of Larry Gallo, which is featured Carmine the snake. I’m sorry, is it in The Godfather or The Godfather Part 2? That was in The Godfather, I think. where the cop walks in, what are you doing open on a Sunday? One of the Godfather’s people, and he throws something over his neck and starts strangling him and fighting with him. The cop sticks his head in, yeah.

[16:36] That really happened. Cop got shot when the guys tried to run away. And Larry had a scar on his neck for the rest of his life. He didn’t supposed to go by himself. And he wound up, he was very comfortable with Carmine and the snake. And that’s why he went on his own, because it was still on the same side at the time.

[16:58] And that’s why he wound up almost getting killed. Is that the reason why your dad was brought in as a bodyguard? Was that the incident that started? Right around that time, they found my father in a wagon wheel in the city. He was working for, bouncing for Tony Bender. The Gallo brothers went to Tony Bender because Tony Bender was very sympathetic to their cause. So they want to break away from Joe Pafaci. They were getting schooled by Bender. My father wanted to be a bouncer there. The story goes that they were there one day. My father wound up knocking out this guy and wound up being Emile Griffith. Larry and Joey says, we need a guy like that in Brooklyn. And they went to ask Bender if they can bring him over to Brooklyn. That’s how my father got to Brooklyn with the Gallo brothers from Tony Bender. Imagine decking Emil Griffith. It’s some punch.

[17:48] He was right. It’s not a story. Many guys used to say to Ricky, man, you broke his face. And I was a little kid. They always said something about Ricky doing that. So it wasn’t just a story we made up. When other people talk about it, you know it’s true. And amil griffith was a perceived killer because he famously killed benny kidd perett on friday night fights national television oh really i didn’t remember that it was into friday night fights i remember watching that when i was a little kid with my dad he’d be yelling right i’ll be damned right more than likely i sure do yeah sure yeah it was good interesting so tony bender now he was genovese guy but he ends up disappearing if i remember right.

[18:41] Yes, Tony Bender was a Genovese captain. There’s a lot of talk why, different stories, why he got killed. They’re saying because they were selling buns. I don’t believe in none of that stuff. That’s just my opinion, that Albert on the stage got killed for that, and Bender got killed for that. My belief is that Vito was making a move, and Vito took him out, Genovese. Because Bender was strong, very strong, and these guys are very paranoid. And my belief is that they took them out because of that but they make the story up with the button stuff it’s interesting you know selling buttons i’ve noticed that the mob somebody gets killed and all of a sudden there’s these stories that denigrate them that just come out oh he was gay oh he was this he was that and so they need to denigrate somebody by floating those stories as interesting phenomenon they wait till they can’t defend themselves who tells a story a guy that likes you tell the story or a guy that don’t like you telling stories. It’s all BS anyway, especially when half the people tell the stories weren’t there or not even close to somebody was there. It’s a treacherous life, life inside the mafia for sure.

[19:54] So talking about Versico, that kind of brings up the war with Gallows and Joe Colombo. Your dad was really close to the Gallows and you were all in and around them. I mentioned before I did this, I read this book that Pete the great Diopolis did. And so you actually knew him. You had some memory of him. I said, he seemed like a nice guy. And Frank says, well, I don’t know if he’s a nice guy. But, you know, we got to talk about the gallows here. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Well, I knew Pete well. I stood on the block with Pete for two, three years, so I know Pete. It was a breakaway. The Gallows did not want to be with Joe Pofacci.

[20:33] a group of maybe 40 guys wanted to break away. He had some other family that was sympathetic to their cause because Joe Pofacci was not a good boss. He made guys around him who were family or people around him who were really close. But everybody else was hurting. And then they got tired of him. He was charging him dues every month. And the guy was a multi-millionaire, didn’t need to dine, but he would squeeze up a nickel. People got fed up, especially when you’re in the street and you’re breaking your ass and doing bad things. And you want to bring money home and you’ve got families. This guy’s squeezing every nickel out. So some guys were sympathetic to the Gallicors. You know, they wound up killing Frankie Schatz. And they were supposed to get a piece of the book. It was a big book, Making a Business Down Red Hook. They didn’t get it because Pafaci gave it to someone else. They got screwed everywhere they could. So they reached out to other families and tried to get some support. First, the support was to grab Pafaci and Thomas to change his ways and to be more generous, to go against them. They were just trying to get support, but it didn’t happen. And they wound up breaking away and going to war. And they kidnapped some guys. You know, they had the idea of kidnapping some guys and try to get to a table to make amends. But that didn’t work. Larry and Joey had a big argument over it. Joey wanted to kill a couple of guys and send their bodies back. Larry, the diplomat, said that it wouldn’t help.

[22:02] That you should just negotiate it. Paffacci makes a deal to get them released that they’re going to sit down at a table and they wouldn’t get what they think was theirs.

[22:12] And he reneged on that and just put a hit on all the Gallup boys. Meanwhile, Joe Paffacci, in the middle of it, he was afraid of the Gallup. That’s my opinion. When it went down, he ran to Florida when everybody was getting kidnapped because he was one of the guys supposed to get kidnapped.

[22:28] But he took off right away because they smelled something going on. He checked himself in a hospital, and I think it was in Florida. When they released all the prisoners, they just went back and forth until he dropped dead of cancer. Joe Colombo took over, and his underboss, Zotto, took over. They were still feuding back and forth, and a lot of bodies were coming up. Then Joe Colombo took over because Magalito died of a heart attack, and they made peace. Joey Gallo wound up going to jail and never recognized Columbo as a boss. So I think from 63 on, it was pretty quiet until Joey got out of jail again. And when Joey got out of jail, he went right back to arguing with the Columbo’s now, with Paffacci’s now the Columbo’s. And that’s how 1970, it all broke out again. 70, 71, broke out again, the argument. Joey couldn’t get along. Joey wanted to be boss.

[23:28] That was his and mine. They say he was nuts. He was a smart, nutty guy, but he was a real tough guy, had no fear. And he was one sided. That’s it. He didn’t believe that Colombo should have. And that’s why they went back to war again. The main drag up through Red Hook. The block where the galos hung out was very remote. It was against the docks and then to the expressway, which is built in a big ditch. Not the sort of place where anybody’s just passing through. If you ended up on the block, that was your destination.

[24:04] The stores, buildings, and apartments were all family for years and years and years. I think that Gallos had, between Columbia and Van Brunt, owned three themselves, and their mother owned one, and another crew member had another building, and Armando had another building. I mean, we then got Joulos. They had, you know, when I got there, there was only like 20 houses left on the block or 15 houses. There was a lot of, you know, knocked down buildings already. But probably owned, if there was 20, we owned 15 of them. So it was really a private block as far as owning everything. It was pretty much private down there. You’re only going down there if you’re visiting a family member or a longshoreman in or having lunch. A lot of longshoremans went down there because they were two, three places. So that’s how the stores originally opened up because they would serve lunch to longshoremans.

[24:56] A funny story. you in the late 70s, my very first apartment after college was at Henry and Sackett. I lived above Mark’s Pharmacy with my girlfriend at the time, who’s still my wife. And we were told on the QT, don’t go on the other side of the expressway. It was rough on that end. It was really rough in those days. It was Spanish and Italian. A lot of Spanish down there at the time. A lot of the stuff coming in because it’s isolated on that side this way. Uh, you had a, a lot of the red hook projects and all that stuff came in that way, cause that was the way to get in and out. So it was a little rough down there, but no one bothered us because everybody know who we were, but you know, other people had problems, you know, and then we policed the area as good as we could. It was rough down there. Talk about the sniper fire.

[25:47] When they shot, I think it was 74. After Joey got killed, it was a lull. They wanted to break up. They didn’t want Albert to be the boss of the crew. So they put my father up to be the boss of the crew. My father says, it’s Gallo’s name. It’s his family, a crew.

[26:07] So about seven, eight guys broke away, really tight guys that went through the war in this first war. But after Joey got killed, they were still there. But then they want to break away. So about seven guys broke away and they went back to Colombo. And they started feuding over who owned the numbers, who owned the clubs, you know, bookmaking. Because everything was entwined so deep over those years. These guys started shooting each other. On the corner of Union Street and Columbia is, you know, facing our block. So we had a Frankfort guy in the corner of Columbia and Van Brunt that we used to eat Frankforts on the corner all day. Punchy Ileano, Frank Ileano, was on the corner, and they wound up shooting him from a rooftop on the corner of Union Street. He lived. About a month later, Louis the Syrian, Nubella, was on the same corner, getting a hot dog. Cypress shot him, and he lived, though. Not that the shooting did them any good. No, because both guys lived. The shooter got away. In between that, the Gallo crew tried to kill two of the guys twice, and they wound up living too. But they got some other guys in between. I think they got Tarzan and the Blue Beetle. I think they killed them in between. And…

[27:31] Then it quieted down for a while because the gallows wound up talking the chin and breaking away from the Colombo family and going with the Gennarisi family. In between a year, everything was nice and quiet. Sniper again, but this time on the block across the street from Aurora’s club, shoots another gallow member, Stephen Borrello. It makes a stink that you can’t do that. So they call in Chiraz, which is Jerry Baciano, and Mooney. They called the guys in, and Mooney ran away, but Chiraz came in, and they told him that you got to stop, and everything will be okay. They just called him one day on Bond Street, and they wound up killing him, Chiraz. And they sent a message to Smoke, Mooney, that it’s over with now, They didn’t come back in because Mooney ran. And when Mooney came in, they killed him too. So they killed both of them for that shooting. And after that, it was all over. Everybody else just disappeared. And those seven, eight guys, they went, well, who went with Bananos? Who went with the Colombos? Who went with the Gambinos?

[28:47] And it was really over then. After the Mooney killing, all that Gallo stuff was completely finished.

[28:56] And i was 76 during those years i read him he actually was a guy testified against a real bad killer in chicago harry aleman and a guy ran with him testified that aleman used to sit around the social club and they’d have these headlines like the gallo murder and other real flamboyant killings on the streets aleman used to say well they know how to do it in new york that’s the way I want to do it next time just run in a restaurant and make a big splash and he did a couple of those so, that’s why they made that movie the guy in the conchus straight it was more guys wounded than killed a lot of guys were killed but a lot more guys got shot and died, they went after Carmine twice and twice and they missed Carmine it was crazy times in the mob world there was some.

[29:51] I have a question from the movies. Does every little corner store and bodega have numbers and maybe take some sports bets? Is everybody lined up in a neighborhood like that? Downtown, where I’m from, I’m not your mom and pop place. They would make like Romeo’s and they make sandwiches and coffee. But if you had a bookmaker that would sit there, everybody would know to go there and see Sonny or Mike the Owl and put their bets in. A lot of those people, legitimate people, they were hardworking Italians there for two, three generations already that ran these grocery stores and food markets and Italian restaurants. They weren’t all criminals and gangsters. There was a lot of very legitimate, hardworking Italians at the time. But all the people knew that there was some kind of bookmaker be right there to take their bets. Yeah. Okay. He was always sitting right underneath the TV set. That’s right. That’s how you could find them.

[30:50] Interesting. So I don’t know. You got any other stories that you really liked out of this book? Something that you guys really liked, either one of you? I mean, the whole book is interesting, man. I mean, it goes for… It is. It is. It’s a whole mixture of colorful characters and situations out of this one little neighborhood. Frank likes to say that it’s like the Old West and that they were like cowboys. And one of the things I found that made that seem even more true were the feral dogs for more than a hundred years there were wild packs of dogs in Red Hook, they moved like rats, they skittered when they ran and they could fit through tiny spaces, and they’d look suspicious and guilty all the time and scary, well you know a couple of times they would tree a guy, they’d have to climb the tree and they’d be at the bottom of the tree, bark at him and it wasn’t until they built Ikea.

[31:43] Which is the big furniture store that they finally came in and rounded up all the wild dogs and disposed of them in some humane way. For hundreds of years, there are reports that, you know, you don’t go down to the end of Conover Street because you’re liable to get coyote-like animals coming at you. But they weren’t coyotes. They were dogs that had never known the touch of man. And it went on for decades and decades. Great. Red Hook was only known in the 70s to the 90s to buy drugs. That was the only reason to go down Red Hook. There was no restaurants. It was two bars in the whole neighborhood and the boys ran them. But everybody went to Red Hook to buy drugs. That was it. Two places in the city, 125th Street in Lexington and Red Hook. That’s where you got your heroin. I knew the big pot bill is there. They had storefronts and everything, and that was a place to go. You had to go to the hook. But that’s what it was known for. No one went to the hook. You couldn’t get a decent person and go on the other side of that highway in the 70s and 80s.

[32:50] That’s kind of the ultimate gentrification of a neighborhood put in Ikea. It’s like, oh, my God. It’s gone now. All the color is gone now. Yeah, Red Hook’s probably nicer now than it ever was. And there’s still some sections that are sketchy. Well, they threw money into it and tried to rebuild it. I think because it is isolated, that hurt them. They were thinking that if they threw the money in and put the restaurants and rebuild, because there’s a lot of nice homes down there and warehouses you can convert and stuff like that. But it’s still so isolated that you’re just preying on what you have down there. And I think that’s what hurt it. They’re running cruise ships out of there now. I happened to take a cruise that started and ended in Red Hook, and it was almost impossible to get home. I was maybe six, seven miles from my home when I got off the ship. It took hours because getting 5,000 people out of one exit and one entrance to a neighborhood took forever. No car service down there. There’s no cabs down there. You couldn’t get it. There was never a yellow can down there. Hard to get in now.

[34:02] Interesting. Well, public transportation, I guess they got left out of the public transportation network in New York city. Mainly you can get anywhere on public transportation in New York city.

[34:13] I think you had one bus to Columbia Street, up in Columbia. That was it. There was a lot of blocks there in Red Hook on that side. So you had a little hike to get to that bus and get off that bus to where you live. The nearest train was the F train. They built the tracks so high over the neighborhood that it’s about a six-flight walk up to the tracks. That’s the highest elevated train station in the country?

[34:37] You could get a nosebleed trying to catch the F train there. Another wall between the rest of the world and red hook and they were right on the border of the split huh it’s really interesting neighborhood well guys the book is red hook Brooklyn mafia ground zero get that i’ll have links in the show notes to buy that book and actually i have links to both frank and michael’s author page on amazon because they’ve got a lot more books out there that i know all you guys would be interested in several of them and we’re going to do more shows with both of you guys, I really appreciate y’all coming on the show. It’s been most enlightening. I really like that Chicago Red Hook connection. I didn’t exactly understand that before I started looking at your book and then talking with you guys.

[35:24] It lets you know how this thing developed and ends up in Kansas City and Cleveland and Milwaukee. Every one of these Midwest families came out of that, except that little influence out of New Orleans, but primarily right out of Red Hook and those areas down there on the docks.

[35:44] Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So look out for motorcycles when you’re out on the street. If you have a problem with PTSD, if you’ve been in the service, make sure you go to the VA website and get that hotline number. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, our friend, former Gambino prospect or proposed member, Anthony Ruggiano is a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida, and he has a hotline on his website. I appreciate everybody tuning in and I really appreciate Frank DiMatteo and Michael Benson coming on the show. Thanks a lot, guys. Thank you, Gary. Bye, Gary.

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Transcript [0:00]Well, Hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there back here in the studio of gangland wire. This is retired Kansas city police intelligence unit, Sergeant Gary Jenkins with another show. We’re going back into the thirties today. You know, you leave deal with these seventies gangsters a lot and, and, uh, sixties gangsters, uh, mafia, but this is going to go back to the thirties and the days of the bank robbers, the Midwest bank robbers. I mean, they, they caught out at got a wide swath across this country and we have a book by john aller gangster hunters and here it is and you’ll you’ll find links in the show notes to where you can find that book he does a great job of telling many of the unknown stories and the known stories in great detail of the famous bank robbers dillinger and uh pretty boy floyd and and uh the ma barker gang and and machine gun Kelly and all those great nicknames. So welcome, John. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for having me. [1:02]John, how did you get into this? Tell us a little bit about your history. I was a lawyer for many years, and then I retired from active practice to pursue a writing career or writing avocation, I would call it. And I’ve concentrated on nonfiction, American history, biography and true crime I’ve done, this is my third true crime book which I find a genre that interests me what I found out is that while all the bank robbers Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Babyface Nelson, etc Bonnie and Clyde in particular have been written about many times over and movies made of them and everybody’s heard of them very few people have heard know anything about the um kind of anonymous fbi agents who chased and captured and in some cases killed them of course everybody knows j edgar hoover yeah um but hoover by design kept his agents anonymous because he wanted all the glory of the fbi to flow Well, to him, love. I have read about that. I understand that Melvin Purvis actually was almost forced out of the service because J. Edgar Hoover was so jealous that he was getting all those headlines up in Chicago. [2:31]Yeah, Melvin Purvis is probably the only FBI agent, field agent from that era who people might recognize the name. Of course, he’s been played in a number of movies, most recently in the Johnny Depp movie, Public Enemies. Johnny Depp played Dillinger and Christian Bale played Melvin Purvis, although it wasn’t a very historically accurate portrayal. Well, I mean, Christian Bale is this kind of handsome, big guy. And Melvin Purvis was this little, thin, wispy guy, 5’7″, 130 pounds. [3:11]So other than Purvis, probably most of the guys, FBI guys in my book, other than Purvis and Hoover, the general public has never heard of. And so that attracted me to telling their story. And what I did is I tracked down a bunch of living relatives of these FBI agents, children, grandchildren, nephews, grandnephews, et cetera. And surprisingly, a surprising number were still living. So I would interview them and, you know, they had family stories and in some cases, photos of guys that had never been published before. And there’s a number of those in the book. And then I used a lot of raw FBI files to do the research because there are voluminous FBI files on all these cases. [4:08]And it takes a long time to sift through them. They’re very lengthy reports, single-spaced, 20 pages or more. So I had to read all those. But that’s how I went about it. Yeah, I see. Here’s one. Johnny Madala, what do you call a briefcase agent? A briefcase agent, that’s like an agent that just has a briefcase, not a gun particularly. I know those early guys, they didn’t carry guns. [4:38]That’s kind of a theme of the book is a lot of these early FBI agents entered the bureau, you know, thinking that they were going to have desk jobs. It was kind of a white collar job. You know, they would maybe investigate antitrust violations and bank fraud and that kind of thing. Perceived to be sort of a cushy job which paid relatively well during the depression and a lot of these guys were lawyers and they couldn’t really get jobs as lawyers so they went into government service and and then all of a sudden this war on crime broke out in 1933 these guys were pressed into service and you know they instead of a briefcase now they had a tommy gun in their hands, which they had never shot. A lot of these guys had never fired a weapon in their life and never been fired at by anyone. Now, some were, particularly the guys from the South, were a little more gun sappy than the Southwest. But the younger guys, they did not sign up for For this tour of duty. But yet they got thrown into it. And they were fairly inexperienced. In the beginning. And they didn’t have a lot of technological. [5:59]Wherewithal. They didn’t have two-way radios. They didn’t have cell phones. Obviously. They didn’t have night vision goggles. It was just their own wits. And bravado. That they had to develop. To take on these gangsters. Who were much more heavily armed, had faster cars. [6:22]Elaborately planned getaways, which were much better planned than the FBI raids. So all of the deck was stacked in favor of the gangsters in the beginning. Yeah, really. Tell me something. Did you stumble across this story? I seem to remember this, that at least one of these guys, I think it was… [6:44]Who was arrested down in New Orleans? Was that- Alvin Karpis. Alvin Karpis. Did J. Edgar Hoover tell them to wait until he got there so he could be part of the arrest team or something? There’s some story I remember about that. Yes, yes. He had been embarrassed in Congress because he testified at a hearing. He was seeking more money for the FBI. And one of the senators who didn’t like the FBI, there were a lot of people who were who thought that the FBI was kind of this national police force and they didn’t like that. And so anyway, so this Senator was grilling Hoover and he asked him, you know, have you ever personally made an arrest? And Hoover had to admit, he had to admit, no, I mean, Hoover was a desk man, his entire life. He spent his 24 seven at his desk in Washington. [7:38]And he was embarrassed by that. And so he came out of the meeting and he told his people, because he knew they were closing in on alvin karpis yeah um and i think he knew at some point that that karpis was going to be arrested in new orleans and he said i want to be there for that, so he flew to new orleans and um he was in on the arrest he didn’t personally make the arrest although he kind of um allowed the press to portray him as the guy who arrested um so it was it was sort of at by that time alan karpus was public enemy number one that was a term they used back then for the the most wanted and all the other public enemies number one had been killed or i guess killed uh before that karpus was the last one standing and so hoover was, christened Public Hero No. 1. So Public Hero No. 1 arrested Public Enemy No. 1. That was kind of the legend. [8:43]They did not expect to take Karpis alive because every other… Public enemy number one, Dillinger, baby face Nelson, pretty boy Floyd had, you know, died in a shootout. They figured Karpis would be the same. So when they arrested him almost by accident, they didn’t. He came out of his hotel or his rooming house. Nobody had any handcuffs. They hadn’t brought any handcuffs along because they didn’t expect to take him alive. And so one of the agents, a guy named Buck Buchanan, took off his necktie and handed it to one of the other agents. And they used the necktie to tie Karpis’ hands. And Hoover actually asked the agent to send him that necktie for his exhibit room in Washington, which he did, although it’s been lost to history over the years. It disappeared. But anyway, that was a little tidbit of the Karpis arrest. [9:47]Interesting. Now you talk about how they didn’t even have as good of plans. The story of the Battle of Little Bohemia, I’ve done that not too long ago, so we don’t need to really belabor it. But that was such a good example of they just jumped in their cars and headed north and they got in a plane and headed north and got up there and then borrowed another guy’s car and drove out to that lodge and then shot up all the wrong people at the start. Right, right. I mean, there was no plan. [10:20]Well, the problem was that they got there that night. You’ve probably covered this but i’ll just briefly touch on it they got there that night and they knew that dillinger and his gang were holed up in the little bohemia hotel lodge yeah and um they were planning to raid it the next morning but then they got word filtered out to him through a an informant that no dillinger had changed his plans and he was leaving that night So they either had to strike then or miss him. So they decided to go ahead with the thing and it was too dark. And so there was confusion in the darkness and they ended up killing an innocent civilian by accident. And one of the agents got killed by baby face Nelson. And it was a fiasco. And after that, a lot of people thought that Hoover would lose, lose his job. [11:22]And per Melvin Purvis, um, who was in charge of the operation, they thought that he would lose and should lose his job. It had been botched so badly. So that was a very tenuous time for the FBI. And, um, uh, Instead, what happened, there was a public uproar and Congress passed some laws to strengthen the FBI and made things illegal that had not been illegal before, such as killing a federal officer, which was not a federal crime back then. [11:54]They stumbled and bumbled around quite a bit in those early days. Yeah. One thing I will say, they extracted a price. They made Babyface Nelson pay for killing that agent up there. Oh, yes. There’s a little bohemian out there, and that’s a story in itself. Now, you cover that from the FBI’s angle particularly. [12:14]Can you tell us about that, killing the baby-faced Nelson? That was in Barrington, Illinois, which is a little south of, a couple hours south of a resort in Wisconsin named Lake Como. A couple of agents were staking out a hotel in Lake Como where they had been where they were told Babyface Nelson was going to show up anytime. [12:39]And he did show up. They didn’t recognize him at first. And they thought about taking a shot at him. They decided not to because they weren’t really sure that it was him. But anyway, he got away from the hotel. They did get his license plate number and he was with another one of his gang members and with his wife, Helen Gillis. And so the word got back to Chicago, the Chicago office, that they had spotted Baby Phelous Nelson and had his license plate number. So a couple agents went out in a car searching for him and the license plate number. They did see the car. They started to follow him. He turned around, started following them. And um and then another car um came by and there was a gun battle and one two of the fbi agents were killed by baby face nelson in that gun battle in barrington illinois but baby face nelson was also killed or mortally wounded in the same same battle so um he he holds the the distinction baby face nelson of having killed more fbi agents than any other person in history it’s three one at liberal bohemia and two in this battle at uh great barrington he was a. [14:07]Basically a psychopath i mean he was a cold-blooded killer and he hated cops yeah you know i i think back to those times and these guys all uh the criminals were carrying uh they were raiding these uh armories these uh national armed armies and they were getting these bars and that you buy these colt monitor uh sub thompson submachines gun basically although Colt made their own version of it, you could buy them at a drug store. I mean, at a hardware store. Guns were really available to these guys, and the FBI had just started carrying guns. Yes, yes. The BAR was the favorite of Clyde Barrow. He preferred it to the Thompson submachine gun because a BAR could cut through an armored car. [15:03]It was just much more powerful. And Clyde, he cut his down. It was a big, the BAR is a Browning automatic rifle. It’s a big thing. Clyde sawed his off so that he could hold it on his shoulder by a strap. And then the Colt Monitor, which was kind of also a shortened version of the BAR, became the first FBI fighting rifle. A couple of years later, Hoover wasn’t interested in it at first, and then he saw what it could accomplish, so he bought a bunch of them. There’s only about 120 ever manufactured, and if you can find one today, they’re worth over $100,000. Wow, that’s a collector’s item. Wow. Yeah. Anyway. Anyway. [15:53]Interesting yeah the gun the gun that’s a whole story in itself i just i was browsing around i found a whole website that’s just dedicated to the guns of these 30s gangsters and and yeah you know the the colt the 1911 colt 45 and and some of the different guns that that they used back then they were popular with them and believe me the local cops especially were totally outgunned by these guys oh yeah i mean they had they had they had old six shooters you know yeah and um uh baby face nelson had what they called a baby machine gun it was it was basically a um uh a pistol which fired automatic and he got it custom made by a gun dealer down in texas who serviced a lot of these um uh criminals and uh that’s the gun he used to kill the the uh agent at the bohemia oh really did you have a picture did you have a picture of that in your book yes yes i remember i was looking over those pictures yeah i’ll make sure i get that picture up boy that’s interesting, yeah i have a picture of the colt monitor which is a version of the bar and the thompson machine submachine gun and the and the baby machine gun uh that babyface nelson favored. [17:14]As well as pictures of some of the getaway cars. The gangsters had these pretty fast getaway cars. There was one called the Essex Terraplane, which Dillinger liked. And Clyde Barrow had a big Ford V8, powerful Ford V8. Now, I say these were big, powerful. In fact, the gangster cars back then, while they were faster than the law enforcement cars, they’d be blown off the road by a Toyota family, Toyota Corolla today, which could go 120 probably. Probably these gangster cars really couldn’t go more than 80. And if you were on the roads back then, the dirt roads, you know, you were risking being run off, being run off the road if you went more than 45 or 50. So they looked very pretty and they still do the antiques, but they really weren’t that vast other than relative to the law enforcement vehicles. [18:20]You know you know another famous story uh why don’t we talk about this a little bit and it’s partly because at least when i was young there was a movie an old movie that played about the ma barker gang and there’s this famous film clip where she’s like got this machine gun she’s screaming out the wind and she’s fighting tooth and nail and shooting with back and forth these fbi agents which these guys all battled with the agents nobody hardly anybody gave up only machine Sheen Gun Kelly, as far as I can tell, gave up. I don’t think anybody else gave up. I think that’s right. Karpis gave up, but that’s only because he was surrounded. [18:59]But Ma Barker, she’s an interesting case because Hoover manufactured this myth about her that she was the criminal mastermind of the Barker-Karpis gang. She had four sons. They were all criminals. two of them uh doc barker and fred barker were the main barker gang uh guys and they teamed up with alvin karpus um to form the barker karpus gang but hoover said she was a diabolical you know um funeral mastermind that wasn’t true another gangster said that she couldn’t plan a breakfast um uh she was basically this woman from the ozarks uh who listened to hillbilly music and uh i guess you call it hill country music is the more euphemistic term but um um and she liked to play bingo and listen to amos and andy on the radio which is a popular old show um but. [20:01]She did know that her sons were criminals, and she helped them out. She helped them get parole, and she willingly accepted their money to buy fur coats and the like and jewelry. So, but anyway, she finally gets holed up, H-O-L-E-D, holed up in this house with her son, Fred, in Florida, near Ocala, Florida. And the FBI tracked her down there, tracked her and her son. Uh son they surrounded the place and and ordered her to come out and fred barker her son you know with their hands up um they didn’t come out ordered them again they still didn’t come out and then all of a sudden these machine gun fires started coming out of an upper window at the FBI agents. And it turned out that machine gun fire and rifle fire started coming from multiple windows in this house. And so it couldn’t have all been coming from one person because it was simultaneous shooting. [21:22]And I believe, and I think most historians agree, agree that she was doing some of the shooting with a machine gun. Now, I don’t think she was particularly adept with a machine gun. I’m not sure she’d ever fired one before, but she decided she was going to go down with her son in a blaze of glory. And there’s a photo that was taken by an FBI agent after she was killed and then her son was killed in an upstairs bedroom. And it shows Shows her with a machine gun at her side, next to her hands. And I have that photo in the book as well. So it’s not been seen. It’s a fairly rare photograph. I got it from the son of one of the FBI agents. So she wasn’t a criminal mastermind, but she wasn’t this innocent old lady either. He was somewhere in between. [22:24]And, um, I, you know, I think you have to go back and realize that these guys, most of these guys had been, um, were murderers and they knew that if they got caught and put on trial back then, the death penalty was pretty automatic for murder. And, um, so they had nothing to lose. They were gonna, they were not gonna be taken alive if they could help it. So, um, the, the majority of them, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie, obviously, uh, John Dillinger, uh. [23:00]Babyface nelson um and pretty boy floyd were all killed in action and um all of them had been killers and you know they were not they were not going back to jail and they were not going to face the electric chair interesting well these fbi agents says uh did they did the fbi start start recruiting some a different type of person i’ve solved one thing where it looked like that they at least tried to select some ex-policemen some guys that were real street savvy compared to those yes they did that they had they did particularly after the fiasco at little bohemia they brought in some um guys who had been either texas rangers or cops in you know oklahoma or or texas who were good with guns and um they weren’t intellectuals they were not you know law school trained or accountants yeah uh so but but you know their forte was shooting and so they brought some of these guys in um and in fact it was one of them a guy named charles winstead uh who was the man who killed who shot john dillinger in chicago outside the biograph theater. [24:20]Um and a couple other ones um uh doc white he was a he was an ex uh texas ranger if you if you’re familiar if you saw the movie the osage about the osage murder uh murders in um. [24:39]Uh oklahoma killers killers of the killers of the flower moon the martin scorsese movie one of the one the lead uh fbi guy in that movie was a guy named tom white who was an ex texas ranger he’s played by actor jesse pleemans in the movie his younger brother was doc white and doc white was in on some of the later gunfights including the one that uh in which mama barker died um so yes so they brought in some of those guys and they certainly helped um in the final stages of the capture and kill killing of the most vicious of the criminals interesting they must have flown them around the country whenever they thought they were getting some of the the bad guys surrounded or pinned down they must have flown these special guys in like bring in the SWAT team or the HHR, I think they call it now. Yeah. Yeah. [25:40]Yeah. Yeah. But that’s another thing. Back then, there were bulletproof vests, which the agents sometimes wore, but as often or not, they decided, you know, they were too bulky. And so they wouldn’t even wear them into action. And at least a couple of the guys who were killed probably would have survived if they’d had their bulletproof vests on, but they just didn’t use them. Now, the criminals used them when they could. [26:10]And John Dillinger was saved once when a Chicago cop shot him. Not a Chicago, an East Chicago, East Chicago, Indiana cop during a bank robbery. [26:23]Shot Dillinger at point blank range, but it bounced off his bulletproof vest. And, um, so Dillinger lived another several months until he was gunned down, um, by, Without a bulletproof vest outside the movie theater in Chicago. Yeah. I don’t usually wear your, uh, boat proof vest out on a date, I guess. [26:51]Yeah. I never did. I remember when we first got them, uh, and everybody got it, they were a pain. They were hot in the summer. They were bulky. They were hot. And these were a lot lighter and smaller than the, those ones back in the thirties. But yes a lot of guys didn’t wear them for a long time once you start wearing them you’d go into work at night one night i remember going in and i forgot it at home i usually would carry it in because it was real hot i’d carry it in then put it on just before i went out and well i just felt naked all night long it was uh yeah yeah feeling the comfort with that bulletproof vest yeah and And of course they didn’t, it didn’t protect your face. So, but yeah, at least you had a chance. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you’re facing one of those Bars and that, uh, 30 odd six round with, with, with military ammo, with, uh, uh, the, uh, uh, full jacketed, uh, ammo would just go right, cut right through like a knife through butter, man. Yeah. It would not help at all. Yep. Yep. [27:57]Um anyway so that was ma barker and uh she uh um i think shelly winters played i think you’re right i think you’re right iconic image of her battling it out with agents yeah yeah so it’s you know it’s it there’s a kernel of truth in in that yeah movies in which she she did go down firing a machine gun. Now, you know, she didn’t, none of the FBI agents were killed or were even hit in that final battle in Florida. Anyway, so that’s, that’s her. So your book, you deal a lot with the FBI agents. Is there anything else you want to tell us about the FBI agents that, you know, were especially tasked to go after these Midwest bank robbers? Because they were bad. They were the baddest of the bad at that point in time. [28:50]Yeah. Um, I think, I think over time, even the young lawyers and accountants got better at what they did. You know, they, after a while they sort of got the raids down, they got a protocol, they knew how to do it. And I think what they learned over time was that the only way you were going to get these guys was to outnumber them greatly. I mean, they had 20 law enforcement, FBI and police surrounding the Biograph Theater that Dillinger was killed in. There were at least six or seven guys who gunned down Pretty Boy Floyd in a field in Ohio and, Um, a body and Clyde were ambushed by a whole posse. So what they, what they realize is that in a one-on-one or two-on-two battle, they were going to have the short end of the stick versus the criminals who were just better shots and more experienced and ruthless. [30:04]Um, you know, that sometimes the FBI guys would, would, would hold their fire in one One case because one of the gun malls, Babyface Nelson’s wife was in the way, so they didn’t shoot. And the criminals, they had no such inhibitions. [30:25]I should mention that a lot of the book talks about the so-called gun malls. And some of them were pretty interesting. You know, the not just Bonnie Parker, but, you know, Dillinger’s girls and Babyface Nelson’s wife and Pretty Boy Floyd’s girls. And some of them were prostitutes. Some of them were just looking for a good time, you know, kind of a joyride kind of thing. Remember, this was the Depression and it was a pretty bleak time. Time, some of these women, you know, they might be a waitress in a little soup kitchen or diner and, uh, they didn’t make any money. And, and so this guy would come along and he’d flash his jewels and he’d flash his wad of money. And, and they said, Hey, you know, that sounds like a pretty good gig just, you know, um, and, and they would, they would basically scout ahead. They would rent the apartments that were the hideouts they would cook the meals you know and none of them ended up. [31:38]Killed um i don’t believe other than bonnie parker and she was more than a just a sidekick she was actually uh um you know she she actually shot at people so um that’s i talk about that in the but is this it’s kind of a debate through history did bonnie parker actually ever shoot at a law enforcement agent um and the answer is the answer is yes um at least on a couple on that that’s killing the two state troopers that were on motorcycles on i believe it’s dove road down yeah uh just outside of dallas north of fort worth i believe they had a witness that saw her walk up to one of those troopers that was down and and fire a gun into him is that true yeah that good that’s that’s sort of a disputed um story um but what’s not disputed at least from From the FBI’s files and from another, one of the cops who was kidnapped, kidnapped and taken across state lines and finally let out, is that she did pull a gun a couple times on law enforcement agents. [32:53]And interesting, Bonnie and Clyde were not… They were not nearly the big time bank robbers that these other guys, they were, you know, they knocked over gas stations and little grocery stores, you know, for twenty five dollars or forty dollars. But they attained a level of fame and infamy. A lot of it due to those photos that were found. They found some film in one of the places that they had vacated. And of course, they published those throughout the country in the newspapers. That was the famous one with Bonnie smoking a cigar and guns and holding guns against each other. Yeah. Yeah. Now, there was an interesting story that Bonnie, um, uh, when she, when they let go one of their hostages, a cop, um, uh, he said, you know, the newsmen are going to want to interview. Um, what should I tell him? and you know she could have said tell him i didn’t kill that guy back there tell him i didn’t pull a gun did it no what she said tell him i don’t smoke cigars. [34:05]She was she was outraged by that because it was just a playful she didn’t actually smoke she did smoke cigarettes but she didn’t yeah she just posed with a cigar and she was you know enraged that she was viewed as a cigar smoker our egos are fragile egos uh yes yes yeah they were kind of the uh the john gottys of uh of the bank robbers they got all the publicity the rest of the guys didn’t get much and dylan dillinger was not averse to publicity if you remember those pictures he posed for there at the uh jail at crown point jail with the the lady sheriff there and everything. He was not opposed to publicity. [34:48]Oh, yeah, he had his arm around the prosecutor and vice versa. And he was joking with the reporters. And when Hoover saw that photograph, he went ballistic. He thought it was completely inappropriate that these two, that this prosecutor and sheriff, local sheriff, were, you know, chumming around with a killer like John Dillinger. Um uh you know interestingly with both with bonnie and clyde and with john dillinger originally hoover didn’t was not interested in getting involved in chasing those guys he wanted to leave it to the locals but what happened is dillinger’s fame especially after he broke out of that jail with a allegedly with a wooden gun um and bonnie and clyde after they They had killed a number of law enforcement officers there that they became so famous and infamous that Hoover decided, well, if his little agency, which was not that well known and not, and kind of lightly regarded time, if they were going to be perceived as a top notch criminal fighting unit, they had to get involved in going after John Dillinger and, and, and Bonnie and Clyde. Yeah. And the FBI was actually involved heavily in the search for Bonnie and Clyde. They were not there at the final ambush because the guy was. [36:18]Off on off on some other case and there’s some suspicion that that hoover sent him on a wild goose chase so that he couldn’t reap the glory of of the ambush of bonnie because he he was having an affair with the wife with the wife of the district attorney in louisiana and that got back to hoover and hoover thought you know he was going to fire this guy and so he didn’t want to get the glory of Bonnie and Clyde. So Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger, got all the publicity, even though the FBI was intimately involved in helping set up that ambush. [37:01]Interesting. There’s a lot of little stories like that in this book, guys. I’ll tell you what, you need to get this. Gangster Hunter, John Aller, right? Did I get that right? Aller? Yes, yes. All right, John Aller, Gangster Hunter. John, I really appreciate you coming on and telling us these stories and telling guys what’s in this book. And I’ve been looking through it. It’s great. We’ll use some of those pictures. And you guys, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see some of the pictures. They’re interesting pictures that he’s got in his book. It’s almost worth it just for some of the photos and see like that baby machine gun. I’d never heard of that or seen that before. And these are pictures that you got from relatives of the FBI agents, so they’ve never really seen the light of day before, correct? Correct. John, I really appreciate you coming on the show, and I really appreciate you writing this book. It’s going to be a real addition to anybody’s true crime library, and certainly to mine. That’s one advantage of doing this podcast is you can see the books in the background, and that’s just a tenth of what I got. And I give a bunch of them away every once in a while to a friend of mine. So I get a lot of books doing this and they’re great books. And this is a particularly good one on John. You got any last words of wisdom for us? No, I think, I think, um. [38:20]I hope that some of these guys get their final, finally get their due in recognition. You know, they’re not going to become household names, but I think they’re deserving of being remembered by history for really being, you know, brave for doing this stuff when they were not really trained or qualified to do it. Yeah, really. But they did it, but they did the job nonetheless. [38:47]Yeah, yeah. And they got their men. men in the end they got their men you know when uh one last story by me i used to work with the fbi a lot when i was in intelligence they’d always send their guys their their intelligence their mafia investigators over to work with us to get a feel for the city and what was going on you know who was who and where things were so we’d always take them down to union station and show them the bullet holes in the wall and say this is where the first fbi agent got killed so remember that’s true That’s true. That’s true. And that’s a big episode in my book, too. I know you’ve covered it in another episode of your podcast, but there’s a historical debate, which I don’t think is much of a debate anymore, as to who were the criminals at Union Station in Kansas City. And it’s positive that Vern Miller was one of them there’s some question over who the others were but I think it’s pretty clear that Babyface Nelson Pretty Boy Floyd was there and his sidekick Adam Ricchetti they convicted Adam Ricchetti on pretty slim evidence but. [40:10]You know, they wanted heads after that Union Station massacre. Somebody wanted a head. Somebody had to pay. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think Ricchetti was he was not guilty of the crime that he was convicted of and executed for. I do believe he was there, whether he fired any shots or whether he was just as a lookout or getaway car driver or or some people say he was too drunk to take the drunk sober enough. But I think where, where Floyd was, Richetti was, Richetti was always at Floyd’s side. And I can’t, I can’t believe Floyd would have gone there without Richetti. [40:52]No. And, and Richetti’s fingerprints were on a beer bottle at Floyd’s house. Floyd been staying in. So those little clues, forensic clues like that would leave me believe that, that that’s, as you said, that’s exactly. And and ricchetti had a he had no alibi you know they asked him afterwards uh you know where did you go after that he couldn’t remember um he couldn’t remember where he went and why it was just it was it was consciousness of guilt anyway all right um okay john aller gangster hunters great book john i really appreciate you coming on the show okay thank you enjoyed it well guys You know, I like to ride motorcycles, so don’t forget, watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website. [41:43]And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, go to Anthony Ruggiano’s website or go and find his hotline number or find him down in Florida. [41:53]And if you have a problem with gambling, that’s that way in 800 bets off. So that’s all the, uh, public service announcements I have, uh, you know, don’t forget to like and subscribe. And check this book out uh gangster hunters and don’t forget to give me a review if you think about it if you’re on apple podcast and i’ve got some stuff for sale and we take donations on my website gangland wire and i got a couple movies out there brothers against brothers uh savella sparrow war and gangland wire on amazon you can rent them for a dollar 99 and and tell your your friends about us and keep coming back and listens every week because we get a lot of good stories on here so thanks guys.

T. J. English begins by sharing his journey into crime journalism, explaining his unique perspective on crime writing as a means to explore broader social themes, from the pursuit of the American Dream to the stories of marginalized communities in America. He explains how organized crime can act as a lens for understanding cultural assimilation and survival strategies across generations, pointing out that many immigrant communities, such as the Irish and Italians, were historically pushed toward illegal activities as a means of survival.

The discussion then turns to the Cuban drug trade in America, especially during the cocaine boom of the 1980s. English highlights key players like Willie Falcon and Sal Magluta, who used political connections and resources to pioneer cocaine distribution networks. The conversation explores how Los Muchachos, a Cuban drug trafficking group, established a stronghold in the U.S. by strategically lowering prices and expanding cocaine’s reach, setting the stage for explosive demand.

Throughout the episode, English contrasts Los Muchachos’ tactics with those of other criminal organizations, particularly noting their reliance on loyalty and community ties over violence. This approach, forged through the shared experiences of exile, helped them maintain unity and discipline in their operations.

Jenkins and English also discuss the evolution of the cocaine market, from its glamorous early days to the more violent era marked by the rise of crack cocaine in the late 1980s, which reshaped public perceptions and spurred aggressive law enforcement responses. T. J. English explains how these shifts pressured Los Muchachos to adapt, prompting alliances with Mexican cartels to continue thriving in an ever-changing landscape.

Tune in to this episode for an in-depth look at the history, culture, and operations behind the Cuban drug trade, and how organized crime continues to reflect the broader social dynamics at play in America. Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

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Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here

[0:02] in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective, a later sergeant. Now, I’ve got this podcast going, Gangland Wire, and we have another guy that I was just talking to TJ a little bit. I picked up a book called The West years ago before I even thought about doing a podcast or any of this entertainment business, and I was entranced by that book, The Westies. It’s about the Irish mob in Manhattan in New York City. Now they ended up working with the Gambinos and that’s a page turner. He’s got a new one out here that I’ve been going through it. I just got it the other day and it is a page turner too. So it’s TJ English. Welcome, TJ. My pleasure. Great to be here. All right. So you are the man when it comes to reporting on the mob. There’s a few of you guys. You know, Nicholas Pelleggi has got Las Vegas sewed up and Anthony DiStefano, he’s got New York sewed up. But I tell you what, when it comes to Cuba, especially with your trilogy, your Cuban trilogy, you’ve got that sewed up. You are the man in that. And you’re the man as far as the Irish mob is concerned to me. So I really am excited about doing this interview with you and meeting you. You want, you know, TJ, you won more book awards and been on the New York Times bestseller list. that I can’t even count them all. I don’t know how many there are.

[1:29] You know, let’s talk just a little bit about, I guess, where you came from, how you got into this. How did you get into this true crime writing and what is it that attracts you?

[1:40] Well, you know, I started as a journalist, and for me as a journalist, crime was kind of the ultimate calling. It was what requires the greatest skills from a journalist. It’s a subject that nobody wants you to write about, especially the people who are engaged in criminal activity in particular.

[2:03] And it would seem to be a subject that’s impossible to get at. And that, of course, was the challenge, is the challenge that most any journalist should find alluring on one level or another. I always did. And it requires entering into worlds that I don’t know personally. I’m not a criminal. I’ve never lived a criminal life. I’ve never made what I would call a poor life choice to choose crime as a way of life. I’ve never done that. But I’m fascinated by it, and I’m fascinated to hear from people in that world about why they made those choices. So I started to follow that path early in my journalism career. I guess what led me to the writing of the books, and if I do have a distinctive quality as a crime writer, it’s my desire to take criminal stories and place them in a historical and cultural context that actually elevates the stories, makes them about something more than just the nuts and bolts of that particular story. And this is why I’ve chosen ethnic stories of the Irish and Cubans. I wrote a book about a Vietnamese gang. I’ve written about.

[3:23] Organized crime in America from many different ethnic points of view. And to me, it’s so fascinating because ultimately all of these stories are about one thing, the pursuit of the American dream, the pursuit of the American dream by individual people or by groups of people, the belief that you can carve out a path for yourself in the United States. If you have to do that on the so-called wrong side of the law, then so be it. It’s an avenue of success. And so I find it to be an inexhaustible topic. Once I learned that I could write contemporary versions of this, modern stories, but I could also go back in history and write historical, books, like a book I wrote called Havana Nocturne, which was about the era of the mob in Cuba in the 1950s. I wrote a book called Paddywhack, which was a big sweeping history of the Irish-American underworld in America. Once I learned that you could do contemporary and historical versions of this subject matter, I realized that there was really no end to the possibilities of examining this subject from all these different perspectives.

[4:42] Yeah interesting i’m glad the way you your view of this genre if you will because i like i always if i do a talk and it talks are in kansas city about the mafia in kansas city and of course it’s all italian last names and i always remind people that you know when italians first got here like any immigrant when they first get to this country they’re squeezed out they are not welcomed into to the economy and the jobs, you know, but when the Irish got here, the English didn’t really want them here, you know, Irish, no Irish need apply and that kind of thing. When the Italians got here, you know, they were darker, they spoke another language and the Irish had all the good jobs sewed up, you know, all the government, the police and the fireman’s jobs and the decent businesses. And so they kept the Italians forced, really squeezed out. And, you know, when they, when people come up from south of the border today, people complain about that, but you You’ve got these bright young guys that are looking to live the American dream. And they’re, you know, because of language barriers, many times they not, they’re not accepted in and it’s hard for them to get a foothold. So you’re a bright guy.

[5:52] You’re bold and you can’t get a foothold anywhere else, you can get a foothold in crime. So I really like hearing that somebody’s taking that into consideration. It’s much more than that. Oh, no, listen, it’s part of the American process. It’s part of the American process of assimilation. And it is as American as apple pie.

[6:13] Virtually every ethnic group in the United States has gone through some version of this. We think of traditional organized crime as Italian and Irish and Jewish, perhaps, simply because those were the ethnic groups that controlled the criminal underworld at the time of prohibition in the 1920s, the legal boost, which was the biggest criminal racket to ever take place in the United States, in America, up to narcotics. And so now Now it’s Cubans and Colombians and Mexicans involved in that criminal business. But it’s the same process. It’s eerie in its similarities. It’s led me to the conclusion that there’s something very American about it, that it is part of the American process. And so people oftentimes will ask me, don’t you get tired of writing about organized crime? And that’s an easy answer. No, because organized crime to me is an inexhaustible topic. It can be, it’s like a prism you hold up to the light and you can look at it from many different angles. There’s so many different angles. I feel that I’m just writing about American culture and American society from a particular point of view, from the point of view of the gutter, perhaps.

[7:32] But to me, it’s as relevant and a lot more interesting than writing about sports or politics or entertainment. Yeah.

[7:41] You know, and speaking of politics now, this most recent book and your last one, The Corporation, all revolves around the political problems between the United States and Cuba and Castro. And you really bring that into this last trilogy. You know, you start with the mob in Cuba and then the communists take over. Castro takes over and people, refugees from Castro, then come in, in your book, the corporation, you deal with that. And that was Bolida and gambling and some narcotics. But now you get into the big money. It’s just like prohibition, just like alcohol. Cocaine became the way for somebody to really make it big. You’re retelling the story, the real story behind the movie Scarface. It seems to me like in this last kilo. So this third-year trilogy about organized crime along our southern borders, and it includes Mexicans, too, I noticed in this last Kilo episode.

[8:43] And it’s fascinating. It’s really fascinating. You know, I noticed you use a lot of the usual sources, you know, cops and police reports and reporters and newspaper articles and all that. But you also were able to talk to our hero of this story, Willie Falcone. And I believe it was Sal, all of a sudden I’ve lost his last name. Sal Magluta.

[9:06] Yeah, did you talk to him too? No, he’s buried away in prison. Okay, but you talked to Willie Falcone and really got how that business worked. Yes, well, not only that, Willie Falcone led me to, the organization was called Los Muchachos, and they basically invented this distribution system of cocaine in the United States, starting in the late 70s and throughout the 80s. And Willie Falcone and Salma Gluta were the leaders of that organization. Willie led me to a lot of others within the organization who had done long prison sentences 12, 15, 20 years. In Willie’s case, it was 27 years behind bars. So most of these men had paid their dues to society and come out on the other side.

[10:00] And because Willie gave me his seal of approval, they were willing to talk to me. You know, I try to do this with all the books that I write, and I get some criticism for this from some people who don’t like it or don’t understand it, and that is, look, I, We can go out and talk to cops and people in law enforcement. And I do that. And I tell their story within the story of the criminal organization. But to me, as a writer and a journalist and an author, the more valuable thing is to try to get the point of view that we don’t know and we don’t hear from very often. And that’s the people who lived it on the criminal side.

[10:41] And so I try to find them and talk to them. I get accused sometimes of glorifying or being overly empathetic and perhaps getting played by the gangsters as sources. I don’t get played. I verify everything I receive. I don’t sit down with a Willie Falcone and interview him and then just put it right down on the page unexamined. I do my due diligence, but I treat criminals as human beings. I start from the basic fact that we’re all human beings. Clearly, they made choices that were misguided choices. In some cases in the criminal world, yes, you find sociopaths and psychopaths, but you also find people like Willie Falcone, who I talked to many, many people about Willie Falcone, and not one person had a bad word to say about Willie Falcone.

[11:35] He had a code. He was a decent human being. He just happened to apply it to this field of endeavor that was criminal activity and was against the law and he paid dearly for it in the end, but a fascinating guy, an interesting guy, and I was lucky that he, he felt that he could trust me and talk to me and lead me to other sources who helped me flesh out this incredible story.

[12:02] You know, and Willie Falcone was the right guy in the right time and in the right place to, and he had some forethought and some, he was prescient, if you will, about the future because cocaine at that point in time, when he first got going was, it was like this little recreational drug that everybody liked. And the movie stars could get it. Just a few people could get it, and he saw that opportunity, and he leaped onto it, it appears to me. Remember, what did he talk about getting started in this business before it was so widespread? He was an early, early adopter.

[12:43] Well, he stumbled into it, really. I mean, we got to get into this. It has to do with the politics of the Cuban Revolution and the desire of certain factions within the United States, the CIA in particular, who were part and parcel involved with Cuban exiles in an effort to eliminate Fidel Castro and take back Cuba. And so Willie Falcone comes over as a 19 or 20-year-old kid. I mean, he was 11 when he first came over, but by the time he’s 18 and 19, he’s working construction, And because of his family history of having been kicked out of Cuba, basically by the Castro government, he’s devoting himself to the anti-Castro movement. So he’s showing up at rallies and all the things that young male Cuban exiles would have done in South Florida during this period of the 1960s, we’re talking about. And some leaders of that movement came to Willy Falcone because they recognized his dedication.

[13:47] He was showing up at all the meetings. He and a number of his friends that were also around his age. And some of the older members of that movement came to him and said, hey, would you be willing to help us with a certain operation? Well, that operation was to smuggle weapons to the Contras in Central America, in Nicaragua, because it was believed that, well, if we can’t kill Fidel Castro, because CIA and, And Cuban exiles had been trying to kill Castro for years. That’s all come out in the wash. That’s not conspiracy theory stuff. That’s finally been, those records were released by the CIA that there was a program called Operation Mongoose where they were attempting to assassinate Fidel. And they were failing on a pretty regular basis. And then they decided, well, if we can’t kill Fidel, we can stop the spread of Castroism. The Castro philosophy, there was a great concern in the United States that communism could spread into Central America. And so that was seen as the battlefront.

[14:57] For the war, a dirty covert war of the United States versus communism. It would take place in Central America. So the CIA was arming the Contras, a secret counter group to the Sandinistas and the revolution that was brewing in Nicaragua that had an eerie resemblance to what had taken place in Cuba. And so they come to these young kids and they say, we have a plan of selling cocaine. We can get cocaine from Central America. We can bring it into the United States through pilots who are CIA connected and therefore they won’t be searched or investigated. They can come in as part of a covert operation. We need someone to sell the cocaine. We need someone to open up a market for this thing and create a new market for cocaine. Now we’re talking about 1977.

[15:54] And as you so rightly said, by then cocaine was pretty much just an elite activity for people who had the money to buy it. The idea was to bring in enough cocaine that we could lower the price and make it accessible to people in nightclubs, working class people, to people that wouldn’t have been able to afford cocaine. And so there you have it, the beginnings of the cocaine smuggling business. I’m not the first person to write about this, of course. It has been written about. But I think Falcone gives names. He gives details about the beginnings of this process of bringing cocaine in the United States to sell it and how that was sanctioned by people within the CIA. So it’s pretty fascinating to me, and it’s history that everyone should be aware of. That is the origins of the cocaine business in the United States, all tangled up in politics.

[16:52] Really. And you bring forth the point here that they had this relationship with people who were connected to the CIA and connected to governmental agencies.

[17:03] And so then they realized that they need to corrupt more people. And I remember when the cocaine cowboys and all that kind of got going, we were hearing up here that there was so much bribery and so much graft and so much money flowing around. I mean, when you’ve got millions and millions of dollars, you hand a guy a hundred thousand dollars, you can buy a lot of goodwill. You hand a guy a million dollars and you could buy a whole small police, you know, small county police department or a small city police department. And that was going on. So that’s, you know, and really prohibition that totally corrupted most law enforcement in the United States in the 30s. And now the cocaine wars or the cocaine distribution is starting to corrupt law enforcement all over the United States, but particularly in South Florida. You tell a great story about the mutiny hotel and the sheriff that Willie was buying off down there. Could you elaborate on that mutiny hotel and the sheriff? Yeah. Well, one of the things that they did early on, Los Machachas, is they created their own landing strip in central Florida.

[18:11] And they realized that to do that, they would need to buy off local law enforcement. And it wasn’t difficult because we’re talking about access to money that people working in small town law enforcement could never have dreamed of making in their lifetime, much less all in one or two payments over the course of a month or two months or whatever. So yes, they found a sheriff in the county where they were wanting to open up this landing strip and they bought him off. Actually, he was a deputy sheriff. He was the son of the sheriff at the time, but the actual sheriff.

[18:49] In a totally unrelated crime got murdered and so the son took over as sheriff and now they had the sheriff and this guy was not only in their pocket he was gleefully in their pocket he was dedicated to showing them all the things he could do for them and went at it enthusiastically and created a possibility for them to do that but you know i have to say one of the things as the business business started to boom. It started to boom right away in the late 70s and on into the 80s, because what the Los Muchachos organization discovered was if they could bring the price down to something that was affordable, that it was an incredibly popular drug in the social scene, in nightclubs, everywhere.

[19:41] And within a few years, cocaine became so popular in the United States, It went well beyond the nightclubs. It was being used by professionals, lawyers, doctors, maybe even people in law enforcement, anyone who could get their hands on it. It was kind of the ultimate party drug. And so it boomed. Like the numbers are just phenomenal how quickly it started to grow. It was growing faster than Los Muchachos, Falcón and Los Muchachos, could bring it in to the country. They couldn’t get it fast enough. The demand was above and beyond anything they could meet. So they had to create a system that brought the cocaine to the people. Part of the system was boats, was airplanes. That landing strip in Florida was essential until it was discovered, and they shifted their operation in a different direction. But through all of this, who reminisce about those years, and they’ll tell you, you know, it was kind of ominous. You started to get the feeling that everyone was on the take because judges were on the take. People at all levels of federal and local law enforcement were on the take. It was kind of like invasion of the body snatchers. You were slowly realizing that, that everyone in the system had been corrupted to one degree or another. So it was a daunting and terrifying task, I think, for some people in law enforcement to come to terms with it.

[21:11] Yeah, I noticed you talk about, oh, let’s go back. You described the Mutiny Club or the Mutiny Hotel.

[21:18] Tell the guys about that. Right out of Miami Vice, this place. Everyone wants to hear about the Mutiny. Yeah, the Mutiny. Well, the Mutiny was a hotel and nightclub in Coconut Grove in a very beautiful setting right on the water. And it quickly became kind of the Rick’s Cafe from Casablanca of Miami at a time when Miami was probably the most fascinating criminal universe on the planet. It was at that time in the 60s, 70s, where Cuban exiles and Contras and Narcos and the celebrity world are all sort of crossing paths at the mutiny. The mutiny became the desired place to be. Of course, Willie Falcone and his crew had the best table in the house.

[22:11] And Willie would tell me stories of when they would get word that a big shipment had come in. There was a song they would play. I’m forgetting the song now. But there was a song, like a disco song, in the club. And everyone in the club knew that that song meant that a huge shipment of coke had just landed in South Florida. And the place would go crazy, and people would start coming up to Willie and asking him, hey, is it going to be a good price? Same price as last time. Is it good quality and all that? He said when he was in the mutiny at those moments, he felt like he was at the center of the universe when that would happen. And so there was law enforcement people passing through there. A lot of very well-known local detectives would come into the mutiny. And it was just kind of the cultural center of the cocaine scene as it was exploding in the late 70s and early 80s.

[23:10] Yeah. It was all fun and games for a while. And what’s happened, I noticed in your book, and that happens happened here is people started robbing the drug dealers. And these guys that robbed drug dealers, these are the baddest of the bad. And you even had cops down there were kidnapping drug dealers or their family members. Cause you get, you know, you can make that a hundred thousand or $500,000 score really easily. So that, that kind of the violence started creeping in to this business at that time.

[23:41] I asked Falcone about that a lot because one of the things I noticed about the story of Los Muchachos as I started to get into it was there was little or no violence in the telling of their story. I’m like, Willie, this makes me suspicious. What do you mean? I said, didn’t you guys use violence to discipline your own people, for instance? He’s like, no, we weren’t. We were obviously we were a criminal organization, but we weren’t a criminal organization like that. He said we were a family.

[24:13] We were all Cuban exiles. We all were guys whose parents had been forced out of Cuba. And we’d arrived here at the ages of 10, 11, 12 and had to adapt. We became a tight family. We became a tight community, probably tighter than most people, most ethnic groups are, because it was sort of us against the world. We were reinventing ourselves as Cubans in the United States.

[24:41] And, you know, in South Florida, Cubans hardly really even thought of themselves as Americans. They thought of themselves as Cubans in exile in America, quite a different thing. And so the end result of that was an organization that was airtight, airtight. Nobody talked. Nobody snitched. You couldn’t penetrate that organization. Even the law enforcement people would tell you this. You couldn’t penetrate that organization. Willie’s thing was like, no, we didn’t discipline our people with violence. If somebody did something wrong and got caught doing something wrong, we simply cut them out of our business. And the worst punishment you could do was cut somebody out of our business because we had so much control over the distribution aspect of cocaine. If we cut you out of it, you were shit out of luck, so to speak. And so that was a powerful weapon that they had. So that was fascinating. The other thing was, and Falcone explained this to me, was they were at the level of distribution. They were bringing cocaine from Colombia and later Mexico into the United States and selling it off.

[25:54] So they weren’t at the street level, which you were just talking about, the competition and rivalries at the street level. Drugs killing each other over territory and things like that.

[26:08] Falcone’s group wasn’t doing that. So they were in kind of a privileged position in the cocaine business where they were sort of not affected by all that violence. They were separate from it. They were above it and didn’t have to deal with it much. It was kind of an interesting thing because the violence eventually created a lot of problems for them because it was bringing a lot of heat to the business and of course they had the added problem of pablo escobar who is their main source and pablo escobar of course not only was willing to use violence he waged war against all of colombian society using violence and so it was a violent business. And the muchachos had to deal with an answer for the violence, even though they themselves weren’t really engaged in the violence.

[27:02] And I noticed in your book, and a lot of the guys out here have watched Narcos, the whole story of the arc of Mexican drug business going from marijuana into cocaine. And then they started, they were transporting four people out of colombian and your book i noticed gets into several of the guys felix gallardo and oh the guy that flew the airplanes the masters of the master of the skies your book gets into that so tell the guys just a little bit about how the los machachos then ended up with the the mexican cartels yes well they started with escobar and uh the medellin cartel and they also did business with.

[27:48] The Cali cartel. And they were doing this at the same time without those organizations knowing that they were double dipping, so to speak. And this was part of the secret of their success and why they were making billions. Willie will scoff if you ever bring up a name like Griselda, who’s so well known now in the business. His feeling of that is she was small potatoes compared to what they were doing. In fact, most of the names we know of people in the cocaine business who are small potatoes compared to the dollars, the money that Los Muchachos was generating. They started with the Colombians and they were doing just fine with the Colombians.

[28:29] Business was booming in the 80s. But then the DEA came in and sort of declared war on drugs, starting with Reagan and then Bush. They started investing billions and billions of dollars into the war on drugs. In the mid-80s, they had some successes and shut down the Caribbean as the primary route of smuggling. They made some inroads into those Colombians smuggling kilos through the Caribbean islands into South Florida.

[29:03] So the Los Muchachos had to improvise and come up with a whole new scheme starting about 1985-86. They created an avenue of importation through Mexico. And so they shifted and they were now doing business with all these big Mexican cartels, some of whom you just mentioned, who were the big names at the time. It was really fascinating to me because I got to go from the history of cocaine in Colombia and the Colombian cartels and what cocaine meant to that culture. And now we’re dealing with Mexico and the Mexican cartel. This is like a separate universe.

[29:43] It was like, oh, I’m in the midst of the Latino narcotics universe from Colombia, Mexico, to the Cubans in South Florida. This is when I started to refer to it as the narcosphere because we’re not talking about a specific region or country. We’re talking about a universe of crime that spans boundaries and jurisdictions. It’s its own world. This is one of the things that law enforcement had to bend their mind around, too. You couldn’t pin this all on one country or one region. You had to bend your mind around the fact that this was international economics and that it was playing out on a level that was above and beyond individual law enforcement jurisdictions. It was a challenge. So anyway, Los Muchachos were smart enough to have shifted their mode of transportation through Mexico into Southern California.

[30:45] And then they created distribution networks using semi-trucks that ventured out with the kilos of cocaine from Southern California to Chicago, to New York, to the West Coast, and back to Florida, which they always joked about how nobody would have guessed that they were smuggling cocaine in the United States into Southern California and shipping it to Miami, not the other way around. Yeah. When that took place, that was like a second golden age. That was the late 80s. That was the second golden age cocaine where, I mean, it must have been frustrating in law enforcement where you’re spending millions of dollars and busting your butt. And all of a sudden, after doing this for a decade, they’ve created whole new avenues of importation and the business is booming twice as big as it was before. And so they were pioneering an illicit trafficking business. These were all guys with very little formal education. They were exiles who came here with nothing.

[31:48] And, you know, I was fascinated by the psychology of it. What was it that was driving these guys, other than just money, but what was it that was driving the will to success? Because that’s what it was. And it was a very uniquely Cuban process connected to the humiliation that their parents’ generation went through when they were exiled from Cuba. And many of their parents were professionals, doctors and lawyers that were kicked out of the country and came to the United States and all of a sudden

[32:19] had nothing, had absolutely nothing. And so I think the children of that generation were determined that they were going to create something in America that, quote unquote, would make their parents proud by succeeding in a way in America that no one could have imagined. And that was a big part of the psychology of what was driving them, I think.

[32:42] Yeah, I got a question here. Did he talk or did you interview him much about how, I mean, how do they… How do they set up this distribution network throughout the United States? You know, they get to the border. They’re big in Florida. They just, because of their start in Florida, get to know people who were the big time, the kingpins in New York, kingpins in New Jersey, Atlanta.

[33:12] Dallas, Fort Worth, that kind of thing. They get to know them, and then they just dealt with them only. And they had their own networks that dealt with another sub-network. It’s so compartmentalized. It’s just always been amazing to me how that works. Obviously, they didn’t have a mafia structure. Right. Mafia was everywhere.

[33:33] Well, the mafia could, you could plug into other, the mafia was a fraternity and a network spread all over the United States where you could go to different cities and you could do, you could plug into the mafia family there and you could do business. to both your advantages. Maybe if you heard about some shipping scam that you could get in on that was taking place in Kansas City and you were from New Jersey, you’d come into town, you’d meet the boss of the Kansas City mob and you’d say, hey, we have this thing we want to do. We’ll give you a piece of it. Now, sometimes that didn’t always go well and there were wars over who got a piece of what. But generally speaking, it was a network of like-minded criminals that you could plug into to do business all around the United States. The Cubans did not have that. But what they did have was Cubans were everywhere. Cuban exiles were in a lot of places. You mentioned New Jersey. Union City, New Jersey has the second highest concentration of Cuban exiles anywhere in the United States. So there are a lot of Cubans in New Jersey and New York area immediately that plugged into, that they were able to utilize.

[34:51] They were all anti-Castro. They all had that like-minded philosophy about how they had been wronged by the Cuban revolution and how they wanted to make that right. And that became a bonding mechanism for them. And it was a bonding mechanism they could use to tap into Cubans all around the United States. And if they didn’t exist, Los Machachos was smart enough to send them there and establish a foothold there. Southern California, they had their eyes on Los Angeles almost from the beginning. And so they had some emissaries that they sent out there and said, you’re going to live in LA for a while. We’re going to put you up in a really nice place. We’re going to buy you a car. You’re going to try to find some local job and you’re going to learn the lay of the land and that you’re going to be our contact there. They used foresight um and and they did that in in san francisco they did that in a few different places they basically branched out and franchised the way you would franchise any sort of business that you were trying to make exist on a national level um and so they did that very successfully and everywhere they did that they had that mentality that i was talking about before of like total loyalty and dedication to each other as Cuban exiles. That was the glue that held that all together.

[36:17] So I guess they get in these bigger cities and then they would, if they didn’t already, a Cuban population there, they would know who the local kingpins were. Yes, they do that. You move into a city, you don’t know anybody. How did that work? Did he talk about that? Well, they would just simply, no, they didn’t connect with local kingpins unless they were Cuban. And they just ignored local kingpins. They came in and started up their own operation. Wow. And they undercut the local market.

[36:50] They undercut the local market by charging less, way less per kilo than that market had ever seen before. They single-handedly created a cocaine boom in Los Angeles, Southern California, that was unlike anything anyone had seen. And they did that simply by selling the kilo price way below what the market had previously established. And so they just took over by offering a superior product at a lower price and they had this airtight distribution system of going right to the source in Colombia and making a deal with Pablo Escobar directly and bringing it in themselves it was a a controlled operation from start to finish. They weren’t selling it off to other factions. They had so few customers because they were selling in huge amounts of bulk. They’d just sell it off to some guy who controlled all of, let’s say, the Bay Area. Now, that guy might take that coke and sell it off to people below him, but that wasn’t Los Muchachos’ business. They were merely importers and distributors at the highest level. Where it went from there was not their concern.

[38:13] Well, interesting. I’ll tell you what, folks, this book is a hell of a stroll through the world of cocaine in the 1980s, which as TJ said, they were selling it cheap. I know from the start of my career to the end of it, 76 and in the intelligence unit up to when I retired in 96, the price of cocaine was actually cheaper than when I first started. It was just, it was crazy. And there was more and more and more of it. And then, you know, crack hit and that was Katie barred the door. They had, I don’t know how much money. I mean, it was just, it was a crazy time. Let’s talk about that a little bit, the crack phenomenon, because it’s pretty fascinating. Let’s say late 80s, mid and late 80s when crack cocaine explodes on the scene. Up until that point the cuban narcos that were distributing cocaine i mean yes there was violence out on the street among colombian cartels and whatnot but as i mentioned los muchachos weren’t really affected by that and within their social world they were kind of seen as they were kind of put on a pedestal they were the bringers of good times i mean all all this fun everyone was having at the nightclubs and using cocaine to spice up their life and add excitement to their life.

[39:36] The guys, people like Los Muchachos were sort of seen in a benign way. But then along comes crack, which, you know, they had nothing to do with. Crack was something that was created at the street level. It was a phenomenon where someone discovered how you could boil down the components of cocaine and extract the part of cocaine that really made you high, that you could crystallize it into a rock and that you’d smoke it in a pipe and you’d get an instantaneous hit that was 10 times greater than you might get from snorting cocaine. And this was a phenomenon and it brought with it a lot of immediate and sudden and uncontrollable social decay, crackheads and violence associated with it and a kind of fevered.

[40:27] Activity that had not existed up to that point in the cocaine business. And all of a sudden, Cubans, let’s say in Florida or New Jersey, as I mentioned, started to feel like this is a dirty business. We have blood on our hands. This is not fun and games anymore. The crack era made it clear that this was not fun and games anymore. All of a sudden it turned ugly and a lot of public opinion shifted against cocaine and against people like Los Muchachos, the dealers themselves. And even within the Cuban community, the mood changed. The view changed. It wasn’t a benign activity anymore. People were dying from it. It was ugly. It was awful. It changed everything. It shifted the focus. And Falcone himself told me they were embarrassed by, they were ashamed by crack.

[41:24] And what it represented. It was not anything they had anticipated. And in fact, Falcone and Magluta started to think about getting out of the business at that point.

[41:33] They decided amongst themselves, this is ugly. It’s an ugly business. It’s going to bring, among other things, bad karma our way. Let’s get out of the business. And what they learned is by then, by late 80s, They had a multi-billion dollar business that employed thousands of people spread all over the United States. You can’t just shut that pipeline off overnight. You shut off that pipeline overnight and the consequences will be profound. There’ll be killings. There’ll be maneuvering for control to pick up the business. There’ll be a lot of ugliness. So obviously, if you’re going to get out of the business, you have to phase out. You have to phase out. And they kept telling themselves they were in the process of phasing out. But of course, they kept increasing the size of their shipments over and over again. Once you get in that deep, apparently phasing out is not an easy thing to do. But the business you’ve created makes it very difficult to do that.

[42:43] Really yeah it’s uh that’s that’s really interesting that that they saw what the cocaine was doing and and at least acknowledge it i never figured they’d ever even acknowledge it at that level but they did see it and they did at least acknowledge it uh yes they did they did with crack crack was different you know crack was.

[43:06] I think they should have also acknowledged that law enforcement was going to ramp up their efforts, and they already had been. And so that you can only last so long. I used to follow guys around that were, you know, thought they were big time criminals. I think if you only knew the forces that were arrayed against you right now, you cannot stand up against this. So they cannot stand up against it in the end. And somebody is going to start breaking. And so I have to assume, if I remember right, this David Borov was one of their, was he a former DEA agent or a CIA pilot or something? Well, he was. Somebody like that breaks, and then they just start unraveling it. Yeah. Well, they put a lot of faith in the power of corruption. They were big believers in the in the power of corruption because you know they’d started in the business in partnership with the cia yeah and and and and they knew that people like george bush former director of the cia who became president was privy to what they were doing or had been doing They knew that people at the highest levels of the U.S.

[44:25] Government had to have known how this business had started. And so they always felt like what we know makes us untouchable.

[44:35] They can’t screw with us. We know too much. And this was the philosophy of the Cuban, the fallout from the Cuban revolution and this whole thing of the intelligence community going into business with anti-Casso exile. It was a dirty, it was a dirty alliance that they formed. And it was based on covert operations, stuff that the American people were never supposed to know about. And so this was at the root of what they were doing. And I think they always just kind of believed when the shit hits the fan, we’re untouchable. You know what I mean? We were partners with the U.S. government. In fact, when the Iran-Contra scandal happened in the 80s, and they started to investigate a little bit, not much, But they started to investigate a little bit this possibility that the financing of the Contras had taken place through the selling of cocaine and that perhaps the CIA and even other factions of the U.S. Government were part and parcel of it.

[45:48] Willie said at that point he was on the lam. He’d been indicted and he was on the lam. And he was watching the Iran-Contra hearings. And he was saying, this is our story. Willie was watching the Iran-Contra hearings and he knew way more than what was being revealed at the Iran-Contra hearings. He knew the truth behind all that that hadn’t come out yet and he watched it thinking, will it ever come out? And it didn’t come out, not really. John Kerry had a report in the wake of the Iran-Contra hearings that was about as close as the U.S. Government ever got to acknowledging the sale of cocaine in exchange for money to buy arms for the conference. He did spell it out a bit, but nobody paid any attention to that report. It got very little coverage or attention. So the Cubans felt they were touched by the hand of God in a way, that they were in a privileged position. you know, and they put a lot of faith in that. We’ll, we’ll buy our, we can buy our way out of anything. And they kind of believe that about law enforcement in general.

[47:03] Well, well, in the end, uh, they didn’t, it didn’t quite make it out. They made it out, you know, reasonably intact. And one Sal’s still in the penitentiary, but Willie’s out here having a merry old time. Did he ever go back to racing power, power boats down in Florida? No he’s too old that’s a young man he’s getting a young man job you get this book you’ll you may have even seen that I’ve seen some blog pieces or videos about uh the Los Muchachos and and how they were uh Willie and his partner Sal were big time big time in the press in the public view all the time uh power in the powerboat racing down in Florida oh yeah they were they were champions I mean uh, Powerboat racing in Miami, in South Florida, is as big as football is in Kansas City and Green Bay. Really?

[47:58] It’s the biggest thing there is. And so their involvement in that kind of put them in a position in the community that was on a very exalted level. I mean, there were always rumors and chatter about them being in the cocaine business and that the powerboat steam was just a cover for the cocaine business. And that’s not entirely true. I mean, it was a cover for the cocaine business. And they did use the boats for moving cocaine from the islands, Caribbean islands, onto the coast of South Florida. But they were devoted and legitimately dedicated to powerbowl racing. And it was Willie and Sal and Willie’s brother, Gustavo, Tabby Falcone, who was also brilliant. And they were just great at it. They were young guys with unlimited resources. They weren’t just champion powerbowl racers. They owned a boat-making company. So they created boats. They created the engines that were used in the boats. It became a great source of laundering their money from the cocaine business back into the powerboat business. And it was fun and good times for about a decade there in Miami where these guys were on top of the world.

[49:22] Wow. Crazy, crazy, crazy. It’s a, it’s a heck of a story, guys. You got to get this book, the last kilo was the, and you might want to get the first two, the trilogy he has about the, about organized crime down in the longest Southern border, really all the way over to Mexico, but particularly in Florida and down into Cuba. And you can see for yourself, all those stories about funding the cocaine business was funding the Contras and all that stuff that’s been in the headlines for a long time. So I really appreciate you coming on the show, TJ.

[49:59] It’s been a pleasure for me to interview you. Hey, the pleasure is mine. Great to meet you. Keep doing what you do. It’s valuable. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Good to talk to you. All right. Take care. So guys, don’t forget, like ride motorcycles. If you’ve got a motorcycle and you’re out there, watch out for cars. No, I’m just kidding. If you’re in a car out there, watch out for motorcycles. And if you have a problem with PTSD, go to the VA and get that website hotline number. And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, go to Anthony Ruggiano, go to his website, get that hotline number, get some help from him. And if you have a problem with gambling, there’s that 1-800-BETS-OFF or something like that. We’re just getting online sports gambling in Missouri. I believe the election is coming up this November. And I just about assure you that we’re going to have the app be able to bet on the apps. And, you know, that gambling, a lot of people can handle it. Some people can’t handle it. And if you can’t handle it and it’s causing your problems, why they’ve got a hotline number for that. You know, don’t forget, I have that new book out there, the Windy City Mafia.

[51:16] Chicago outfit. I have, uh, my movies, gangland wire and brothers against brothers and ballot theft, burglary, murder, and cover up are all on Amazon prime. You know, that windy city mafia, you know, buy that book, give me a review. That’ll help me sell more books. That’s a good way to support the podcast. Even if you don’t have a Kindle, just get you a dollar 99 Kindle book and, and give me a review, be a verified purchaser. And you can, uh, you can help the podcast. I get a little piece of the action and you know all every little piece of the action helps i like having that money coming in while i’m sleeping it’s like a mobster huh anyhow thanks a lot guys i really appreciate y’all tuning in.

The plot thickens as Santoro is drawn into a botched robbery scheme alongside Pitera asociates Frank Gangi and Billy Bright. Their inexperience with residential break-ins quickly turns their plans for fast cash into a chaotic encounter. Breaking into a Russian jeweler’s home, they find themselves face-to-face with an elderly woman, struggling to keep control. The tension is palpable, showing how the criminal life can spiral out of control, especially for those unprepared for its high stakes and brutal outcomes.

As we unfold the story, we reveal connections between the Bonanno and Genovese crime families, as Frank Gangi attempts to profit from the heist by selling the stolen jewelry to mob contacts, including a Genovese captain. A pivotal moment arises when the stolen jewelry catches the attention of Joe Butch Corrao, a Gambino family capo who’s determined to reclaim a pair of prized diamond earrings. This leads to a tense sit-down meeting where we witness the mob’s complex hierarchy and decision-making dynamics. As different factions vie for control and respect, this meeting underscores the razor-thin balance required to survive in this world, where even the smallest oversight can unravel alliances.

The episode culminates with a series of betrayals and tragic outcomes, as Frank Gangi ultimately turns against Tommy Karate, seeking refuge in witness protection while others face severe repercussions. Join us as we explore the themes of loyalty, betrayal, and the steep price of a life in crime, through the brutal world of Tommy Karate Pitera and his deadly network of associates. Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

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Transcript [0:00] Hey guys, welcome all you wiretappers out there. I’m back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. As you can see, this is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit officer, now turned podcaster and author, actually. So don’t forget, I have this new book about the Chicago outfit, Windy City Mafia, the Chicago outfit. Help me beat the algorithms of Amazon. Go out there and buy that book. Give me reviews on it. That way for $1.99, even if you don’t have a Kindle for $1.99.

[0:31] I get part of that. I get a little piece of that, but also it gets Amazon to put it out to more people. And so the more people that buy it, the more money I make, the more money I

[0:42] make, the better I like it. So anyhow, help me out if you can, guys. I have a New York story today. I go all over the United States from Kansas City and worked a mob here for many years. This is a New York story I happened to run into I thought was really interesting and really kind of telling for about how some of these guys work and they do different crimes and and kind of the I love the intricacies of of how guys work not just that they went out and killed 20 people or they dealt drugs and you go on or they did some kind of a score how do they do that so back in the 80s i believe that larry santoro was a cabinet maker and larry Santoro knew some guys in Tommy karate patera’s drug gang Tommy karate was a feared murder uh he was an enforcer he was he killed people out the ass he cut up their bodies he was a banana guy so he could deal drugs He had a huge drug gang. I did a whole show on, uh, Tommy karate. So go back and look at my, uh, old shows and find that Tommy karate show kind of overview of him.

[1:55] Anyhow, he, he knew guys in that crew. One of them was Frank Ganji. He was probably closest to Tommy karate. Frank Ganji had, uh, he had problems in the end. Uh, Billy Bright, uh, who will get killed in the penitentiary in the end. And a guy named Manny Maya or Maya, I don’t know much more about him other than he was a defendant in the drug conspiracy trial. The one time of karate went down, DEA worked a big case on him. I mean, karate, he will go on to commit many, many murders. And he brought this Frank Ganji in with him and to help do some of these murders. And Ganji, uh, was, is not the kind of guy you want to do murders with. They’re not the kind of guy you want to know your business. Karate, Tommy Karate, he really jacked up by taking this guy into his confidence. He should have known. He should have known after doing a few things with him that this guy is weak in the end. Tommy Karate was in the Bonanno family. He’s a made guy. He was in a faction of the Bonanno family. And there was a big split in the Bonanno family. And the three capos.

[2:59] Sonny Red and Delicato, Dominic Trinchera, and Philip Jack Leone, all ended up being murdered in that infamous basement tribal murder planned out by Joe Messino, which I talked about in the Joe Messino story. And Dominic, Sonny Black, Napolitano also was part of the planning of that and the implementation of it. They were trying to just protect themselves as well as their, uh, the boss of the Bonanno family, Rusty Ristelli, who was in, uh, prison at the time. And, and Joe Massino had gone to the commission and, and told them that he was getting information that these three capos were trying to, uh, we’re going to make a move on them and take over the family and boot Rusty Ristelli out. And Castellano supposedly reportedly told Joe Massino that, you know, you do what you got to do to defend yourself. And this is what Joe Massino did. And Joe Massino, of course, went on to be the boss and went on to then be the first mob boss in New York to ever turn.

[4:00] So go back in that Joe Massino story I did. It’s a great story. A lot of people really liked it because it had a lot of different experts and some former made guys as well as FBI agents that were Joey Massino. You know, Tommy Karate is working on Anthony Spiro, who put him under Frank Leno, who was a survivor of the three Capo murders, who ran out before they could take him down. And then he came back and all was forgiven. One of Tommy Karate’s most famous murders probably was the most famous was Willie Boy Johnson, which was kind of shows this inner family.

[4:34] And this story is about kind of inner family relationships and inner family cooperation. One of his more famous murderers was Wilford Willie boy. Johnson shot him down as he walked to his car. Johnson had been a really, he wasn’t a made guy. I think it was Indian. He’s been a real close associate of John Gotti. John Gotti liked this guy. He really liked this guy and been a Gambino associate and, They’d been, they’d done stuff together since they were kids.

[5:01] Willie boy had also been a top echelon and former the FBI for a long time. You don’t slide them little tidbits, not really anything that you’ll, you’re going to make a case on directly where he’d have to testify. And he’d been doing it for several years. I don’t know why, you know, whatever, what people do things for different motives. You know, I, you never know what a guy’s motive is, but it done that. But they’re, they’re the first trial of, of Gotti, which you got to not guilty you on there’s a prosecutor a lady named diane jackaloni and she wanted willy boy to testify and she had you know his control agent went to him they did not want to have him testify because that was going to out him that would take out their future source of information inside right next to gotti they didn’t think they really needed him to get the conviction uh jackaloni thought they did.

[5:52] And she ended up exposing him, fronting him out during the trial.

[5:56] And so that’s why Tommy Crotty ended up killing him at the request of the Gambinos and John Gotti. Now, these four guys I mentioned before, Larry Santoro, who was a cabinetmaker who set it up, and Manny Maya, who then connected Billy Bright and Frank Ganji to this little scheme, they robbed a Russian jeweler who mainly worked out of his house santoro again i think i said he was a cabinet maker and he was involved in a home remodel in the russian jeweler’s house this was in the canarsie section of brooklyn kind of a solidly upper middle class section uh in brooklyn and and their name was blumenkrant it’s more of a german name but uh russian germans i don’t know blumenkrant and they not only sold a lot of legitimate really high-end pieces but they also dealt with stolen jewelry which you know when you’re when you’re a fence yourself a lot of fences get robbed by their customers when they know they’ve got something big because you know the fence is meant less likely to cooperate with the police if you do get caught if you get caught you may have to give this stuff back depending on.

[7:04] Who’s connected to the fence but they didn’t really know this guy uh they probably knew he maybe dealt with some hot stuff but a lot of people knew that they didn’t know he was a connected guy They should have done their homework a little better. But these guys, they were not really experienced B&E or breaking and entering guys. They were not experienced home invasion guys. They were helping Tommy Karate kill people and helping him sell drugs and collect money and transport drugs and all that. They wanted the easy money. And Frank Gansey himself, he was a bad alcoholic. And during this time, he was needing more money, more money, more money because his cocaine addiction was really getting next to him. And he was spending a ton of money. His alcoholism was going out of control. And he was blowing money out the butt. And so, you know, this here, he gets a lot of, he can make a lot of quick money off of this deal.

[7:55] And not have to share it with Tommy Karate or any other buddy, any other guys in the mob. You know, lots of times they find out you work with a mob guy and they find out you made a score. They want to wet their beak, as they used to say. They want a taste of the action. He got Billy Bright, who had been in the penitentiary with and gotten to know there and was good friends with. And what’s interesting, what I learned about Billy Bright is he was a born-again Christian out of the prison. You know, he probably had gone to services in prison and probably had a little group, a safe little group to meet with in prison. But Billy Bright, he had no compunction about robbery, murder, or drug dealing. Took a look at this setup, met with this larceness cabinetmaker, Larry Santoro.

[8:39] They didn’t look very close, but, you know, they looked at it and they said, yeah, we can do that.

[8:43] They thought, from what they saw, that the jeweler’s wife would be home alone.

[8:49] And there would be a safe with a lot of jewelry. Really high-end jewelry in it day of the robbery they billy bright was holding a cash or a big stash of guns for tommy karate patera so he borrowed a couple of guns out of that stash and they stuck them in their belts and drove the neighborhood and parked down the street maybe a block or so away and then walked down the street like they knew what they were doing and and they cut through a backyard and went into the blumenkranz home through the back door and the back door and they found it was unlocked walk in and they don’t find they think the just the wife is going to be there and all they find is an elderly grandmother who doesn’t really speak english very well all she could do is start screaming in russian and pointing in her handbag at the same time landing larry santoro’s cousin another cabinet maker still in there working so they got to handcuff him and trying to calm the grandma down and she keeps pointing at her handbag and finally they get it and open it up and hand it to her and she takes some heart medicine out and starts gulping down pills so you know it’s kind of a out of control scene at first and finally get her calmed down they start you know searching around through the house they’re not finding the safe they’re not finding anything finally in a finished basement they just a find a bag that’s got a lot of high-end looking gold jewelry with diamonds and other stones in it and and i think maybe a couple of high-end watches, but anyhow.

[10:15] They find what they think is going to be a nice score. And it turned out it was a nice score. These guys, as I think I said this a minute ago, they don’t, they’re not experienced B and E guys. They don’t have a fence that they regularly work with that they is already set. Maybe they even already discussed the score with them and say, tell them about what they’re going to get and have the guy all lined up. They start asking, they have started asking around.

[10:41] And, and seeing who will buy this stuff. Well, Frank Gansey takes his share and he sells it to a Genovese captain and the owner of what’s, uh, uh, called the wrong number lounge guy’s name. They called him Sally dogs, Salvatore Lombardi. And he also takes another part of his share to a fourth Avenue jewelry store called Bianco’s jewelry’s Bianco jewelry’s jewelry store. And more than likely those guys are connected to, uh, you know, and Sally dogs, he, he was a mob drug dealer himself. even though he was in the Genovese family. Bananos were famous for selling the drugs and seemed to have the ability to sell drugs, but we know Gambinos were too, and this guy was at Genovese Capital. He was too. He took his first hit for manufacturing, selling Quaaludes.

[11:28] He went to prison for a long time. I think he maybe died in prison after they caught him on a wiretap, trafficking heroin, trying to buy a large bunch of heroin. So now you know that guy knows that they got this big score and he knows what the pieces are like and what they are i’m not sure about uh billy bright what he did with his but do know about this one new york is a huge vast city as you guy anybody’s been to new york knows but the mafia world and in kansas city or chicago or whatever that’s a small world that’s like a small town and people in small towns they talk you know they frequently uh associate in uh different bars they They talk to each other as, you know, one’s a Genovese guy. If they’re not at some war, one of a Genovese guy will meet with a banana guy that they, you know, they like. They like to drink with. They like to gamble with in the gambling social clubs and gambling joints. You know, they’ll do all kinds of stuff together.

[12:24] The stories of big scorers get around. You know, these guys, you know, crime is their business. You know, like policemen, that’s our business. So you hear about somebody that did something big time deal. Well, you want to know more about it. You start asking around. Well, somebody does a big score. They start hearing about it. Sally Bugs was not Sally Bugs, uh, uh, Sally dogs. You know, he told people, Hey man, I just, you know, I got some really nice pieces. I got a hell of a deal on this here. Look at this. You want to buy one of these? Or, you know, I, I, the word gets around that this guy has this and what they didn’t know at this time.

[13:00] A capo in the gambino family six foot four inch joe butch corral was really good friends with this russian guy not only that his joe butch’s wife had left a very expensive pair of diamond earrings with the russians and he wanted those earrings back but he not only wanted the earrings back this guy’s a mob guy right he wants a piece of that that uh caper he wants a piece of the action i mean come on man and they’re they’re buying it now at 250 000 now you know that didn’t mean shit you know you may the the jeweler probably uh told the police it was an insurance company it was 250 000 worth you know in fact you know you might be 10 or 15 000 you might get on the streets off of this stuff but he wants a piece of this 250 000 these guys you know they they want to know who did something where the swag is can i make money off of it uh can i maybe he’s robbed the thieves. Where is it now? Joe Butch, you know, he’s, you know, he’s all over this.

[14:02] Capos heard it. Lieutenants heard it. Soldiers heard it. It was everywhere. So Tommy Karate hears about it too. And he figures out that, you know, it was his guys that did it, but they didn’t tell him about it. They didn’t ask his permission, which you’re supposed to deal a score like that. You should ask Tommy Karate’s permission and then shared a piece of the, the swag with him. Well, then he finds out about this story. Joe Butch Correo and, and being he’s a Gambino and Tommy karate has long done stuff back and forth with the Gambinos and, and John Gotti in particular. So they have, you know, as I told you early on, yeah, he killed, uh, uh, Willie boy Johnson for John Gotti. So he, he likes to stay in with the Gambinos and, and getting points with them. So, you know, he goes and he goes to Gambinos and said, okay, here’s the deal. These guys did this. I, they didn’t ask my permission, uh, but I am responsible for them and their actions. We need to have a sit down. So they have a sit down over it. And Frank Gansey had a cousin who was a Genovese capo. So he, he said, so he’s made guy. So he can sit down with Joe Butch and Tommy Karate. The three made guys have a sit down to decide what to do about these associates that got a little, you know, out of their lane, if you will, kind of went off the tracks for a little bit.

[15:20] Joe butch he’s putting on an act and he’s a joe butch is a big guy and he and he’s a tough guy he he’s not in a capo they used to describe him as a war capo he he’s a bad man i had a friend that was in a penitentiary with him uh steve saint john used to walk the track with him and at one time and he agrees he said he said this is a kind of a soft-spoken gentleman guy but but he could tell he said this is this is a bad guy who who do what he needs to do ross ganji the general to be this guy explains you know this is my cousin and you know we’ll get your diamond earrings back i’m pretty sure i’m not sure about half the score and and talks about his cousin he said you know now there’s nothing i can do with this guy he’s his own man and i can’t order him to really do anything and he’s been a problem and he really uh what he does he tells those other two guys and And that’s not Patera obviously knew it because he’d done a lot of crime with Ganji before. He’d done murders with Ganji, had Ganji’s help for murders. But he tells Joe Butch in this meeting that, you know, he’s a drunk. He drinks too much. He does too many drugs. I can’t do anything with him. And, you know, if you think about that, when he says that, he’s kind of given his permission, indirectly his permission. You know, you do what you got to do with this guy because we can’t do anything with him.

[16:40] Patera did speak up for him. He said, you know, I’ll be responsible here. I’ll get what I can and give it to you, Joe Butch. And, you know, by the end, Joe Butch was happy.

[16:52] He accepted that. And, you know, they broke up and went their separate ways.

[16:56] You know, what was kind of interesting is this meeting, the cops were following, the DEA was following a lot of these guys because they were working on Tommy Karate Paterin. They followed him where this meeting was. They were always curious about what this meeting was. And they found it was really a mafia hotspot. And it was, you know, like you find a hotspot like that that nobody knew about before. Then you, you like throw guys on there and you write license plates down for the next, you know, several months and get, take pictures. If you can, uh, they’re, they’re like, uh, I mean, that’s like gold, man, gold mine, find a spot that they’re using. They don’t think anybody knows about, but Tara, Tommy karate will regret saving Frank Ganji. Cause in the end.

[17:36] Frank gansey nephew genovese capo will testify against tommy karate patera billy bright will not testify he’ll go to the penitentiary and he’ll end up getting killed in prison supposedly because he’s involved in the killing of a guy named ryder whose cut whose brother uh was uh a drug dealer in the Gene Gotti, Angelo Ruggiano heroin conspiracy. And so he knew Billy Bright was involved with that murder with Tommy Karate. They can’t do anything with Tommy Karate, but he did have Billy Bright killed in prison. It’s my understanding that Frank Gangi will go into witness protection. He’ll confess to all the murders he was involved with with Patera and all the drug dealing.

[18:25] And uh and what happened i i said this in my tommy uh karate patera show but i remind you what happened with frank gansey he was a bad alcoholic he was feeling guilty and remorseful about because they were cutting up bodies tommy karate had like a hot tub or something and and uh he’d have gansey come over and and strip naked and help him cut up bodies and then take them at this uh cemetery they They had a wooded area up in Gravesend and Brooklyn and buried the bodies with the heads separately and cut them up so he could put them in bags and things like that. He was like a real Roy DeMeo kind of guy, a Gemini method kind of a guy. Ganji is, I think he’s arrested for DUI. He’s in a cell just for the DUI, nothing else. He’s feeling guilty and remorseful, and he tells the jailer, hey, call the FBI. Get an FBI agent down there. Tell him who I am. He’ll want to talk to me. And so he turned him. That’s the story of Frank Ganji, Billy Bright, Larry Santoro,

[19:29] a guy named Manny Maya, who I never did figure out whatever happened to him. He went to jail with all the crew that were in the drug conspiracy with Tommy Parade.

[19:41] Get my tongue in front of my eye teeth. I can’t see what I’m saying. Here’s a snippet from an interview that Frank Ganji did while he was in witness protection. Actually, he went and witnessed protection for a while. He didn’t like it. Came back out. He’s died since. And he gave an interview to a guy out in Las Vegas who has the Joy Ciccone show. It’s on his YouTube channel, so you might get that if you want to listen to the whole interview with Frank Ganji. I just snagged a little bit of it just so you could see, you know, kind of what he had to say and what his voice sounded like.

[20:13] I got caught. And I had to do a two- to four-year sentence. in New York. And meanwhile, pot business blew up. Philly, without the street, that was supposed to be part of the business. Right, right. Without the street making nothing. $1,000, $1,000 with the man. But when I got out, you know, he made me a partner of the business. But meanwhile, the business was in the red now. A friend of ours, a very close friend of ours, had brought me a profit of $350,000 worth of pot. So Billy comes visit me in prison one day, and he says, Frankie, he says, listen, you know, I think officers are going to try to kill me to take the officers over. We got to kill him. Two weeks left to go on my prison sentence. I called Billy I said, Billy, just wait until I come home Don’t do nothing until I come home I go on a storm show two weeks You know.

[21:07] Billy took the limousine up With my girlfriend to pick me up from prison They’ll hand me like a $5,000 Lot, you know, from my pocket You know, and then I was making Thousands of dollars a day, Billy, I just got out of jail Billy kept talking about killing off I really wasn’t into killing somebody Right now, I just got out of jail So thanks a lot guys, I really appreciate y’all tuning in the show don’t forget i like to ride motorcycles and don’t forget that if you got a problem with ptsd and you were in the service go to the va website and get that hotline number and if you have problems with drugs or alcohol be sure and go to uh angelo reggiano’s youtube channel and look for that hotline number he’s a drug and alcohol counselor uh as well as an entertainer a mob entertainer uh he’s down in florida i believe and if you have a problem with gambling, you know, that 1-800-BETS-OFF is a good place to go.

[22:01] And, you know, I got a lot of stuff to sell. I sold my newest book at the start of the show. I’ve still got my two mob movies, Gangland Wire, which is about the Kansas City end of the casino movie. You’ll see how that all got started and what was going on here and how they uncovered all that money coming out of Las Vegas. It started at the TROP, and then from there, they figured out it was a lot more money is coming out of the TROP, the Stardust going to Chicago and Kansas city was getting the trap money. So, you know, it’s a, it’s kind of a complicated story, but I tried to simplify it in my documentary gangland wire. And also at the same time in Kansas city, we had a mob war going on the Savella Spiro war. And so I have brothers against brothers, which tells the inside look, gives you an inside look at that mob war here in Kansas city. And I have a book too about called leaving Vegas, how FBI wiretaps ended mob domination of Las Vegas casinos, man. It’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Uh, so I also got that book out there that it also tells that story. And if you get the, um, uh, Kindle version, you can click on links in there and here are the actual wiretaps.

[23:11] So I think that’s all I got to sell guys. And I really appreciate you listening in and all your kind comments on my ganglandwire podcast, Facebook group. You have to be either invited or you had to find it and then ask to join and answer the questions to answer that you’ll agree to the rules. We’ve got too many scammers in that thing and had to really clamp down on it. It’s a big group. There’s a lot of good discussions, a lot of great pictures in there. And my YouTube channel, I got all kinds of comments in there. Keep making those comments, answer questions. I read every one of them. I like those comments. I like answering the questions and interacting with you guys. So thanks a lot, guys.

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Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here

[0:03] in the studio of Gangland Wire. You know, this is Gary Jenkins, your host and producer of Gangland Wire podcast. I am a former retired, not former, retired Kansas City police detective and sergeant. I was in the intelligence unit for 13 years, 14 maybe altogether.

[0:21] And, you know, after I left, I got into making documentary films and i made three documentary films you can find on amazon just search for my name and mafia you’ll find all kinds of stuff about me and what i’ve done so we won’t belabor that but i let’s get on to the show i have a man that i recently met a kansas city man is john sanders he’s a kansas city based screenwriter and author welcome john thanks carrie i appreciate it all right well john got hold of me and he just wanted to meet and talk about the mob because he had this big interest in it so we met the coffee shop here close to me and had a had a nice long conversation and and he was telling me in particular he’s been working on something about only madden and i hadn’t done anything on only madden or if i did it was a long time ago and the early beginnings of the irish mob in new york and i thought what an idea for a show so john graciously agreed

[1:16] to come on the show and and share his uh knowledge uh the story of Oni Madden. So, uh, John, uh, tell us a little bit about yourself before we get started talking about Oni.

[1:27] Okay. Well, I was, uh, the son of a guy who was born and raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and anybody who knows anything about Oni Madden knows that he became the main man in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And I would, was grown up with stories about how he would, uh, see Oni sitting in the front of the Southern Club where he would dispense wisdom and give out cash and help and take care of people. He was a very generous guy all throughout and through most of his life.

[1:59] I recently started working on a screenplay about Oni’s life, thinking about my dad’s stories. And I found him to be just a fascinating, fascinating character and one that I could really get connected to because you could see through the course of his life how he started out as a thug and a killer and learned and became much more sophisticated than what he did, highly respected in the mob world. And I just, I enjoyed that aspect of his growth where a lot of gangsters don’t get that opportunity to do anything.

[2:43] Oney was an English-born gangster, came to the United States with his mother after being born in Leeds. His parents were Irish, so that got him some cred in Hell’s Kitchen when they landed in Hell’s Kitchen. And by the age of 14, he was running with the Gophers, which is one of the main gangs in New York.

[3:08] They called themselves the Goofers for some reason, but we’ll call them the Gophers for now. They, of course, had their share of opponents in the streets, and one of those was the Hudson Dusters. They were their main opponent. They would have run-ins with them and battles. And at one point, Oney, who by this time had been running the Gophers, had followed his estranged wife to a Hudson Duster dance hall. He just wanted to keep an eye on her. So he’s sitting up in the balcony watching, and he turns around, and all of a sudden there’s 11 Hudson dusters standing behind him, and they all pull out guns, and they all shoot him. He ended up with 11 bullets in him. They thought, you know, everyone thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He was, they asked who did it, and he said, I did it to myself. You know, we’ll take care of it.

[4:00] Amazingly, they got him to the hospital. They were going to stop at the morgue, but he pulled through, who pulled, I believe it was, six bullets out of him, and they had to leave five behind, and those things would bug him the rest of his life. He had all sorts of problems with that. But he survived, and in a matter of a couple of weeks, six of the dusters who had shot him were dead. He was back running the streets. But while he was down, one of his guys, a guy named Patsy Doyle, who was kind of a psychopathic guy who was in the Gophers, wanted to take over. He was telling everybody that Oney was done for. He wanted to take us to the spot.

[4:39] Well, Oney wasn’t much for that kind of disloyalty, so Fatsy was found beat up pretty good with a pipe, a lead pipe that was wrapped in newspaper, and that was Oney’s tool of choice when it comes to beating people up. He survived, but he started doing stupid things like snitching on Oney and telling the cops what he was up to, and so that he had to be taken out. And unfortunately, people that lured Patsy to his demise in a cafe pinned it on Oni. They apparently were coerced by the prosecutors. The guys that actually did the shooting went to prison for he was convicted on manslaughter and sent up the Sing Sing for 10 to 20 years. I remember on that setup at that cafe, did a woman, somebody that Oni knew a woman, then lure him to that cafe? Interestingly enough, all of Oney’s trouble seemed to hang around the women. I mean, the guys that he shot were hitting on his girlfriends.

[5:47] And Freda Hopper, who was on again, off again, one of Oney’s girlfriends, Nancy Boyle was absolutely infatuated. And that was the only reason he came, because he wanted to see Freda. And unfortunately, Freda got forced into saying that he was involved and he ended up in prison. It was in prison where he really, he really blossomed, I guess you could say.

[6:17] He decided that, you know, even though he claimed that he had nothing to do with that Patsy Doyle murder, he decided, well, you know, I’ve done enough things. So this is probably justice, even though I didn’t do this one. And so he decided to be the best he could be in prison. He became friends with Warden Laws, who would, I mean, he was a celebrity in prison. He was able to calm down gangs that were having problems in prison. He was very much appreciated by Warden Laws. And when new inmates would come in, he’d call Oli over to see the guys getting off the bus. He said, what do you think? What do you think about that guy? And Arnie would give him the straight scoop. He’s a smart guy, but, you know, he’s this mess and that. He spent seven and a half years in prison. And during that time, he was having a lot of problems with his stomach. For some reason, just glommed on to the prison surgeon, a guy named Dr. Steele, to the point where after he got out of prison, whenever he had any problems with his stomach, he wouldn’t trust regular doctors. He’d go up to Sing Sing and have that doctor work on him. And he was just held in high regard and got out after seven and a half years or so. So he comes out.

[7:36] Was that a reduction? Seemed like he would have got more than seven years for murder. Well, he was on parole. And it was supposed to be a 10 to 20, but he got out seven and a half years on the behavior. Because the lawyer, the warden really appreciated him. Yeah. Okay. All right. I was curious.

[7:54] So, yeah, he should have gotten out. He should have had at least 10 years. He gets out in 1923 and everything’s prohibition has just kicked in and the dusters are, the gophers are gone. And so he needs to figure out a way to make some money, but try to do it in a smart way and not with a gun.

[8:15] After that stint in prison, he would never carry a gun. Shortly after he gets out, he picks up with Frank Costello, who is a major rum runner and just getting started in bringing in shipments from whiskey from Canada or Scotland, rum from Jamaica or Caribbean. They became very, very close friends for the rest of their lives. And during that time, he also met up with a guy who became his closest business associate. And that guy was named Big Frenchie Demange. And they were an odd couple because at this point.

[8:59] Oney was a very classy British guy with a beautiful accent and very precise, always dressed to the nines. And here’s Frenchie, who was this thug, who was loyal and did whatever, you know, Oney wanted him to do. And interestingly enough, had Ben, he didn’t care. It was, he trusted this guy. And he got them all dressed up and made them look presentable. And he became partners in all of his home running, his brewery that he had in Manhattan, all his nightclubs, including the Cotton Club.

[9:40] And so he was very much a part of Oloni’s life. And fun story about the big Frenchie. He was a bit of a Claude. When the Atlantic City Crime Conference came together, Oloni was going to be honored at the end of it. And they wanted big Frenchie to do, and they were going to give him a beautiful gold watch. And that was, let’s explain that Atlantic city crime conference. That’s when the, uh, I can’t remember the boss down in, in, in Atlantic city, the whole and boardwalk, the document, Nucky Johnson, Nucky Johnson. He had lucky Luciano and Costello and even Al Capone and all these beer barons or mobsters who were in bootlegging to come and line up, get it organized throughout the United States so they would do business rather than fight each other. Is that right?

[10:35] Absolutely. That was with the early stages for the crime commission. Right, okay. And an interesting story about that is, you know, Pone came thinking he was in cat’s pajamas, and this was not too long after the St. Valentine’s Massacre, and they all angry with him for for making so much noise and they told him you have to go to jail just to take some heat off you know on a lesser crime he wasn’t happy about it but he did it but remind me and that is it that when he went to jail like in pennsylvania for like a year some kind of a phony baloney gun charge or something it was just yeah weapons charge he He was carrying a gun. And, you know, I think he only spent a couple of months in prison or jail. Okay. All right. Go ahead. I’m sorry. I just tried to get in my mind. No problem.

[11:28] But back to the big Frenchie, he was a good-hearted guy. And, you know, he was as tight as you could be with Ony. And so when they wanted to, at the end of the conference, make a presentation to Ony, thanking him for his great organization, what a great guy he was. And so they had big friends. So he calls them up. He’s not used to give them presentations. So he says, okay, you got to watch. He said, yeah, give it to me. And he hands him his watch. I’m sure it was a very nice one. And Big Frenchie drops it on the ground and stomps off. He said, what did you do that for? He said, well, you got a new one. Here, take this one. Now, that’s a story that came from Barney Raditzky, the old New York detective who told that same story at the Keefabrick hearings back in the 50s.

[12:25] Yeah he was he was a very interesting guy things were going great in the 20s for only he i mean my goodness just months after getting out of prison he and uh frenchie and rothstein go in together to buy the cotton club which well they created the cotton club it was a different club uh prior to that and uh they ended up having quite a few clubs and speak pieces again this is pro vision the cotton club was his flagship that was the the one that he really loved and you could tell when he loved a certain something a certain building or something because you know we should put a pigeon coupe on top because he was a he just loved messing with pigeons he learned that from his dad yeah so the 20s were going he was making money hand over fist He and Costello had a fleet of ships bringing in those.

[13:19] He had his own brewery in Manhattan, the Phoenix Brewery, which had been making mere beer. He bought it, started making Madden’s Fiend, but number one, which was at the time, the premier beer that you could get during the edition. Before that, it was just this pillared water that you could get from Dutch Schultz. So he became very famous for Adams, number one, because of his close ties to Tammany Hall, Jimmy Hines, the police, and all the money he paid out. His story was protected by the police to the point where even if the feds showed up trying to break in, the local cops would stop him and turn him back and say, you’re not getting in here. You’re getting a business in. He had a lot of power, had a lot of influence in New York, and he was rolling along just fine until Mad Dogfold decided to target him. Now, Mad Dog, he was a wild Irish thug who had originally been a gopher and then went to work for Dutch Schultz as a hitman and guarding liquor shipments and things like that.

[14:38] And Cole decided, he got a little too big for his bridges and decided he wanted to go 50-50 partners with Schultz. And Schultz wasn’t having it. And so he decided to split off with some of Schultz’s guys and started killing some of Schultz’s guys that didn’t go with him. Shot up the front of the Helmar Social trying to get Jerry Rayo, Schultz’s gambling guy. He didn’t get Rayo, but he killed a little kid who was standing in front selling lemonade.

[15:07] And in fact, Rayo would throw pennies out on the front of his social club so that the kids would come and collect them and nobody would think about shooting it up. Well mad dog would and that’s how he got his name he gets out you know they show up he pulls out his tommy gun and tears the place up and kills a little kid he was he was uh definitely a scourge in new york he you know everyone wanted him gone and then he started doing something he wanted to make a little more money for kidnapping the purple gang in detroit were doing some of that making some money. So he thought he’d give it a try. And he decided that the guys with the money at that time during the Depression were the crooks. So he decided, hey, Oney’s probably a softer target than Dutch. So he went after and actually kidnapped Big Frenchy. Called Oney up and said, I got Big Frenchy and it’s going to cost you 50 grand to see him again. Tony tried to negotiate, but he said not. I’m coming over. He actually walked into his office at the Cotton Court.

[16:18] Oney had the money, and this was a very unwise move. Big Frenchie got released. Mad Dog decided that was a pretty easy score, so he calls Oney up and says, okay, I’m going to make you a deal. You give me $100,000, and I won’t kidnap him. Oney just hung up on him, and he was kicked off. Calls a meeting of the guys.

[16:40] Luciano was there, Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, because he was the target of Cole as well. And they basically said, OK, Cole’s got to go. They just couldn’t find him. It took a while to find him. He was in hiding. And in the meantime, Oney decides to take a vacation. And Dutch had been telling him about this great place down in Arkansas called Hot Springs, where gangsters can, you know, do whatever they want. Everyone, you know, nobody’s shooting up anybody. It’s got gambling that nobody cares about. They got a racetrack. They got hot springs where you can soak during the day and then gamble and listen to major entertainment at night. And so he decides to go down there and Dutch tells him, make sure you meet the cute girl at the gift shop across from the Arlington Hotel. Tell he goes in there and that’s where he meets agnes demby who is to be his the love of his life she was in a had a little gift shop and uh struggling mightily during the depression he walks in and spends a thousand dollars on gifts and invites her out to dinner and she says no but changes her mind shortly thereafter and they spent the next two weeks together fell very much in love When he went back to New York, he gave her a ticket, a train ticket to come up and visit when things looked like they were, you know, calm.

[18:07] So he gets up there. Nobody’s seen or heard of Mad Dog. So he thought, okay, he brings up Agnes. Well, unfortunately, Mad Dog hears that Agnes is in town and that Oni’s got a new girlfriend. Says something to basically threaten his girlfriend. That just made Oni’s blood boil. They decided, he and Dutch decided, okay, let’s put an end in this. So this is according to his biographer, Graham Nowen, in the book, Arkansas Godfather, describes how the whole hit happened. He was hiding out in a hotel, and he had a bodyguard that they were able to get to. And they paid the bodyguard 50 grand to set him up. The bodyguard comes and says, oh, he wants to talk to you, wants to settle this thing. So he set up a phone conversation in a drugstore that Cole was comfortable in. Bodyguard leads him over there, and he goes into the phone booth waiting for the call. The call comes just as a sedan pulls up, and one of Schultz’s hitmen walk in.

[19:22] The bodyguard walks out. he tells everybody to be quiet while he’s on the phone with us he tells me, Mad Dog gets his final reward and, you know, right through the glass somebody in the phone booth. All that glass was torn out, but he didn’t chip any of the wood around him. I mean, this guy was a great guy to really handle his Tommy gun. Especially with a Tommy gun, because those things, I don’t know if you’ve ever shot an automatic, but if you hold it down for any length of time, they just start rising on. You have to really know what you’re doing. and you have to practice with it to hold it steady. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, Judge Schultz’s guys have plenty of practice. Apparently so.

[20:08] So that was the demise of Mad Dog. After all this, everyone, of course, was looking at Oni. The parole board was looking at him. And this Judge Seabird, who was trying to crack down all the corruption in New York, wanted to send him back on parole violation. He was still on parole at this point in 31. He sicked his investigators on owning, and they were interrogating him and said, so where are you working? So I work at this laundry. As it turned out, he was a part owner of the laundry. He knew the owner that ran the laundry, but he hadn’t gotten his story straight, unfortunately. The judge sends the investigators over. Minutes happen, only walks out. And asked him, you know this guy? Oh, yeah, oh, he’s a great guy. Does he work there? No. No, he didn’t work there. Well, that was enough. Lying to the parole board was enough to send him back to Sing Sing. They had the, you know, he had a good attorney and he had Cole. And he was supposed to go back that day. But he was, you know, just a bizarre legal maneuver. He was able to get out on bail for parole violation, which is just not done. There’s no bail.

[21:33] And oddly enough, while he’s out waiting for this final decision, he gets a call from Charles Lindbergh. And Lindbergh, this was right after his baby had been kidnapped. And he comes to Oni Madden asking for help to find out if it was one of these, like, the Purple Gang. They thought Fleischer might have been the one to nab the kid. And he did what he could and met with him several times. But he wasn’t able to help him out other than no one who was. So Oni ends up going to prison again, sing-sing. But he hated all the media attention, all that stuff. He didn’t want his picture in any paper, whatever. So rather than turn himself in at the courthouse, he gets himself driven up to Sphinx and walks up to the front door. Nobody’s expecting him. And the guard on the other side of this iron braid says, who the hell are you? He didn’t know who he was. He said, I’m Oni Madden. I think the warden is holding a cell for me.

[22:47] He said, yeah, get the hell out of here. And it just so happened that the warden’s secretary was walking by and Oni saw him and called out to him. And so they finally let him in. And he was there for a good year, spent time, you know, staying in touch with Agnes. And uh by the end of his year uh term he uh got out and he along with some of the other guys in new york including meyer lansky basically orchestrated his.

[23:25] Retirement i guess you can say he left new york and promising never to come back that was the rule you can go you can get out of here but you can never come back, he snuck in a table a couple times but that was the deal down to Hot Springs where Lansky had been able to set up, the uh his basic control of the of the local gamblers that ran casinos and he bought into the southern club and the belvedere built the bay burners the big nightclub that ended up getting blown up one night when there were some problems with the political group but only just was the was a very beloved figure in hot spring he you know at this point he was just a calm quiet gentleman, who spoke beautiful English and treated everyone with respect. People would tell stories about coming up to him and saying, gosh, this happened. My kid’s sick or we need money for the pool in the black area of town. And he’d pony up the money. He had so much money, he didn’t know what to do with it. But he still kept it coming in. He was running the race wire, the local race wire in Hot Springs.

[24:50] But he ended up dying in 65 of emphysema, which was right about the time that the whole illegal gambling in Hot Springs,

[25:02] the governor just said, okay, I’m not going to take any more of your bribes. We’re going to have to close you guys down. So that was roughly the time that things got changing, but they still cherished their mob roots back in the Hot Springs. You know when i got back there in uh well i guess it was 2004 with my dad uh to sit to you know see his hometown again went to see the arlington where they have the capone suites and uh yeah uh he would tell me stories about his parents you know sewing for the gangsters and uh well it was an end of an era and um.

[25:48] It was a very interesting time and i think only was just a really really beloved character i mean when he when he died that this funeral it was a pretty nasty storm there about 250 people outside, a bunch of limousines pull up and a bunch of guys who have flown in from uh chicago and new york and l.a and uh vegas they all came to to pay their respects to somebody that they held them in very likely you know that’s one thing i find interesting about the the mafia or the organized crime in this country is you have these interconnections nationwide and if somebody is beloved or somebody has made somebody a lot of people a lot of money and not really hurt a lot of people been a gentleman throughout his whole you know criminal life if you will they’d like they’ll show up at funerals i mean that was the greatest place for us to go to a mob funeral and write down tags and gets photos because these guys all show up it’s amazing.

[26:54] Yeah you’re talking about you know hot springs is not that far from kansas city and a little side story oh by the way guys i have a hot springs mob tour i did with ron rossin who is a new orleans expert met me up there and he’s kind of he’s an expert on the different locations in hot springs And I have that, uh, uh, tour up on my YouTube page. So if you want to go see some of these spots that, that John’s been talking about, the vapors, the, the Belvedere, uh, um, oh, what was the other one? Southern club and only Madden’s house is still there. Just was sold recently. I noticed. And, and so we, we walked all up around it and, and there are a lot of other spots down there in hot spring. So it’s, uh, it’s a really interesting, interesting place.

[27:42] And they’ve kept so much of it intact, all the old bathhouses, which were actually not privately owned. They were owned by the federal government. And that was in a very small national park right there. And they built them right inside. You know, that’s a good point. I never really thought about that, this den of wickedness, if you will. And then the federal government had owned that mountain and the hot springs right there. And still, it’s a national park. And another thing about hot springs is most of the major league baseball teams had spring training down there. So they’ve got some, a bunch of signs around town about who had been in town and where they had stayed and a place where Babe Ruth used to, it would hit home runs out of this little park into a alligator farm, which is still going. There’s an alligator farm down there, guys, which is still going. I will never forget that alligator farm. I went there when I was four years old. Okay. Went again and took my daughter, you know, when we went back to, you know, 20 years ago. Yeah. Uh, it’s still there. It’s just amazing. And they had that little merman.

[28:52] Yes. They still have the merman. I was just there last year. I know it’s crazy. And like you, when I, the only trip we ever took, when I was a little kid, we drove down through the South and then came back home and we went to that alligator farm and I was about six years old and it’s scared to live in the Jesus out of me. All those alligators piled on top of alligators and those pins and it’s exactly the same as it was then it’s crazy oh yeah and that’s been going on since before uh only got there you know in the early 30s yeah that’s that was a thing a little side story about the uh spring training there was a field real close and they could hit a ball out of the park and go into the alligator farm uh, major one of the, not major league baseball, but one of the team team’s owners started fighting the players for hitting a ball on the alligator farm because they lost the ball and they wanted to be reimbursed for the ball.

[29:50] So it’s, uh, it’s a pretty historic place for a variety of reasons and really off most people’s radar. It’s really, really interesting. It is. And I, uh, I plan on I’m going down there again real soon. Just a little more time down there. Plus they still have, they still have horse races and they have a casino. You can, you can go back down and gamble. You know, when I was, uh, when I was about 18 years old, about the time they closed down in 19, yeah, 1965, I had this older guy I hung around with and he was a huge gambler, huge dice player with, you know, other guys in this small town. I was, I I’d lose $10 and I’d be like freaking out. But he would go for, you know, hundreds of dollars back in 65. And he kept telling me, he said, Gary, we got to go down to hot springs. They got a real casino down there.

[30:40] We never did make it. I wish I had it now. But the papers lasted clear up till 65. And I think governor, was it Winthrop Rockefeller closed all the gaming down, just cracked down on it. Yep. Finally, he locked it all down. You know, now interesting as you were talking about, you know, the gambling and all only was a, was a really interesting guy in that he rarely drank during, you know, during prohibition. He didn’t, he didn’t do any of that and he didn’t gamble. So even though he ran, you know, alcohol and gambling operations, he stayed away from that. He just wasn’t going to get sucked into that. Agnes helped to settle him down as women had a tendency to do. Yeah, because I believe she was her father, the mayor or something. She was kind of connected to society in Huntsbury. Yeah, he was the postmaster. Postmaster, yeah. Yeah, he was the postmaster, which in a small town was an elected position and held some sway.

[31:45] And that helped him work into Hot Springs society, getting tight with Mayor McLaughlin and the other power brokers that he had to pay off to keep things moving smoothly. Yeah, he fit in very well there. He was a celebrity in the hot screens. The Arkansas godfather, huh?

[32:11] Yeah. Final note here, obviously, all the gangsters would come and visit him. And when he was in prison, they’d come and visit Agnes because, you know, show respect. And it was in 1936 when Lucky Luciano was running from Dewey, who was trying to put, you know, try to grab him and put him in prison. He goes down to Hot Springs where he knows that, you know, cops are going to let him do what he wants to do. They actually arrest him, but he’s out, you know, on $500 bond. And Dewey just throws a fit and calls the governor and has the state police come down and pick him up and send him back to New York where he ended up going to prison. Particularly corrupt chief of police all during those years. It was kind of well known. I can’t remember his name now, but.

[33:06] Oh, yeah. I mean, he’s smooth and just keep running. Yeah. And he, he’s the kind of a police, you know, chief that would stroll down the street with Lucky Luciano, just, you know, chatting and talking about whatever.

[33:21] The gamblers were a source of their income, but they wanted to keep them coming. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, it was a different time, a different place, wasn’t it? You know, one last note about that. When I was down there, I got to think, well, Bill Clinton, former president Clinton, He was raised in hot springs. So he was raised in this kind of aura of criminality. Well, you might say something about his character. I don’t know. I’m either Democrat Republican here, just about him as a person.

[33:57] Yeah. Well, you know, it’s, uh, it’s interesting, but you know, one thing about hot springs is just, and I probably have a lot in all the major cities, especially during Prohibition, where the gangsters were getting them what they wanted, what they’ve always been able to have, and only, you know, approached it like, you know, this is the perfect crime to do where most people don’t think it’s a crime. You know, the victimless crimes. And so then after Prohibition, it was gambling in Hot Springs. And, again, the victimless crime, and nobody, you know, looked at him differently for doing it. And he stayed away from violence pretty much the rest of his life, except for probably the final incident with Mad Dog Cole.

[34:45] He had it coming. He did society a favor with that one.

[34:50] Everybody was happy. Everybody was happy. Interesting. All right. John Sanders. Well, thanks a lot, John. I really appreciate you coming on the show and, and, you know, keep a good luck with your screenplay. Let me know if we need to get something going with that way. We’ll, we’ll talk again, anything else I can do in the future. If you work on any other mob stories, I can help you out. Why be sure and give me a call. Thanks so much. It’s been fun. Hey guys, don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re on the street. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website.

[35:24] If you have a problem with drugs and alcohol, you know, our friend, uh, Ruggiano, Mr. Ruggiano from, uh, from the Gambino family has a, uh, hotline number on his website. I believe he’s a drug and alcohol counselor. And let’s see, he seems to be doing pretty good with his, uh, YouTube page. So he may not be still doing working the square, square John job. He may just be entertaining with his mafia knowledge now, but anyhow, just that’s a place to go. And, and for gambling, you know, there’s one 800 bets off. We’re just about to get sports gambling here in Missouri and we’ve got it all around us. And, and so, you know, these, these problems, that’s one reason the mob made so much money because there’s addiction related to it. And addicts will spend every spent they got in order to pursue their addiction until they, you know, they go into retreatment or they die or go into recovery and they die. So that’s, that’s just how it is. And, and guys, don’t forget, I’ve got books and movies on my website. Go take a look at my most recent book I took from some of my early podcast shows about Chicago from Al Capone to Harry Aleman to Frank Calabrese Jr.

[36:34] And all in between the Chicago PD intelligence unit got about seven or eight different stories. And it’s called Windy City Mafia, the Chicago Outfit. It’s on Amazon right now or it’s on my website or just get hold of me through the website and our email. Tell me ganglandwire at gmail.com and we’ll work you out of copies.

[36:56] Autographed copies. So thanks a lot, guys. And John Sanders, thank you so much for coming on the show and enlightening us about Oni Madden.

[37:03] Thank you for having me. It’s been a fun place. Okay. All right, John. Thank you. We’re out of here. I appreciate you coming on the show. I’ll let you know when I get this together. It’ll probably be a month. Maybe I don’t know. I’ll make sure you know when it’s going up and send you a link. Sounds great. Okay.

Mark shares his journey from the Marine Corps to the FBI, detailing how his training prepared him to tackle organized crime. The discussion highlights the world of strip clubs as a major revenue source for criminals, drawing parallels to his early police work in Kansas City. At the heart of the conversation is the Gold Club, owned by Steve Kaplan, who turned it into a hotspot during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, attracting celebrities and high-profile figures. Mark describes the criminal activities that took place, from credit card fraud to connections with the Gambino crime family. Mark reveals the challenges of infiltrating the club and gathering evidence, including working with strippers as informants and tracking financial transactions. He also discusses key figures in the Gambino family, such as Mikey Scars DiLeonardo and Steve Kaplan’s partnerships with corrupt police officers and mob players.

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Investigating America’s Most Notorious Strip Club: The FBI, the Gold Club, and the Mafia

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Transcript

0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Detective and later Sergeant. I’ve got this podcast, Gangland Wire, and we look into the mob. Today, I have a great story, a real mafia story. You know, and we saw this in Kansas City. These guys love these strip clubs because there’s a lot of money to be made out of strip clubs. And maybe some of you have heard of the gold club down in Atlanta. When I first got Mark’s book, our guest, you know, I thought I remembered that there was all these Patrick Ewing and all these big-time basketball players going there. And it was a hell of a scandal, but I didn’t remember much about it, but Mark Sewell. Welcome Mark. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

[0:46] Well, Gary, you’re, you’re very welcome. I’ve been a fan of your podcast and your media work for a while too so i’m glad to do this thanks for having me well good and i told you before like you know we had the same thing in kansas city and these bobsters they love strip clubs there’s a lot to to make out of a strip club besides the money besides a skim besides blackmail on people possibly and and all kinds of things can be made for the mob out of a strip club and and you dive right into the middle of it. Now, Mark, your first office was down in Atlanta, but before that, tell us a little bit about your history and what led you to join the FBI. Sure. Shortly after high school, Gary, I joined the Marine Corps out of the Houston, Texas area, 1987. And I stayed in the Marine Corps until 1997. During that time, I was able to earn a commission.

[1:45] So when I left the Marine Corps, I was a young captain in the Marine Corps. And I was stationed in Honolulu, Hawaii, or Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. But I recruited into the FBI out of the Honolulu office there. And that recruiter, FBI recruiter, came over to the Marine Corps base and took seven officers out of my battalion in about a one-year period. Period because we all had security clearances because we were intelligence battalion. Yeah. And so we, she knew we could pass the FBI’s background investigation because we already had these top secret clearances and so forth. So I joined the Marine Corps out of Hawaii in 1997.

[2:27] Excuse me. I joined the FBI. I was in the Marine Corps. So I joined the FBI in 1997. I go to the Academy in Quantico, which I’m already familiar with Quantico because as you know, the Marine Corps has, that’s their place actually. The FBI is a tenant on the Marine Corps base. So I was very familiar with the Quantico landscape and I get there in 1997. I complete new agent training and I get assigned to Atlanta, Georgia as my first office. I have to assume that the basic training of an FBI agent was a little bit different than the basic training of a Marine Corps.

[3:04] Yeah, you know, you make a good point because as a Marine, you go there wondering, is this going to be anything like what I’ve experienced in the past, right? Because when I went to OCS, Officer Candidate School, that’s kind of like a boot camp for officers. And you know that’s that’s a that’s a screaming event and a stress event and that kind of thing but i tell everybody that the fbi academy is what i call a gentleman’s course compared to the marine corps so i was uh pleasantly surprised and relieved yeah i bet you get a little bit older you can’t you you ain’t playing that homie don’t play that anymore having people screaming yell at you trying to make you look like an idiot and demeaning you and breaking you down all the way so they can build you back up. You know, I know that drill. Anyhow, so, you know, you get out of the Quantico Academy and your first office is Atlanta, Georgia. I assume you didn’t get to go back to Hawaii or you hired in at Atlanta.

[4:02] I didn’t want to go back to Hawaii, to be honest, because it’s just so doggone expensive out there. And, you know, there’s a chance when you go out there as an FBI agent that you could be there a long time. The Marine Corps is going to move you every three years, But you could go out there potentially in today’s FBI and you could spend your whole career out there. So the idea of spending a decade in Hawaii with that cost of living, we loved it, but we were ready to move on. So Atlanta, cost of living in Atlanta was a lot better. Yeah, I can only imagine. Atlanta is probably going to be more like Kansas City, although it’s probably more expensive than Kansas City. But it’s going to be more like the Midwest than Hawaii for sure. And then, of course, you know, FBI agents, guys, you may or may not know this. Agents that get assigned to san francisco and new york and i’m not sure if there’s another one or not but they have to get a little extra stipend because it’s the cost of living is so expensive and it’s true so it’s you know it’s a problem living in those huge big cities like that besides all the traffic and stuff of course that’s where the action is i assume washington dc gets an extra stipend too i would think and that and that is the the payoff you you mentioned it yeah working in New York, living in New York can really be a hassle, but if you’re looking for quality FBI type of work.

[5:20] Then there’s no place better than New York, right? So it’s a give and take sometimes. The great thing about Atlanta was there was great work because Atlanta is the ninth largest city in America. That’s home to a number of Fortune 500 companies, but yet the cost of living is a lot less. Yeah, you don’t have the old school Italian mafias, you know, ensconced in Atlanta, but there’s plenty of organized crime in Atlanta to work on in there. That’s right. And, you know, and I was surprised when I learned that I was going

[5:51] to be assigned to the Organized Crime Squad. I just knew a little bit about organized crime having grown up in Texas.

[5:59] And really all I knew was what I read in the newspapers or saw on television. And then I find out I’m going to be assigned to an Organized Crime Squad. And then specifically, I’m going to be assigned to the LCN part of the Organized Crime Squad. And I always made the joke. I had to go out and research what is the LCN because I really didn’t know a lot about it. I knew one name, John Gotti. That’s all I knew. That’s because he was in the headlines during that era.

[6:27] That’s all I knew. I was drinking from the proverbial fire hose. I had a lot to learn. Yeah, you did. You found out that their tentacles reach out to Atlanta and a whole lot of other places in the United States, any place there’s a large city and there’s opportunities for advice and ways to make money. These guys, they’ve got their, they got their fingers in it somewhere. And especially a place like Atlanta, because there’s a lot of money to be made in Atlanta. But one of your early case, you were, I guess, let’s go back your first off office. And then your first, your break-in officer, he was assigned to be your mentor, was a man named Simmons, John Simmons. Tell us about working with John Simmons. I had read in your book that that was a real positive, great experience for you.

[7:16] It was. John is what we call a Hoover agent, as you well know. Yes, I know what. John came in the FBI when J. Edgar Hoover was still the director. And when I joined in 97, there were still a handful of Hoover agents left in the Bureau, but not many. And they just did things different. They operated different. They talked different. They had a different attitude. It just was a whole different way of life. I went through in my career, I went through FBI directors, but you have to remember, J. Edgar Hoover was a director for 49 years in the FBI. So he was the FBI. So John was a Hoover agent and John had broke into the FBI work in organized crime as well and had really worked his entire career by the time I get assigned to work with him in 1997. At that point, he had 27 years already in the FBI.

[8:13] And the vast majority of that was working organized crime, was working the LCN.

[8:19] Starting when he was assigned as a new agent out of the academy, he went down to Tampa really quickly for about a year and then they ship him up to New York and he gets assigned to this brand new organized crime squad that the FBI had just kind of started. James Calstrom was on that squad, for example, some of the noteworthy names in the FBI, and they were working this case. This guy named Joe Pistone had a case going on. And so that’s how John broke in with the FBI is helping work the Donnie Brasco case. And John was in New York for 10 years. And then he went down to Miami and worked Wise Guys down there for about eight years and then came up to Atlanta for his, around his 20th year in the FBI, he gets up to Atlanta and work an organized crime there. And then this Gold Club case gets brought to his attention.

[9:16] And John realizes, and the new supervisor, Kenny Power of the squad, realizes we’re going to need some help on this case because it’s big. One guy can’t do this and so me right out of the academy i get assigned to the squad and i get assigned to john to help him on this case eventually we built it out to four agents working it exclusively but it started with john interesting yeah he’s he went all the way back and i’ve got a friend here in kansas city doug fensel who was on the gambino squad during that time and doug actually was one of the guys that went to sunny black and said hey joe pistone is is not donnie Roscoe and he’s not an informant. He is an FBI agent. So I talked to Doug, I’ll probably see him in the next week or so. We need to set up another breakfast with a mutual friend of ours.

[10:03] So that’s, those are pretty exciting people to come down to Atlanta. Some of the Gambino guys and you got John Simmons there who, who knows the Gambino family. And so how did you, you look at the gold club and you see, you find this guy named Steve Kaplan and Steve Kaplan, I kind of had an investigation works guys is you find this guy who’s who’s run the thing and you say well where did he come from who is this guy let’s go find out about him and start sending out leads right and and so how did that work from there just check did john simmons know him and know that history he had with the gambinos or how did that work can you describe that yeah i can sure steve kaplan bought the gold club in 1994 as a wise business investment to get ready for the 1996 summer Olympics, which were coming to Atlanta.

[10:54] You know, Atlanta was going to have millions of males that are young and, and sports fans, you know, come down into the city and what are they going to do in their off hours? There was money to be made. Strip clubs knew it. And so that’s where you wanted to be. If you wanted to make some money during the Olympics, that was one of the many money-making opportunities. So Steve bought that club in 94 after successively running a number of nightclubs, legitimate nightclubs, discos back in the 80s, nightclubs in New York and then down in Miami. This was his first adult business that he got into.

[11:33] In Atlanta or a gentleman’s club, as you call it, because it was high end. You know, it wasn’t a shady place. It was a very high end place. And he bought it in 94.

[11:43] And as soon as he bought it, New York picked up the telephone, the FBI agents there and called John, his connections, you know, John still had connections all over the FBI. And they said, Hey, John, we just want you to know that one of our leading associates up here in New York just bought a club down in your area. and you might want to look into it. And that’s how John first came about the case and Steve Kaplan. And then to answer your question also, then you start figuring out, well, who is Steve Kaplan? And of course, New York already knew who he was. So they give us his dossier, if you will, and start telling us a little bit about who Steve Kaplan is. But there’s still a lot to learn. And you know, the FBI only knows so much about a guy. We didn’t have any turncoats, if you will, or sources directly tied to Steve Kaplan yet. So we didn’t know everything about him. Once we made the case and some of his closest friends cooperated against him, we learned even more about his mob connections. But he was tied at the highest levels, Gary. I mean, he was ultimately to jump way ahead. He was in John Gotti Jr.’s crew and John Gotti Jr. Doesn’t take guys on that aren’t making money, right? So that’s who he was. And that’s how we found out about him was New York gave us that big heads up, and then we just started working the streets.

[13:02] Interesting. And we had a little conversation just before we started recording about, we’re going to talk about Michael D. Leonardo or Mikey Scars in a little bit because he was involved, but.

[13:12] Mark and I were comparing, I was telling him about interviewing Mikey’s cars and he was telling me about when he was made and Mark said, yeah, that was like the rookie class that made it big in, in the FBI. I mean, in the, uh, organized crime, the Gambino crime family. And what’s interesting is Steve Kaplan was connected to all of them almost throughout his thing. And so tell us about that, that the making ceremony was John Gotti Sr. Didn’t want to make his own son. So he had Sammy the Bull do the ceremony and John Gotti Jr. And Mikey Di Leonardo and Bobby Borrello and another guy whose name we can’t seem to remember were all made in that class. And so tell us about Kaplan’s connection. I know he was, it was connected to Bobby Borrello, but he seemed to go from one guy to the other for a while.

[14:06] Yeah, that class you’re talking about, that induction ceremony was Christmas Eve of 1988, if I’m not mistaken. And Bull Gravano, yeah, he did lead that ceremony, if you will. When Steve first came to the Gambino’s attention is when he owned a nightclub in New York in the mid-1980s. And, you know, kind of like the old joke goes, the Gambino’s made him an offer he couldn’t resist. Right. So he he gets he gets into bed with the Gambino’s and he’s first assigned

[14:37] to the crew of a guy named Frank Marano, a.k.a. Frankie Blair from the mid 1980s. But their relationship does not work.

[14:47] Well, and Steve was making enough money at that time, even in the early 80s for the Gambinos that he had already caught their attention. And what we were told later is that Steve was able to go to John Gotti Sr.

[15:03] And tell and ask or or make a make an issue that, hey, I don’t like this guy, Frankie Blair. I don’t I don’t like him. He’s not good for business. Give give me somebody else to work with. And so the story is, is that John Gotti Sr. Reassigned him to a guy named Shorty Muscusio, Anthony Shorty Muscusio, who was a close friend of John Gotti Sr. And so the theory is that he reassigned Steve Kaplan to Shorty Muscusio and says, hey, Shorty, take care of my guy here. He’s got some problems with Frankie Blair. Let’s treat him right because he’s making good money for us. And so Shorty takes over and Shorty was a famous mobster in his own right. He had his photo taken one time in 1987 during one of the John Gotti senior acquittals at the state level where he, when John Gotti came out of the courtroom, the first person to greet him was Shorty Muscusio with a handshake and then escort him into a Lincoln town car that was waiting on the curb and then get him out of there. And that photo went nationwide and that was Shorty, Shorty Muscusio. And that’s who Steve Kaplan ended up with. That was his second handler, if you will. And, but Shorty.

[16:19] Got sideways with Steve Kaplan’s business partner at a club called Bedrocks in about 1987-ish. And one night, about one or two in the morning, there was an altercation between Steve Kaplan’s partner, a guy named Dave Fisher, and Shorty Muscusio. And the story is, we believe, is that Shorty went into the only bathroom that there was down in the basement to use the bathroom. And when he came out, Dave ambushed him from behind and shot him in the back of the head and killed him.

[16:55] And Dave claimed to the NYPD that it was self-defense, that Shorty was beating him up that morning, Shorty and his crew. Shorty had a guy named Dino Bassiano was in his crew at that time. And Dino later testified in our Gold Club trial up in Atlanta. And he told us this story that they roughed him up a little bit. And when he had a chance, he shot Shorty coming out of the bathroom. And you would think that, okay, you shoot a made guy in the Gambino’s, you’re going to pay for it with your life, right? But because John Gotti Sr. was on trial in 87 and 88 and 89 with these state cases, Sr. Put out the word that don’t touch Dave Fisher. We’ll deal with him later because if we touch him, that’s going to bring more heat on me. That’s going to bring more attention to the fact that we’re shaking bedrocks down to begin with and so on and so on. So just leave him alone. You know, we’ll deal with him later. So with Shorty killed, dead now, Steve Kaplan gets assigned to Bobby Borrello, who you mentioned earlier, in 88.

[18:03] 87, 88 timeframe. And Bobby’s a rising star in the Gambino’s as well. He’s in that class that you just mentioned. He had just been made, but he’s now been assigned to be John Gotti senior’s driver and his bodyguard. He held that position there. And so because he, Bobby Borrello was close to John Gotti, that ultimately caused him his life. And I’ll tell you why is because still the other four families had not forgiven John Gotti Sr. For whacking Paul Castellano without permission. So they still held that vendetta against John Gotti. And when it was time to pay that Piper, if you will, their thought was, who am I going to take from the Gambinos that’s going to hurt John Gotti Sr. The most for what he did when he took out Paul Castellano? So they took out his driver. They took out Bobby Borrello. So Bobby was killed coming out of his house and trying to get in his car one morning. And Bobby was Steve Kaplan’s handler. So now Steve’s last two handlers have been whacked, Shorty Muscusio and Bobby Borrello. So then Bobby gets, excuse me, Steve Kaplan gets assigned to John Gotti Jr.

[19:19] All right. So now we’re in the early 90s and he gets assigned to John Gotti Jr. And as we, as you and I talked about earlier in warmups, you don’t end up in John Gotti Jr.’s crew unless you’re a significant moneymaker. Yeah. And that, and of course we knew that Steve was a big moneymaker.

[19:38] All the way back, even in that time frame. And when John Gotti Sr. Goes away, gets convicted by the FBI led case at his in his federal trial in 92.

[19:50] He goes to prison and now the Gambinos need an acting street boss because because the old man is still the boss in prison, but they need an acting street boss. So they bump up the kid and he becomes the acting street boss. And when he becomes the acting street boss, Steve Kaplan can no longer be in his crew because street boss doesn’t run a crew, right? So now Steve Kaplan gets handed over to the third person in that induction’s crew of 1988, and that’s Michael DiLeonardo, known on the streets as Mikey Scars. And he stayed with Mikey Scars from that 92, 93 era, all the way through buying the Gold Club in 94, up to our trial in 2001. And we took both of them to trial together as a team, along with a number of other employees from the Gold Club. So that’s who Steve Kaplan was and is. He started with the mob in the mid 80s and he ran with the at the highest levels.

[20:51] And he knew that he was at the highest levels and he often used that to his advantage. He threw names around, you know, I’m with John, you know, and not many people can call anybody John and the other guy know what you’re talking about. And we have Steve on tape there at scores in New York City when that club was being shut down and the FBI was taping those conversations. We have Steve saying, I’m, Hey, I’m with John. I’ll take care of this, you know, that type of thing. So Steve ran at the highest levels.

[21:25] Interesting. So now you’re, you’re down here at Atlanta and you, you know, I, first thing the bureau is going to do, I think is see, well, we got any informants that are already going in and out of this club, frequented it. Do you start running some surveillances on it? Start trying to find out who’s working there. Can you turn anybody? You need somebody on the inside. You need to find out, you know, the hierarchy inside and, and maybe what start learning, what kind of scams are going down. So tell the guys how you proceeded with this investigation. I mean, you know, you get the paperwork and, and all that kind of stuff, but then you got to hit the streets and, and find out who’s what in the investigation, you know, hours of surveillance, writing down the license numbers out front. I’ve been there doing all that and then going inside and having some drinks and, and just to see who, how people relate to each other. Talk about how that investigation then started going.

[22:17] Yeah, that’s a good question. And we didn’t have a really good strategy to begin with, because like you said, there were a lot of ways to go at it. We didn’t know which one was going to be the most productive. So in the beginning, we we kind of tried them all, if you will, and see where we could gain some traction. But where we gained the most traction was the following two that I’ll tell you

[22:41] about was, hey, look, what’s the number one occupation in a strip club? It’s going to be dancers. It’s going to be strippers. Right.

[22:51] So we made a decision that if we could get the strippers to talk to us, if we could get the dancers to talk to us. And tell us what was going on in the club, that would probably be about as good as information as we could get about the internal workings of the club and the scams that might be going on in the club. So we made an effort to do that. And I’ll tell you more about those in a minute. And then the second thing that kind of fell into our lap was there on a fairly regular basis, there were upper middle-class businessmen that were calling the FBI in Atlanta through the, you know, the 1-800 number, if you will, and saying, hey, I went to this club last night in Atlanta and my credit card got ripped. I walked out of there with what I thought was a $5,000 tab. And then American Express called me the next morning and said, no, it’s 25. So we started getting these calls on a regular basis. And we would go out and interview these fellas. And, you know, of course, they’re, they’re really good witnesses. They’re educated college types, businessmen, and they can tell a good story. And we knew if we ever went to trial some way, way down the future, they’d make good witnesses because they have good backgrounds. You know, they’re not criminals, right? That kind of thing. So they’re easy to believe.

[24:12] And they told us some pretty good stories about how they think their credit cards got manipulated and part of the story. And then while they’re telling those stories, we’re learning a little bit about how the club works as well, how the girls are manipulating the credit card. So the customers tell us this story, hey, my credit card got ripped, and here’s how I think it happened. So that’s on one hand, Gary. And then we’re talking to the dancers that we’re able to flip on the other hand, and they’re telling us how the credit cards are getting ripped and we’re marrying the two together. Now we’re getting the dancer’s version and we’re getting the customer’s version and they were very similar and they told the same story. And so we knew that we were on to something when it came to credit cards.

[24:59] And then a lot of those girls also told us about the cash and how it was handled in the club. And we knew there was tax fraud going on. Steve Kaplan wasn’t paying all of his taxes that he should be paying. He’s dealing a lot in cash. Remember, in the late 90s, America’s still dealing a lot in cash. It’s not a credit card exclusive community yet. Yeah. So there was still a lot of cash going on. So we knew we had some tax violations going on there. And what we eventually came to the decision was, what we need to do is get inside the club, conduct a search warrant, grab as many records as we can, figure out what’s going on from looking at those records. And then because there’s so many people in this club that are associated with it from a customer perspective, from an employee perspective, the prosecutor, the AUSA, Art Leach, had made a decision that we’re going to throw all of these people, which turned out to be hundreds, into a grand jury and investigate and conduct a grand jury investigation, which you’re very familiar with.

[26:06] So that’s a long answer to your question, but it really kind of focused on the financial crimes. We discovered other crimes as well when we got into it, prostitution, paying off police officers, obstruction, obstruction all the way back to that murder of Frankie or Anthony Muscusio that I told you about. We charged Steve Kaplan with obstruction because there was one witness to that murder, and Steve took him down to Florida and hid him out so he couldn’t talk to the NYPD. But because of the power of RICO, we could go back and charge Steve with that obstruction even though it didn’t happen in Atlanta. It happened in New York, but it’s all part of the Gambino enterprise.

[26:45] So when we got into the investigation, we started finding these things. But really, it was in the beginning and ultimately at the end. It really was a financial investigation. It boiled down to the money, boiled down to the cash. And we brought the IRS in to help us. And a guy named Bill Selinsky led that charge and they were super happy. Uh effective and we’re glad we did so you didn’t you didn’t have some young fbi agents you could put in there and give them a whole bunch of cash and they could get lap dances and have a party every night hey man i used to have guys that’s all they wanted to do yeah we’re gonna work the strip club boss you know we just need about a hundred bucks and you know we’ll have a merry old time you couldn’t do that well look we we certainly went in the club and we went in you know in a in an undercover capacity, but we were low key and we weren’t spending money. We were just flies on the wall, go in, observe, try and put faces with names, see the layout of the club, see what we could see from just a common perspective. We, you know, we had heard about names and we wanted to put faces with those names and, and so on and so on. But, you know, Gary, as you know, I know what you’re saying because that’s what young agents and young police officers think.

[27:57] But what they don’t know is that one day you’re going to be on a witness stand and a defense and a defense attorney is going to eat your lunch because they’re going to play those tapes that you made to the jury. They’re going to see and hear about you getting lap dances. They’re going to see and hear about you having sexy conversations with these dancers and so forth and they’re going to embarrass you is what they’re going to do in front of the jury so even though we talked about things like that And we certainly went into the club. We stayed away from being customers in that sense. And, you know, trying to engage the girls in prostitution or drug sales or anything like that, because it wasn’t worth it. We knew we could make this case other ways that wouldn’t embarrass us on the witness stand. Yeah. They were smart. You were smart doing that. Cause it’s real. It’s real. That goes back to, that goes back to John Simmons and some of these other guys that I’m, you know, that I was working with, you know, you, you, John Acavelli came up from New York. He had transferred from Atlanta to New York, and John had been on that Gambino squad that convicted the old man in 1992.

[29:02] In fact, he knew Mikey Scars previously because he, John Acavelli, another agent that I worked with, was working the union that Mikey Scars was shaking down, one of the construction unions. So he knew Mikey Scars really well. So that type of experience helped tell young agents like me and the other guys, look, we don’t need to go in this club and start acting like we’re wanting to get laid up in the gold rooms and things like that. That’s not the way to do this.

[29:32] So describe the inside of that club. You mentioned the gold room and these are like a VIP room. They have these different rooms that they’ll go back and you get a private dance with, which costs you a little more money. And so kind of describe how this was laid out. I know it was extremely high-end stuff in there. It was. The gold club was enormous to the tune of somewhere around 15,000 square feet. Wow. So, yeah, it was really big. It had two levels. The upper level lined two walls, and the upper level was the gold rooms, or what’s famously known in the strip club business as the VIP rooms. But they called them the gold rooms. And keep in mind that in Atlanta and in Georgia, but specifically in Atlanta, you can have full alcohol and full nudity, which is a rarity in the strip club business. Yeah. At the time, I don’t know what it is now, but at the time that we were

[30:26] doing this case, only two other states allowed that type of strip club business to go on. And that was Florida and Texas. You know, even up in New York or Las Vegas or out in California, the girls had to wear pasties or you couldn’t sell our art alcohol at the bar. You could only sell beer. It was a give or take. So.

[30:47] You now have, you know, full alcohol, full nudity, and you have these VIP rooms upstairs. And so Steve Kaplan knew that he had a magic formula where I can just charge these guys outrageous amounts of money and they’ll pay it. So they can see this girl get naked in a room upstairs by themselves, whether sex happens or not, they’re going to pay for it because who wouldn’t, right? If you got the money, they’re going to spend it up in these rooms. So Steve charged crazy amounts of money for these gold rooms, starting at a minimum in $1999 when we did the search in 1999, $200 an hour at a minimum.

[31:28] Depending upon the size of the room, it could go up to five hundred dollars an hour to buy a room. You also had to buy a bottle of champagne. The minimum bottle of champagne went for two hundred dollars minimum.

[31:41] And then you had to buy the girl. You had to pay for her hourly wage as well. And that was negotiated with the girl. And that was generally in the one to two hundred dollars an hour range, too. So to get into the least of the attractive gold rooms upstairs with the least amount of time, with the least attractive girl, if you will, was $600 just to get in the door right there. Okay. And that was a bare minimum. So you were going to spend probably at least $1,000 when you walked into a gold room. And all seven of those gold rooms were full all the time, cycling through them, cycling through them, cycling through them every night. It was not uncommon for Steve to make $40,000 to $50,000 on a weekend night. And most of that was coming from gold room businessmen churning those credit cards over or paying cash, either one. So that’s what the gold rooms were. And then, of course, when the celebrities came into town, specifically the athletes, they were the most noteworthy there at the gold club. But there were other, there were movie stars and the like as well. But when the athletes came into town, that was exclusively where they went, was up into the gold rooms and the private rooms and et cetera. So the gold rooms were the, were notorious there at the club, but they were big, big money makers for Steve Kaplan.

[33:00] Interesting. Yeah. When those athletes, they come in with their entourage. Yeah. There’s, there’s a song out there by a singer songwriter talks about this guy said he’s the guy that carries a boombox for Mike Tyson. And he says, hey, Mike, let’s go to the strip club because he knows, you know, Mike will take him to the strip club and, you know, everything will pay for everything. They just start throwing money around and those athletes do that kind of stuff. And movie stars will do. Well, you know, it’s interesting what you’re describing. And here’s what I learned working in Atlanta because I worked strip clubs for almost 10 years. What you’re describing is really a ethnic race difference type of strip clubs. The black strip clubs in atlanta and strip clubs are very segregated for the most part there’s white strip clubs and there’s black strip clubs and then there’s a few that are like the gold club, that are interracial but those are the high-end clubs yeah and but typically are you still with me gary yeah something’s going on here let’s just let’s just stop just a minute and.

[34:09] Start again. All right. Try it again. Start back over about where you were going into the, okay. Okay. You’re good. Yeah. So this Mike Tyson story that you’re telling, that’s very typical in the black strip clubs of America and even in Atlanta where the, the celebrities, the athletes, et cetera, will come in and bring a big entourage and throw money around. That’s not what happened in Steve Claflin’s club. Oh really? Because, because Yeah, he came up with a formula that figured, hey, I can make more money doing it different. And here’s the way it was.

[34:42] His formula was simple. And he learned this through an athlete named Larry Johnson, who played for the Charlotte Hornets and then went to the New York Knicks. But Larry had played college basketball at Nevada, Las Vegas. They won a national championship. He was a very famous athlete, did commercials for Nike called the Grandmama commercials. If you remember those back in the nineties, Larry Johnson came to the club one night, just shortly after Steve Kaplan bought it. And he begged Steve Kaplan to let Steve take a girl home with him, let Larry take a girl home with him. And Steve wouldn’t do it. Steve had just bought the club and Steve was trying to run it kind of a, I don’t want to get in trouble with the cops type of thing. And the easiest way to get in trouble with the cops to start running prostitution. So, so Steve said, no, I’m not letting you bring the, I’m not letting you take the girl home. And someone else that was there at that conversation told us this story later. But then Steve had a change of heart after Larry left. He said, you know what? This is my hook, and here’s the way I’m going to do it. These athletes want to come to this club and hook up with these beautiful women. I’m going to allow them to do it, but I’m not going to allow just the average guy to do it. Here’s the way it’s going to work.

[35:57] The athlete will come, Patrick Ewing, Larry Johnson, the list goes on and on. And I will give them a free gold room and I’ll give them, I’ll pay for the girls to go up there and entertain them. And what’s going to happen is there, those athletes are going to draw in the average Joe, if you will, the, the guy that wants to go to the club to say, Hey, I was at the club last night and guess who was there? Madonna was there. I was at the club last night and guess who was there? George Clooney was there. That’s going He’s going to tell his buddies, and they’re going to tell their buddies, and they’re going to tell their buddies. And now you’ve got hundreds of just average Joes walking through the door because they think they might get to see Dennis Rodman or Patrick Ewing or Madonna or whatever it may be. So Steve came up with this formula that I’m going to allow these celebrities to come up. They don’t have to spend any money. They don’t have to throw money around like Mike Tyson. I’m going to pay for it all because I’m going to make my money back by having four and five hundred guys show up wanting to hang out with a NBA player, that type of thing. Smart. And it was smart. It was very, it worked. Yeah. It was, we, our sources were telling us that it’s, it’s known throughout the city of Atlanta. If you want to hang out and see the jet set and the celebrities of Atlanta, go to the Gold Club.

[37:17] Interesting. So it worked. It gave it a certain legitimacy among polite society, if you will, that guys, people wouldn’t maybe not normally go there would feel okay. It was okay to go there. They wouldn’t feel afraid or threatened or anything where they might, you know, one of these lowered in strip clubs, you know, they might want to go in, but they’re afraid to, but the score, it was old club.

[37:38] You’re right. The lights were bright. There was no dark rooms. There were no shady, you know, things happening. Like in most strip clubs, there weren’t drug deals happening in the corners. This was a very light, bright business with disco balls and loud music. And his philosophy when he first bought the club, Steve Kaplan, was to turn it into a Studio 54 type of atmosphere. And that’s exactly what it was like. But at the same time, he’s paying police officers. He’s ripping people’s credit cards. He’s allowing the athletes to engage in prostitution. And he’s skimming money and taxes and not paying what he should be. So there were plenty of other crimes going on as well. Plus, he was supporting the Gambino family or a big chunk of the Gambino family.

[38:24] We had video. So later in the investigation, before we conducted the search warrant, I was able to put a camera on the front door. The local bank director of security was a retired FBI agent. And we went to him and asked him to use one of his cameras. And he said, sure. We turned this back then. The cameras were four feet long, right? So we turned this long four foot long camera. It looks like a, it looks like a rocket and we turn it and we put it on the front door. We’re shooting probably about a hundred yards away and we put it on the front door and we start seeing everybody that’s coming through and so forth. And it was the who’s who of, you know, Atlanta, you know, seven foot tall basketball players, politicians, police officers in uniform, police officers out of uniform, you name it, just a high-end businessman who owned the local car dealerships or owned the local fast food establishments and those type of things. And that.

[39:26] That that camera proved to be extremely beneficial. Later, the club discovered it because how can you not discover a four foot camera, you know, staring at you across the street? And we have great video of them standing out there in the parking lot, pointing at the camera, even bring one of their police officer friends over. And he points at the camera and they’re all sitting there staring at the camera,

[39:47] trying to figure out what’s going on and so forth. But I wanted to make a point about the camera. You said something a little earlier. What was it you just said to me earlier about the legitimacy you said something else that made me think about cameras gary refresh my memory oh i just talked about the previous question the club was on the surface was legitimate it was a safe place for people to go that in that there weren’t things bad things happened there yeah so yeah yeah i guess that’s what it was yeah i guess that’s what it was is that i was i was going to go to the cameras with that and we had you know we had the parking lot covered with the cameras and then with surveillance and you know you would bring your car up and you would hand it off to the to the one of those guys that park your car the valets.

[40:33] Yeah yeah steve kaplan was such a businessman that he got a percentage of the valet even though he he farmed the valet out to another company yeah he got a percentage of that of course he got a he got a percentage of everybody that walked through the door they paid a fee to get into the club. You pay outrageous amounts of money for the alcohol. You pay outrageous amounts of money to go up in the gold rooms. If you want to take your credit card and turn it into cash so you have something to stick into the girls’ garter belts or pay them in cash, he paid outrageous interest on that. Everything that was able to be turned into a moneymaker at that club was to the utmost steve made nine million dollars at the club legitimately in 1999 making it the most profitable strip club in america 1999 really now did he have like a a crow we call a crow company set up where when the guy’s credit card bill came back it wasn’t to the gold club or scores or some club sound did he have like a real that’s right where john sounded that’s what they usually do So how did he do that? Well, it was called MSB Sports. And what that stood for, no, it was just MSB Inc. I take that back, MSB Inc. And what that stood for was Mona’s Sports Bar.

[42:00] And Mona was Steve Kaplan’s wife. That was her name. So it was Mona’s Sports Bar, MSB Inc. So you’re right. So when you get home as a businessman and your wife goes through the credit cards receipt, She doesn’t see scores or gold gloves. She sees MSB. You’re right. That’s exactly right. Yeah. You know what you’re talking about, Gary. Cumber and Rango. I know I’ve been there. I’ve investigated a few of these things. We had an escort service that I worked real hard on that a mob guy really owned. And that’s what they did. They early in the credit card days. And so they started taking credit cards over the phone, but they had another company name set up so it wouldn’t come back as the escort service.

[42:44] So you mentioned police officers several times. Nope. Gary, I’m sorry. I remember the point I was going to make earlier. Yeah. You talked about, yeah, Steve Kaplan doing all these things. And then you said something like to the effect, then of course, Steve was paying the Gambinos a bunch of money as well. And you’re right. And here’s where I was going with the camera. Is it on that camera on? So the club was not open on Sundays. It was closed on Sundays only. It was open six days a week. It was open about 18 hours a day. They had to close at 4 a.m. and they could open up again at 11 or 6, or excuse me, 11 or 10 the next morning. So it was only closed about six hours a day.

[43:25] But on Sunday mornings, after the week’s worth of money had been made, we called a number of times one of Steve’s closest associates wheeling a suitcase on wheels out of that club at about, I don’t know, let’s say like eight or nine in the morning after the proceeds had been counted out and et cetera. And we let in wheeling that suitcase out and then going and get on a Delta line airline and then taking that money. That’s what was in that suitcase. We’re taking that cash back to New York. And that was, that was a big part of the skim that Steve was kicking to the Gambinos is that mostly about once a week on a Sunday morning, they would pack a suitcase full of money. Now, remember this is pre nine 11. So airline security is completely different for those listening who don’t, who are thinking, how do you get a suitcase with, you know, a hundred thousand dollars in cash on Delta airline?

[44:21] Well, one security was different, but two, Steve Kaplan had corrupted two employees at Delta airlines that allowed him to do this easier to carry this money onto the plane without any undue interference, if you will. So Steve had all his employees.

[44:38] Avenues covered. Yeah, he did. And I tell you, that guy really did. Now you mentioned police officers. That’s a subject near and dear to my heart. And, and so Atlanta’s best I know, they didn’t have what you would call institutional corruption for years and years and years, like some of the big Eastern cities.

[44:57] And so as a, as a department, it doesn’t have the reputation of, of being corrupt from one end to the other, but you know, we’re always going to have individuals. We had them here in Kansas. You’re always going to have individuals. So how did this work with them? But guys, guys that are bent that way, they’ll start showing up at these places. They’ll go in for a drink or whatever, and they’ll make sure that the manager or somebody knows they’re a cop. And then a sharp guy from New York, like Kaplan is any guy that runs one of these kinds of joints knows that, you know, start, you know, comping them drinks and, and start trying to, to, to get them on their side and see how far they can go with it. Is that kind of how it worked there and how extensive was it?

[45:40] Well, you know, I did other cases on other strip clubs and, and I made cases on police officers that pled guilty to corruption. And that’s the way it happened in those other cases, but nothing Steve Kaplan did was normal. Gary, he, he had his own way of doing business. And let me tell you how he corrupted these police officers. The two that we charged and took to trial, Steve Kaplan doesn’t need you unless he can use you, and he knows he can use you. So just like I said earlier, when Steve knew he needed to get money on a Delta airline airplane to fly to New York, he needed a connection within Delta Airlines. You know, from your experience, Gary, what’s the biggest headache for a strip club owner? It’s going to be inspections and permits, right? The vice unit is going to come and make sure all the girls have their permits. They’re all licensed, that you’re following all the rules, the alcohol, et cetera, et cetera. So Steve got him a guy inside the permit unit.

[46:44] A guy named Reginald Burney, who, how they met, we never found out, but he was in that permit unit and he would call Steve and he would warn Steve

[46:55] that, hey, there’s going to be an inspection tonight, be prepared. And in return, he was given pretty much carte blanche in the club. We had testimony at trial that he slept with at least one of the girls, both in the club and would take her home after hours, which was a violation of the rules that he’s supposed to be enforcing as a permits guy. A lot of people may not know this, but.

[47:22] At least then, an employee of a strip club could not leave a strip club with a customer, could not change clothes, get dressed, go to the locker room, get dressed, and walk out of the club with a customer. Because, obviously, it’s prostitution. It will lead to prostitution. So, permits would inspect those type of things. They’d set up vice traps and et cetera. But, yeah, here, Reginald Burney, we had testimony at trial that he’s doing this exact same thing. The other officer that we charged. And at trial, Gary, we had to cut the trial in half because we had 17 defendants. So only eight were on trial the first time. And then we were going to try the nine other in the next trial. So it was eight and nine is the way we cut it up. The second police officer was in the second trial. And his connection to the club was, he was a very senior man in the department. He knew everybody. He knew the city of Atlanta, not like the back of his hand, but more importantly, his wife had worked at the club. She had been a dancer back before Steve had bought the club, and then when Steve bought the club, she became what’s known as the house mom. She ran the locker room for the girls, made sure the scheduling was right, made sure they all had their permits. You know, the managers don’t really get involved with the administrative duties of the girls. A house mom handles all of that.

[48:47] This police officer named Jack Redlinger, his wife was one of the house moms there at the club. There were other house moms as well. She was one of them. So Jack would come to the club to pick up his wife, bring her home, take her home, do that kind of thing. And he became friends with Steve Kaplan. And Jack had this reputation already that was shady. Quite frankly, we had other police officers tell us, oh, everybody knew Jack was shady. And then one thing led to another and Jack became the guy that Steve could call for anything that he needed. I need advice. I need you to come look at that camera that’s pointing at me across the street. That was Jack Redlinger pointing at the camera in uniform. I need you to do an unauthorized escort for my bus full of basketball players on my celebrity golf tournament. Jack would do that for him. Jack would do anything that needed to be done. And what we ended up charging him with was there was a rape allegation that happened at the club in the limousine involving one of the managers, Steve’s close friends, and one of the.

[49:55] Well, Jack obstructed that rape investigation we charged. Jack got in touch with the sex crimes investigator and really talked poorly about the girl. You can’t believe her. She’s a liar. She sleeps around. Don’t listen to her. You know, these type of things. Then he instructed, we had testimony at trial that he instructed the limo driver of that limousine where the rape happened to destroy evidence, get rid of the logbook that shows who’s in the limousine, to lie about his testimony to the sex crimes investigator, things like that. So we charged Jack with that rape obstruction as well. But that’s how Steve got in with those police officers. Who can help him? It wasn’t just dumb luck of a guy coming to the bar like you’re talking about. That’s what other guys, that’s what other strip clubs did. Steve didn’t do it that way. Steve was very strategic about who he wanted to be his partners in crime.

[50:51] Interesting. That’s why he’s a good moneymaker. You know, now let’s get back to Michael DeLeonardo, Mikey Scars. Now, did he come down there or did he just was, he was up in New York. He lived up in New York. Did he just, you know, help get that money and distribute it on the other end? Or did he come down to have a presence at the club very much or how did that work yeah yeah good question so when steve owned his club in miami called club boca it was a very high-end legitimate disco type of nightclub and john gaudy jr would come down to that club and hang out i had a girl tell me one time that she took pictures in the club and she didn’t know who she was taking pictures of and and somebody came and took the camera from her and crushed it and threw it it It was a disposable camera, right? Oh, yeah. Crushed it and threw it away. And and she later learned, oh, that’s John Gotti Jr. over there that I’m taking pictures of and so forth. But but Junior did not like strip clubs. We were told that by multiple witnesses that he never came down to Atlanta to see Steve’s moneymaker in Atlanta. But Mikey’s scars did come down to answer your question. And we never had testimony and we never have reason to believe that Mikey came down because he wanted to, you know, have sex with the girls or anything like that. It was to come down.

[52:07] Remember, Mike’s Mikey’s the ultimate professional, right? He’s your stereotypical wise guy that you would see portrayed in the Don Corleone movies, right? Yes. Coat and tie, polished shoes, legit.

[52:21] So Mike would come down to the club for a couple of reasons. One, I want to see the moneymaker. I want to see how this is happening. I want to make sure that the money that Steve Kaplan is paying to us, I have a real good gut feeling that this is the proper amount based on what I’m seeing come through this club. And, and at the same time, look, this guy’s fabulously wealthy, Steve Kaplan. So if he wants to take me to Atlanta Falcons football game, fine. If he wants to put me up in a gold room just to talk with a girl all night for good company and give me free champagne and that type of thing, I’m all for that too. So scars did come down. I caught him on the video that we were talking about earlier, that camera on the front door, getting in and out of the limo, going to the Atlanta Falcons football game, those type of things. But it wasn’t because he was there to have sex with the girls, quite frankly. He was there to see the moneymaker, make sure the Gambinos were being told the truth about the money that Steve Kaplan was making and so forth, and then take advantage of the spoils at the same time to a certain extent. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I talked to him at length and he didn’t seem like a partier kind of guy. He was more of a serious businessman mobster. He was a mobster, no doubt about it, but he was not a, I didn’t get that vibe from him at all, a party kind of a guy. So let’s say. I would agree with. We never had testimony to the contrary. Yeah.

[53:49] So, you know, this is, we’re kind of coming down to the end here. The girls, let me ask a couple of questions about how the girls work. Now, the girls, if I remember right here, they mainly, they can make a couple of thousand, maybe $2,500 a night. They’d only work a couple of nights a week and make four or five grand sometimes are really good ones. And they were in high demand of other strip clubs and kind of the circuits. There’s kind of a circuit of the higher end strip clubs that these girls would work. And so they got their tips and they had to tip out other employees but did did kaplan seem like the strip club owners here they didn’t take any of the girls money they basically allowed them to work there and then they generate a lot of money how did that work with the girls there wasn’t anybody that didn’t walk into that club whether you’re a customer or employee that didn’t have to pay steve kaplan and ever steve got his money out of everybody here’s the way the girls paid out at the end of the night. First of all, they had to pay to show up to work. So it was called a dance fee. And each girl had to pay, I believe it was $50 a night just to get out on the dance floor in their stilettos and their bikini. $50 right there. So unless they make $50, they’re in the hole. So that’s Steve gets 50. And on some nights they would run almost 100 girls through that club. So do the math. Yeah. 100 times 50. Right. Steve made five thousand dollars just on the girls just to show up for work.

[55:14] And then the way the girls made their money was the primary way they made their money is we call it the funny money in the strip club business or the monopoly money. And Steve had his monopoly money. It was called gold bucks. It’s where a customer could come in and put $10,000 on his credit card. And I would give him $10,000 in fake funny money. And then he could take, and it was in a hundred dollar denominations. And then he could take that funny money and he could give it to the girls at the end of the night as their tips, as their money, as their dance fees. And now the girl would have, like you said earlier, $2,000 in funny money, But how is she going to turn that into U.S. Money, U.S. dollars? She would have to take it to Steve Kaplan at the end of the night or to the club management and do what they call a cash out. And she would take her $2,000, give it to Steve Kaplan, and Steve would get 20% of that to turn it into U.S. currency.

[56:09] But keep this in mind also, Gary, that when that customer put that $10,000 tab on his credit card, Steve got 20% of that too. He charged him an extra 20%. So Steve got 20% from the customer for that 10,000. And then he got 20% of that 2000 that the girl got just in that one transaction right there. So Steve was getting 20% of every dollar that was being spent between a customer and the dancer on a credit card transaction. No, strike that 40% on every credit card transaction that was happening up there in those gold, in those gold rooms. And again, I’m telling you, those guys were spending crazy money up there. It wasn’t uncommon.

[56:51] The customers were okay with spending $5,000 and $10,000 a night. That was not uncommon. Yeah. Yeah. Not uncommon. I know a guy here in Kansas City reasonably well and –, He’d do that. He’s a, he’s a real big bucks lawyer and he’d do that. He’d, he’d spend five grand and just a blink of an eye at a strip club. I was like, dude.

[57:13] Multiply that by 30 or 40 guys a night, seven, six nights a week. Yeah. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. That’s a, that’s been a heck of investigation. So eventually you’re going to have to take this down. Yeah. You’ve been, you started with a grand jury investigation, bringing people in. Know they know the jig is up and they know something’s going on and so you’re slowly but surely gathering all these different statements from people and serving search warrants and then records cepedas and and putting on it had to be a huge huge paper case that you guys put it was after after all the fun of doing the surveillances and following people around and figured out who was who now you got to do that so that how many agents did you end up having working on this.

[57:58] Well we had four fbi guys we had four fbi full-time we had two irs full-time and we had two support employees from the fbi that were assigned to us to assist with records checks and things and that so we had eight working full-time off the top of my head and then we of course we’d have part-timers as well but when we did those searches of course it was all hands on deck you know we had the night that we did the search we did three searches we did one in new York and two in Atlanta. We searched Steve Kaplan’s house in Atlanta. We searched the gold club at 4 AM and we searched his corporate warehouse in New York. And we probably used a hundred plus agents to conduct those searches and do all the, and then at the same time, while we were doing those searches, we had another hundred agents out handing out subpoenas for the grand jury, knocking on doors for the employees that had, that were not at the club or that

[58:52] we had already missed because they had went home before 4 a.m. Or something to that effect. So the night of the searches, it was an all hands on deck, a couple hundred agents running around the city of Atlanta and New York supporting this effort.

[59:05] And we run that grand jury investigation for six months. We have three indictments. We supersede it twice. The original indictment had 97 pages in the indictment. That’s how I think it was. The last indictment was about 120 pages. And that was the one that It finally included Mikey Scars, Michael D. Leonardo. He was not in the original indictment. But as we started flipping people and we started getting more cooperation, we were able to put more and more things together. And then we get ready for trial in April, May of 2001. It took two years to get from the search in 99 to the trial in 2001. And we go to trial with 17 defendants, eight in the first trial.

[59:51] Did people start making deals at the end did they end up going ahead and copping please we had a number of folks that, that did do what you just said, they, they cooperated. The way we worked the grand jury was this, Gary, is that, look, there’s a good chance that as an employee of that club, you committed a crime. You either slept, you either engaged in prostitution, you ripped somebody’s credit card, or you committed a tax fraud, some form or fashion, but we don’t care because you’re low level and you’re not our target. Our target is Steve Kaplan. So come into the grand jury, get your immunity letter, tell us the truth, and you’ll be fine. And 99% of the employees, mostly girls, did just that. But we brought a lot of guys in as well. We brought a lot of mobsters in. We brought a lot of male employees in, managers. And they did the same thing. Look, I don’t want to get in trouble. I’ll tell you the truth. And they took our deal. But there was a handful of employees that were very loyal to Steve that said, no, I’m lying. Steve never did anything. There was never any sex. There was never any drugs. There was never any credit card fraud. Steve was not in the mob. There’s no police officers. Whatever story they wanted to tell, they were just very loyal to Steve.

[1:01:10] And because of that, we had no choice but to charge them for the crimes that we felt like were significant enough in the club to warrant prosecution. So we had 17 defendants. But we did have probably, I would say, in that close-knit circle, we had probably half a dozen cooperators that flipped once the grand jury and the search warrant became public. One of them was Steve’s closest right-hand man, quite frankly, a guy named Thomas Siganano, who had been in, what’s D.B. Leonardo’s first name there, the guy that got whacked in the Gambinos that Gravano killed. Called him D.B. D.B., yeah. Remember D.B.? D.B.’s crew. Yeah. Yeah, he had been in DB’s crew back in the mid 80s and hooked up with Steve Kaplan and was helping him up in Atlanta and had been in the limo when Steve was driving around with John Gotti Jr. and Mikey Scars. And, you know, he he he got his own attorney and his own attorney turned out to be Ed McDonald. You ma]]> Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode of Gangland Wire Crime Stories, retired police detective Gary Jenkins speaks with former FBI agent Mark Sewell, who delves into his investigation of the notorious Gold Club in Atlanta and its ties to organized crime.

Mark shares his journey from the Marine Corps to the FBI, detailing how his training prepared him to tackle organized crime. The discussion highlights the world of strip clubs as a major revenue source for criminals, drawing parallels to his early police work in Kansas City. At the heart of the conversation is the Gold Club, owned by Steve Kaplan, who turned it into a hotspot during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, attracting celebrities and high-profile figures. Mark describes the criminal activities that took place, from credit card fraud to connections with the Gambino crime family. Mark reveals the challenges of infiltrating the club and gathering evidence, including working with strippers as informants and tracking financial transactions. He also discusses key figures in the Gambino family, such as Mikey Scars DiLeonardo and Steve Kaplan’s partnerships with corrupt police officers and mob players.

Click here to buy Mark’s book

Investigating America’s Most Notorious Strip Club: The FBI, the Gold Club, and the Mafia

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Transcript

0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Detective and later Sergeant. I’ve got this podcast, Gangland Wire, and we look into the mob. Today, I have a great story, a real mafia story. You know, and we saw this in Kansas City. These guys love these strip clubs because there’s a lot of money to be made out of strip clubs. And maybe some of you have heard of the gold club down in Atlanta. When I first got Mark’s book, our guest, you know, I thought I remembered that there was all these Patrick Ewing and all these big-time basketball players going there. And it was a hell of a scandal, but I didn’t remember much about it, but Mark Sewell. Welcome Mark. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

[0:46] Well, Gary, you’re, you’re very welcome. I’ve been a fan of your podcast and your media work for a while too so i’m glad to do this thanks for having me well good and i told you before like you know we had the same thing in kansas city and these bobsters they love strip clubs there’s a lot to to make out of a strip club besides the money besides a skim besides blackmail on people possibly and and all kinds of things can be made for the mob out of a strip club and and you dive right into the middle of it. Now, Mark, your first office was down in Atlanta, but before that, tell us a little bit about your history and what led you to join the FBI. Sure. Shortly after high school, Gary, I joined the Marine Corps out of the Houston, Texas area, 1987. And I stayed in the Marine Corps until 1997. During that time, I was able to earn a commission.

[1:45] So when I left the Marine Corps, I was a young captain in the Marine Corps. And I was stationed in Honolulu, Hawaii, or Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. But I recruited into the FBI out of the Honolulu office there. And that recruiter, FBI recruiter, came over to the Marine Corps base and took seven officers out of my battalion in about a one-year period. Period because we all had security clearances because we were intelligence battalion. Yeah. And so we, she knew we could pass the FBI’s background investigation because we already had these top secret clearances and so forth. So I joined the Marine Corps out of Hawaii in 1997.

[2:27] Excuse me. I joined the FBI. I was in the Marine Corps. So I joined the FBI in 1997. I go to the Academy in Quantico, which I’m already familiar with Quantico because as you know, the Marine Corps has, that’s their place actually. The FBI is a tenant on the Marine Corps base. So I was very familiar with the Quantico landscape and I get there in 1997. I complete new agent training and I get assigned to Atlanta, Georgia as my first office. I have to assume that the basic training of an FBI agent was a little bit different than the basic training of a Marine Corps.

[3:04] Yeah, you know, you make a good point because as a Marine, you go there wondering, is this going to be anything like what I’ve experienced in the past, right? Because when I went to OCS, Officer Candidate School, that’s kind of like a boot camp for officers. And you know that’s that’s a that’s a screaming event and a stress event and that kind of thing but i tell everybody that the fbi academy is what i call a gentleman’s course compared to the marine corps so i was uh pleasantly surprised and relieved yeah i bet you get a little bit older you can’t you you ain’t playing that homie don’t play that anymore having people screaming yell at you trying to make you look like an idiot and demeaning you and breaking you down all the way so they can build you back up. You know, I know that drill. Anyhow, so, you know, you get out of the Quantico Academy and your first office is Atlanta, Georgia. I assume you didn’t get to go back to Hawaii or you hired in at Atlanta.

[4:02] I didn’t want to go back to Hawaii, to be honest, because it’s just so doggone expensive out there. And, you know, there’s a chance when you go out there as an FBI agent that you could be there a long time. The Marine Corps is going to move you every three years, But you could go out there potentially in today’s FBI and you could spend your whole career out there. So the idea of spending a decade in Hawaii with that cost of living, we loved it, but we were ready to move on. So Atlanta, cost of living in Atlanta was a lot better. Yeah, I can only imagine. Atlanta is probably going to be more like Kansas City, although it’s probably more expensive than Kansas City. But it’s going to be more like the Midwest than Hawaii for sure. And then, of course, you know, FBI agents, guys, you may or may not know this. Agents that get assigned to san francisco and new york and i’m not sure if there’s another one or not but they have to get a little extra stipend because it’s the cost of living is so expensive and it’s true so it’s you know it’s a problem living in those huge big cities like that besides all the traffic and stuff of course that’s where the action is i assume washington dc gets an extra stipend too i would think and that and that is the the payoff you you mentioned it yeah working in New York, living in New York can really be a hassle, but if you’re looking for quality FBI type of work.

[5:20] Then there’s no place better than New York, right? So it’s a give and take sometimes. The great thing about Atlanta was there was great work because Atlanta is the ninth largest city in America. That’s home to a number of Fortune 500 companies, but yet the cost of living is a lot less. Yeah, you don’t have the old school Italian mafias, you know, ensconced in Atlanta, but there’s plenty of organized crime in Atlanta to work on in there. That’s right. And, you know, and I was surprised when I learned that I was going

[5:51] to be assigned to the Organized Crime Squad. I just knew a little bit about organized crime having grown up in Texas.

[5:59] And really all I knew was what I read in the newspapers or saw on television. And then I find out I’m going to be assigned to an Organized Crime Squad. And then specifically, I’m going to be assigned to the LCN part of the Organized Crime Squad. And I always made the joke. I had to go out and research what is the LCN because I really didn’t know a lot about it. I knew one name, John Gotti. That’s all I knew. That’s because he was in the headlines during that era.

[6:27] That’s all I knew. I was drinking from the proverbial fire hose. I had a lot to learn. Yeah, you did. You found out that their tentacles reach out to Atlanta and a whole lot of other places in the United States, any place there’s a large city and there’s opportunities for advice and ways to make money. These guys, they’ve got their, they got their fingers in it somewhere. And especially a place like Atlanta, because there’s a lot of money to be made in Atlanta. But one of your early case, you were, I guess, let’s go back your first off office. And then your first, your break-in officer, he was assigned to be your mentor, was a man named Simmons, John Simmons. Tell us about working with John Simmons. I had read in your book that that was a real positive, great experience for you.

[7:16] It was. John is what we call a Hoover agent, as you well know. Yes, I know what. John came in the FBI when J. Edgar Hoover was still the director. And when I joined in 97, there were still a handful of Hoover agents left in the Bureau, but not many. And they just did things different. They operated different. They talked different. They had a different attitude. It just was a whole different way of life. I went through in my career, I went through FBI directors, but you have to remember, J. Edgar Hoover was a director for 49 years in the FBI. So he was the FBI. So John was a Hoover agent and John had broke into the FBI work in organized crime as well and had really worked his entire career by the time I get assigned to work with him in 1997. At that point, he had 27 years already in the FBI.

[8:13] And the vast majority of that was working organized crime, was working the LCN.

[8:19] Starting when he was assigned as a new agent out of the academy, he went down to Tampa really quickly for about a year and then they ship him up to New York and he gets assigned to this brand new organized crime squad that the FBI had just kind of started. James Calstrom was on that squad, for example, some of the noteworthy names in the FBI, and they were working this case. This guy named Joe Pistone had a case going on. And so that’s how John broke in with the FBI is helping work the Donnie Brasco case. And John was in New York for 10 years. And then he went down to Miami and worked Wise Guys down there for about eight years and then came up to Atlanta for his, around his 20th year in the FBI, he gets up to Atlanta and work an organized crime there. And then this Gold Club case gets brought to his attention.

[9:16] And John realizes, and the new supervisor, Kenny Power of the squad, realizes we’re going to need some help on this case because it’s big. One guy can’t do this and so me right out of the academy i get assigned to the squad and i get assigned to john to help him on this case eventually we built it out to four agents working it exclusively but it started with john interesting yeah he’s he went all the way back and i’ve got a friend here in kansas city doug fensel who was on the gambino squad during that time and doug actually was one of the guys that went to sunny black and said hey joe pistone is is not donnie Roscoe and he’s not an informant. He is an FBI agent. So I talked to Doug, I’ll probably see him in the next week or so. We need to set up another breakfast with a mutual friend of ours.

[10:03] So that’s, those are pretty exciting people to come down to Atlanta. Some of the Gambino guys and you got John Simmons there who, who knows the Gambino family. And so how did you, you look at the gold club and you see, you find this guy named Steve Kaplan and Steve Kaplan, I kind of had an investigation works guys is you find this guy who’s who’s run the thing and you say well where did he come from who is this guy let’s go find out about him and start sending out leads right and and so how did that work from there just check did john simmons know him and know that history he had with the gambinos or how did that work can you describe that yeah i can sure steve kaplan bought the gold club in 1994 as a wise business investment to get ready for the 1996 summer Olympics, which were coming to Atlanta.

[10:54] You know, Atlanta was going to have millions of males that are young and, and sports fans, you know, come down into the city and what are they going to do in their off hours? There was money to be made. Strip clubs knew it. And so that’s where you wanted to be. If you wanted to make some money during the Olympics, that was one of the many money-making opportunities. So Steve bought that club in 94 after successively running a number of nightclubs, legitimate nightclubs, discos back in the 80s, nightclubs in New York and then down in Miami. This was his first adult business that he got into.

[11:33] In Atlanta or a gentleman’s club, as you call it, because it was high end. You know, it wasn’t a shady place. It was a very high end place. And he bought it in 94.

[11:43] And as soon as he bought it, New York picked up the telephone, the FBI agents there and called John, his connections, you know, John still had connections all over the FBI. And they said, Hey, John, we just want you to know that one of our leading associates up here in New York just bought a club down in your area. and you might want to look into it. And that’s how John first came about the case and Steve Kaplan. And then to answer your question also, then you start figuring out, well, who is Steve Kaplan? And of course, New York already knew who he was. So they give us his dossier, if you will, and start telling us a little bit about who Steve Kaplan is. But there’s still a lot to learn. And you know, the FBI only knows so much about a guy. We didn’t have any turncoats, if you will, or sources directly tied to Steve Kaplan yet. So we didn’t know everything about him. Once we made the case and some of his closest friends cooperated against him, we learned even more about his mob connections. But he was tied at the highest levels, Gary. I mean, he was ultimately to jump way ahead. He was in John Gotti Jr.’s crew and John Gotti Jr. Doesn’t take guys on that aren’t making money, right? So that’s who he was. And that’s how we found out about him was New York gave us that big heads up, and then we just started working the streets.

[13:02] Interesting. And we had a little conversation just before we started recording about, we’re going to talk about Michael D. Leonardo or Mikey Scars in a little bit because he was involved, but.

[13:12] Mark and I were comparing, I was telling him about interviewing Mikey’s cars and he was telling me about when he was made and Mark said, yeah, that was like the rookie class that made it big in, in the FBI. I mean, in the, uh, organized crime, the Gambino crime family. And what’s interesting is Steve Kaplan was connected to all of them almost throughout his thing. And so tell us about that, that the making ceremony was John Gotti Sr. Didn’t want to make his own son. So he had Sammy the Bull do the ceremony and John Gotti Jr. And Mikey Di Leonardo and Bobby Borrello and another guy whose name we can’t seem to remember were all made in that class. And so tell us about Kaplan’s connection. I know he was, it was connected to Bobby Borrello, but he seemed to go from one guy to the other for a while.

[14:06] Yeah, that class you’re talking about, that induction ceremony was Christmas Eve of 1988, if I’m not mistaken. And Bull Gravano, yeah, he did lead that ceremony, if you will. When Steve first came to the Gambino’s attention is when he owned a nightclub in New York in the mid-1980s. And, you know, kind of like the old joke goes, the Gambino’s made him an offer he couldn’t resist. Right. So he he gets he gets into bed with the Gambino’s and he’s first assigned

[14:37] to the crew of a guy named Frank Marano, a.k.a. Frankie Blair from the mid 1980s. But their relationship does not work.

[14:47] Well, and Steve was making enough money at that time, even in the early 80s for the Gambinos that he had already caught their attention. And what we were told later is that Steve was able to go to John Gotti Sr.

[15:03] And tell and ask or or make a make an issue that, hey, I don’t like this guy, Frankie Blair. I don’t I don’t like him. He’s not good for business. Give give me somebody else to work with. And so the story is, is that John Gotti Sr. Reassigned him to a guy named Shorty Muscusio, Anthony Shorty Muscusio, who was a close friend of John Gotti Sr. And so the theory is that he reassigned Steve Kaplan to Shorty Muscusio and says, hey, Shorty, take care of my guy here. He’s got some problems with Frankie Blair. Let’s treat him right because he’s making good money for us. And so Shorty takes over and Shorty was a famous mobster in his own right. He had his photo taken one time in 1987 during one of the John Gotti senior acquittals at the state level where he, when John Gotti came out of the courtroom, the first person to greet him was Shorty Muscusio with a handshake and then escort him into a Lincoln town car that was waiting on the curb and then get him out of there. And that photo went nationwide and that was Shorty, Shorty Muscusio. And that’s who Steve Kaplan ended up with. That was his second handler, if you will. And, but Shorty.

[16:19] Got sideways with Steve Kaplan’s business partner at a club called Bedrocks in about 1987-ish. And one night, about one or two in the morning, there was an altercation between Steve Kaplan’s partner, a guy named Dave Fisher, and Shorty Muscusio. And the story is, we believe, is that Shorty went into the only bathroom that there was down in the basement to use the bathroom. And when he came out, Dave ambushed him from behind and shot him in the back of the head and killed him.

[16:55] And Dave claimed to the NYPD that it was self-defense, that Shorty was beating him up that morning, Shorty and his crew. Shorty had a guy named Dino Bassiano was in his crew at that time. And Dino later testified in our Gold Club trial up in Atlanta. And he told us this story that they roughed him up a little bit. And when he had a chance, he shot Shorty coming out of the bathroom. And you would think that, okay, you shoot a made guy in the Gambino’s, you’re going to pay for it with your life, right? But because John Gotti Sr. was on trial in 87 and 88 and 89 with these state cases, Sr. Put out the word that don’t touch Dave Fisher. We’ll deal with him later because if we touch him, that’s going to bring more heat on me. That’s going to bring more attention to the fact that we’re shaking bedrocks down to begin with and so on and so on. So just leave him alone. You know, we’ll deal with him later. So with Shorty killed, dead now, Steve Kaplan gets assigned to Bobby Borrello, who you mentioned earlier, in 88.

[18:03] 87, 88 timeframe. And Bobby’s a rising star in the Gambino’s as well. He’s in that class that you just mentioned. He had just been made, but he’s now been assigned to be John Gotti senior’s driver and his bodyguard. He held that position there. And so because he, Bobby Borrello was close to John Gotti, that ultimately caused him his life. And I’ll tell you why is because still the other four families had not forgiven John Gotti Sr. For whacking Paul Castellano without permission. So they still held that vendetta against John Gotti. And when it was time to pay that Piper, if you will, their thought was, who am I going to take from the Gambinos that’s going to hurt John Gotti Sr. The most for what he did when he took out Paul Castellano? So they took out his driver. They took out Bobby Borrello. So Bobby was killed coming out of his house and trying to get in his car one morning. And Bobby was Steve Kaplan’s handler. So now Steve’s last two handlers have been whacked, Shorty Muscusio and Bobby Borrello. So then Bobby gets, excuse me, Steve Kaplan gets assigned to John Gotti Jr.

[19:19] All right. So now we’re in the early 90s and he gets assigned to John Gotti Jr. And as we, as you and I talked about earlier in warmups, you don’t end up in John Gotti Jr.’s crew unless you’re a significant moneymaker. Yeah. And that, and of course we knew that Steve was a big moneymaker.

[19:38] All the way back, even in that time frame. And when John Gotti Sr. Goes away, gets convicted by the FBI led case at his in his federal trial in 92.

[19:50] He goes to prison and now the Gambinos need an acting street boss because because the old man is still the boss in prison, but they need an acting street boss. So they bump up the kid and he becomes the acting street boss. And when he becomes the acting street boss, Steve Kaplan can no longer be in his crew because street boss doesn’t run a crew, right? So now Steve Kaplan gets handed over to the third person in that induction’s crew of 1988, and that’s Michael DiLeonardo, known on the streets as Mikey Scars. And he stayed with Mikey Scars from that 92, 93 era, all the way through buying the Gold Club in 94, up to our trial in 2001. And we took both of them to trial together as a team, along with a number of other employees from the Gold Club. So that’s who Steve Kaplan was and is. He started with the mob in the mid 80s and he ran with the at the highest levels.

[20:51] And he knew that he was at the highest levels and he often used that to his advantage. He threw names around, you know, I’m with John, you know, and not many people can call anybody John and the other guy know what you’re talking about. And we have Steve on tape there at scores in New York City when that club was being shut down and the FBI was taping those conversations. We have Steve saying, I’m, Hey, I’m with John. I’ll take care of this, you know, that type of thing. So Steve ran at the highest levels.

[21:25] Interesting. So now you’re, you’re down here at Atlanta and you, you know, I, first thing the bureau is going to do, I think is see, well, we got any informants that are already going in and out of this club, frequented it. Do you start running some surveillances on it? Start trying to find out who’s working there. Can you turn anybody? You need somebody on the inside. You need to find out, you know, the hierarchy inside and, and maybe what start learning, what kind of scams are going down. So tell the guys how you proceeded with this investigation. I mean, you know, you get the paperwork and, and all that kind of stuff, but then you got to hit the streets and, and find out who’s what in the investigation, you know, hours of surveillance, writing down the license numbers out front. I’ve been there doing all that and then going inside and having some drinks and, and just to see who, how people relate to each other. Talk about how that investigation then started going.

[22:17] Yeah, that’s a good question. And we didn’t have a really good strategy to begin with, because like you said, there were a lot of ways to go at it. We didn’t know which one was going to be the most productive. So in the beginning, we we kind of tried them all, if you will, and see where we could gain some traction. But where we gained the most traction was the following two that I’ll tell you

[22:41] about was, hey, look, what’s the number one occupation in a strip club? It’s going to be dancers. It’s going to be strippers. Right.

[22:51] So we made a decision that if we could get the strippers to talk to us, if we could get the dancers to talk to us. And tell us what was going on in the club, that would probably be about as good as information as we could get about the internal workings of the club and the scams that might be going on in the club. So we made an effort to do that. And I’ll tell you more about those in a minute. And then the second thing that kind of fell into our lap was there on a fairly regular basis, there were upper middle-class businessmen that were calling the FBI in Atlanta through the, you know, the 1-800 number, if you will, and saying, hey, I went to this club last night in Atlanta and my credit card got ripped. I walked out of there with what I thought was a $5,000 tab. And then American Express called me the next morning and said, no, it’s 25. So we started getting these calls on a regular basis. And we would go out and interview these fellas. And, you know, of course, they’re, they’re really good witnesses. They’re educated college types, businessmen, and they can tell a good story. And we knew if we ever went to trial some way, way down the future, they’d make good witnesses because they have good backgrounds. You know, they’re not criminals, right? That kind of thing. So they’re easy to believe.

[24:12] And they told us some pretty good stories about how they think their credit cards got manipulated and part of the story. And then while they’re telling those stories, we’re learning a little bit about how the club works as well, how the girls are manipulating the credit card. So the customers tell us this story, hey, my credit card got ripped, and here’s how I think it happened. So that’s on one hand, Gary. And then we’re talking to the dancers that we’re able to flip on the other hand, and they’re telling us how the credit cards are getting ripped and we’re marrying the two together. Now we’re getting the dancer’s version and we’re getting the customer’s version and they were very similar and they told the same story. And so we knew that we were on to something when it came to credit cards.

[24:59] And then a lot of those girls also told us about the cash and how it was handled in the club. And we knew there was tax fraud going on. Steve Kaplan wasn’t paying all of his taxes that he should be paying. He’s dealing a lot in cash. Remember, in the late 90s, America’s still dealing a lot in cash. It’s not a credit card exclusive community yet. Yeah. So there was still a lot of cash going on. So we knew we had some tax violations going on there. And what we eventually came to the decision was, what we need to do is get inside the club, conduct a search warrant, grab as many records as we can, figure out what’s going on from looking at those records. And then because there’s so many people in this club that are associated with it from a customer perspective, from an employee perspective, the prosecutor, the AUSA, Art Leach, had made a decision that we’re going to throw all of these people, which turned out to be hundreds, into a grand jury and investigate and conduct a grand jury investigation, which you’re very familiar with.

[26:06] So that’s a long answer to your question, but it really kind of focused on the financial crimes. We discovered other crimes as well when we got into it, prostitution, paying off police officers, obstruction, obstruction all the way back to that murder of Frankie or Anthony Muscusio that I told you about. We charged Steve Kaplan with obstruction because there was one witness to that murder, and Steve took him down to Florida and hid him out so he couldn’t talk to the NYPD. But because of the power of RICO, we could go back and charge Steve with that obstruction even though it didn’t happen in Atlanta. It happened in New York, but it’s all part of the Gambino enterprise.

[26:45] So when we got into the investigation, we started finding these things. But really, it was in the beginning and ultimately at the end. It really was a financial investigation. It boiled down to the money, boiled down to the cash. And we brought the IRS in to help us. And a guy named Bill Selinsky led that charge and they were super happy. Uh effective and we’re glad we did so you didn’t you didn’t have some young fbi agents you could put in there and give them a whole bunch of cash and they could get lap dances and have a party every night hey man i used to have guys that’s all they wanted to do yeah we’re gonna work the strip club boss you know we just need about a hundred bucks and you know we’ll have a merry old time you couldn’t do that well look we we certainly went in the club and we went in you know in a in an undercover capacity, but we were low key and we weren’t spending money. We were just flies on the wall, go in, observe, try and put faces with names, see the layout of the club, see what we could see from just a common perspective. We, you know, we had heard about names and we wanted to put faces with those names and, and so on and so on. But, you know, Gary, as you know, I know what you’re saying because that’s what young agents and young police officers think.

[27:57] But what they don’t know is that one day you’re going to be on a witness stand and a defense and a defense attorney is going to eat your lunch because they’re going to play those tapes that you made to the jury. They’re going to see and hear about you getting lap dances. They’re going to see and hear about you having sexy conversations with these dancers and so forth and they’re going to embarrass you is what they’re going to do in front of the jury so even though we talked about things like that And we certainly went into the club. We stayed away from being customers in that sense. And, you know, trying to engage the girls in prostitution or drug sales or anything like that, because it wasn’t worth it. We knew we could make this case other ways that wouldn’t embarrass us on the witness stand. Yeah. They were smart. You were smart doing that. Cause it’s real. It’s real. That goes back to, that goes back to John Simmons and some of these other guys that I’m, you know, that I was working with, you know, you, you, John Acavelli came up from New York. He had transferred from Atlanta to New York, and John had been on that Gambino squad that convicted the old man in 1992.

[29:02] In fact, he knew Mikey Scars previously because he, John Acavelli, another agent that I worked with, was working the union that Mikey Scars was shaking down, one of the construction unions. So he knew Mikey Scars really well. So that type of experience helped tell young agents like me and the other guys, look, we don’t need to go in this club and start acting like we’re wanting to get laid up in the gold rooms and things like that. That’s not the way to do this.

[29:32] So describe the inside of that club. You mentioned the gold room and these are like a VIP room. They have these different rooms that they’ll go back and you get a private dance with, which costs you a little more money. And so kind of describe how this was laid out. I know it was extremely high-end stuff in there. It was. The gold club was enormous to the tune of somewhere around 15,000 square feet. Wow. So, yeah, it was really big. It had two levels. The upper level lined two walls, and the upper level was the gold rooms, or what’s famously known in the strip club business as the VIP rooms. But they called them the gold rooms. And keep in mind that in Atlanta and in Georgia, but specifically in Atlanta, you can have full alcohol and full nudity, which is a rarity in the strip club business. Yeah. At the time, I don’t know what it is now, but at the time that we were

[30:26] doing this case, only two other states allowed that type of strip club business to go on. And that was Florida and Texas. You know, even up in New York or Las Vegas or out in California, the girls had to wear pasties or you couldn’t sell our art alcohol at the bar. You could only sell beer. It was a give or take. So.

[30:47] You now have, you know, full alcohol, full nudity, and you have these VIP rooms upstairs. And so Steve Kaplan knew that he had a magic formula where I can just charge these guys outrageous amounts of money and they’ll pay it. So they can see this girl get naked in a room upstairs by themselves, whether sex happens or not, they’re going to pay for it because who wouldn’t, right? If you got the money, they’re going to spend it up in these rooms. So Steve charged crazy amounts of money for these gold rooms, starting at a minimum in $1999 when we did the search in 1999, $200 an hour at a minimum.

[31:28] Depending upon the size of the room, it could go up to five hundred dollars an hour to buy a room. You also had to buy a bottle of champagne. The minimum bottle of champagne went for two hundred dollars minimum.

[31:41] And then you had to buy the girl. You had to pay for her hourly wage as well. And that was negotiated with the girl. And that was generally in the one to two hundred dollars an hour range, too. So to get into the least of the attractive gold rooms upstairs with the least amount of time, with the least attractive girl, if you will, was $600 just to get in the door right there. Okay. And that was a bare minimum. So you were going to spend probably at least $1,000 when you walked into a gold room. And all seven of those gold rooms were full all the time, cycling through them, cycling through them, cycling through them every night. It was not uncommon for Steve to make $40,000 to $50,000 on a weekend night. And most of that was coming from gold room businessmen churning those credit cards over or paying cash, either one. So that’s what the gold rooms were. And then, of course, when the celebrities came into town, specifically the athletes, they were the most noteworthy there at the gold club. But there were other, there were movie stars and the like as well. But when the athletes came into town, that was exclusively where they went, was up into the gold rooms and the private rooms and et cetera. So the gold rooms were the, were notorious there at the club, but they were big, big money makers for Steve Kaplan.

[33:00] Interesting. Yeah. When those athletes, they come in with their entourage. Yeah. There’s, there’s a song out there by a singer songwriter talks about this guy said he’s the guy that carries a boombox for Mike Tyson. And he says, hey, Mike, let’s go to the strip club because he knows, you know, Mike will take him to the strip club and, you know, everything will pay for everything. They just start throwing money around and those athletes do that kind of stuff. And movie stars will do. Well, you know, it’s interesting what you’re describing. And here’s what I learned working in Atlanta because I worked strip clubs for almost 10 years. What you’re describing is really a ethnic race difference type of strip clubs. The black strip clubs in atlanta and strip clubs are very segregated for the most part there’s white strip clubs and there’s black strip clubs and then there’s a few that are like the gold club, that are interracial but those are the high-end clubs yeah and but typically are you still with me gary yeah something’s going on here let’s just let’s just stop just a minute and.

[34:09] Start again. All right. Try it again. Start back over about where you were going into the, okay. Okay. You’re good. Yeah. So this Mike Tyson story that you’re telling, that’s very typical in the black strip clubs of America and even in Atlanta where the, the celebrities, the athletes, et cetera, will come in and bring a big entourage and throw money around. That’s not what happened in Steve Claflin’s club. Oh really? Because, because Yeah, he came up with a formula that figured, hey, I can make more money doing it different. And here’s the way it was.

[34:42] His formula was simple. And he learned this through an athlete named Larry Johnson, who played for the Charlotte Hornets and then went to the New York Knicks. But Larry had played college basketball at Nevada, Las Vegas. They won a national championship. He was a very famous athlete, did commercials for Nike called the Grandmama commercials. If you remember those back in the nineties, Larry Johnson came to the club one night, just shortly after Steve Kaplan bought it. And he begged Steve Kaplan to let Steve take a girl home with him, let Larry take a girl home with him. And Steve wouldn’t do it. Steve had just bought the club and Steve was trying to run it kind of a, I don’t want to get in trouble with the cops type of thing. And the easiest way to get in trouble with the cops to start running prostitution. So, so Steve said, no, I’m not letting you bring the, I’m not letting you take the girl home. And someone else that was there at that conversation told us this story later. But then Steve had a change of heart after Larry left. He said, you know what? This is my hook, and here’s the way I’m going to do it. These athletes want to come to this club and hook up with these beautiful women. I’m going to allow them to do it, but I’m not going to allow just the average guy to do it. Here’s the way it’s going to work.

[35:57] The athlete will come, Patrick Ewing, Larry Johnson, the list goes on and on. And I will give them a free gold room and I’ll give them, I’ll pay for the girls to go up there and entertain them. And what’s going to happen is there, those athletes are going to draw in the average Joe, if you will, the, the guy that wants to go to the club to say, Hey, I was at the club last night and guess who was there? Madonna was there. I was at the club last night and guess who was there? George Clooney was there. That’s going He’s going to tell his buddies, and they’re going to tell their buddies, and they’re going to tell their buddies. And now you’ve got hundreds of just average Joes walking through the door because they think they might get to see Dennis Rodman or Patrick Ewing or Madonna or whatever it may be. So Steve came up with this formula that I’m going to allow these celebrities to come up. They don’t have to spend any money. They don’t have to throw money around like Mike Tyson. I’m going to pay for it all because I’m going to make my money back by having four and five hundred guys show up wanting to hang out with a NBA player, that type of thing. Smart. And it was smart. It was very, it worked. Yeah. It was, we, our sources were telling us that it’s, it’s known throughout the city of Atlanta. If you want to hang out and see the jet set and the celebrities of Atlanta, go to the Gold Club.

[37:17] Interesting. So it worked. It gave it a certain legitimacy among polite society, if you will, that guys, people wouldn’t maybe not normally go there would feel okay. It was okay to go there. They wouldn’t feel afraid or threatened or anything where they might, you know, one of these lowered in strip clubs, you know, they might want to go in, but they’re afraid to, but the score, it was old club.

[37:38] You’re right. The lights were bright. There was no dark rooms. There were no shady, you know, things happening. Like in most strip clubs, there weren’t drug deals happening in the corners. This was a very light, bright business with disco balls and loud music. And his philosophy when he first bought the club, Steve Kaplan, was to turn it into a Studio 54 type of atmosphere. And that’s exactly what it was like. But at the same time, he’s paying police officers. He’s ripping people’s credit cards. He’s allowing the athletes to engage in prostitution. And he’s skimming money and taxes and not paying what he should be. So there were plenty of other crimes going on as well. Plus, he was supporting the Gambino family or a big chunk of the Gambino family.

[38:24] We had video. So later in the investigation, before we conducted the search warrant, I was able to put a camera on the front door. The local bank director of security was a retired FBI agent. And we went to him and asked him to use one of his cameras. And he said, sure. We turned this back then. The cameras were four feet long, right? So we turned this long four foot long camera. It looks like a, it looks like a rocket and we turn it and we put it on the front door. We’re shooting probably about a hundred yards away and we put it on the front door and we start seeing everybody that’s coming through and so forth. And it was the who’s who of, you know, Atlanta, you know, seven foot tall basketball players, politicians, police officers in uniform, police officers out of uniform, you name it, just a high-end businessman who owned the local car dealerships or owned the local fast food establishments and those type of things. And that.

[39:26] That that camera proved to be extremely beneficial. Later, the club discovered it because how can you not discover a four foot camera, you know, staring at you across the street? And we have great video of them standing out there in the parking lot, pointing at the camera, even bring one of their police officer friends over. And he points at the camera and they’re all sitting there staring at the camera,

[39:47] trying to figure out what’s going on and so forth. But I wanted to make a point about the camera. You said something a little earlier. What was it you just said to me earlier about the legitimacy you said something else that made me think about cameras gary refresh my memory oh i just talked about the previous question the club was on the surface was legitimate it was a safe place for people to go that in that there weren’t things bad things happened there yeah so yeah yeah i guess that’s what it was yeah i guess that’s what it was is that i was i was going to go to the cameras with that and we had you know we had the parking lot covered with the cameras and then with surveillance and you know you would bring your car up and you would hand it off to the to the one of those guys that park your car the valets.

[40:33] Yeah yeah steve kaplan was such a businessman that he got a percentage of the valet even though he he farmed the valet out to another company yeah he got a percentage of that of course he got a he got a percentage of everybody that walked through the door they paid a fee to get into the club. You pay outrageous amounts of money for the alcohol. You pay outrageous amounts of money to go up in the gold rooms. If you want to take your credit card and turn it into cash so you have something to stick into the girls’ garter belts or pay them in cash, he paid outrageous interest on that. Everything that was able to be turned into a moneymaker at that club was to the utmost steve made nine million dollars at the club legitimately in 1999 making it the most profitable strip club in america 1999 really now did he have like a a crow we call a crow company set up where when the guy’s credit card bill came back it wasn’t to the gold club or scores or some club sound did he have like a real that’s right where john sounded that’s what they usually do So how did he do that? Well, it was called MSB Sports. And what that stood for, no, it was just MSB Inc. I take that back, MSB Inc. And what that stood for was Mona’s Sports Bar.

[42:00] And Mona was Steve Kaplan’s wife. That was her name. So it was Mona’s Sports Bar, MSB Inc. So you’re right. So when you get home as a businessman and your wife goes through the credit cards receipt, She doesn’t see scores or gold gloves. She sees MSB. You’re right. That’s exactly right. Yeah. You know what you’re talking about, Gary. Cumber and Rango. I know I’ve been there. I’ve investigated a few of these things. We had an escort service that I worked real hard on that a mob guy really owned. And that’s what they did. They early in the credit card days. And so they started taking credit cards over the phone, but they had another company name set up so it wouldn’t come back as the escort service.

[42:44] So you mentioned police officers several times. Nope. Gary, I’m sorry. I remember the point I was going to make earlier. Yeah. You talked about, yeah, Steve Kaplan doing all these things. And then you said something like to the effect, then of course, Steve was paying the Gambinos a bunch of money as well. And you’re right. And here’s where I was going with the camera. Is it on that camera on? So the club was not open on Sundays. It was closed on Sundays only. It was open six days a week. It was open about 18 hours a day. They had to close at 4 a.m. and they could open up again at 11 or 6, or excuse me, 11 or 10 the next morning. So it was only closed about six hours a day.

[43:25] But on Sunday mornings, after the week’s worth of money had been made, we called a number of times one of Steve’s closest associates wheeling a suitcase on wheels out of that club at about, I don’t know, let’s say like eight or nine in the morning after the proceeds had been counted out and et cetera. And we let in wheeling that suitcase out and then going and get on a Delta line airline and then taking that money. That’s what was in that suitcase. We’re taking that cash back to New York. And that was, that was a big part of the skim that Steve was kicking to the Gambinos is that mostly about once a week on a Sunday morning, they would pack a suitcase full of money. Now, remember this is pre nine 11. So airline security is completely different for those listening who don’t, who are thinking, how do you get a suitcase with, you know, a hundred thousand dollars in cash on Delta airline?

[44:21] Well, one security was different, but two, Steve Kaplan had corrupted two employees at Delta airlines that allowed him to do this easier to carry this money onto the plane without any undue interference, if you will. So Steve had all his employees.

[44:38] Avenues covered. Yeah, he did. And I tell you, that guy really did. Now you mentioned police officers. That’s a subject near and dear to my heart. And, and so Atlanta’s best I know, they didn’t have what you would call institutional corruption for years and years and years, like some of the big Eastern cities.

[44:57] And so as a, as a department, it doesn’t have the reputation of, of being corrupt from one end to the other, but you know, we’re always going to have individuals. We had them here in Kansas. You’re always going to have individuals. So how did this work with them? But guys, guys that are bent that way, they’ll start showing up at these places. They’ll go in for a drink or whatever, and they’ll make sure that the manager or somebody knows they’re a cop. And then a sharp guy from New York, like Kaplan is any guy that runs one of these kinds of joints knows that, you know, start, you know, comping them drinks and, and start trying to, to, to get them on their side and see how far they can go with it. Is that kind of how it worked there and how extensive was it?

[45:40] Well, you know, I did other cases on other strip clubs and, and I made cases on police officers that pled guilty to corruption. And that’s the way it happened in those other cases, but nothing Steve Kaplan did was normal. Gary, he, he had his own way of doing business. And let me tell you how he corrupted these police officers. The two that we charged and took to trial, Steve Kaplan doesn’t need you unless he can use you, and he knows he can use you. So just like I said earlier, when Steve knew he needed to get money on a Delta airline airplane to fly to New York, he needed a connection within Delta Airlines. You know, from your experience, Gary, what’s the biggest headache for a strip club owner? It’s going to be inspections and permits, right? The vice unit is going to come and make sure all the girls have their permits. They’re all licensed, that you’re following all the rules, the alcohol, et cetera, et cetera. So Steve got him a guy inside the permit unit.

[46:44] A guy named Reginald Burney, who, how they met, we never found out, but he was in that permit unit and he would call Steve and he would warn Steve

[46:55] that, hey, there’s going to be an inspection tonight, be prepared. And in return, he was given pretty much carte blanche in the club. We had testimony at trial that he slept with at least one of the girls, both in the club and would take her home after hours, which was a violation of the rules that he’s supposed to be enforcing as a permits guy. A lot of people may not know this, but.

[47:22] At least then, an employee of a strip club could not leave a strip club with a customer, could not change clothes, get dressed, go to the locker room, get dressed, and walk out of the club with a customer. Because, obviously, it’s prostitution. It will lead to prostitution. So, permits would inspect those type of things. They’d set up vice traps and et cetera. But, yeah, here, Reginald Burney, we had testimony at trial that he’s doing this exact same thing. The other officer that we charged. And at trial, Gary, we had to cut the trial in half because we had 17 defendants. So only eight were on trial the first time. And then we were going to try the nine other in the next trial. So it was eight and nine is the way we cut it up. The second police officer was in the second trial. And his connection to the club was, he was a very senior man in the department. He knew everybody. He knew the city of Atlanta, not like the back of his hand, but more importantly, his wife had worked at the club. She had been a dancer back before Steve had bought the club, and then when Steve bought the club, she became what’s known as the house mom. She ran the locker room for the girls, made sure the scheduling was right, made sure they all had their permits. You know, the managers don’t really get involved with the administrative duties of the girls. A house mom handles all of that.

[48:47] This police officer named Jack Redlinger, his wife was one of the house moms there at the club. There were other house moms as well. She was one of them. So Jack would come to the club to pick up his wife, bring her home, take her home, do that kind of thing. And he became friends with Steve Kaplan. And Jack had this reputation already that was shady. Quite frankly, we had other police officers tell us, oh, everybody knew Jack was shady. And then one thing led to another and Jack became the guy that Steve could call for anything that he needed. I need advice. I need you to come look at that camera that’s pointing at me across the street. That was Jack Redlinger pointing at the camera in uniform. I need you to do an unauthorized escort for my bus full of basketball players on my celebrity golf tournament. Jack would do that for him. Jack would do anything that needed to be done. And what we ended up charging him with was there was a rape allegation that happened at the club in the limousine involving one of the managers, Steve’s close friends, and one of the.

[49:55] Well, Jack obstructed that rape investigation we charged. Jack got in touch with the sex crimes investigator and really talked poorly about the girl. You can’t believe her. She’s a liar. She sleeps around. Don’t listen to her. You know, these type of things. Then he instructed, we had testimony at trial that he instructed the limo driver of that limousine where the rape happened to destroy evidence, get rid of the logbook that shows who’s in the limousine, to lie about his testimony to the sex crimes investigator, things like that. So we charged Jack with that rape obstruction as well. But that’s how Steve got in with those police officers. Who can help him? It wasn’t just dumb luck of a guy coming to the bar like you’re talking about. That’s what other guys, that’s what other strip clubs did. Steve didn’t do it that way. Steve was very strategic about who he wanted to be his partners in crime.

[50:51] Interesting. That’s why he’s a good moneymaker. You know, now let’s get back to Michael DeLeonardo, Mikey Scars. Now, did he come down there or did he just was, he was up in New York. He lived up in New York. Did he just, you know, help get that money and distribute it on the other end? Or did he come down to have a presence at the club very much or how did that work yeah yeah good question so when steve owned his club in miami called club boca it was a very high-end legitimate disco type of nightclub and john gaudy jr would come down to that club and hang out i had a girl tell me one time that she took pictures in the club and she didn’t know who she was taking pictures of and and somebody came and took the camera from her and crushed it and threw it it It was a disposable camera, right? Oh, yeah. Crushed it and threw it away. And and she later learned, oh, that’s John Gotti Jr. over there that I’m taking pictures of and so forth. But but Junior did not like strip clubs. We were told that by multiple witnesses that he never came down to Atlanta to see Steve’s moneymaker in Atlanta. But Mikey’s scars did come down to answer your question. And we never had testimony and we never have reason to believe that Mikey came down because he wanted to, you know, have sex with the girls or anything like that. It was to come down.

[52:07] Remember, Mike’s Mikey’s the ultimate professional, right? He’s your stereotypical wise guy that you would see portrayed in the Don Corleone movies, right? Yes. Coat and tie, polished shoes, legit.

[52:21] So Mike would come down to the club for a couple of reasons. One, I want to see the moneymaker. I want to see how this is happening. I want to make sure that the money that Steve Kaplan is paying to us, I have a real good gut feeling that this is the proper amount based on what I’m seeing come through this club. And, and at the same time, look, this guy’s fabulously wealthy, Steve Kaplan. So if he wants to take me to Atlanta Falcons football game, fine. If he wants to put me up in a gold room just to talk with a girl all night for good company and give me free champagne and that type of thing, I’m all for that too. So scars did come down. I caught him on the video that we were talking about earlier, that camera on the front door, getting in and out of the limo, going to the Atlanta Falcons football game, those type of things. But it wasn’t because he was there to have sex with the girls, quite frankly. He was there to see the moneymaker, make sure the Gambinos were being told the truth about the money that Steve Kaplan was making and so forth, and then take advantage of the spoils at the same time to a certain extent. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I talked to him at length and he didn’t seem like a partier kind of guy. He was more of a serious businessman mobster. He was a mobster, no doubt about it, but he was not a, I didn’t get that vibe from him at all, a party kind of a guy. So let’s say. I would agree with. We never had testimony to the contrary. Yeah.

[53:49] So, you know, this is, we’re kind of coming down to the end here. The girls, let me ask a couple of questions about how the girls work. Now, the girls, if I remember right here, they mainly, they can make a couple of thousand, maybe $2,500 a night. They’d only work a couple of nights a week and make four or five grand sometimes are really good ones. And they were in high demand of other strip clubs and kind of the circuits. There’s kind of a circuit of the higher end strip clubs that these girls would work. And so they got their tips and they had to tip out other employees but did did kaplan seem like the strip club owners here they didn’t take any of the girls money they basically allowed them to work there and then they generate a lot of money how did that work with the girls there wasn’t anybody that didn’t walk into that club whether you’re a customer or employee that didn’t have to pay steve kaplan and ever steve got his money out of everybody here’s the way the girls paid out at the end of the night. First of all, they had to pay to show up to work. So it was called a dance fee. And each girl had to pay, I believe it was $50 a night just to get out on the dance floor in their stilettos and their bikini. $50 right there. So unless they make $50, they’re in the hole. So that’s Steve gets 50. And on some nights they would run almost 100 girls through that club. So do the math. Yeah. 100 times 50. Right. Steve made five thousand dollars just on the girls just to show up for work.

[55:14] And then the way the girls made their money was the primary way they made their money is we call it the funny money in the strip club business or the monopoly money. And Steve had his monopoly money. It was called gold bucks. It’s where a customer could come in and put $10,000 on his credit card. And I would give him $10,000 in fake funny money. And then he could take, and it was in a hundred dollar denominations. And then he could take that funny money and he could give it to the girls at the end of the night as their tips, as their money, as their dance fees. And now the girl would have, like you said earlier, $2,000 in funny money, But how is she going to turn that into U.S. Money, U.S. dollars? She would have to take it to Steve Kaplan at the end of the night or to the club management and do what they call a cash out. And she would take her $2,000, give it to Steve Kaplan, and Steve would get 20% of that to turn it into U.S. currency.

[56:09] But keep this in mind also, Gary, that when that customer put that $10,000 tab on his credit card, Steve got 20% of that too. He charged him an extra 20%. So Steve got 20% from the customer for that 10,000. And then he got 20% of that 2000 that the girl got just in that one transaction right there. So Steve was getting 20% of every dollar that was being spent between a customer and the dancer on a credit card transaction. No, strike that 40% on every credit card transaction that was happening up there in those gold, in those gold rooms. And again, I’m telling you, those guys were spending crazy money up there. It wasn’t uncommon.

[56:51] The customers were okay with spending $5,000 and $10,000 a night. That was not uncommon. Yeah. Yeah. Not uncommon. I know a guy here in Kansas City reasonably well and –, He’d do that. He’s a, he’s a real big bucks lawyer and he’d do that. He’d, he’d spend five grand and just a blink of an eye at a strip club. I was like, dude.

[57:13] Multiply that by 30 or 40 guys a night, seven, six nights a week. Yeah. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. That’s a, that’s been a heck of investigation. So eventually you’re going to have to take this down. Yeah. You’ve been, you started with a grand jury investigation, bringing people in. Know they know the jig is up and they know something’s going on and so you’re slowly but surely gathering all these different statements from people and serving search warrants and then records cepedas and and putting on it had to be a huge huge paper case that you guys put it was after after all the fun of doing the surveillances and following people around and figured out who was who now you got to do that so that how many agents did you end up having working on this.

[57:58] Well we had four fbi guys we had four fbi full-time we had two irs full-time and we had two support employees from the fbi that were assigned to us to assist with records checks and things and that so we had eight working full-time off the top of my head and then we of course we’d have part-timers as well but when we did those searches of course it was all hands on deck you know we had the night that we did the search we did three searches we did one in new York and two in Atlanta. We searched Steve Kaplan’s house in Atlanta. We searched the gold club at 4 AM and we searched his corporate warehouse in New York. And we probably used a hundred plus agents to conduct those searches and do all the, and then at the same time, while we were doing those searches, we had another hundred agents out handing out subpoenas for the grand jury, knocking on doors for the employees that had, that were not at the club or that

[58:52] we had already missed because they had went home before 4 a.m. Or something to that effect. So the night of the searches, it was an all hands on deck, a couple hundred agents running around the city of Atlanta and New York supporting this effort.

[59:05] And we run that grand jury investigation for six months. We have three indictments. We supersede it twice. The original indictment had 97 pages in the indictment. That’s how I think it was. The last indictment was about 120 pages. And that was the one that It finally included Mikey Scars, Michael D. Leonardo. He was not in the original indictment. But as we started flipping people and we started getting more cooperation, we were able to put more and more things together. And then we get ready for trial in April, May of 2001. It took two years to get from the search in 99 to the trial in 2001. And we go to trial with 17 defendants, eight in the first trial.

[59:51] Did people start making deals at the end did they end up going ahead and copping please we had a number of folks that, that did do what you just said, they, they cooperated. The way we worked the grand jury was this, Gary, is that, look, there’s a good chance that as an employee of that club, you committed a crime. You either slept, you either engaged in prostitution, you ripped somebody’s credit card, or you committed a tax fraud, some form or fashion, but we don’t care because you’re low level and you’re not our target. Our target is Steve Kaplan. So come into the grand jury, get your immunity letter, tell us the truth, and you’ll be fine. And 99% of the employees, mostly girls, did just that. But we brought a lot of guys in as well. We brought a lot of mobsters in. We brought a lot of male employees in, managers. And they did the same thing. Look, I don’t want to get in trouble. I’ll tell you the truth. And they took our deal. But there was a handful of employees that were very loyal to Steve that said, no, I’m lying. Steve never did anything. There was never any sex. There was never any drugs. There was never any credit card fraud. Steve was not in the mob. There’s no police officers. Whatever story they wanted to tell, they were just very loyal to Steve.

[1:01:10] And because of that, we had no choice but to charge them for the crimes that we felt like were significant enough in the club to warrant prosecution. So we had 17 defendants. But we did have probably, I would say, in that close-knit circle, we had probably half a dozen cooperators that flipped once the grand jury and the search warrant became public. One of them was Steve’s closest right-hand man, quite frankly, a guy named Thomas Siganano, who had been in, what’s D.B. Leonardo’s first name there, the guy that got whacked in the Gambinos that Gravano killed. Called him D.B. D.B., yeah. Remember D.B.? D.B.’s crew. Yeah. Yeah, he had been in DB’s crew back in the mid 80s and hooked up with Steve Kaplan and was helping him up in Atlanta and had been in the limo when Steve was driving around with John Gotti Jr. and Mikey Scars. And, you know, he he he got his own attorney and his own attorney turned out to be Ed McDonald. You ma]]> false Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode of Gangland Wire Crime Stories, retired police detective Gary Jenkins speaks with former FBI agent Mark Sewell, Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode of Gangland Wire Crime Stories, retired police detective Gary Jenkins speaks with former FBI agent Mark Sewell, who delves into his investigation of the notorious Gold Club in Atlanta and its ties to organized crime. Mark shares his journey from the Marine Corps to the FBI, detailing how his training prepared him to tackle organized crime. The discussion highlights the world of strip clubs as a major revenue source for criminals, drawing parallels to his early police work in Kansas City. At the heart of the conversation is the Gold Club, owned by Steve Kaplan, who turned it into a hotspot during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, attracting celebrities and high-profile figures. Mark describes the criminal activities that took place, from credit card fraud to connections with the Gambino crime family. Mark reveals the challenges of infiltrating the club and gathering evidence, including working with strippers as informants and tracking financial transactions. He also discusses key figures in the Gambino family, such as Mikey Scars DiLeonardo and Steve Kaplan's partnerships with corrupt police officers and mob players. Click here to buy Mark's book Investigating America's Most Notorious Strip Club: The FBI, the Gold Club, and the Mafia Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to "buy me a cup of coffee" To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here! Transcript 0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Detective and later Sergeant. I've got this podcast, Gangland Wire, and we look into the mob. Today, I have a great story, a real mafia story. You know, and we saw this in Kansas City. These guys love these strip clubs because there's a lot of money to be made out of strip clubs. And maybe some of you have heard of the gold club down in Atlanta. When I first got Mark's book, our guest, you know, I thought I remembered that there was all these Patrick Ewing and all these big-time basketball players going there. And it was a hell of a scandal, but I didn't remember much about it, https://blubrry.com/kc_crime/137870403/john-curley-montana-and-the-cleveland-mob/ https://ganglandwire.com/?p=9484 Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Mon, 28 Oct 2024 05:00:47 -0400 In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Detective Gary Jenkins engages former FBI agent Fred Graessle, who shares insights from his thirty-year career with the Bureau. They discuss Graessle’s early experiences in Cleveland during a tumultuous period of organized crime, focusing on significant cases such as the violent conflicts involving Italian and Irish mobs.

Fred tells the famous story about the stolen informant list how it contained the name of John Curley Montana, and how this information forced Jimmy the Weasel Fratianno in as a cooperating witness.

Fred recounts the chilling details of John Curly Montana’s involvement with the kidnapping and murder of businessman Henry Podborny, illustrating the complexities of criminal conspiracies and the challenges of law enforcement. The episode also highlights the importance of informants, the rigorous investigative work required, and the collaboration among law enforcement in tackling organized crime, offering listeners a fascinating glimpse into federal investigations. Support the Podcast Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

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Transcript Welcome to Gangland Wire [0:03]Gangland Wire. I am retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit, Detective Gary Jenkins. I even got promoted to sergeant before I left and went back to the intelligence unit for a period of time. Now I’ve turned podcasters, y’all know. And I have one of my many great expert former FBI agents. You know, we’ve had a lot of them on here today. It’s Fred Grassley. Fred, welcome. Thank you very much, Gary. Now, Fred, did I get your last name pronounced right? It’s Graessle. But anything close to that will work. Call me anything but late for dinner, right? I’m notorious for butchered names, as these guys know. Anyhow, Fred, Fred and I had a meeting not too long ago for lunch, and he had gotten hold of me. He’s retired out of the Cleveland office or Northwest Indiana office. I can’t remember which office you retired out of. Northwest Indiana. Northwest Indiana. And he moved to Kansas City, retired to Kansas City as a company. So I’m going to let Fred tell you a little bit about his background and his career in the FBI and a little bit of post-FBI, because I think that’s got to be interesting. So, Fred, tell us about yourself. [1:21]Sure. I went to Indiana University and got a degree in accounting specifically to qualify myself to be an FBI agent. That was something I wanted to do ever since I was a small child. I graduated in 1973, went into public accounting for a couple of years, passed the CPA exam, and applied with the Bureau and got in pretty quickly in August of 1975 and was a special agent. For 30 years during that point in time. I spent my first 10 years. [1:56]For you guys that don’t know, that was the route, one of the three routes into the FBI back in those days. Back at that time. They’ve added language skills since then, I think. But to be a lawyer or an accountant or a former law enforcement with two or three, four years of experience was the route to go in the FBI. So that’s correct. [2:18]Anyhow, go ahead, Fred. I’m sorry to interrupt you. I spent my first 10 years in Cleveland, and that’s where this story is going to take place. But I spent the last 20 years in Northwest Indiana, first in Gary, Indiana, and then we moved out of Gary into Merrillville, Indiana. Northwest Indiana being one of the most violent and corrupt areas in the country. I got there in 1985. In the 1990s, Gary was the murder capital of the United States for four of the 10 years of the 90s. They were always in the top five. It’s just a very, very violent location. Perfect place for an FBI agent to work. Lots of great, great work in that area. And then I retired in 2005. I started my own forensic CPA firm as soon as I retired. And I started the firm initially in Indiana. I joined one of my clients for about a six-year stint. I was the vice president of franchise relations of a company by the name of Direct Buy. It was a consumer buying club throughout North America. And I also acquired the Kansas City territory for direct buy, which is what brought me out to direct buy or brought me out to Kansas City in the first place. And so my family and I moved out here. I kept flying back and forth to Northwest Indiana for the corporate headquarters, but we operated the club here for about [3:41] Fred Graessle’s FBI Journey [3:38]six years and then ended up selling the club. I reopened my forensic CPA firm and I’ve been representing clients ever since. [3:47]Most of my clients, in fact, all of my clients end up are victims of crimes in one form or another. [3:55]All right. So any of you guys that have a company and you think you might be a victim of a financial cryboy, here’s a contact for you. Just get hold of me. If you can’t figure out him, I’ll have his contact information. So anyhow, Fred, you got hold of me and you told me this great, great story. And it starts with, really, it starts back in Buffalo, New York with the early guys or mafia members that came over from Sicily with John Curley, Montana. [4:24]Who was a made member of the Buffalo family. So let’s, we’re going to get into that, uh, and then into his son who was in, in Cleveland and connected to the Cleveland outfit of the Cleveland family, and then into a big time crime where they kidnapped and murdered a businessman trying to get, I don’t know, as much as a $500,000 maybe from him, if I remember right. So John Curley, Montana comes to Buffalo from Sicily. And what do you remember about that’s the father that’s the father the man we’re going to be talking about tell us about him well he was born in sicily and came to the united states ultimately rose to the underboss of the buffalo crime family his son john became john curly montana moved to the cleveland area and became a made member of the of the cleveland la cosa nostra family. He was headed up by John Licavoli and actually had been reputed, alleged to have been a contract killer also with the Los Angeles mob. [5:35]The informants had indicated that he had been out there as many as six times to commit hits on behalf of the Los Angeles mob. Fred, do you think that was because of, was that been because of his connection with Jimmy Fratianno, who was connected to both families, or did you know anything about that, how he, I think there was a, as I understood it, there was a pretty strong connection between the Los Angeles family and the Cleveland family. And that was linked strongly because of James Fratianno, Jimmy Fratianno, who had family in Cleveland. And he would repeat it. He would travel back and forth to visit family. And many times when he was there, he would visit with Licavoli, with the Cleveland crime family, and they’d talk things over. And so there, I think there was a connection there definitely with. Yeah. It’s always interesting how these guys are connected from city to city. And I know people here in Kansas city and they talk to me about their connection in another city, or they know somebody who has a connection in another city. Lots of times those relationships are created in penitentiaries. You’re in a cell with somebody or in a wing with somebody for a period of time from another family, a geographic area. And then you get out and you, you trust each other and you know each other. So it’s always fascinating to me how these guys know each other throughout the whole United States. So, you know, one last thing about Curly, Montana, your guys… [7:03]Dad is is he was like in buffalo he he was like mr politician he was above the board businessman i think he had a lock on the taxi business in in buffalo until appalachian came out and and he got caught at the meeting and and he died out after that everybody knew he was exposed and before that they thought he was just you know mr businessman mr you know good john joe q john John Q. Citizen. So interesting thing about the Montana family. I’m sure he passed some of that along to his son as best he could. Anyhow, so let’s go back to Cleveland and his son, John Montana, and this case. [7:46] The Mafia’s Connection to Cleveland [7:46]So let’s start. How’d you get into this, I guess? Go ahead. [7:52]Leading up to this, you know, I’m a brand new agent. I get into Cleveland. I just happened to be there right at the start of some gang wars that of a gang war that was taking place between the Italian mob and the Irish mob at that point. And in 1970, I got there in December of 75. In early 1977, John Nardi, who was a defector from the Licavoli family, was blown up with a car bomb planted next to his car, 16 sticks of dynamite. And allegedly, Curley, Montana, put that bomb together. And that was used for that killing. About five months later, in October of 1977, Danny Green was similarly blown up. A Chevy Nova was pulled in next to his car when he was at a dental office or a dental appointment. And when he gets back out to his car, the bomb in that Chevy Nova was detonated. And allegedly, that bomb was put together by Curley. I don’t believe… The indications are that Curley actually detonated the bomb. The source information that came in was that he was an individual that had something to do with putting it together. [9:10]After the Danny Green bombing, Curley Montana was interviewed by an agent on the Organized Crime Squad. And, of course, denied having any knowledge about the Danny Green bombing or anything like that. But offered to be available if the FBI had any other questions to feel free to give him a call and he’d be more than happy to talk to him. Well, the agent that talked to him then opened him up as a top echelon informant in the Cleveland informant files because he agreed to cooperate and make himself available. So in our records at the Cleveland office, Curley, Montana was was a, was listed as an informant. Then we get into the selling of the list. If you want me to swing into that. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s talk about that list. Yeah. Guys, you may or may not remember there was a famous situation that came up that Fratianno really brought Fratianno into the witness protection and becoming a cooperating witness. And that’s this list of top echelon informants from the Cleveland office that was sold and Fratianno freaked out. So tell us about that. Fred was right there on the seat, if you will, when this happened. Tell us about that and the people that were involved. [10:26]Yeah. In February of 9th, the primary informant clerk, Geraldine Rabinowitz, and her husband, Raymond, were interested in getting a down payment for a home. Raymond worked at a Lincoln dealership on the east side of Cleveland. And coincidentally, the Chevy Nova that blew up next to Danny Green’s car came, came from the used car lot of that Lincoln, of that Lincoln dealership. What a coincidence. Oh yeah. What a, what a, what a coincidence. So the, her husband working at that unit was, was told that they’d buy individuals that they’d give them $16,000. [11:06]If her, if his wife would bring them a list of all the informants for the Cleveland division. So she hand wrote all of the informants out on some paper and gets it out of the FBI office and they get the $16,000. On that list were four top echelon informants. And two of them were named informants and two of them were numbered informants. So the two named ones included another guy, not relevant to this story, and Curly, Montana. And then there were two additional numbered ones. [11:42]And Rabinowitz informed the mob that she would try to do everything she can to find out who those numbered informants were. And so is back in town and he’s talking with Licavoli and Licavoli tells him, yeah, we got this broad in the FBI office that’s getting this information out of there. And she’s got a list of informants and includes these two named guys, including Curly Montana and two numbered guys. And she’s going to get us the identity of the two numbered guys. [12:16]Well, Fratianno was concerned that he was one of those two numbered informants on that list. [12:23] The Infamous Informant List [12:24]And that if Licavoli finds out, if she finds out and it is him, and Licavoli finds out, Licavoli might very well take care of Fratianno at that point. So Fratianno contacts retired FBI agent Larry Lawrence. I guess Larry must have been the agent that worked him for a while, and tells him that there’s a breach in the Cleveland office. And so Lawrence really just almost hangs up the phone and calls the Cleveland office and talks to the SAC and tells him, you’ve got a breach there. You’ve got the informant list has been compromised. And we eventually got the actual handwritten copy of the list back through a search warrant. But I can tell you all agents in the division had to personally contact every one of their informants that were on that list. And I had six that were on that list that I had to contact. And I can tell you I had six very unhappy informants with that process. But Geraldine Rabinowitz and her husband admitted what they had done. And I think by late March had pled guilty and both started serving time for that process. [13:39]Wow. I tell you what, I would have hated to have done what you had to do and all the rest of you guys had to do. How embarrassing too. I mean, it’s just like, oh my God, it’s so embarrassing. Plus those top echelon informants. I know that the Bureau agents, even though the guy’s dead, if he’s never really been exposed in court, they refuse to acknowledge he was a top echelon informant. And I ran into that with a friend of mine here in Kansas city. And I know that guy was top echelon from something else. And I, I told Bill about it. He said, and he just looked at me like, what do you want from me? He was not, I know he knew it, but he was not going to ever confirm or deny. He was just, well, this, this is now because of the, the, the theft of the list. Yeah, I know. It’s just that became, became an issue on that. I think what guys don’t realize is the reputation of the bureau to keep those names quiet. Even after they’re dead, if they can, if you can’t do that, then other people will refuse or not will hesitate to come in because their family members are then subject to, you know, murder or at least being shunned by other family members because they all live in this little closed community anyhow. So it’s it’s huge. May monitor or maintaining the secrecy of these names. It’s just I can’t even maybe can’t even emphasize enough. And I doubt if you can’t either, Fred, how important it is to keep these names quiet. [15:06]Anyhow, so. But that made Curly, Montana was a very important name for us in Cleveland. So that brings us into January of 1981, just a few years later, just a couple of years later after that, which is when the Henry Podborny matter came to light. I guess one question I would have here is then what happened with Montana after this list? I mean, Licavoli knew that he was on the list. Did he somehow convince them that he hadn’t really done anything or did other events conspire to keep him safe? Well, Fratianno supposedly had a conversation with Licavoli and convinced him that that list couldn’t be legitimate if it had Curly Montana. List because of all that, that he believed Curley would never front the family and he never did. But, but, but I think there was, there was some indication Licavoli was concerned that, that, that, uh, the FBI had set him up by giving that list and putting Curley Montana’s name on the list. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Thank you for that. All right. Let’s move along to the Henry Podborny case. That was a fascinating case. [16:23] The Henry Podborny Case Begins [16:24]Yep. So on January 30th of 1980, an informant contacts is being worked by the Organized Crime Squad. [16:35]Informant contacts the agent that he’s working with and says, look, I just got approached by a guy by the name of Jim McLean. And McLean wanted, he gave me a check for $600 for cash that he wants, that’s drawn on the West Point Pallet Company in Berwyn, Illinois. And he wants me, the source, to find a friendly banker that’ll help him cash the check and help loot the company and take all the rest of the money out of the company. And McLean tells the source, you got to hurry because Podborny’s been iced and we got to get this done as quickly as possible. So Podborny owned this company, the pallet company. Right. It’s a company that he signs the checks and it’s the West Point Pallet Company. And McLean tells the source that this is Podborny’s company. Okay. McLean tells him, I’ve got the checkbook that’s got all the checks. And he says, and I’ve got his driver’s license and he’s, and he tells him I even look like, so I just need a friendly banker that’ll help me cash these checks. And we want to loot the company and get, get everything out of there. So the source immediately runs and contacts the organized crime agent that he’s working with. And that agent comes over to, I’m on the white collar squad, comes into the white collar supervisor’s office. [18:04]And tells him the story. And then all of a sudden I get called into the supervisor’s office and I’m, I’m told that I’m going to be given this case. [18:12]And so I’m sitting there. I literally, I have, I have a check in my hand. It’s a $600 check. The Bureau would never take a $600 check on, they never opened up a case on $600, but for the statement that Henry Podborny had been iced. So I get the case and I start working it. I have a partner by the name of Gary Hall, Excellent agent. And he was with me the whole way on this case. And so we started to get ready to get going. I contacted the Chicago office, which covers Berwyn, Illinois. And I had a friend of mine, Jack McCoy, went out literally in a quick undercover capacity going out to look for Henry Podborne at the West Point Pallet Company. Just said he was a friend of his and needed to talk to him. And the guy had one employee at the, at the, at the company and the employee said, well, you know, Henry left yesterday, which is January 29th. Supposedly he’s been separated from his wife, Dimple Pogborny of all names, but he’d been separated from Dimple and he was really distraught and Dimple contacted him and told him, come to Cleveland and I’ll reconcile the marriage. And so he immediately dropped everything, got a flight to Cleveland and left on the 29th. And the employee has not heard from Henry since that point. [19:41]So now we have, at least at that point in time, we’ve confirmed that Henry Podborne, he has the company, he’s at least not accounted for at that point in time, and that he caught a flight the day before to get to Cleveland. We do some background on Jim McLean. McLean’s a, what we call an organized crime associate. He’s not a made member or whatever, but he’s occasionally used by their members to accomplish whatever they want to accomplish. and we start checking around. We check with some of the morgues and other hospitals to try and determine whether there’s somebody that supposedly fit Henry Podborny’s description had been turned in and nothing had shown up in that area. So we arranged to meet with the informant later that night and had him confirm with McLean on the phone that McLean still had the checkbook and they had the driver’s license and still wanted a friendly banker. [20:40]We, on the other hand, at that point, had also contacted Society National Bank. I think it’s now Regions Bank, but back then it was Society National Bank. And we talked to the head of security and asked if we could meet with them, that we had a situation. And we wanted to bring in this Jim McLean guy and bring in the checkbook and the driver’s license of Henry Podborning. And that we wanted to catch him with that in the act because if something has happened to Henry Podborny, that would give us an extremely strong position with Jim McClain. And Society National Bank… Immediately agreed to work with us on this case. And they made available one of their branches on the west side of town. [21:30]And we arranged to have the source tell McClain to be there at 5.15 the next day and that the banker would be waiting for him. In the meantime, at 5 o’clock, the bank dismissed all their employees. That was the closing time for the bank at that time. And we replaced all the employees with FBI agents, and I was going to be the friendly banker that McLean was going to meet with, or that we were hoping would meet with, and bring in the checkbook and the driver’s license. So we wait until 5.15 shows up, no McLean. 5.30, no McLean. 6 o’clock, no McLean. So we finally make the decision. We’ve got to go find McLean immediately and arrest him, hopefully getting the checkbook and the driver’s license. And then we can find out what happened to Jim McLean. [22:25]And so we head out to Jim McLean’s house. It’s out in the country. He’s got a little bit of a driveway, but we’ve got some good trees and good coverage. So we were stationed at the home. It was pitch black when we got out there. [22:40]We were pretty well concealed and we’re sitting there for a while and then eventually some headlights pull into the driveway and that was Jim McLean so at this point in time you know that. [22:55]Henry Podborny is iced or on ice. You don’t really know if he’s dead or alive, but somehow he’s in, he’s in danger or he’s already dead. You don’t know. And McLean will know. And so you got to make a decision at this point in time. Do you carry on through and work McLean undercover a little bit, or you just go ahead and pop him and try to find out if maybe you can save Podborny. You don’t know, right? Is that what we’re at? Well, yeah, our decision to move was based on the premise that even though the indication was that he had been killed, there was some possibility that he might be being killed someplace. And we certainly didn’t feel that we had a lot of time to try to finesse that type of information out. So when McLean arrives home, we literally are right behind him. As he goes through the door, we’re right behind him, and we’re right there in the kitchen area, and he’s carrying a little satchel with him, and in that satchel turned up was the checkbook and the driver’s license. So now we have McLean with the driver’s license and the checkbook in his possession. [24:14]Prior to all those events, we had gone to the United States Attorney’s Office and we had an assistant United States Attorney. We drew up an arrest warrant for McLean based on that fraudulent check that he had given the source earlier. [24:31]So we were ready to go. We have, we have the arrest warrant. We get through there. We get, we get McLean in his house. He’s got the, the, the checkbook and the, and the driver’s license. I give McLean his rights and I tell him, I’m very concerned about what happened to Henry Podborny. And he looks at him and he said, so am I. I think they killed him. He said, I want to help. I want to cooperate, but I got to have, I got to have a lawyer before I say anything else. And, um, So we had to take him at that point. We called the prosecutor, and this was like at 10 o’clock or 10.30 at night. [25:13]And we told, it was Nancy Schuster was the prosecutor. We told her, we got to get McLean in to see a judge first thing in the morning, and he’s got to have a public defender waiting there. And she said, no problem, we’ll be ready by 8 o’clock. So by eight o’clock the next morning, we picked him up out of the Cuyahoga County Jail, brought him back over to the federal courthouse. And there was a federal public defender waiting for him. And a judge was there for us to meet him in chambers and closed door session. And McLean pled guilty at that point in time to the check fraud and agreed to cooperate with us moving forward. [25:55]Wow. That was fast. I mean, you guys were moving. That’s the faster I’ve ever seen the FBI move. Man, you guys, that’s like a tech unit local PD squad might work. I have never seen you guys work that fast. I got to tell you, we were really hustling. You were. So McLean’s agreement required him, obviously, to be honest with us, but also we only gave it to him because he assured us that he was not involved in the actual murder of, of Henry Podmorny. And so if, if, if that changed, then, then that agreement was going to be out the window, but we didn’t want to, we just didn’t want to pass off, give him a free pass for, for a murder situation. Yeah. He had to, he had to not have been involved in the murder. [26:42]So we immediately start debriefing him and, and we probably spend about four or five hours going over the details, mentions that effectively Dimple and a daughter and son from a former marriage, both live in the Cleveland area, agreed that they should initially kidnap Henry Podborny and then cleat out his accounts. And that was later changed when the stepson, Gary Gabbard, who was a member of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle group and another Hells Angel by the name of Lee Juarez were present during the discussions. And they both said, look, dead men tell no tales. You know, we don’t need to kidnap him. We just need to get him, kill him and go clean out his accounts. And so that became the plan. [27:36]The money that Henry Pogborny supposedly had was a result of a loan shark, not because of the West Point Pallet Company, but because he was allegedly engaged in a loan sharking operation with a U.S. Congressman in the Illinois area. And they had potentially millions out on the street, and they had a lot of money hidden in the house, money hidden in the warehouse, and money in safe deposit boxes in various banks. [28:05]Dimple his estranged wife kept pressing him and pressing him for money and one of the reasons she left was because he wasn’t going to henry apparently wasn’t going to dip into the loan sharking money and so she just left and said i’m i’m done with you i’m through with you well they wanted to get their hands on that money and they knew that that money wasn’t going to be turned over in a divorce by any means nobody’s going to say well we have a loan sharking business, So here’s your half of the money. They needed Henry out of the way so that they could get in and search where they thought they had money available. And so that was the plan. Pod Borny flies into town. [28:46] The Plot Thickens [28:47]And according to McLean, he was picked up at the airport by Robert O’Neill, who was a black male, just a thug in the Cleveland area, and taken back to O’Neill. O’Neill had a vacant bar that had gone out of business, but he still basically operated out of the bar. And he was taken back to O’Neill’s bar. And O’Neill and his sidekick, Lloyd Allen, were supposedly the ones present when Pod Borny was killed. [29:20]But Pod Borny gets taken to the abandoned tavern. And O’Neill tells him that Dimple was inside the side door of the tavern just to go on in. And that’s what he did. And then nobody saw Henry Podwornie after that. [29:36]McLean tells us that O’Neill brought out the checkbook and the driver’s license and gave it to her. And then they immediately drove and met with McLean, where McLean got the copy of the check. And that’s why he had the check and the checkbook the very same day. [29:56]So that’s about the extent of what McLean told us. No mention of Curly, Montana at this time. Nothing like that came up. So this was absent Curly, certainly at that point in time. So our next step at that point is to get McLean to talk to Gale to find out what happened, actually happened to Henry Podmorny. And where is Henry Podmorny located? And so we’ve got several consensual recordings in which McLean is talking to Gale. Gale and Dimple and the brother Gary are now back in Berwyn. They left the day after Podborny showed up to get there to supposedly search and try and find the money that they thought was hidden back there. And in the first conversation that John McLean has with Lola Gale Toney, the daughter-in-law, Lola tells him that the money’s gone. We got here and the money is gone. It was supposedly buried under the floorboards in the attic, and those floorboards were torn up. There’s no money there. There’s no money in the safe, and they don’t know what happened. Lola makes an interesting statement, though, to McLean during this call. She says the letter showed up. [31:23]And that’s all. And McLean just changed the topic, changed the subject at that point. And so later on, we asked McLean, what does she mean the letter showed up? And McLean just really passed it off as, I don’t know. I don’t know what she’s talking about. And then changed the subject back to trying to figure out where Henry Podborni was. [31:44]So we try our our key now is is that she’s not revealing where henry is and and in in multiple attempts of talking to her she says that robert o’neill will not tell her what he did with him, and so now we’ve got we’re in a really tight spot at this point because if there is even the slightest chance that, that Henry’s alive. We’ve got to get her back from Cleveland or from Illinois. And, and we’ve got to find out where, where Henry is located. So we come up with a plan that McLean tells her if, if Podborny had an insurance policy, they can collect on that policy if his body’s found, but if they never find his body, he’s, they’re never going to, they’re going to, It’s going to be at least seven years or so before they can collect. [32:34] Lola’s Betrayal [32:34]And so Lola says, well, let me check and find out. And we get a call back shortly, or McLean calls her back shortly later. And she goes, yeah, he did. He had a couple of policies. And so I’m going to catch a flight to Cleveland the next day, and we’re going to go to O’Neill and find out what he did with Henry. [32:55]So the next day she flies in to Cleveland Hopkins airport and we’re sitting there, we’re surveilling. She literally brushes up against me. I’m on a phone outside the disembarkation area, but she literally walks right by me, goes out and she gets into a car with McLean. And the first thing they, they did was they pulled over and to a phone booth and she was, she was to call Robert O’Neill at that point. I remember there aren’t, there aren’t cell phones at that, at that point in time. So she had to go to a phone booth. She gets back in the car with, with McLean. And of course we’ve got the car fully wired and it’s transmitting everything that they’re talking about. [33:40]And she says, Robert won’t tell me what, what happened with him. He doesn’t trust me. He wants to know why I’m asking, asking about Henry at this point. And I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know where he is. So we make the point at that time that we’re going to affect an arrest on, on, on Lola. And we, we pose a, or we, we, we fake an arrest of McLean at the same time. So she doesn’t know that he’s, that he’s cooperating. And, and we take her back. We joined up with the Cleveland Homicide Unit at this time just because we knew we had a homicide on our hands. We also had other federal crimes too. So we take her back and we take her into the Homicide Unit. And Lola Galtoni absolutely flips over and cooperates immediately and identifies all aspects of the school. Hey, Fred, now remind us who Lola Gayle Tony is. What was her relationship? That’s the daughter-in-law. That’s the stepdaughter of Henry Podborny. Of Henry Podborny, okay. [34:49]Yes. And she was the, uh, she’s the daughter of, of Dimple Podborny from a, from an earlier marriage. Okay. All right. All right. So go ahead. Yeah. So, yeah. So Lola admits the whole thing. She talks about her brother, Gary being there and the, and Lee Juarez, both Hell’s Angels being there when the, when the plan was, when it was discussed. And then it, it, it became apparent that they needed somebody to help them clean out the bank accounts. And since she had worked with Jim McLean in the past and knew that he was a con man and knew about banking. She gives him a call right away. And she says that in the planning aspect of it, they’ve got a problem with the house and the warehouse in Berwyn, Illinois, because Henry Podborny had Dobermans that he kept in those locations. And they were concerned about how to deal with the Dobermans. And so McLean, she says that McLean says, I’ll take care of that. I got somebody that knows how to do it. And he brings in another guy. [35:50]And the guy says, listen, you’re going to do this. You need to have an alibi set up so that it looks like Henry’s still alive and he’s somewhere else in the country. So he says, get me a letter that Henry has sent to Dimple and make sure there’s no date on it. And I’ll see to it that it gets mailed from Buffalo, New York, and that’ll make it look like he misses Dimple, he’s looking for, and he wants to get back with the marriage. He also told them to take an advertisement out in the Chicago Tribune that says something like, Henry, all is forgiven, please come home. And that will make it look like Dimple was trying to make sure that he would come home. And so we got that, we found that advertisement and, and then Dimple, and then Lola tells us when she’s admitting to everything, she says, and the letter came from Buffalo that was, that was being sent by the guy. And I said, what guy are you talking about? And she says, it’s McLean’s friend, Curly Montana. [37:01]Now that’s the first time we’d heard of Curly Montana with, with having anything to do with this case. And she gives us all this information. And so we decided at that point, since she’s now in custody, we’ve got to get these other guys in custody also for the same thing. So the Cleveland Homicide Unit got warrants for Robert O’Neill and Lloyd Allen for a kidnapping murder. Of course, we had the warrant for Lola. Dimple had admitted herself to a hospital in Berwyn, and so they got a warrant for her. And so she was arrested at the hospital, and guards were put on her room there. And of course, the brother, Gary Gabbard, was arrested and Lee Juarez was arrested. At this point in time, you still don’t have a body, though, or an actual witness who saw him murdered, correct? We don’t have, even Lola can’t say, I saw him killed. I saw him murdered. All she could say was that Robert said he killed him. Okay. And that he and Lloyd had done it. So now we have, at this point, we have six people in custody for kidnapping murder for an individual, and we have no body, we have no murder weapon, we have no witness that saw the murder, anything like this. [38:27]And and lola was the only one that was what was the initially the only one cooperating until lee war as the the hell’s angel that wasn’t the family member lee war as says look if you guys will cut me a deal i’ll i’ll tell you what i know and so that the homicide unit got a deal cut with him right away and he says yep he said we were there we were with dimple we talked about the kidnapping. [38:57]And, and of course he says, Gary’s Gabbard, the brother, the stepson is the one that said dead men tell no tales. So we’ve got to get that. We got to kill him instead of just, just kidnap him. And so with his, with his cooperation now, we thought, well, okay, we don’t have a body, but we’ve got, we got two people that were a part of the planning that to, to kidnap him and kill and kill him that are talking. We thought we were in pretty good, in pretty good shape until Lola says at the end of the day, after she’s cooperated and signed a statement, she says, you know, I decided I’m not going to cooperate. I’m just going to go to trial. You guys are going to have to take me to trial. That doesn’t mean we can’t use her information because she gave a voluntary [39:45] The Turning Point [39:41]signed statement, but we’re going to have to take her to trial on the case. And the only cooperating witnesses at that point that knew anything about this where Jim McClain and Lee Warris. [39:54]Well, we finally get a chance that after everything kind of calms down after all of these arrests, we’re now starting to put this case together to figure out how we’re going to go to trial without a body and murder weapon and such. But we finally get a chance to get McClain off to the side and tell him, tell us about Curly, Montana, McClain. And McLean says I didn’t tell you about him because I knew Curly Montana was not under arrest. [40:28]And that if he knew I was snitching on him, he would kill me and my wife. And so that’s why I didn’t tell you anything about it. No, we had a real decision to make at that point. You know, what do you do with McLean at that point? He’s obviously held back critical information, but now he’s finally coming through with it. But only after we get Lola Gale, Tony tells us about Curly, Montana. him. [40:55]So the decision is made is that he’s, he’s got to, he’s got to record a conversation with Curley and he’s got to, he’s got to try to do whatever he can to incriminate Curley on, on this case. And I got to tell you something, Jim McClain was, was, was very, very nervous with doing this because he feared Curley tremendously. But on April 6th, 1981, he has, has, he has the recording. we have a recorded conversation with Jim McClain and Curly Montana. And I’ve got a couple of excerpts here. If you don’t mind, I’ll just read them real quick as to what Curly says. They’re talking about the letter. McClain kept saying, I’m worried about that damn letter. And McClain says, they can’t prove we ever had the fucking letter. They got to prove it. We ain’t got to admit it. If we admit it, it’s possible, possible. They could indict us for the conspiracy, but you don’t admit it. It’s her word against ours. It’s her word against ours. And you say you didn’t have no letter. I’ll say we didn’t have nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And they ain’t going to do nothing if we would both, but if we both admit it, possibly they would indict us on the conspiracy for shooting him. You understand? [42:14]That’s the first time I heard that Henry Podborne has been shot. Yeah. Now that begs a question. That begs a question. What did McLean know? Right. So, and then he goes on and says, Jimmy, you go out there and say, you’re not involved in the disappearance. You’re not involved in the hit. You don’t know nothing. Neither do I. So fuck them. If you say we did the letter, well, we sent the letter. we could really become involved in the conspiracy part of killing him. And then the best line was right at the end of the conversation when Curley says, but you know, it’s only her word and ours. They can’t do a fucking thing about it. Remember that. And that was on the transcript. And that was one of the last things the jury heard before they went back to deliberate. Right. Now that letter, that letter was designed to make it look like he was still alive. [43:12]And in a right. Because the general, the general information was, was, was Penry was going to be killed and the body was going to be disposed of and nobody was ever going to find that body. And so if they just have an alibi letter several weeks later, that makes it look like he’s alive in Buffalo. That’s going to be an alibi defense in this matter. Interesting so yeah so what do you guys do next you got them charged and then cleveland’s got some homicide charges on some of these guys right so how how does that going to work now i mean this you got two different jurisdictions you got the feds and the locals right which historically have maybe not worked so well together especially in cleveland so how do you go from here you got a lot of of tutorial decisions to make it seems to be like. [44:04]We do. And coincidentally, you know, the two groups worked well together. And I got to tell you, you couldn’t have two more diverse groups than the White Collar Crime Squad and the Cleveland Bump. I know. I know. I’ve been there. These guys, I got to tell you, they’re great. They’re the consummate professionals in what they do. They deal with the scourge of the earth every day. And while they worked with the FBI before, I can tell you they never worked with the White Collar Crime Squad until this case came out. So we’re in a spot here now where we’re starting to corroborate everything that McLean has said, everything that Lola Galtoni has told us. And we’re starting to build a pretty solid case. And of course, there is no Henry Podborny that’s still out there walking around. So we put together a case that’s pretty decent. [45:02]We’re all a little bit nervous that we’re going to trial without the body. But then on April 24th, I’m out driving in my bureau car. I get a radio message that I need to return to the office as quickly as possible. I do. And I walk in and they’ve got a phone set up with a recorder on it and everything’s all set. And I’m told that by the supervisor that an anonymous caller called in and wanted to talk to the case agent on the on the pod borning matter. and that he knows where the body is, but he’ll only talk to the case agent, which is me. So 20 minutes later, right on cue, the phone rings again, and it’s the anonymous caller. [45:47]And he tells me on the phone, he says, man, he says, I know where that body is that you’re looking for, that Henry Podvorny, and I know it’s him. And I said, how do you know? And he goes, I’m just telling you, I know where the body is. And I want $10,000 to tell you where the body is. So now we have, I’m getting extorted for $10,000 to tell him, to be told where the body is on the case. So i eventually tell him look i can come i can come up with a hundred dollars and i promise you i’ll do everything i can to get the rest will you do will you work with that now and the guy goes sure meet me at and then he gives me the address where to meet him so we we all had we all rush out at that time i get to the it’s a filling station i i see him in his car he gets into my car and i said okay where do we go and he’s and he points right down a one of the road one of the main streets there on the east side of Cleveland. We go about half a mile and he says, stop. And we stop and there’s a big vacant lot and it’s in between two relatively six, seven story apartment buildings, really in dilapidated condition. But in the middle, in between the two was a vacant lot with a big pile of trash out in the middle of the lot. [47:08]And the guy says he’s at the bottom of that bought that hill of trash out there in that lot. So while I stay in the car with him, the rest of the other agents and homicide people head out to the pile of trash. And then one of them comes running over and says, it’s Henry. Oh, man. So now all of a sudden it’s like, that’s pretty good. There you go. I said, well, how did you determine? And he had no ID on him, but on the inside pocket of his pants was a laundry mark that said H-Pod. So at that point in time, we were very confident we had Henry Podboarding. Now, the guy that points him out says, he points to one of the two apartment buildings. He says, the guy that works maintenance in that building told me that the body was out there. And his name is Wilbur Higgins. And he said, Wilbur told me that he was asked by Robert O’Neill to move that body and to get it moved. Otherwise, Robert O’Neill’s life was over with. [48:19]And he was going to move the body that night. And so this guy got the idea, well, maybe I can make $10,000 by calling up the FBI. So anyway, we obviously we start the recovery of the body. The body is wrapped in a pool table cover. And we go over and we talk to Wilbur Higgins. But when we made the arrest of Robert O’Neill and Lloyd Allen, And we searched that dilapidated tavern that he had. And the one thing we all noticed was that there was a pool table there, but the cover had been ripped off of it. But nobody, I mean, that didn’t mean anything to us, other than the fact that it was cut out. But we found no evidence of Henry Podborny in that facility at that time. [49:09]But now we have a body wrapped in a pool table cover. So now we take that pool table cover back to the tavern, and it’s the cover. So now we have a location connected with it. We interview Wilbur Higgins. Higgins tells us that he received a call from Robert O’Neill, that he was a friend of Robert O’Neill’s and Lloyd Allen, and that Robert O’Neill says, look, man, we dropped that body in that lot. And it was back on January 29th. and I need you to move that body. Man, my life’s on the line. If you don’t move it, something bad’s going to happen to me. Because this is now April 24th. That body was put out there on January 29th. So the temperature went from freezing to almost 60, 70 degrees, back again and then up again, and that body was starting to smell. And Robert O’Neill knew that somebody was going to find that body eventually. [50:09]That’s why he asked, he called Wilbur Higgins and it told him to come down to the jail, which we confirmed from the visitation records that he comes down and he tells him, you got to move that body. And so that was the night he was going to move the body. We just happened to get the, get a guy that wanted to make 10,000 bucks to give us a call. But now we have the body. Yeah. So I guess my question, my question here is, first of all, did you pay him the $10,000? No. I guess I did. I did not. I did not. And yeah, there were some other situations where he agreed not to take any more. Okay. All right. Go ahead. Carry on. Yeah. So now the coroner got the name of Sam Gerber, a name that some people that are familiar with the series and the movie, The Fugitive, Sam Shepard’s murder case in Bay Village, Ohio. Um, Sam Gerber was the coroner on that particular case and had received some prominence in that thing. Well, Sam, Sam Gerber is still the coroner in Cuyahoga County at the time of this, this murder. The initial cause of death was pronounced as a blunt force trauma to the back of the head. [51:27]And so that night, literally we got that ruling that night when we found the body. So we, at that point in time, we now had a cause of death and we have a location, which is the, the, the, uh, O’Neill’s bar. And we’re a lot farther way down the line until the next morning, Sam Gerber calls me up and says, Fred, you got to get down here right away. So I get down there and he says, hold out your hand. So I hold out my hand and he drops a 38 shell casing in my hand. He said, I just took that out of Podborny’s brain. He said, the cause of death has changed now to gunshot wound to the head. So now I said, well, you know, Dr. Gerber, I said, that’s the second time I heard that Henry Podborny had been shot. First time, obviously, was when Curly, Montana said. So now we have the cause of death now, the gunshot wound. But Gerber says, you got to go back to that tavern. And he said, you got to look up on the ceiling. [52:32]Because most likely Todd Borny would have been down on the ground after they clubbed him and they shot him in the back of the head right where they had clubbed him. And that’s why it wasn’t noticeable initially. And he said, when that blood hit the back of the head, he said, that blood is going to splatter up on the ceiling and the upper wall. And nobody’s going to automatically see that, but they’re going to be tiny splotches of blood up there. So now we go back to the tavern again. This time we go with stepladders and we go in and we go up above right when you first walk in the side door. And we find 159 blood on the ceiling and the upper part of the wall. [53:19]And, of course, it was Henry’s. And we literally took the ceiling down and the wall down. And during trial, we actually reconstructed that for the jury so that they could see exactly where the blood was. So now we had an exact location. We have the cause of death. [53:38] The Body is Discovered [53:39]We have the body. And so we’re in infinitely better shape. [53:43]All of the defense originally filed for a speedy trial act. I mean, they were, you know, there’s a, the state didn’t have a federal, but they, but they, they requested a speedy trial to set their, set their cases because at that time they knew we didn’t know, we didn’t have the body. And, and my guess is they’re thinking is let’s get this thing to trial with, and there won’t be a body. Well, all of a sudden now about a week and a half before the first trial, we have the body and they want to go, they want to delay. They want to delay their pieces on this thing. But the judge said, we’re going to trial. Your Honor, Your Honor, I need a continuance. I need a continuance, Your Honor. So interestingly enough, before we found the body, Dimple had two attorneys, one of them in Cleveland and one from Chicago. The Chicago attorney was a guy by the name of John Coghland, and the Cleveland attorney was Jerry Milano. Both expensive attorneys. So I’m wondering where she got the money to pay them. But at any rate, before we found the body, we were told by her defense attorneys that, hey, we have a defense. We have an alibi letter. And you guys, we got it all wrong. Henry Pyeborn, he’s still alive. And that’s their affirmative defense on this thing. Yeah. So now we know they have an alibi letter that’s not going to do them any good. [55:09]So Nancy Schuster pulls what I would say is a genius move. We indict Curly Montana for mail fraud. Now that’s not, we know he’s going to get charged in the, in the kidnapping and the murder down the line, but let’s get our hands on that letter. We’ll indict him federally for mail fraud. And, and she gave me a subpoena to serve on the defense attorneys to turn over the letter that they’d said they had as an alibi letter, which they now, that’s now evidence in another case. and now it’s been subpoenaed and they have to turn it over. And the day after I served that subpoena on Jerry Milano, he walks up to me and throws the letter and it’s in a sandwich bag and says, there, Merry Christmas. And it turns out that’s the letter. It’s mailed from Buffalo, New York. And that was critical on the Curly, Montana case. Yeah, I can imagine. [56:05]Made made every bit of that wire that consensual recordings you guys made made every bit of that like i mean it put him right in the middle of it just sucked it just nailed him right right in the whole thing was there any conjecture that he seemed to know that he’d been shot was there any conjecture that maybe he was a guy waiting inside the tavern that actually did the coup de grade was he there or was it just these hell’s angels guys we don’t know we don’t know the The evidence somewhat indicated that it was Robert O’Neill and Lloyd Allen who did it. But your point is very valid. We never found out who the shooter was. And that very, very simply could have been Curly, Montana. And I’ll tell you something that lends at least a little bit of credence to that. Is that when Lola Gayle Toney tells Jim McLean on the phone that the money’s gone, that the floorboards are up or torn up in the attic. [57:02]Their first thought was that John Montana, Carly Montana, went up to home in Berlin knowing that the rest of the group back in Cleveland were occupied with getting rid of Henry. He may have beaten them up there to the ash, torn up floorboards, because he had been told where the money was hidden. And remember, he was going to take care of the dogs. He also offered to go up there and watch the house to see if it’s being surveilled by law enforcement, just in case somebody was looking for Henry Podborny. So he knew where the money was. It’s very likely that he got up there and got the money before everybody else did. Wow. [57:48]That’s a hell of a case, man. That was one heck of a case, I got to tell you. And of course, it became… And once we found out that the Curly, Montana was involved in it, it’s like, you know, this is a real plus on this case. You know, we worked it obviously just as hard, but that was a nice finish for Curly, Montana. Yeah, you get a lot more help, a lot more prosecutorial resources, a lot more attention paid to it once you drop that mob guy’s name in there. There’s no doubt about it. So in the end now, who took convictions in state court for the actual murder? Did you have some convictions of actual murder? And then in federal court, what were your convictions? So explain to the guys kind of the difference in the two tracks and what happened there. Right. While they could have been charged with a kidnapping case, since they were charged in state court for kidnapping, I mean, there was no reason to, you know, they weren’t going to get a second charge on that one. But we did convict Curley, Montana, for mail fraud relating to that letter sent from Buffalo. [58:59]And we convicted Jim McClain, pled guilty. And Lee Juarez eventually was convicted, I believe, federally on this, where he was an accessory in the planning stage. Lola Giltoni, convicted of a kidnapping murder. Dimple, kidnapping murder. Robert O’Neill, Lloyd Allen, both kidnapping murder. Gary Gabbard, kidnapping murder. And ultimately, the county, after I had left Cleveland, I left to go to Northwest Indiana. They indicted Curley and convicted him in state court. In state court, too. Wow. [59:39] Convictions and Legal Outcomes [59:36]I guess most of the convictions ended up in state court, it sounds like. But you got the job done. That was a hell of a job, you guys. That was fine. I mean, we could have had two different settings. I think the state court was the far more appropriate venue for kidnapping murders. Yeah, yeah. The laws are much better for that state court. [1:00:00]But all those times that Curley had allegedly been involved in hits and involved in other killings, they just couldn’t get anything on him for that one. But we just got lucky. And the white-collar squad and the organized crime squad worked very closely together in Cleveland. There was an organized crime unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office there. And we worked. The white-collar statutes were used oftentimes to charge organized individuals. Yeah. So we had a very good working relationship. Yeah. Which is kind of interesting from a procedural standpoint. A lot of guys don’t know what white collar crime. You work with them. See, they want to take years to make a case and local homicide prosecutors. They want to do it now. They want to do it this month, this week and organized crime guys. They want to develop informants so they could get the bigger guy and the bigger guy and the bigger guy. So you have these three diverse units that have different kind of mandates, almost, if you will, different ways of working. And you all put it together. That’s amazing. [1:01:07]Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And and that was, you know, initially we thought that that would that would create a real conflict on the thing. But I got to tell you, we worked we worked together closely. The county prosecutors, Carmen Marino and John Coghlan, not John Coghlan, I think it was his name in a second here, were, I mean, they were absolutely fantastic. And we were happy with the speed. Even when we didn’t have the body. [1:01:32]You know, we felt we had such a strong team and the circumstantial evidence was really great. But, you know, without that body, you run the risk of having somebody. And in fact, the, the, the attorneys that represented Lola later told us that if we hadn’t found the body, they were just going to call one witness on their side and they were going to call Henry Podborning. And, and they, they knew that everybody would look at the back of the courtroom to see who comes in the door. And they were going to argue that that’s a reasonable doubt that she should have to. And it could work with a jury that could work. You can, you’re guaranteed almost a mistrial on a deal like that. You’re going to get at least one juror. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Interesting. Interesting. That’s another question I had, and all of a sudden I forgot what it was. Kind of a complicated case, but Fred, you really kind of distilled it down to the, and told it in such a way that, that we could follow along. And a lot of times these cases are complicated. And when you got organized crime and white collar crime and street criminals and, and all working together on something. And, you know, thank God they, they, they all started running their mouths and not wanting to do their own stuff. You know, this, if there’s a lesson to be learned is do everything yourself. No, not exactly. [1:02:53]But, you know, a lot of a lot of violent organized crime acts or just straight straight murder acts, you know, there’s a there’s one of the underlying themes for a lot of that is, is that they’re after money or they’re after valuables of some sort. And that oftentimes follows the white collar statutes when it when it comes to, you know, fraud and stealing the money and that type of thing. So the two oftentimes do overlap. [1:03:20]Yeah, really. You can also, I think oftentimes the organized crime prosecutor doing a RICO case will use some white collar crimes and what you guys have done to get one of the predicate acts that then say, oh, and this guy ordered it. So that’s, they always have to work hand in glove and you guys work well together. I’ll say that. Anything else you want to say about this case? It’s just been fascinating. You’ve got, you’re working on a screenplay, I know, and there’s not a book out there yet, guys, but he’s working on it. Yeah, I still got some pieces to put together, but, you know, there were a couple of real interesting points when we were looking for the body and thought we had located. Lee Juarez called us up a couple, oh, about a week or so after he was arrested and says, you know, I think if he’s being held someplace, we didn’t believe he was alive at that point by any means, but he said they may have put him in an abandoned hotel. Hotel, I believe it was Solon, Ohio. And he gave us the location of that. And that was one of these real little stripped down little hotels off the side of the road. [1:04:28]And so we get this information late at night and myself and Gary Hall, agent that worked this with me, both decide, well, let’s go out and check this hotel out. Now there’s fresh snow on the ground at this point. And we get to the hotel and we pull into the parking lot and there’s obviously car tracks, you know, that have pulled into the parking lot. And there were a series of footprints, a trail of footprints going to unit number eight. In that hotel and back and forth, back and forth. And so Gary and I get out and, you know, we decide, Hey, we potentially have exigent circumstances or we need to, we need to find out what’s happening. Now I’d love to tell you that we just busted that door down, but it was actually a block. So we just opened it up. No drama. [1:05:21]I’m not exactly sure that Gary and I combined could have broken that door. But anyway, the door was open. And there was nothing in there. But at midnight, we thought, well, you know, slight possibility this guy was part of the planning. He tells us he thinks that this might be a location. So that was one of the events when we’re trying to look up the body. Another location we looked at, we ended up bringing in a helicopter with the FLIR monitoring camera system. And they pointed out two locations on the property we were searching that were [1:05:55] Closing Thoughts and Reflections [1:05:53]large enough to be a human body. Turned out they were deer uh that had been that had been buried there but so we had we were we were actively looking looking for the bottom for the body just without success until the very end yeah well yeah there’s there’s always those dead ends at any big investigation and you didn’t tell us all of them i know there’s always these different dead ends that you have to you go down but you’ve got to go down them and and they take a lot of time many times and but you gotta go down them because you just don’t know yep you sure do sure do all right red grassley it’s a it’s a great story i really appreciate you coming on and sharing this with the guys my guys that listen to the podcast and and i know they’re gonna they’re gonna be just like i was the whole time they’re gonna be engrossed in this one it’s a heck of a story. [1:06:47]Well, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to explain it in his podcast. All right, Fred, we’re going to have to have lunch again one of these days. It’s great to make your acquaintance right here in Kansas City. Guys, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. Guys, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. And if you are out there in your car, make sure you watch out for motorcycles. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website. And hand-in-hand with PTSD is the problem with drugs and alcohol. Well, you know, Anthony Ruggiano, a former Gambino, I guess he was a prospect, if you will, a proposed member. Witness Protection came back out. He’s now running a drug and alcohol center, or he’s a counselor down in Florida, and he has a hotline on his number. And, you know, I’ve got some books out there, and I’ve got my new book. You can see back over my shoulder, Windy City Mafia, that I did from some of the early interesting stories that I did in the podcast. I just went to several different episodes and created a written chapter, if you will. Each chapter is different. Got some Al Capone, got some Harry Aileman, got some Frank Calabrese Jr. [1:07:59] Got some, I don’t remember what else. Anyhow, just get that book. It’s on Amazon. And I’ve got that other book about the skimming from Las Vegas, leaving Vegas, how the FBI wiretaps in and mob domination of Las Vegas casinos. And I got my two documentary films, gangland wire and brothers against brothers, the Sabella Spiro war for just a dollar 99 rental. So thanks a lot guys. And, and thanks again, Fred, I really appreciate you coming on and telling us this story. Thanks. Take

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Transcript [0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, back here in the studio of Gangland Wire, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police intelligence unit detective, and now podcaster and former filmmaker and author. I mean, I’ve just done it all here in my retirement. I’m just kidding. You know, I don’t take myself that seriously. I want to tell you a kind of a short story today about the manager of the Ravenite Social Club, Norman DuPont. I recently was looking at some video and i snagged some video to put up youtube shorts of people going in and out of the ravenite and so i i didn’t hear this one guy was so i threw it out you know to the fans on youtube and they said oh that’s norman dupont and and what you could tell he was like the guy running errands he was running in and out opening the door going next door and getting supplies and bringing them back to a little corner store there and bringing them back to the club. So Norman DuPont. And I thought, well, who is this guy? I started researching him. You can’t find out a whole lot about him. It’s kind of an interesting story later in his life. One of the first things I found out about him was he was kind of crazy. [1:12]In 1990, it’s not too long before he committed a crime that sent him away for a long time. he was working at the Feast of San Gennaro down in Little Italy at Mulberry and Spring Street. And there was a child of an off-duty New York City police officer named Anthony Pinzone, and she complained that a concession game was not working properly. And a couple of off-duty cops went over to the booth and started making a complaint. And the booth attendant called out. All of a sudden, some other guys showed up and some other off-duty cops were in the area, showed up, and they have a. [1:54]Have a big brawl and and the cops ended up getting the worst end of it these guys beat him with like sticks and iron bars or something and they all get they got went to the hospital retreated and released one of them was uh kept for a while he had a fractured skull so one of the persons arrested was the ravenite manager norman dupont they charged him a second degree of salt all uh it’s just like crazy crazy crazy now this uh he was manager at the ravenite and ravenite was an italian american heritage club which is we all know was the headquarters of goddy late you know it’s like after he ascended to the the throne if you will it’s a 247 mulberry street used as a mob mob hangout and became a storefront later on became a shoe store and a men’s clothing most recently but what’s the history of it this thing goes clear back to 1926 it was the alto knights social club which was an old street gang during prohibition used it and that’s what they call themselves the alto knights it was a hangout for lucky luciano and and others of that prohibition area mafia uh this name was taken from the order of saint james of alto passio uh 1957 carlo gambino. [3:17]Gambino took over the family and became named the Gambino family, as we know now. [3:26]He renamed the club the Ravenite in honor of his favorite poem. Now, who would have thought that Carlo Gambino would have a favorite poem? [3:34]Go figure that one. He liked Edgar Allan Poe, and of course, the Raven was his favorite poem. And so we call it the Ravenite. Now, he hung out there, and he was the boss there, and people would come and see him there. But eventually, you know, Carlo Gambino was a guy. He was careful. He was always careful. And he quit going down there when he discovered the cops had a big interest in surveillance of that club and the FBI. You know, by this time, you know, if you’ve listened to my podcast with Gary Clemente telling about his father, Peter Clemente, Peter Clemente was in the first one of the first guys in a top hoodlum squad. One of the first italian guys in the top hoodlum squad and gambino was his his guy so he was probably down there watching gambino himself so gambino he he leaves that he understands now he didn’t pass that god he didn’t learn that lesson from him as we know the management of club then and the the head duck of the club then goes to anello della croce of course he’s the underboss for Gambino and he uses it until he dies. Gotti will come in and take it over as his club, leave the Bergen Fish and Hunt Club after he does away with Paul Castellano. [4:53] The Ravenite’s Surveillance Struggles [4:53]The uh the club is is a there’s a it’s a constant battle between the fbi and the mafia to get bugs and wiretaps in places now you can always tap a phone out on the pole but you can you need to get a bug inside because people are really careful and then eventually they’ll become even more careful about talking inside anywhere and they do the walking talks but the fbi if you watch this most Most recent, Get Gotti on Netflix. I think it’s in the second episode, they tell about all the ways they tried to get bugs into the Rabonite. It was hard. They got a key bait, so they could go in and out at will, and it seemed like nobody was paying any attention to it. They were going in and out, and they kept putting in bugs, and nothing was working, nothing was working. And even when they did kind of work, they weren’t getting anything because as they find out, eventually, eventually they find out that Gotti was going out the back door of the club up some inside stairs into another apartment building. Some elderly Italian lady giving her a little bit of money and she’d leave and he’d have his meetings up there. They got the bug up there and the rest is history. Really, it really brought them down that that wiretapper, that bug up there really brought them down, you know, surveillance of it. [6:13]Kind of helped the FBI when Gotti made everybody come in on Wednesdays, I believe. He also, another thing that’s not known is labor union guys who were connected to the Gambinos or wanted something from Gotti, was doing business with Gotti, was doing business with the mob. They would show up a lot and do those walking talks out front. So it helped the FBI determine who the labor union people that were corrupt. [6:36]Melvin DuPont, he wanted to be a gangster so bad, I guess, because he eventually will make his bones. Now he’s, you know, he’s involved with this fight, but that ain’t a deal. There was a guy named Joy Fabozzi who had a car service company there in Manhattan and he owed money to Melvin DuPont or Melvin DuPont had, had, had verified him and vouched for him or something. The guy wasn’t paying DuPont. I believe he got drunk. He goes to the car service, and there’s a dispatcher there named Harmon Fuchs, and DuPont shoots and kills him just as a message to his boss. There’s a couple of low-rent scumbags, Tony Nose Perscietti and Guy Zappula, who are either with him or know about this, and they end up testifying against him, and he gets like 25 to life or something. Now, while he’s in prison, he has a teenage son who is drowned in an upstate boating accident there in New York. And the prison people will not, the management will not let him go out and go to the funeral. But he does get an agreement with his family that they’ll bury the kid. They bring the kid down into West Virginia so at least he’ll be buried close to his father’s in Glenville, West Virginia, the Gilmer Federal Prison. [7:59] Tragic Fate of Melvin DuPont [7:59]And that’s kind of an interesting story. [8:05]Another thing about these social clubs, I know, you know, they had several managers. And we look at our social club here in Kansas City, they’re always a target of the FBI and the intelligence people. [8:20]And they’re really careful in and around them. But here we had one called The Trap. Everybody just called it The Trap. It really was a Northview social club. They even used to have a sign out front. When I was young, they had a sign out front. And you know i’d see these guys hang around out front they’d be inside to be playing cards they had the espresso machine and and the whole nine yards and and they’d have people they have games going on texas hold them and play gin and and different kinds of gambling games they know there’s always gambling on it of course and and in the back room there was a smaller room that’s where they’d have the bigger games and that’s where these guys would bring some big fat fish that they could fleece that this some of these business guys they’d want to you know have the the cachet of playing cards with the mob so they’d bring them into the back room and and of course fleece they’d pay for that little trip into the back room of the uh trap or the northview social club we always had a manager here too back when i first went in the unit it was a guy named turk harris he was italian i don’t know what his if his father was not italian or whatever his last Last name was Harris, but he was Italian. He used to tell everybody that he was like the head of the mafia in Kansas City. And he lived up above it. So he’s really hard to get into that thing. Anyhow, you could get it done, but it was hard to do. [9:40]I know an FBI agent who was in the basement running some wire one night about four o’clock in the morning. And as he started out, there was some mob guy had been up in one of these upstairs apartments visiting a girl. And he was walking out the same time the FBI agent was walking out. The FBI agent just happened to hear him coming out the front door as he started to open the front door of the trap. and he pulls the front door shut and just looks out the window and sees this Willie Camisano Jr. Walking out and getting his car driving away. [10:12]And then Bobby Maroon took it over after Turk Harris. I never knew what happened to Turk Harris. I don’t think he died. [10:24] The Trap: A Kansas City Social Club [10:18]I think, I don’t know. He was kind of a loud mouth. I think people didn’t like him in the end. And a guy named Bobby Maroon took it over. He had been, I think, a joint at a West 12th Street bar, bar kind of a b-girl bar and he’d had that for quite a while and they trust him and and he helped run the gambling games there he actually ended up starting another game down the street uh upstairs above a pharmacy but he ran it until i think it finally closed down bobby maroon got old and died everybody started going to prison there in the 80s late 70s early 80s and and it just closed down it’s still sitting there today uh vacant i know a guy that went in there tried to buy it they They wanted like $100,000 for this just like run-down old storefront. [11:06]It actually had a little restaurant adjoining it, but they wanted $100,000 for it. And this guy wanted to turn it into an Italian restaurant, and it’s down in our little Italy. So I don’t know. Somebody ought to do that with the Ravenite, get a hold of it, and turn it into a little bar and restaurant. [11:26] Conclusion and Future Projects [11:22]I think it would go just a cachet of being able to go into the old Ravenite. But anyhow, so that’s the story of Norman DuPont and the Ravenite Social Club. [11:32]Thanks a lot guys and don’t forget i like to ride motorcycles so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there if you have a problem ptsd go to the va website and get that hotline number and along with ptsd is drugs and alcohol you got that problem you don’t have to be in the uh, the you don’t have to be a veteran you can go see anthony rugiano he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in florida and he has a hotline on his uh website or his youtube page or something i don’t know he’s got one anyhow and and don’t forget to like and subscribe and tell your friends about us and you know hey i’ve got books and movies out there and movies to rent my documentaries you can rent and i got a book for sale in amazon i’m working on a couple other books i think i’m going to start trying to like take several podcasts and then make a short book of several chapters And each chapter will be whatever the podcast was that I did a particular week. What I’ve got so far is a bunch of Chicago stories. And so I’m working on that and I’ll do some New York stories and I’ll do some Midwest stories. I may do one with just Kansas City stories and some of my own experiences. I must start putting out a few short books as if I don’t have enough to do. But anyhow. So thanks a lot, guys. And keep coming back.

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Transcript [0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City police intelligence sergeant, detective sergeant later on back here in the studio of gangland wire with this episode. I’m you got to bear with me, guys. I’m going to do a little selling at the very start. I usually sell anything I got to sell at the end or asking for promote or for support or whatever. [0:22]But at the start, we’re going to do a little promotion. I have a book that I just did and I’m going to give you, I’m going to reward you. I’m going to give you a story, an interesting story, but to start, I have a book here that I’ve done. Windy City Mafia, the Chicago outfit. You can see it back over my shoulder there. Like any good day ever seen any author being interviewed on a podcast on a, on YouTube, you’ll see they had the book propped up over their shoulder. So anyhow, I’ve done this book and what I did. So, stories from Gangland Wire. So I took a bunch of my different Chicago stories and I just take my show notes and the transcript and then distill that down into a short story. So it’s a variety of different chapters. Each one is different. Let’s see, I did an overview, The Rise of the Chicago Outfit, kind of an overview of that. Then I’ve got seven chapters, which I’ve got Scarface on the golf course, which I thought was a really funny story and a good one. The Trial of Al Capone, that’s a first-person account that I found, and I put some other things together and did a show on that. The rise of Tony Accardo, Joe Batters, the murder of Estelle Carey, which was a particularly horrific murder. [1:40]I found a story about the Chicago Police Intelligence Unit serving a search warrant on an outfit gambling house, and they found a bunch of bookmaking records. Kind of near and dear to my own heart, I was part of the intelligence unit. We never served any search warrants. We set up some other people for vice to go serve the search warrants. Had an interview with Frank Calabrese Jr. And so I went back through that and pulled out a lot of the salient details about the Calabrese family. And finally, I did the executioner, Fear in the Chicago Outfit. What a catchy title for that chapter. And that’s really the story of Harry Aleman, which is, I mean, that guy was, he was a piece of work, wasn’t he? [2:24]Anyhow, but the story I’m going to tell you today, oh, and that book will be on Amazon, both the Kindle and the hardcover version. And if you guys will go out right away and, you know, for, I think, $1.99, you can get that Kindle version. Even if you don’t have Kindle, hit that $1.99. If I can get a whole bunch of people to buy this thing the first 10 days or two weeks or so, Amazon will see that and they’ll say, oh, man. And so they’ll push it up in their algorithms and it’ll show it to a lot of other people who have bought books, true crime books about the outfit or any mob books. Because there’s a huge fan base out there that buy all kinds of mob books. And a lot of you guys are a lot of you guys that listen are those guys that buy those mob books. And I bought many, many myself. Now I get a lot of them sent to me, which is kind of nice. And I interview these authors while they send me their books. So I get all the latest books and I pass them along to one of my big supporters, Eric, Eric Tyler. I really appreciate what you’ve done for me in the past. I help him make my movie and and other things that you’ve done financially and emotionally and physically support the podcast and my work. Well, I get him those books. [3:48] Eyewitness Account of a Mob Murder [3:43]And so, you know, that’s what it is. That’s my and and help me out if you can. I would really appreciate it. So today I’m going to tell you the story out of the words of an eyewitness of the murder of the two Spilotro brothers, Anthony or Tony Spilotro and his brother, Michael. You know, they were big out in Las Vegas and they got in trouble out there. And, you know, it’s really I think it’s interesting. It’s an insider’s account of a mob murder. You know they had had brought a lot of attention especially tony had brought a lot of attention onto the outfit out in las vegas and during the same time you know we’d started this here in kansas city uh listening to this guy named joe agosto talk about Spilotro talk about frank rosenthal talk about the skim coming back to kansas city from the stardust or from the Tropicana, and also talking about the Stardust and the fact Skim was coming out of that and going to Chicago. [4:48]And so first two full days on a witness stand, there’s a guy named Nick Calabrese. Nick Calabrese’s brother was Frank Calabrese Sr. And he ran the 26th Street crew, which was a crew of killers. And of course, I interviewed Frank Calabrese Jr. About that life with his uncle Nick nick and his dad frank sometimes it’s like i talk to these guys like frank jr and he talks about his that was just his uncle nick when he was a little kid his dad was just you know dad. [5:21]Uh, like some of these, uh, kids here in Kansas city, I talked to them once in a while and, you know, their grandpa or their great uncle was just Cork Civella. I mean, it was just grandpa, you know, to us, it was Cork Civella, a real killer to them. It was just grandpa. So I always find that really kind of fascinating. You know, Nick Calabrese kind of starts out right on the, off the bat. He said, uh, prosecutor asked him about what happened. And he said, well, he said, I tackled Spilotro’s brother, Michael, around the legs. And I heard Tony in the back ask if he could say a prayer. [5:58]What happened next? The prosecutor said, you know, he said, I couldn’t, I didn’t hear anything anymore. You know, I, you know, you go into the action, everything else closes down. I’ve been there on that. You go into some kind of action, your hearing closes down. You don’t need your hearing more than likely. And you start taking the action. You’re looking for any kind of a danger to you. The article I read said that he just spoke in a monotone, calmly, and just like, matter of fact, well, you know, we did this and we did that. Nick Calabrese had been a longtime hitman along with his brother Frank and his 26th Street crew. In the months before the Spilotros were killed, he had been part of a team of mob killers, some of these other guys who we’ll name later on, that went out to Las Vegas trying to catch and kill Tony and Mike Spilotro out there. They were going to use explosives, and they even had a silencer-equipped Uzi, they said, followed him around, followed him to Goodman’s office and downtown, and back there where his home is, it’s on a cul-de-sac. I tell you what, I’ve been there, it’s in my, uh, Las Vegas mob tour on YouTube. [7:08]It would be a hard one. It would be impossible to sit on. You can follow him in, but you couldn’t stay down in there. There’d be no way. Somebody would be calling the police on you. I mean, there’s just nobody moving in and out of that neighborhood. And everybody parks their cars in the garage. Nobody parks on the street. So it’s impossible to sit on that house. So the outfit acting on Joey Iupa’s orders said, let’s get them to come back to Chicago. So they came up with a ruse and said, Michael is going to be promoted. He’s going to be whistled in. He’s going to be a made guy and they’re going to promote Tony to be a capo. Now, Calabrese testified that one of his fellow hitman, John Farracotta, said that Tony Spilotro supposedly was targeted because he had an affair with the wife of what they called a Chicago bookmaker, which has to be Frank Rosenthal. Which is kind of a no-no, but I don’t buy that you would do all this because he had an affair with Jerry. Supposedly, they put out the story that he was moving drugs with a motorcycle gang out there. You know, big no-no, don’t move drugs. I don’t really believe that. [8:21]I’m not sure why. If we want to speculate, I would say that Tony Spilotro had just gotten too big for his britches out there and brought a lot of heat. I mean, a lot of heat, and it really wasn’t particularly him, although part of it was because of him, but that heat all started in Kansas City, and it started on FBI wiretaps, and it spun off to Chicago because Lefty Rosenthal was doing all this crazy stuff out there and bringing all kinds of attention to himself, which brings law enforcement attention to him. Tony Splatro was also bringing a lot of law enforcement attention when he started this hole in the wall gang, which brought the Chicago, the Metro intelligence unit to actually combine with the FBI for the first time ever and a little task force and work on the hole in the wall gang, which then turned Frank Cullotta. So it’s, it was just a variety of things. It probably wasn’t either one of these two things. [9:20]Calabrese talked about when he first was told that he was going to be part of this hit on Mike and Tony Spilotro, he told his brother, his older brother, Frank Singer, and Frank Singer said, well, why didn’t they ask me? I want to be there like a little kid. You know, why come? I’m not chosen for this team. Crazy. He ends up, he’s not there. I’m not sure exactly why. But 83 or so, I think the the skim trials that started and Iupa and Jackie Cerrone and Angela LaPietra are going to prison as well as, you know, Tuffy DeLuna and Nick’s Nick Civella had died. Cork Civella, Frank Balistrieri, John Scalise, Mashie Rockman, and Cleveland are all mob bosses. The whole skim thing was done and all that money that they’d been getting every month. I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars between the trop and then all the four casinos that Alan Glick owned out there. The Stardust, the Hacienda, the Fremont, and God, I never remember the name of the other day. I had four casinos. They were skimming them out of that. That was going to Chicago. Chicago was divided up with Cleveland. [10:38]Milwaukee and Kansas city Kansas city had the Trop covered 40 grand a month we recovered 80 grand when we took them off uh with the uh guy that was bringing the skim back and a regular guy named Caruso and had a junket that was going in and out of Kansas city to uh las Vegas so he you know had cover uh and he took 80 grand off of him that was two months skim so 40 grand a month out of the trop and and over a hundred thousand dollars maybe even a couple hundred depending on the month out of those other four casinos so it was a lot of money and and i think he felt like and we needed somebody to blame i would say and Spilotro you know he had drawn all this heat with the hole in the wall gang and Frank Cullotta was testifying by then but anyhow it was reported did later on that Aiuppa when he ordered the brother’s murder he said you know I’ve had enough of this and there’s. [11:39]Been several people that have are bringing us down here and I don’t care how you do it just get him I want him done I want this done I want him out that’s when they they sent Nick Calabrese and some other some of these other guys out to Las Vegas kill him with explosives and the automatic weapons that didn’t work came back that’s when they scheme they hatched up this scheme to lure him to a meeting in a house in bensonville it’s a suburb up in Chicago with this promise of mob promotion for tony and and you make Michael get “whistled in” and break a lot of call he said you know he was asking about that and and he said you know they i don’t know if they call it made he said we just always called it being whistled in and that makes sense how let’s click over. Tony and his brother get together. They’re back in Chicago. Tony’s always maintained a house in Chicago, and Michael lived there mostly and had a wife and family there. So June the 14th, 1983 or 86, June the 14th, 1986, they get together. [12:46]Michael left. He told his wife that, you know, I’m going to this meeting. I’m not sure this doesn’t look good, but I don’t know. His wife will later testify that he said if he wasn’t back by nine o’clock, it was no good. it. Michael Spilotro’s daughter also will testify that Michael told her he loved her at least 10 times before leaving on that fatal day, or should it be fateful day, fateful, fatal day. Both Tony Spilotro and Michael removed all their valuables and all their personal identification before they left. Now, I don’t know if that’s normal when you’re going to go to a meeting where you’re going to be made. I don’t particularly think it is. I don’t know. I I wouldn’t have showed up at that meeting. They said Tony Spilotro had a gun hidden on him, but he didn’t get a chance to get to it, apparently. Nick Calabrese will tell the court when he’s testifying that he was told to wait at a shopping center on 22nd Street, just west of Illinois Highway 83 in DuPage County, and somebody will pick him up. [13:51]Waiting with him were John Ferricotta and another capo, Jimmy LaPietra, Angelo LaPietra’s son. Son i think and now the leader of the 26th street crew jimmy marcello who will be the really the next boss or as it probably was the boss at the time with Aiuppa in jail or on his way he picked him up in what calabrese called a fancy blue van one of these big uh navigator kind of vans early in the afternoon is a saturday afternoon they drove up to this bensonville subdivision uh went to irving park road and where all the homes looked alike all had uh you know these partial brick walls and then uh wood the rest of it bay windows in the front garage doing on two garages most of them have two car garages drove in the garage door was already up when they got there they just drove right in shut the garage door so nobody really might not even notice that blue van then what they do is they put the bodies in that blue van and back out and take off when He said when it got there, there was John Bananas DiFronzo, who will become the boss later on, Sam Wings Carlisi, who will have a short period of time at the boss, and Joe Ferriola is a longtime capo over in Chinatown and the 26th Street crew and has moved on up. [15:09]He was the one who brought Harry Aleman in and schooled him and used him, and he was really the guy. If you wanted somebody killed, then you went to Joe Ferriola and he could get Harry Elman and some of the members of the Wild Buds to do that. There were this this Chicago outfit of the 70s and 80s that we’re talking about. This is the end of that really peak peak of the outfit. The final last straw, except I guess there’s still something going. And Calabrese will remark that Calabrese, that Wings Carlisi said he really got a good tan and. [15:49]And then made some passing remark about when Nick Calabrese and John Farrakata were down in Phoenix recently. [15:59] The Execution of the Spilotro Brothers [15:56]And he’s Ferracotta had spent a lot of money when he was down there. Well, Calabrese will say that Ferracotta runs in the bathroom. And when he comes out, he’s pale. He said, Calabrese testified. He said, I figure he thinks this is slow parties for him. And it wasn’t, he wasn’t marked for murder yet. He’d be killed about three months later because he’s the one that bots the, uh, Uh, Spoletro’s burial didn’t bury him deep enough and left before they really got buried really good. I think they got scared off. They thought somebody was coming. They all ran off at one dude, uh, taco. He had, uh, his wife, she ends up testifying against him. He has to call her to come and get him. About 30 minutes later, the Spoletro’s get walking upstairs and Nick Calabrese says, you know, I remember hearing somebody talking, saying, hello, there’s a few guys upstairs. Some of them were downstairs. Most of them were upstairs because they wanted to then push these guys downstairs when he went down the basement. It’s one time he really showed a little bit of tension and a little bit of emotion on the stand. They report that he exhaled audibly like, I’m wound up because I’m tense. I’m focusing, totally focusing on what I’m going to do. Look around at the rest of the courtroom. [17:11]Marcello had no reaction and just, you know, deadpan. He was sitting there and this is in the family secrets trial. Actually, I think I forgot to mention that. Most of you guys probably know that. First one down the stairs, Nick says, was Michael Spilotro. Then he stepped forward at Green and said, how you doing, Mike? Because I knew him, you know, and you say, oh, yeah, how you doing? And would step towards him. About that time, this dude named Marino and several others jumped on him. So Calabrese said, I dove and grabbed his legs. [17:44]He said, I noticed there was Louie the Mooch Eboli who was there and he threw a rope around his neck was strangling. And he said he remembered only one thing before he kind of, you know, as far as his hearing went blank, he said, I heard Tony Spilotro say, can I say a prayer? And, and all the rest of the waiting men, men just bum rust. These brothers just swarmed them. [18:04]There’s nothing you could do when you got the weight of seven or eight men, even though you’re a tough guy yourself, you can’t do it. These guys are just as tough and many of them were bigger, swarmed them and kicked them and beat them and hit them with only with their fists. [18:20]A lot of people said it was with some blunt instruments like, you know, axe handles or whatever, baseball bats or whatever kind of, you know, Hollywood thing you want to think of. But the coroner will say this blunt force trauma was from fists and feet and not from any instrument. And also there’s a rumor that they were found with dirt in their lungs that they were buried alive but the autopsy will show that their lungs are filled with blood from the beating so if they died from not being able to get air it was from all the blood that filled up their lungs from the internal damage that they were did as they beat them lotto brothers are dead you know and and they hope that their bodies will never be found as i said they didn’t bury them deep enough some farmer found them and kind of a uh you know it’s sad commentary on their end but the these long-time catholic tony splatter even wanted to pray at the end the Chicago archdiocese ruled that they cannot be given a catholic funeral at saint Bernardine in forest park because of their organized crime connections so they had a private service and a cemetery chapel it was located at the Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillsdale, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. It’s on June the 27th. [19:36]Really not that long after they were killed and they were buried in the family plot up there. They had a wake at Salerno’s Galewood Chapel on North Harlem Avenue. And three of the killers, Joe Ferriola, Marino. God, I can’t remember his last first name. Let me know what his first name is. Marino. I should have looked it up. And Rocky InFelice all showed up at the wake. [20:04] Reflection on the Spilotro Murders [20:01]So I once attended a mob associates funeral. And this guy one guy showed up and i thought uh-oh uh-oh one made guy showed up at this funeral who would have been the kind of guy that would would probably maybe orchestrated this thing he didn’t do it himself but i bet he he orchestrated it uh i have to tell that story someday i did so much on jimmy Duardi, i don’t remember i’ve got an old podcast on jimmy Duardi one of our a made guy who was a real old-time mobster but anyhow so that’s the story of the murder of the splatter brothers tony and Michael and who did it and what went down right from the mouth of a man who did it nick calabrese uncle to frank calabrese jr. [20:50]Who i have a story about in my book so don’t forget my book windy city mafia the chicago outfit stories from gangland wire podcast. I’m gonna do more of these i’ll look up some more chicago stories that i think interesting and haven’t been told and retold a jillion times and i’m gonna do one on new york and i’m gonna do one on kansas city and so i’m just gonna kind of keep doing these all along as i have time to uh to do them it’s just kind of kind of fun for me too, and gives me another, uh, another stream of income. So if you guys will go whole bunch of you go buy this book, why, uh, it will help immensely. So thanks a lot, guys. Uh, don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles and you know, all the rest of it. You got problems with drugs or alcohol or PTSD. [21:33]There’s, there’s help available. If you’re a veteran, go to the VA and Anthony Ruggiano, former Gambino, uh, proposed member. I’ve been told not really a made guy. Um, they got, they got help for you out there. I’ve got other books, some other book, the Amazon site, and that’s the one about the skimming from Las Vegas from the Kansas City viewpoint and all the wiretaps that they used. You get the Kindle version. You can click on the transcripts that are used inside the book and hear the actual wiretaps. And I’ve got the two movies that are out there for I think is a dollar ninety nine rental gangland wire, which tells about the starting of the skim investigation and the whole big to do that really got the FBI into it. And then brothers against brothers, the Savella Sparrow war, which was about right on the heels of the start of the skimming investigation and all the wiretaps. Then this little war between some upstart young Turks, last name of Sparrow, broke out. And we all pulled out of that, let the FBI, all they did then was sit on the wiretaps. And we all went into in the middle of this war, really. So we about got caught up a couple of times right in the middle of it. So anyhow, thanks a lot, guys.

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Transcript

[0:00]Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have a show today with a officer from the New York Police Department. We’re going to tell some New York Police Department stories. You guys know that I spent 25 years on the Kansas City Police Department. Well, Marique Bartolda spent 20 years on the New York City Police Department. She’s got some great stories. So welcome, Marique. Hey, how’s it going? Thanks so much for having me. Great. I’m really glad to have you on. I think I’m looking forward to our mutual friend, Vic Ferrari says that you have some good stories. And so we’re going to hear some good stories today. I’m sure of that. Now the book guys, the book guys is 20 and out. It’s a compilation of chaos experience while serving 20 years in New York city police department. Here’s a review. I must say that the author was descriptive enough to set the scene of each story. I love that she She explained everything, which made you feel like you were right there with her. I couldn’t put it down and love that each chapter was a job she went to or encountered. Great job, Marique. So that’s, you know, a great review. And you got like all five star reviews, I believe. And so, guys, you can get that on Amazon. I’ll have a link to it in my show notes. So, Marique, tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, your education. And where did you work with the PD before we get into some stories?

[1:22]So I grew up on Long Island in Malvern, which is right on the border of Queens and Nassau County. I went to New Paltz College. And while I was up there, I realized that I wanted to be a cop in New York City. So I left New Paltz, which is in upstate New York. I came back home and I went to school at John Jay College in Manhattan for criminal justice. I took a lot of law classes and I started going on the law track. I was really thinking maybe I wanted to be a lawyer. And I had taken the test for the New York City Police Department and they called me and I said, you know what? I don’t know about case law.

[1:58]Reading it is fun to, you know, get an A in class or, you know, whatever. But to do this like as a chore for the next 30 years might get a little boring. So I said, you know what? I’m kind of an adrenaline junkie and And I might as well just go work in the police department where I can be outside and not stuck in a room with four walls for the rest of my life. So I went into the academy July 1st of 2002. I graduated, I think, January 1st of 2003 or 2nd, somewhere around there. And then when I graduated the academy, I went into transit in the subways in District 20, which is like Queens North and somewhat into Queens South, a little bit of Brooklyn. Uh, and it wasn’t, it wasn’t my cup of tea. I had a lot of fun down there. A lot of good guys, um, was in the blackout of, uh, I think it was 2003 blackout where like the whole Northeast lost power and we had to go into the subways and rescue people off of the trains and stuff.

[2:55]There were some fun times down there, but it wasn’t the type of police work that I was really interested in. I was watching the RMPs, the police cars going flying by with lights and sirens and stuff, and I’m just sitting there watching turnstiles, and I’m like, that’s the kind of stuff I want to be involved in. So I put in transfer requests and ended up going to the 105th precinct, which is in Queens, right on the border of Queens and Nassau. Really big precinct, runs from like the Grand Central Parkway down to JFK Airport.

[3:27]And I went there, I went on patrol, which, you know, is the lowest part of the bar. I did 4 to 12, which was 3 in the afternoon to 1130 at night, which was my favorite tour to work. Work uh so work with a lot of fun guys on that tour you know busted chops got my chops busted uh and then i went to um i did a response order for a little while we basically only responded to in-progress jobs that kind of cover the gap in between tour changes uh then i went into a conditions unit which addresses quality of life issues like you know the guys who pee and the guys who drink with an open container because that was illegal at the time uh and then from From there, I went to SNHU, which is street narcotics enforcement, which is like dealing with low level street level drug rings. Then I went into anti-crime and then I did field intelligence at the precinct level for a few years. And then the NYPD started a new unit for animal cruelty to investigate animal cruelty. So I went there, which was a brand new unit, got that started, you know, did the training for it for, you know, the cops in the police department. Department, did a couple investigations. And then I realized that wasn’t for me.

[4:36]So I requested to go back. So I went back to the 105th precinct and I ended up going right back into the FIO spot, which was great because it was like my favorite spot. And the girl that had replaced me was getting promoted. So it worked out. And I stayed there for the rest of my career. And all in all, it was a blast. It was a blast. Had a really good time. So you’re using some, uh, some terminology. Some of these guys might not know RMP is radio motor patrol. That’s a police car with a radio in it, right? That’s a March police car. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Talking to a fellow cop. I forget. Yeah. Sorry. Right. Yeah. And the next one was, you just said it, it was, uh, RIO or something. IO. What was that? Oh, FIO field. FIO is field intelligence officer. Oh, okay. Field intelligence officer. So, you know, I looked at some of your stories and, you know, I tell you what, especially dealing with emotionally disturbed people is one of the more difficult things that any cops has to do. I’ve got my own stories. I mean, there’s nothing like having to wrestle a naked man in the middle of the night in the middle of an intersection and it’s hotter than hell. You know, there’s nothing like that. They’re super slippery.

[5:55]They’re slippery as hell. Yeah. I know you got some stories and especially many times they’ll have a knife. I remember looking at a window and there’s this crazed woman with a big butcher knife just raised up looking out at me. It’s like, oh man. And, you know, we just walked away because we didn’t have really, she wouldn’t answer the door and we just had a call that, you know, there was some problem inside, you know, we just walked away from that one. So I know you got some stories about that. Yeah. You know, the knives are always a lot of fun. They make this situation very interesting when you get involved with somebody who’s emotionally disturbed. We had a lot of that. It’s actually, I think, a bigger problem than most people realize. I think the interesting part of the of the EDP or emotionally disturbed person is that you never really know when the switch is going to happen and they’re going to go from being completely compliant to like completely nuts and violent. So what you refer to with the knife, one of the stories that’s in my book.

[6:55]When I was on patrol, we had a call for a neighbor had called about her neighbor who was an EDP and had pulled a knife on her. So, you know, my partner and I get there and whenever you’re dealing with an emotionally disturbed person, you always have backup coming. There’s always another car coming. And in the NYPD, we never worked alone. We always had a partner with us in the car. So I knew there were at least two other cops coming. So we get there and the woman’s like, you know, this guy pulled a knife on me. He’s a little crazy. He went running back inside the house. He’s in there somewhere with a knife. So, okay. You know, all right, whatever. So I’m walking up the driveway and I’m looking into the windows to see if I can see him as I’m walking up, and to glued or taped to every single window pane were cloves of garlic.

[7:41]So I’m like, okay, so either, you know, this guy is a legit Italian and he just likes hanging garlic from all of his windows or, you know, he’s got some kind of Dracula complex and, you know, he’s got to protect himself from the outside world. So I said, okay, here we go. So the back door was open where he had run into. So, you know, you go to the door and you kind of stick your head in, you’re looking around and I don’t see anything. I don’t hear anything. So I yell out police and my PD and my partner and I walk in there and it leads to like a little kitchen area. So I look around. He’s not in the kitchen. So I was relieved about that because you never really want to deal with anybody in the kitchen because, you know, the implements of destruction that are in that room are numerous. And, you know, I don’t, you know, I don’t I don’t want to deal with a knife. And, you know, I got a gun, but I don’t really want to have to use it if I don’t really need to. So I was very happy to see that he wasn’t in the kitchen. So I moved through the living room and, you know, it is eerily quiet in this house. I don’t hear a TV. There’s no radio. There’s no sounds. I’m yelling NYPD, police, but I don’t really want to give away my position too, too much. So I get to the bottom of the stairs and I look up and at the top of the stairs, you can see like the hallway, which was very narrow with the railing.

[8:51]And I mean, the stairway was very narrow as it was. And I’m like, well, he’s got to be up of there. So I got to go carefully. So I take a couple of steps up and I’m looking, waiting. And, you know, I have my hand on my gun just in case, because I don’t know where this knife is. And I’m yelling NYPD and I hear nothing. So I keep going up a couple more steps. And all of a sudden he just pops out and there he is at the top of the stairs with the knife in his hand. So, you know, obviously I draw down on him and I’m like, all right, put the knife down, put it down, calm down. I’m not here to hurt you. You know, let’s just put the knife down. Let’s talk, you know just doing the whole the verbal judo of working on compliance instead of force so out of the corner of my eye i can see the other sector had arrived my backup and then my partner was there so i had like three other cops and they’re all big dudes you know so i’m not really too worried about it but i’m just looking at this guy and i’m like he’s got the high ground he’s got a knife this guy is just going to take a flying leap and stab me in my skull and that’s going to be lights up for me. This is not going to end well for me. I am at a tactical disadvantage. How am I going to handle this? So I’m just like, I’m drawing down on him and I’m just, you know, put the knife down. Don’t do it. Just put the knife down. I don’t want to hurt you.

[10:05]And he’s just not doing it. And he’s looking at me and you can see in his eyes, he’s a little off. He’s not all there. You can see he’s calculating his head. And I’m like, well, I’m not backing down, but going up is going to be a tricky move. So we’re kind of frozen in place for, it was probably a minute, but it felt like, you know, 10 or 11 years because it just, everything kind of slows down when you’re in those situations. It feels like forever. So all of a sudden he just, he goes running down the hall.

[10:32]So I take off up the stairs after him and I go running down the hallway and I see he doesn’t have the knife in his hand. So, you know, as I’m running down the hallway, I put my gun back away. I can hear my, the three guys that are my backup up the stairs. I can hear them stomping up the steps right behind me. So I go to grab him in the room and I, I go to put his, his arm behind his back and what an arm bar position. And I go to take him out. So I did this like leg sweep practice thing. I’m like, I got this leg sweep thing, you know, like me, my new karate moves. So I go to do the leg sweep and I hit the side of his ankle and he just stands there. He doesn’t move, doesn’t go down, like total failure of my maneuver. And I’m like, you got to be kidding me. And I was so mad. So meanwhile, my partners, I guess they didn’t know that the knife wasn’t in that hand. I don’t think they could have seen because my body kind of took up the whole hallway. way.

[11:24]So they see me try and like kick them down to the ground and I’m unsuccessful in my endeavors. So one of the guys, just his inertia just grabs the guy and just pummels them and they both go flying into the wall. And I’m just like sitting there like, man, I just, I was so excited to use my move and it should have worked and it just fell flat. And that was it. So we ended up, the knife was in the room. He had dropped it right next to him. So I didn’t notice it when I was running into the room. But so we got him cuffed up and, you know, he apologized for pulling the knife on me or whatever in a moment of clarity that he had for about two seconds. You know, so I call an ambulance for, you know, an EDP or whatever, and I have to escort him to the hospital because he was violent. So I get into the ambulance with him and he’s, you know, he’s giving the ambulance guy his information, like name and date of birth and all that stuff. And he’s like, yeah, so, you know, I’m the sun god Ra. Yeah.

[12:17]And I’m like, really? Okay. Tell me about that. What does being the sun god Ra entail? So, you know, he’s like talking about all this stuff or whatever. And I’m like, what’s up with the garlic? You know, like, I don’t understand that. And he’s just, so he just, I kind of like interrupted him at one point in his story and he did not appreciate the interruption. So I’m like, okay, you just, you just keep on rattling away. You’re handcuffed on the bed. You’re nice and safe. So, you know, I just sat back and kind of just listened to him for the ride. But at least in that scenario, for an emotionally disturbed person, you kind of like you kind of knew what you were getting yourself into because, you know, he was already violent and he knew it was going to be a problem. There was there was another time where we were actually my partner and I were completely fooled by this one chick. We had been called there by her family and they’re like, she’s crazy. She’s nuts. She needs to go to the hospital. And they’re showing me this key. Ask her what the key is for.

[13:08]So I’m talking to this girl and she’s like you and I. why she’s just normal every day, knows what year it is, knows the president talking about normal stuff. She’s on her phone. She’s like, you know, they’re just crazy. They don’t like me, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, well, you know, she’s not exhibiting any signs of mental disturbance or, you know, something’s wrong with her. And I’m not really in the habit of like violating people’s fourth amendment rights and just, you know, putting them in a 72 hour mandatory lockup because the family isn’t for it. You know, like I can’t, you know, I don’t know what the situation is here. I don’t know what the problem is. She has an apartment. There’s a nice couch. It’s clean. There’s a coffee table, a TV. It looks relatively normal. I don’t see anything wrong with anything she’s saying. We can’t do anything. So the family was pissed at us. But, you know, I mean, what are you going to do? So we left.

[13:58]So a few hours later, we get a call for the same location for like loud music. The neighbor’s complaining that the apartment’s playing really loud music. So I’m I’m like, you know, I tell Central, the radio dispatcher, I’m like, okay, show me going back over there. You know, we had an EDP at that location earlier because our Central’s change every half hour, hour or so. So it wasn’t the same Central as it had been earlier that evening. So I go back over there and the door’s like ajar. So I walk in and there she is sitting on the couch and the music is just blaring and she lowers the music and my partner starts talking to her. And I’m thinking like maybe somebody’s in here and she’s kind of like hesitant to talk to us and is she being held against her will or somebody’s here that she doesn’t want or something so I’m like let me go look in the rest of the apartment just see if make sure nobody’s like you know hiding around a corner so I go into the kitchen no tables no toaster on the counter there’s just it’s nothing I go into the next room which I think would have been a dining room and there’s nothing there there’s no dining room table there’s no rug there’s no it looks like somebody Somebody had moved out and took all the furniture. And then I look at the window and where the window clasp is to lock the window, there was tinfoil.

[15:08]On all of the windows. And I’m like, okay, here we go. So, you know, I look around the next corner into the bedroom, no furniture. The only room that was furnished was the living room that we had happened to be in earlier in the day. So I said, okay, you know, tinfoil is a good sign of somebody who’s like a paranoid schizophrenic that they think people are listening and the tinfoil kind of blocks the signal from permeating their home. So I go into the room and I, you know, my partner doesn’t know this, right? Because she’s been talking to her the whole time. So to alert my partner without saying it outright, I said, you know, I mean, I’ll say I think in the book I use the name Jane. I don’t remember what her real name was. And, you know, I wouldn’t say it anyway. But I said, you know, Jane, what’s up with the with the tinfoil on your windows, dude? What’s going on with that? And she’s like, you know, so now my partner knows like something’s up. So she goes, well, there’s a mailman that sits in the back parking lot and he tries to listen to my conversation. So I put the foil on the windows to block him from listening. I said, okay, here we go. We got a little problem here. So I’m like, you know, your mom was talking to me earlier about a key or something. I’m like, what’s that key for? And she’s like, oh, it’s for the White House. She’s like, George Bush gave it to me. It’s for the White House. It opens the White House door. I’m like, okay. So I’m like, all right. So my partner keeps distracting her. So I kind of like turn away and I get on the radio and I’m like, you know, I need an ambulance to my location. I am an emotionally disturbed person here. Okay.

[16:32]EMS gets there, and I didn’t have any further coming. I told the other sectors, like, we’re good here. I figured my partner and I can handle her if she does try and resist, but she was relatively calm. She’s trying to do a fashion show. She’s putting on a jacket, and she’s walking back and forth and saying, look how gorgeous I am. I’m like, yeah, you look great, but those heels look like they hurt. Why don’t you just sit down and calm down a little bit and just take a rest off those six-inch heels you have that are going to be thrown into my eyeball in about two seconds.

[17:02]So EMS gets there and she goes into full blown, I’m not going with them. They’re not authorized. I don’t know who they are. You know, I have to go see the president and all this other stuff. So we tried to work with her. And as I’m sure you’re aware, it’s very hard sometimes to negotiate with emotionally stirred people. It’s you try and do your verbal judo. And I’m very big on let’s talk our way out of this instead of fighting our way out of this because it just makes everything so much easier. year. So he just wasn’t, she just wasn’t going. And I said, okay, now we have to handcuff her because she has to go to the hospital. She’s, she’s crazy. She needs meds to, you know, not to put it very nicely, but that’s just the fact of the matter. So we ended up wrestling with her a little bit. We get her into the handcuffs. So we’re in the ambulance and the EMS guy is asking her information on the way to the hospital. And she’s like, I’m not telling you anything. I’m not giving you any information. So the EMS guy looks at me and he’s like rolling his eyes. So I said, I lean over to her and I kind of like whisper and I’m like, listen, I work for the Secret Service. We are going to the White House, but we have to verify your identification. You’re being recorded right now. Give him your information. He is authorized to obtain it.

[18:12]She looks at me and she like opens her eyes and I’m like, yeah. So she turns to him and gives him the name, the address, the date of birth, you know, Social Security number, all kinds of irrelevant information to validate that, you know, she is the person who needs to go and speak to the president. I think it was Bush. I think President Bush was the president at the time. So I’m like, okay, at least she’s compliant. So now I’m thinking ahead to like the psych ward in the hospital, right? So it’s like the two double doors that are locked. You have to be buzzed in. Then you walk down like this long white hallway into like the little triage area where you sit with the nurse and they go over, you know, whatever the situation is and log them into the procedure to the hospital. So I’m like, you know, I don’t want any problems there because I’m thinking this chick needs help. And if they see that she is resisting in any form, they’re going to strap her down to the gurney. And I don’t, I, you know, I felt bad enough that she was in handcuffs. So I said, you know what, let me, let me prep her for this. So I lean over and I’m like, listen, this is where we’re going to go. We’re going to go into the hospital, but it’s actually a front for an underground tunnel that leads to the White House. And you’re going to go there and you’re going to be filmed. And if any of you, if, if you act out at all, it’s going to be recorded and you’re going to be denied access to talk to the president.

[19:23]She’s like, okay, okay. And she’s on board with this. So some people think about this and they’re like, yo, you are messed up for like going along with this chick’s mental disturbance and you’re just validating her mental instability. And for a point, yeah, okay, you have a point. But at the same time, if I don’t play into this, she’s going to get violent and it’s not going to end well for her. And it makes everybody’s lives easier. So we get to the hospital and I’m like, okay, here we go these are the doors remember you’re being monitored behave yourself be quiet just walk calmly so i had taken the handcuffs off of her before we got out of the ambulance so i’m like i think i think i have her now right because we had been talking and explaining and i was telling her about you know my secret service experience and all this other stuff i was just making up, so we get into the nurse’s office and meanwhile the ems guys looking at me like, these chicks are both crazy like i got two edps on this bus not just one which is you know like Like, whatever, man, it’s the mean to the end. So we get to the nurse’s station and we go in there and we sit down and the nurse is like, okay, you know, and I leaned over and I said, listen, this nurse is an assistant to the Secret Service. She has to vet you, give her your information. She’s authorized and whatever. So, you know, she gives her the information. The nurse is looking at me and that’s all she deals with is EDPs. So she’s like kind of keeping her mouth shut and she gets it and she’s going along with it. So they’re like, okay, you got to take your jacket off and everything. And she’s like, I don’t want my jacket because they give her the hospital gown.

[20:48]And I was like, no, you’re not allowed to wear long sleeves because we had an incident where somebody hit a knife up the sleeve and tried to stab the president. So we have to make sure that you don’t have long sleeves on. And she’s like, OK. So she takes the jacket off. And then they’re like, you know, we need your stockings because stockings can be used to like hang yourself. So they had to take have her take them off.

[21:08]So she’s like, no, I’m not taking my stockings off. And so I lean over to her and I say, listen, as the Secret Service was doing multiple investigations, we found out that there was a way to put metal filament into stockings that would act as recording devices. And we’re not we don’t want your conversation with the president to be recorded because it’s highly confidential. So now I hear my partner and the two EMS guys who have decided to hang around for the show laughing hysterically in the hallway. way. And I’m like, shut up. Like, I got this chick. Like, let’s just go. So, you know, they’re like, where is this chick? Where is she coming up with this stuff? But my EDP looked at me and she’s like, oh, I didn’t know that. I’m like, yeah, we just discovered that, too. It’s a pretty clever invention, but it’s a problem. And this is, you know, you’re having a highly classified meeting with President Bush. OK, OK. Takes off the stockings, give them to the nurse. So I’m like sitting there and I’m like, you know, the nurse is going to start admitting me because how am I even like, where is this coming up from in my head? I don’t even know. But I’m like, they’re going to admit me into the psych ward too, because they’re like, you must be crazy for like getting along with this intense psychosis here. So in any case, she went voluntarily and, you know, I guess she got the meds that she needed. But I think it was a few months later, I think I get a phone call from on the desk. So the desk phone only rings if it’s like a major person.

[22:30]So I answer to the phone and it’s like, you know, secret service agent, whatever. So I’m thinking in my head, it’s one of the guys pranking me, right? Like this is just some BS nonsense and I’m getting my chops busted. But the job was so far away. It was like months prior.

[22:45]And I’m like, that’s not really, you know, like the, the bull busting usually happens like immediately. It’s like a, the immediate gratification that you get from the child busting. So I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t think this, I think this might be legit. And the guy’s telling me he’s secret service agent. He’s got a, uh, a girl there and she was trying to get into the white house and she, you know, she’s saying my name and that I authorized the trip to the white house. And I’m like, oh my goodness. I’m like, I’m like, yeah. I said, does, does she have a key? And he’s like, yeah, she has one key on her. And I’m like, yeah, that’s my girl. That’s yeah. She’s just emotionally disturbed. She’s not trying to kill the president or anything. She’s not like a real threat. So I guess they psyched her down there. And then I think it was like a year later when I got to work, I was told somebody’s waiting for me. So I go over to where the civilians wait to talk to the cops. And there she is. And she thanked me. She’s on meds. And she understood that she was having visions or whatever was going on in her life and that she was on meds now. And she straightened herself out and she like wanted to thank me. And I was like, you know, you’re welcome. No problem. I’m glad that you got yourself healed. But that was a, that was an interesting time. And I think it was, you know, I think it kind of got out like, you know, Mons, which was the name that the guys called me at work. It was my maiden name.

[24:00]Mons is a little nuts. She gets along with the EDPs. So if you have an EDP job, send her over because the crazy recognizes the crazy and they, you know, they’ll, they’ll get along. And I’m like, yeah, man, whatever. whatever, you know, nobody got hurt. That’s the name of the game. So yeah.

[24:18]Speaking of crazy and crazy jobs, you talked about you were a street narcotics unit. I, I never really worked street narcotics, but that’s a crazy deal. Larry hit those streets and make those street buys and everything. But how was that? I enjoyed it. We had a team, it was five guys and the sergeant. So it was, you know, we were a very tight unit. We worked very close. And back then marijuana was legal. That was illegal in New York city. It’s legal now, but it was illegal. And I mean, for anybody who, I get a lot of people who are like, why are you locking people up for weed? It’s just a social thing, whatever. But from the experiences that I had, weed is always tied to some type of criminal act, whether it be gun possession, bigger, more, more powerful drugs that are, you know, felony drugs like heroin and crack and Coke. And it’s always tied to criminal activity. It’s not the innocent, you know, like hippie love and peace drug that people try and make it out to be. So the object of the game then was to get the drug dealers off of the streets to, you know, clean up the streets. We don’t want to see open deals and we don’t want to see open use. So I had a job one time, you know, and we would drive around in like unmarked van and an unmarked car.

[25:36]And we would, we would drive around and kind of just look and see what we found. And then sometimes we would target dealers and, you know, try and pick off the buyers and stuff. So one time it was like, you know, I worked six at night to two in the morning then. And so we’re driving around and we see this car. It was like a summer night. All the windows are down. And I mean, there was the cloud of smoke that was coming out of this car from the weed was like unbelievable. It was like, you know, it looked like somebody was barbecuing there. There was so much smoke.

[26:04]So and it’s clearly weed you could smell it as soon as you pull up so we we get there and, it’s like okay you know uh what what do we got going on guys how’s everything going you know just just verbally talking them down what’s up you guys are smoking weed no big deal you know like we’re just we’re just gonna you know it is it’s a desk appearance ticket we’re just gonna have to bring in you know cut you loose no big deal just we need you to step out of the car so So we always grab the driver first tactically because then at least the car can’t move. Right. Get the keys. Yeah. Like you got, you got to get the guy who can like run you over out of the car first. So, so we always remove the driver first. So we, we go to open the car door for him and he just grabs onto the door frame and he’s, it’s a tug of war for opening the door. So my partner’s in front of me and he’s trying to open the door and he’s a pretty strong dude. And I’m trying to like squeeze my hand in there so that, you know, I can just push the frame open and my boss is reaching over us trying to fight. And we’re in a tug of war for this stupid door. Cause he doesn’t want to open it. And I’m like, in my head, I’m thinking this is it’s weed. Like, it’s not like a felony. You’re not going to be going to jail. This is ridiculous. You’re going to go to the precinct and be released in a couple of hours. And that’s it. And he’s fighting. And the three of the girls in the car are just sitting there and they’re just like, you know, just smoking away as like, you know, cause it’s like, and in my head, it’s like, yeah, go ahead. I mean, you’re, we already got you for it. So whatever.

[27:27]So, um, so there’s like razors in the door handle. So he starts reaching for the razor. So my partner’s like, yo, he’s got bleeds. So now it’s like getting a little hairy. Cause I’m like, he’s going to start like slashing us. And that always gets messy with blood everywhere.

[27:40]

Stories of Emotionally Disturbed Persons

[27:41]So instead of doing that, when my partner yelled at, he got bleeds, he starts yelling.

[27:49]And sure enough, from across the street, out comes Mama in, you know, her pink fluffy slippers and her bathrobe and her hair curlers with the shower cap on. And she just runs across the street. Why are you beating up on my boy? Why are you beating on him? The police is violating.

[28:04]You know, and going through the whole normal tirade of, you know, how we’re violating people’s, you know, civil rights and all sort of nonsense. And I’m like, toots, he’s smoking weed. Like, calm down, back off, whatever. So we ended up, you know, getting them out of the car and he was still wrestling around with us. So I sat there and I said, bro, if you had just gone along and just put your hands up and been handcuffed, you would have been released from the precinct and you would have had the girls with you and you would have continued on your night and, you know, bought more weed and smoke some more. I’m like, but instead you decide to fight with us. You go grabbing bleeds. You know, you fought with us after we were trying to cuff you. Now you’re going to go for like resisting, which is like, now you got to go to the booking. So you like screwed yourself and you’re calling for mommy big mistake dude girls are not they’re not coming back you know and it’s like what are you doing so it was fun you know like the the pickup callers were always interesting like that and uh we we set up a couple of times on we had a a spot where it was a very organized drug deal where they had like hats for the guys who were actually having the weed and the steerer would take the money and he was a block away and he would text the seller so that if you went to go buy, you’d go and give your money to this guy. He would text the dealer, okay, he’s good for a dime or he’s good for, you know, a half ounce or whatever.

[29:23]And then you would walk over to the dealer and he would just give you the weed. So, and you know, sometimes they kept the stash for themselves or sometimes they kept it stashed like, you know, in a car on top of the tire or, you know, in the phone booth because they used to have the paid phone booths or whatever. So So sometimes he had it near him, but it was smart because then, you know, you’re either going to lose the weed or the money, usually never both, you know, in their minds. So we, we set up and it was, it was a summertime and we needed somebody to go on the roof of the supermarket to kind of call out the shots and see what was going on. And I’m like, all right, I’ll go up there. I’m going to get nice tan. It’s going to be, you know, nice and peaceful up there, you know, not realizing the roof was going to be 120 degrees in the sun and I was going to be just baking up there. I kind of forgot about those details that are kind of important. But so, you know, I’m up there and I’m calling out the shots and, you know, you kind of like, okay, this guy’s going to buy, this is what he’s wearing and you wait for him to kind of walk way off the set before my guys go and grab him. Cause you want to give the dealer a heads up, but in order to prove that he’s dealing, we have to have the products that he sold to show that he’s actually dealing weed and not like oregano or something. So we did that a couple of times and we had a couple of buyers. And so I’m like, okay, we’re good to take down the dealer. So my boss gives the go ahead for the takedown. So I’m watching from the roof.

[30:43]And I see my guys pull up and they go, you know, up to the dealer and the dealer sees them. And I’m like, oh, I saw the twitch. He’s going to run. He’s going. And sure enough, boom, he takes off, runs across the street, hops a fence and I lose them because there’s trees and stuff. So I’m, you know, I’m calling out like he’s in the yards, you know, go block over. He might be running through the yard. A little while later, my, my guys on my team come out with him and he’s limping a little bit or whatever, but nothing crazy. So I go back to the precinct and my boss is like, yeah, your, your boy is a, cause it was my arrest.

[31:13]So he’s like, he’s, he’s refusing medical attention. And I’m like, okay, whatever. I go into the cells and it was a guy that I had known, you know, he’s a well-known drug dealer. I’m like, what’s up, bro? And I see him standing there and I see the bone pushing against the skin of his leg. And I’m like, yo, your, your leg is broken, dude. You gotta go to the hospital. And he’s like, no miss. I’m okay. Just send me right through the bookings. and I was like, wow, this guy is like, he doesn’t care. He’s just going to deal with a broken leg. Like how much pain this guy must’ve been in. I told him, dude, you’re not going to make it through EMS and central booking. Cause once you bring the perps to central booking, which is where they hold them until their arraigns, they have to see EMS. And if EMS says they’re sick or something’s wrong with them, they go to the hospital, but they don’t like doing that because they know it delays. It pushes them back in line. They don’t get back into the line for arraignment until they get back from the hospital. So he didn’t want to go to the hospital. I said, listen, bro, you got to go to the hospital. I’ll bang out your paperwork. I’ll get your fingerprinted or whatever, but you got to go. And…

[32:15]I gave him, I gave him a lot of credit for that. I, he, he didn’t lie and say the cops beat him up. He, he hopped the fence and landed on a motorcycle and broke his own leg.

[32:23]So instead of being like, yo, cops beat me up. Look, they broke my leg. I’m suing for a hundred million.

[32:29]He was like, I, I, I hopped the fence. I landed on a motorcycle. It happens. And, uh, you know, he took it and he was even taking the pain. So I saw him after that. He always walked with like a cane or a limb, but I appreciated and gave him respect because at least he wasn’t a total scumbag you know really it is what it is yeah working the streets like that uh those street dealers and and into that thing man i tell you what it there’s action action action constant you know chasing people and trying to duke on them trying to catch them dirty and they’re trying to keep you from catching them dirty it’s it just there’s some wild ass stories we were we were working crack dealers and there’s like one on every other third corner so my guys just got the van you remind me the guy’s got the van and and we’d like somebody sit back and watch or somebody actually one of the narcs would go by and make it by of a rock 25 rock and then he radio and then we’d radio the guys in the van and in order not alert everybody else the van would start driving by kind of slowly and there was somebody two guys inside the sliding door and they’d pull pull up next to this guy. And he’s like, you know, thinking he’s going to make another sale. They’d open that door, reach out and snatch him, pull him in, slam the door and take off again. So we kept that going for about two hours. They didn’t, they, their, their dealers just kept disappearing.

[33:55]That’s almost like kidnapping right there. They don’t know what’s going on. It’s like, hold on a second. I am not dealing crack, man. Those dealers are going missing dancing like crazy over there. So you talked about, uh, working intelligence at the street level. So I, and I know that a lot of, when I was a young policeman, we had nothing like this at all. You know, you were just each individual beat cop, if you will, that you were, I was responsible to find out who was who in my district. Some people did that and some people didn’t because you had to get out of your car and go meet people and talk to people in order to find out, you know, who was, who was doing the crime and who was just, you know, styling and profiling, hanging on the street corners. And so So what was that like for New York? You had like an organized setup to do that. Yeah, it was, it kind of, the program kind of grew on its own and was really highly successful. So when I first went into the unit, it was me and my boss. It was just the two of us. So we were responsible for basically any time a prisoner came into the precinct, we would debrief them. You know, the detective squad would have their job of like, you know, if they, you know, confessions or if they knew anything about other stuff. But we were always interested in who’s got guns, who’s selling drugs. And, you know, if they know anything about the shootings or homicides or anything like that.

[35:19]So we would work jointly with the squad a lot of the time, but it was mostly the goal was to to sign up informants. So if, you know, they were willing to work, which a lot of people actually are, which was very helpful because sometimes the only way you’re going to get into some of these groups is with an informant. And it’s just the fact of the matter. And it’s like, you know, I would tell people, like, I don’t live in your neighborhood, but I’m sitting here trying to make your neighborhood safer so that, you know, your grandma can walk to the grocery store and not be robbed. And, you know, like, I know you know stuff.

[35:54]Information helps. You don’t know what can help us. Let us know. And, you know, so I would sign these guys up and we would work with them and create cases and do, you know, controlled buys of narcotics or gun sites and gun buys and stuff and ends up with search warrants. That was the goal, get a search warrant and get the guns and get the drugs and lock up the guy and build a good enough case where they would, you know, get jail time for their crimes. So it was a lot of fun because it was like you were kind of hiding in plain sight. You know, we had like a rental car and we’d go out and like even sometimes the cops that I worked with wouldn’t even see us set up on stuff. You know, we’d like we’d be watching or like our informant would be going somewhere to go do a buy. And like always happens, there’s just like a 911 call at the same location for something totally different. And you’re sitting there like, not right now, not right now. And I’m like, oh, gosh, this is going to – we got to like pull him – all right, pull the informant back.

[36:53]We got to wait for the cops to go because I don’t want the cops to lock up my informant when they just did a drug buy or something, you know. It’s like – so those things always happen. But it was a lot of fun. It was just me and my boss. We would go out there. We would do what we had to do. And we got a lot of guns and a lot of drugs off the street. It was a really successful program. And we worked with other FIOs or field intelligence officers from.

[37:16]Surrounding precincts and throughout the entire city so it was a it was a very it was very successful now did you have a liaison with the uh narcotics people that as you maybe develop somebody and then you could kind of work on up the chain did you get into that much or, atf or whoever you know you really had somebody who’s dealing a lot of guns did you liaison with other units like that yeah um i mean working as a cop which i’m sure you know you kind of you know when you’re on patrol you work with these guys and everybody kind of graduates to other units eventually some people stay on patrol because you know patrol’s awesome it’s a lot of fun and it works for people with steady hours and stuff yeah um but a lot of the time these guys would go into other units so i ended up working and it’s good because you have a rapport with these people already in these other units so we worked with uh narcotics a lot with guys that i worked with on patrol they went to narcotics so we worked with them jointly on cases uh we worked with the ATF and like the organized crime division of the NYPD on a bunch of cases on, you know, people selling guns and stuff.

[38:24]It was, it was good because it was, you know, you collaborated with these other units and you learn new tricks of the trade. Sometimes you taught them new tricks of the trade. And I mean, even there was one time we had some information that there was like some methamphetamine coming in from overseas.

[38:42]So we contacted JFK and we’re like, listen, we got a tip. This is what’s up. So they’re like, all right, come on down. And, you know, we’ll set up on this guy and we’ll grab when he comes off the plane. So NYPD doesn’t really have technical jurisdiction in that area. We kind of have to rely on the port authority police to go do their thing and like Homeland Security guys. So we go down there and it’s nice because you’re kind of like, it’s not you in charge, right? You’re just sitting back, you gave them the information, you know, you’re kind of, you’re, you’re doing surveillance is basically your only job. Keep an eye on this guy and make sure you don’t lose them. And of course our luck is a national geographic was doing some TV show, like, you know, uh, caught abroad or, um, smuggle smuggling abroad or something like that. There was a TV show. So we get there and I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me. Like, I don’t want this on TV, but I guess it had been a slow week for them. And like the, the National Geographic guys were like, this is great. We got to get this on film and put it on TV. And my boss and I are like, this is, you know, we try and avoid the TV cameras. Like, you know, we don’t want our guy to get killed here.

[39:45]So, uh, you know, that, that threw a definite wrench in the operation, but the, it was going to be put on TV, like so far down the road that it wouldn’t have mattered or whatever. So we ended up, you know, grabbing that guy and he had like, I don’t know, 4,500 pills on him or something. And, you know, that was, that was fun. So you do work with other units and I guess because we all have, especially back then, we all had the same goal. So it wasn’t like.

[40:12]It wasn’t like we were working to get the accolades we weren’t working to get the medals and the recognition and anything if anything we didn’t want the recognition i don’t want my name on you know the the chief of department’s desk for any reason good or bad i want to be unknown, um but so you didn’t you didn’t work for things to get the awards and the medals and you know the promotions or whatever you kind of just did it because it was the right thing to do and who knows how many lives this is going to save and stopping people from od’ing and stuff.

[40:42]Especially when Fentanyl came out, you know, it was like, we gotta, we gotta really step this up and get this stuff off the streets because it’s going to kill a lot of people. So it was, it was a blast. I mean, even sometimes not to, I’m like going on and on here, but it’s just bringing up memories of like one time we were, we were going to pick up an informant, my boss and I to go do a buy. So I’m driving and we have a rental car we use like rental cars so it has no light package it’s got no no police nothing it just looks like a normal rental car I’m in a fishbowl rental car yeah that’s what I come a slick car so we always called a slick car we’d buy for our unit and the other undercover units they just buy use rental cars and each to each two guys had a rental or had a car assigned to them so yeah yeah maybe have a radio and a handy talk that was it yeah Yeah, that’s all you had was your radio that you brought with you. Like the car had no equipment, you know, it wasn’t, that’s, but it worked because nobody, nobody saw you, even though the windows weren’t even tinted. They just, it looks like a regular car. So, you know, I’m driving down the street and I come to like a four way stop and I look to my left and I just see this car flying.

[41:51]And I’m like, he’s not going to stop at that stop sign. And I’m looking at him and the driver, you know, most people drive in a like, like this, this guy is like up looking around, you know, like I can almost see the whites of his eyes. His eyes are so big and he’s flying and he blows right through the stop sign. And I said to my boss, I go, cause you know, he was on the phone checking his emails and stuff. I said, yo bro, he something’s up. He just did something. I don’t know what it is, but he did something wrong. And as I’m saying that my radio comes over the, the sector comes over the radio and they’re They’re like, yeah, we have a GLA, a stolen car. And he starts, you know, going over with the information.

[42:32]So I come over and I’m like, you know, FIO to the sector direct. I go, you got the plate on that car? And now, you know, I turn and I’m following him, right? And he gives the plate and I’m right behind the car. I’m like, yep, that’s him. So I put it over, then I’m following this car. That’s now a fresh steal, right? They just stole the car. So this guy doesn’t make me, but there weren’t a lot of cars on the road. So I’m kind of trying to follow. He had slowed down now that he was like further away from the scene. So I’m trying to follow him at like a half a block away, not letting him know that I’m following him. But I know eventually he’s going to make me because there’s no other cars on the road at this time. I’m like, you got to be kidding me. So he makes a couple of turns and then I’m like, all right, he’s made me. I said to my boss, I go, he’s going to bail. So I’m driving as I’m putting over, you know, westbound on this, eastbound on this, northbound on this, waiting for like, where are my sectors so that they can pull this guy over? You know, it’s like they’re trying to catch up to where I am. So he turns a corner. He guns it, turns another corner. And I see the cars stopped on the side of the road, driver door open, perps in the wind. I just see the tail of him go running through somebody’s backyard. So I slam on the brakes.

[43:40]I leave my car like sort of in the middle of the street next to the perp’s car. There’s nobody else in the car. So my boss goes running into the backyard. But I’m like, I’m not hopping all those fences. And I can hear because it was wintertime.

[43:56]

Navigating the Streets: Drug Enforcement

[43:53]I can hear him breaking branches as he’s going through the yard. So I’m like, I’m going to just head him off. So I go running in front of the houses as I’m hearing him hopping fences. I’m breaking the branches. And I’m putting over the addresses that the house that he’s behind or whatever. And he just he keeps going. I mean, these guys, you know, they’re gazelles. When they’re going, they are gone. They have the speed of cheetahs. I never caught anybody in my life. Never caught anybody in my life.

[44:21]Unless they break a bone. Yeah. It’s like, you’re just not going to catch them. You know, and of course I’m not prepared for like a foot pursuit. You know, I was going out on a bike. I’m lucky I had a vest on because usually I wouldn’t even, you know, I’d have it in the back of the car. But I just, for some reason, I think because it was cold, I just put an extra layer on. But so luckily I had that. But I was like, you know, I’m in like boots. I’m not in like running sneakers. You know, I’m like, this is just, I’m not set up for this.

[44:45]So I’m running down the block. I get to the end of the block and I hear him hop the last fence and I don’t hear anything now, but I hear the rest of the guys, the sirens and stuff are going to where my car I had left at a block previous. So I go over the radio. I set up a perimeter so that we have the whole block surrounded. Okay. And I kind of just turn the radio very low and I like kind of crouch down because I’m like, I know he’s in this yard. Right. So he hops the fence and I come out from the bushes and I just draw down on him. And I’m like, do not effing move. Stay right there. Get on the ground right now. And he just looks at me and I’m looking at him and I’m like, get on the ground, get on the ground. And he’s like, no. And he turns around and he hops the fence. And I’m like, son of a gun, man. You gotta be kidding me. I had him. I should have just tackled him. But, you know, I mean, I don’t know. Whatever. Hindsight 2020. I’m thinking he might have a weapon. You know, I’m by myself over here. Nobody knows where I’m at. And I’m a girl. I’m not as strong as he is. It’s just not, you know, you can do whatever moves you want, but it’s not hard to be overpowered. So I’m like, so he goes hopping back. So I put over the radio like he’s coming back to you guys because now I can hear, you know, my guys coming this way from the branches breaking. And then my boss comes over and he’s like, we got him. You know, I got him. I got him in the backyard. yard, you know, whatever. And I’m like, no, man, I sent him back to you. I had him like.

[46:08]So I was all aggravated about that. But then I get back to my car and my door that I had left open when I got into this foot pursuit was pushed the wrong way. So now it was like parallel to the front of the car, the motor, like it just totally got pushed. And I’m like, who hit my door? So one of the other cops comes over to me and he’s like, yo, bro, I’m sorry I hit your door. And I’m like, Like, this road is literally four car lengths wide. You had like an entire lane to go around my car, but you had to hit my door. I’m like, this is a rental car. It’s not like a peasy vehicle. Like, now we’re going to have to pay to fix it. Now I have to go to accident retraining, which is two days off the street. I’m like, you got to be kidding me right now. So yeah, I go to accident retraining and I’m like, yeah, I’m here because somebody else hit my car because I left my door open in hot pursuit. But this is my situation. No fun. But, and then I didn’t even take the collar because one of the other guys was like, you know, do you mind if I take this? And back then we weren’t, you know, I didn’t need to make arrests then. And I had so many already. I’m like, yeah, dude, you know, knock yourself out. You can have it. So I didn’t even, I didn’t even get the collar. I said, which is an arrest. It was like a lose all the way around. Yeah. Well, one thing about working intelligence, like you said, you just want to stay in the background, pull some string, get some shit done and move on to The next thing it keeps the report right now.

[47:32]Yeah, I don’t want to have to be responsible. I mean, not to, I feel like I’m rambling on with stories here, but every time you talk, it reminds me like I, we had a job because I did warrants, right? So I would do my own self-initiated search warrants, but then if patrol needed a search warrant for something, I would also assist them with it, especially because we had a lot of new guys and I would like to help them out. You know, like when I was a rookie, all the old timers helped me out. So I felt it was my responsibility to do the same with the new guys. So my boss and I are driving around doing recon for a bunch of cases that we had. And we hear like, you know, barricaded EDP with a gun in a house, right? Like hostage crisis, whatever. So I’m thinking to myself, well, they’re going to get him out. If he’s got a gun, they’re going to need a warrant. So let’s just go over there because they’re going to need us anyway. Anyway, so we take a ride over there. By the time we get there, the cops have the street totally taped off on both sides. You know, there’s crowds at either corner.

[48:26]The ESU tack truck, the big black one, you know, like the heavy duty like army tank one is in the middle of the street. You know, I can see the guys tacking up and I’m like, this is great. I don’t have to do a thing. I’m just going to hang back here behind the police lines and just kind of like watch because, you know, my job was going to be after all of the excitement kind of ended. So I’m sitting over there and my boss goes and sees a cop that he knows from another unit. So he goes over and talks to him. So I go over to like a bunch of civilians that are on the corner and I’m like, hey, guys, what’s going on? And, you know, I’m in plain clothes. We worked in, you know, jeans and a T-shirt was our uniform of the day. So they can see I’m a cop, though, because, you know, I have my vest on and my shield is, you know, on my on my belt and stuff. So I’m like, all right, what’s going on? And they’re like, well, you know, uh, our dad is, uh, is in the house and, uh, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, he’s, he’s got a gun and all this other stuff. And I’m like, your dad, I’m like, all right. I’m like, is anybody on the phone with your dad right now? Like, is your dad talking to anybody? And they’re like, no. And I’m like, oh, okay.

[49:28]Somebody, somebody missed a step here. I don’t know what happened, but I got here late. But so I said, can you do me a favor and call up your old man and let’s get him on the horn here. They call him up and he answers. And I’m like, hello, sir. You know, this is Detective Bartoldus from the NYPD. I hear you’re having a bad day. What’s going on in there? So now I’m like kind of involved, right? So as he’s talking to me, I said to the family, where is his house? Where’s your house? So they point. And I assume they point to this house across the street. So I said, OK. So I go underneath the police tape and I start walking. And my boss is like, Mons, where are you going? And I’m like, I got the guy on the phone. I’m going to go over there. And he just like rolls his eyes and starts laughing at me because he’s like, you can’t even, this is something you don’t even need to get involved in. And you’re still somehow involved. So I go walking down the block and, you know, I’m talking to him or whatever. And I’m like, well, you know, I go, I hate talking to you on the phone. Like, I like to talk to people face to face. Do you want to like come out here and just come and talk to me and, you know, whatever, like, I want to try and help you out here. This seems like a problem we can solve together. And he’s like, you know, all right, you know, I’ll try and come out. So now I’m, I’m halfway way down the block and I’m standing in front of where the ESU, you know, army tank truck is and I’m facing what I think is his house.

[50:41]And I hear my boss yelling, Mons, Mons. And I look at my boss and I’m like, I got it. We’re good. You know, I’m giving a thumbs up. I got it. And then I hear my name being called at the other end of the block. And I see my anti-crime guys at the end of the block. They’re like, Mons, Mons. And I’m like, yo, I’m good. I’m like, I got it. What’s up? You know, I’m like oblivious. I’m still talking to this guy on the phone.

[51:01]And then I hear somebody behind me yelling, Mons, Mons, look out. And I turn around and it’s my buddy who was now in ESU at the door of the barricaded EDP with the gun, which I had my back to the entire time. So here I am walking into this really serious scene, talking to the guy. And I had my back to the target location where like, I was a perfect target at this guy. I want to take a shot at me. And everybody’s yelling at me to tell me like, take cover. And I’m just like, yo, I’m good. I got this. We’re good. And they’re like, are you nuts? And I’m like, yes, I am. You know this about me already, but it’s okay. So, you know, the ESU captain like pops his head up from behind the truck and he’s He’s like, detective, come over here. You’re not safe where you’re standing. And I’m like, yeah, I see that now. Sorry about that. So I ended up talking to the guy. I said, listen, come on out. Let’s, you know, let’s talk this out or whatever. So I got him to come out and, you know, we got him in. And he was just, you know, he was an older gentleman. And I guess him and his wife just didn’t have a good day. And, you know, he just, he was at the end of his rope. So we were able to get out of that situation, you know, without any problems. But boy, did I take some serious shot busting on that one. I can’t even imagine what that would be. You’re supposed to be the intel guy. You’re the intel guy. You don’t know what house you’re supposed to be watching. I don’t know, man. Oh, yeah. Well, as they say, all’s well that ends well. Yeah.

[52:26]But that’s why being a cop is awesome. You never know what’s going to happen. You never know what the day is going to bring.

[52:32]

Understanding Anti-Crime Operations

[52:32]One last question. You mentioned anti-crime. And I’ve seen that term used in books and heard that term, but I never really knew exactly what that meant. What is an anti-crime squad at the NYPD?

[52:46]Um, it’s the goal is to prevent crime before it happens. So you go out in unmarked cars and plain clothes and you just kind of drive around and watch people and try and get the jump on people, grab the guns, stop the robberies from happening. Or if it’s already happened, you know, go find the part and, uh, and grab them. Okay. These are the guys that maybe go out, act as decoys, maybe like act like you’re drunk and falling down. You got a billfolder laying beside you. And then you got a little surveillance team watching for somebody to come up and try to take your money. Yeah. I mean, we, you have to get special permission to do that. We, I mean, I did, we did prostitution operations. So I would dress up as like a prostitute and do that kind of a thing. But in anti-crime, we didn’t really, we didn’t really have decoys set up. We didn’t kind of like put the bait out there and wait for somebody to jump]]> Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, Gary interviews former NYPD officer Marique Bartoldus, who shares her 20-year journey in law enforcement. Marique’s book is Twenty and Out: A Compilation of Chaos experienced while serving 20 years in the New York City Police Department. Marique shares exciting life stories on the gritty streets with the NYPD in this well-written book. We discuss her experiences across various divisions, including patrol and SNU or Street Narcotics Unit, and the crazy work of an anit-crime cop in New York City. She explains and highlights the unpredictable realities of street police work. Marique shares gripping stories of high-stress encounters, the importance of quick thinking, and the camaraderie among officers. We also explore the impact of evolving crime trends, including fentanyl, and the personal toll of a career dedicated to community safety.

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Transcript

[0:00]Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have a show today with a officer from the New York Police Department. We’re going to tell some New York Police Department stories. You guys know that I spent 25 years on the Kansas City Police Department. Well, Marique Bartolda spent 20 years on the New York City Police Department. She’s got some great stories. So welcome, Marique. Hey, how’s it going? Thanks so much for having me. Great. I’m really glad to have you on. I think I’m looking forward to our mutual friend, Vic Ferrari says that you have some good stories. And so we’re going to hear some good stories today. I’m sure of that. Now the book guys, the book guys is 20 and out. It’s a compilation of chaos experience while serving 20 years in New York city police department. Here’s a review. I must say that the author was descriptive enough to set the scene of each story. I love that she She explained everything, which made you feel like you were right there with her. I couldn’t put it down and love that each chapter was a job she went to or encountered. Great job, Marique. So that’s, you know, a great review. And you got like all five star reviews, I believe. And so, guys, you can get that on Amazon. I’ll have a link to it in my show notes. So, Marique, tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, your education. And where did you work with the PD before we get into some stories?

[1:22]So I grew up on Long Island in Malvern, which is right on the border of Queens and Nassau County. I went to New Paltz College. And while I was up there, I realized that I wanted to be a cop in New York City. So I left New Paltz, which is in upstate New York. I came back home and I went to school at John Jay College in Manhattan for criminal justice. I took a lot of law classes and I started going on the law track. I was really thinking maybe I wanted to be a lawyer. And I had taken the test for the New York City Police Department and they called me and I said, you know what? I don’t know about case law.

[1:58]Reading it is fun to, you know, get an A in class or, you know, whatever. But to do this like as a chore for the next 30 years might get a little boring. So I said, you know what? I’m kind of an adrenaline junkie and And I might as well just go work in the police department where I can be outside and not stuck in a room with four walls for the rest of my life. So I went into the academy July 1st of 2002. I graduated, I think, January 1st of 2003 or 2nd, somewhere around there. And then when I graduated the academy, I went into transit in the subways in District 20, which is like Queens North and somewhat into Queens South, a little bit of Brooklyn. Uh, and it wasn’t, it wasn’t my cup of tea. I had a lot of fun down there. A lot of good guys, um, was in the blackout of, uh, I think it was 2003 blackout where like the whole Northeast lost power and we had to go into the subways and rescue people off of the trains and stuff.

[2:55]There were some fun times down there, but it wasn’t the type of police work that I was really interested in. I was watching the RMPs, the police cars going flying by with lights and sirens and stuff, and I’m just sitting there watching turnstiles, and I’m like, that’s the kind of stuff I want to be involved in. So I put in transfer requests and ended up going to the 105th precinct, which is in Queens, right on the border of Queens and Nassau. Really big precinct, runs from like the Grand Central Parkway down to JFK Airport.

[3:27]And I went there, I went on patrol, which, you know, is the lowest part of the bar. I did 4 to 12, which was 3 in the afternoon to 1130 at night, which was my favorite tour to work. Work uh so work with a lot of fun guys on that tour you know busted chops got my chops busted uh and then i went to um i did a response order for a little while we basically only responded to in-progress jobs that kind of cover the gap in between tour changes uh then i went into a conditions unit which addresses quality of life issues like you know the guys who pee and the guys who drink with an open container because that was illegal at the time uh and then from From there, I went to SNHU, which is street narcotics enforcement, which is like dealing with low level street level drug rings. Then I went into anti-crime and then I did field intelligence at the precinct level for a few years. And then the NYPD started a new unit for animal cruelty to investigate animal cruelty. So I went there, which was a brand new unit, got that started, you know, did the training for it for, you know, the cops in the police department. Department, did a couple investigations. And then I realized that wasn’t for me.

[4:36]So I requested to go back. So I went back to the 105th precinct and I ended up going right back into the FIO spot, which was great because it was like my favorite spot. And the girl that had replaced me was getting promoted. So it worked out. And I stayed there for the rest of my career. And all in all, it was a blast. It was a blast. Had a really good time. So you’re using some, uh, some terminology. Some of these guys might not know RMP is radio motor patrol. That’s a police car with a radio in it, right? That’s a March police car. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Talking to a fellow cop. I forget. Yeah. Sorry. Right. Yeah. And the next one was, you just said it, it was, uh, RIO or something. IO. What was that? Oh, FIO field. FIO is field intelligence officer. Oh, okay. Field intelligence officer. So, you know, I looked at some of your stories and, you know, I tell you what, especially dealing with emotionally disturbed people is one of the more difficult things that any cops has to do. I’ve got my own stories. I mean, there’s nothing like having to wrestle a naked man in the middle of the night in the middle of an intersection and it’s hotter than hell. You know, there’s nothing like that. They’re super slippery.

[5:55]They’re slippery as hell. Yeah. I know you got some stories and especially many times they’ll have a knife. I remember looking at a window and there’s this crazed woman with a big butcher knife just raised up looking out at me. It’s like, oh man. And, you know, we just walked away because we didn’t have really, she wouldn’t answer the door and we just had a call that, you know, there was some problem inside, you know, we just walked away from that one. So I know you got some stories about that. Yeah. You know, the knives are always a lot of fun. They make this situation very interesting when you get involved with somebody who’s emotionally disturbed. We had a lot of that. It’s actually, I think, a bigger problem than most people realize. I think the interesting part of the of the EDP or emotionally disturbed person is that you never really know when the switch is going to happen and they’re going to go from being completely compliant to like completely nuts and violent. So what you refer to with the knife, one of the stories that’s in my book.

[6:55]When I was on patrol, we had a call for a neighbor had called about her neighbor who was an EDP and had pulled a knife on her. So, you know, my partner and I get there and whenever you’re dealing with an emotionally disturbed person, you always have backup coming. There’s always another car coming. And in the NYPD, we never worked alone. We always had a partner with us in the car. So I knew there were at least two other cops coming. So we get there and the woman’s like, you know, this guy pulled a knife on me. He’s a little crazy. He went running back inside the house. He’s in there somewhere with a knife. So, okay. You know, all right, whatever. So I’m walking up the driveway and I’m looking into the windows to see if I can see him as I’m walking up, and to glued or taped to every single window pane were cloves of garlic.

[7:41]So I’m like, okay, so either, you know, this guy is a legit Italian and he just likes hanging garlic from all of his windows or, you know, he’s got some kind of Dracula complex and, you know, he’s got to protect himself from the outside world. So I said, okay, here we go. So the back door was open where he had run into. So, you know, you go to the door and you kind of stick your head in, you’re looking around and I don’t see anything. I don’t hear anything. So I yell out police and my PD and my partner and I walk in there and it leads to like a little kitchen area. So I look around. He’s not in the kitchen. So I was relieved about that because you never really want to deal with anybody in the kitchen because, you know, the implements of destruction that are in that room are numerous. And, you know, I don’t, you know, I don’t I don’t want to deal with a knife. And, you know, I got a gun, but I don’t really want to have to use it if I don’t really need to. So I was very happy to see that he wasn’t in the kitchen. So I moved through the living room and, you know, it is eerily quiet in this house. I don’t hear a TV. There’s no radio. There’s no sounds. I’m yelling NYPD, police, but I don’t really want to give away my position too, too much. So I get to the bottom of the stairs and I look up and at the top of the stairs, you can see like the hallway, which was very narrow with the railing.

[8:51]And I mean, the stairway was very narrow as it was. And I’m like, well, he’s got to be up of there. So I got to go carefully. So I take a couple of steps up and I’m looking, waiting. And, you know, I have my hand on my gun just in case, because I don’t know where this knife is. And I’m yelling NYPD and I hear nothing. So I keep going up a couple more steps. And all of a sudden he just pops out and there he is at the top of the stairs with the knife in his hand. So, you know, obviously I draw down on him and I’m like, all right, put the knife down, put it down, calm down. I’m not here to hurt you. You know, let’s just put the knife down. Let’s talk, you know just doing the whole the verbal judo of working on compliance instead of force so out of the corner of my eye i can see the other sector had arrived my backup and then my partner was there so i had like three other cops and they’re all big dudes you know so i’m not really too worried about it but i’m just looking at this guy and i’m like he’s got the high ground he’s got a knife this guy is just going to take a flying leap and stab me in my skull and that’s going to be lights up for me. This is not going to end well for me. I am at a tactical disadvantage. How am I going to handle this? So I’m just like, I’m drawing down on him and I’m just, you know, put the knife down. Don’t do it. Just put the knife down. I don’t want to hurt you.

[10:05]And he’s just not doing it. And he’s looking at me and you can see in his eyes, he’s a little off. He’s not all there. You can see he’s calculating his head. And I’m like, well, I’m not backing down, but going up is going to be a tricky move. So we’re kind of frozen in place for, it was probably a minute, but it felt like, you know, 10 or 11 years because it just, everything kind of slows down when you’re in those situations. It feels like forever. So all of a sudden he just, he goes running down the hall.

[10:32]So I take off up the stairs after him and I go running down the hallway and I see he doesn’t have the knife in his hand. So, you know, as I’m running down the hallway, I put my gun back away. I can hear my, the three guys that are my backup up the stairs. I can hear them stomping up the steps right behind me. So I go to grab him in the room and I, I go to put his, his arm behind his back and what an arm bar position. And I go to take him out. So I did this like leg sweep practice thing. I’m like, I got this leg sweep thing, you know, like me, my new karate moves. So I go to do the leg sweep and I hit the side of his ankle and he just stands there. He doesn’t move, doesn’t go down, like total failure of my maneuver. And I’m like, you got to be kidding me. And I was so mad. So meanwhile, my partners, I guess they didn’t know that the knife wasn’t in that hand. I don’t think they could have seen because my body kind of took up the whole hallway. way.

[11:24]So they see me try and like kick them down to the ground and I’m unsuccessful in my endeavors. So one of the guys, just his inertia just grabs the guy and just pummels them and they both go flying into the wall. And I’m just like sitting there like, man, I just, I was so excited to use my move and it should have worked and it just fell flat. And that was it. So we ended up, the knife was in the room. He had dropped it right next to him. So I didn’t notice it when I was running into the room. But so we got him cuffed up and, you know, he apologized for pulling the knife on me or whatever in a moment of clarity that he had for about two seconds. You know, so I call an ambulance for, you know, an EDP or whatever, and I have to escort him to the hospital because he was violent. So I get into the ambulance with him and he’s, you know, he’s giving the ambulance guy his information, like name and date of birth and all that stuff. And he’s like, yeah, so, you know, I’m the sun god Ra. Yeah.

[12:17]And I’m like, really? Okay. Tell me about that. What does being the sun god Ra entail? So, you know, he’s like talking about all this stuff or whatever. And I’m like, what’s up with the garlic? You know, like, I don’t understand that. And he’s just, so he just, I kind of like interrupted him at one point in his story and he did not appreciate the interruption. So I’m like, okay, you just, you just keep on rattling away. You’re handcuffed on the bed. You’re nice and safe. So, you know, I just sat back and kind of just listened to him for the ride. But at least in that scenario, for an emotionally disturbed person, you kind of like you kind of knew what you were getting yourself into because, you know, he was already violent and he knew it was going to be a problem. There was there was another time where we were actually my partner and I were completely fooled by this one chick. We had been called there by her family and they’re like, she’s crazy. She’s nuts. She needs to go to the hospital. And they’re showing me this key. Ask her what the key is for.

[13:08]So I’m talking to this girl and she’s like you and I. why she’s just normal every day, knows what year it is, knows the president talking about normal stuff. She’s on her phone. She’s like, you know, they’re just crazy. They don’t like me, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, well, you know, she’s not exhibiting any signs of mental disturbance or, you know, something’s wrong with her. And I’m not really in the habit of like violating people’s fourth amendment rights and just, you know, putting them in a 72 hour mandatory lockup because the family isn’t for it. You know, like I can’t, you know, I don’t know what the situation is here. I don’t know what the problem is. She has an apartment. There’s a nice couch. It’s clean. There’s a coffee table, a TV. It looks relatively normal. I don’t see anything wrong with anything she’s saying. We can’t do anything. So the family was pissed at us. But, you know, I mean, what are you going to do? So we left.

[13:58]So a few hours later, we get a call for the same location for like loud music. The neighbor’s complaining that the apartment’s playing really loud music. So I’m I’m like, you know, I tell Central, the radio dispatcher, I’m like, okay, show me going back over there. You know, we had an EDP at that location earlier because our Central’s change every half hour, hour or so. So it wasn’t the same Central as it had been earlier that evening. So I go back over there and the door’s like ajar. So I walk in and there she is sitting on the couch and the music is just blaring and she lowers the music and my partner starts talking to her. And I’m thinking like maybe somebody’s in here and she’s kind of like hesitant to talk to us and is she being held against her will or somebody’s here that she doesn’t want or something so I’m like let me go look in the rest of the apartment just see if make sure nobody’s like you know hiding around a corner so I go into the kitchen no tables no toaster on the counter there’s just it’s nothing I go into the next room which I think would have been a dining room and there’s nothing there there’s no dining room table there’s no rug there’s no it looks like somebody Somebody had moved out and took all the furniture. And then I look at the window and where the window clasp is to lock the window, there was tinfoil.

[15:08]On all of the windows. And I’m like, okay, here we go. So, you know, I look around the next corner into the bedroom, no furniture. The only room that was furnished was the living room that we had happened to be in earlier in the day. So I said, okay, you know, tinfoil is a good sign of somebody who’s like a paranoid schizophrenic that they think people are listening and the tinfoil kind of blocks the signal from permeating their home. So I go into the room and I, you know, my partner doesn’t know this, right? Because she’s been talking to her the whole time. So to alert my partner without saying it outright, I said, you know, I mean, I’ll say I think in the book I use the name Jane. I don’t remember what her real name was. And, you know, I wouldn’t say it anyway. But I said, you know, Jane, what’s up with the with the tinfoil on your windows, dude? What’s going on with that? And she’s like, you know, so now my partner knows like something’s up. So she goes, well, there’s a mailman that sits in the back parking lot and he tries to listen to my conversation. So I put the foil on the windows to block him from listening. I said, okay, here we go. We got a little problem here. So I’m like, you know, your mom was talking to me earlier about a key or something. I’m like, what’s that key for? And she’s like, oh, it’s for the White House. She’s like, George Bush gave it to me. It’s for the White House. It opens the White House door. I’m like, okay. So I’m like, all right. So my partner keeps distracting her. So I kind of like turn away and I get on the radio and I’m like, you know, I need an ambulance to my location. I am an emotionally disturbed person here. Okay.

[16:32]EMS gets there, and I didn’t have any further coming. I told the other sectors, like, we’re good here. I figured my partner and I can handle her if she does try and resist, but she was relatively calm. She’s trying to do a fashion show. She’s putting on a jacket, and she’s walking back and forth and saying, look how gorgeous I am. I’m like, yeah, you look great, but those heels look like they hurt. Why don’t you just sit down and calm down a little bit and just take a rest off those six-inch heels you have that are going to be thrown into my eyeball in about two seconds.

[17:02]So EMS gets there and she goes into full blown, I’m not going with them. They’re not authorized. I don’t know who they are. You know, I have to go see the president and all this other stuff. So we tried to work with her. And as I’m sure you’re aware, it’s very hard sometimes to negotiate with emotionally stirred people. It’s you try and do your verbal judo. And I’m very big on let’s talk our way out of this instead of fighting our way out of this because it just makes everything so much easier. year. So he just wasn’t, she just wasn’t going. And I said, okay, now we have to handcuff her because she has to go to the hospital. She’s, she’s crazy. She needs meds to, you know, not to put it very nicely, but that’s just the fact of the matter. So we ended up wrestling with her a little bit. We get her into the handcuffs. So we’re in the ambulance and the EMS guy is asking her information on the way to the hospital. And she’s like, I’m not telling you anything. I’m not giving you any information. So the EMS guy looks at me and he’s like rolling his eyes. So I said, I lean over to her and I kind of like whisper and I’m like, listen, I work for the Secret Service. We are going to the White House, but we have to verify your identification. You’re being recorded right now. Give him your information. He is authorized to obtain it.

[18:12]She looks at me and she like opens her eyes and I’m like, yeah. So she turns to him and gives him the name, the address, the date of birth, you know, Social Security number, all kinds of irrelevant information to validate that, you know, she is the person who needs to go and speak to the president. I think it was Bush. I think President Bush was the president at the time. So I’m like, okay, at least she’s compliant. So now I’m thinking ahead to like the psych ward in the hospital, right? So it’s like the two double doors that are locked. You have to be buzzed in. Then you walk down like this long white hallway into like the little triage area where you sit with the nurse and they go over, you know, whatever the situation is and log them into the procedure to the hospital. So I’m like, you know, I don’t want any problems there because I’m thinking this chick needs help. And if they see that she is resisting in any form, they’re going to strap her down to the gurney. And I don’t, I, you know, I felt bad enough that she was in handcuffs. So I said, you know what, let me, let me prep her for this. So I lean over and I’m like, listen, this is where we’re going to go. We’re going to go into the hospital, but it’s actually a front for an underground tunnel that leads to the White House. And you’re going to go there and you’re going to be filmed. And if any of you, if, if you act out at all, it’s going to be recorded and you’re going to be denied access to talk to the president.

[19:23]She’s like, okay, okay. And she’s on board with this. So some people think about this and they’re like, yo, you are messed up for like going along with this chick’s mental disturbance and you’re just validating her mental instability. And for a point, yeah, okay, you have a point. But at the same time, if I don’t play into this, she’s going to get violent and it’s not going to end well for her. And it makes everybody’s lives easier. So we get to the hospital and I’m like, okay, here we go these are the doors remember you’re being monitored behave yourself be quiet just walk calmly so i had taken the handcuffs off of her before we got out of the ambulance so i’m like i think i think i have her now right because we had been talking and explaining and i was telling her about you know my secret service experience and all this other stuff i was just making up, so we get into the nurse’s office and meanwhile the ems guys looking at me like, these chicks are both crazy like i got two edps on this bus not just one which is you know like Like, whatever, man, it’s the mean to the end. So we get to the nurse’s station and we go in there and we sit down and the nurse is like, okay, you know, and I leaned over and I said, listen, this nurse is an assistant to the Secret Service. She has to vet you, give her your information. She’s authorized and whatever. So, you know, she gives her the information. The nurse is looking at me and that’s all she deals with is EDPs. So she’s like kind of keeping her mouth shut and she gets it and she’s going along with it. So they’re like, okay, you got to take your jacket off and everything. And she’s like, I don’t want my jacket because they give her the hospital gown.

[20:48]And I was like, no, you’re not allowed to wear long sleeves because we had an incident where somebody hit a knife up the sleeve and tried to stab the president. So we have to make sure that you don’t have long sleeves on. And she’s like, OK. So she takes the jacket off. And then they’re like, you know, we need your stockings because stockings can be used to like hang yourself. So they had to take have her take them off.

[21:08]So she’s like, no, I’m not taking my stockings off. And so I lean over to her and I say, listen, as the Secret Service was doing multiple investigations, we found out that there was a way to put metal filament into stockings that would act as recording devices. And we’re not we don’t want your conversation with the president to be recorded because it’s highly confidential. So now I hear my partner and the two EMS guys who have decided to hang around for the show laughing hysterically in the hallway. way. And I’m like, shut up. Like, I got this chick. Like, let’s just go. So, you know, they’re like, where is this chick? Where is she coming up with this stuff? But my EDP looked at me and she’s like, oh, I didn’t know that. I’m like, yeah, we just discovered that, too. It’s a pretty clever invention, but it’s a problem. And this is, you know, you’re having a highly classified meeting with President Bush. OK, OK. Takes off the stockings, give them to the nurse. So I’m like sitting there and I’m like, you know, the nurse is going to start admitting me because how am I even like, where is this coming up from in my head? I don’t even know. But I’m like, they’re going to admit me into the psych ward too, because they’re like, you must be crazy for like getting along with this intense psychosis here. So in any case, she went voluntarily and, you know, I guess she got the meds that she needed. But I think it was a few months later, I think I get a phone call from on the desk. So the desk phone only rings if it’s like a major person.

[22:30]So I answer to the phone and it’s like, you know, secret service agent, whatever. So I’m thinking in my head, it’s one of the guys pranking me, right? Like this is just some BS nonsense and I’m getting my chops busted. But the job was so far away. It was like months prior.

[22:45]And I’m like, that’s not really, you know, like the, the bull busting usually happens like immediately. It’s like a, the immediate gratification that you get from the child busting. So I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t think this, I think this might be legit. And the guy’s telling me he’s secret service agent. He’s got a, uh, a girl there and she was trying to get into the white house and she, you know, she’s saying my name and that I authorized the trip to the white house. And I’m like, oh my goodness. I’m like, I’m like, yeah. I said, does, does she have a key? And he’s like, yeah, she has one key on her. And I’m like, yeah, that’s my girl. That’s yeah. She’s just emotionally disturbed. She’s not trying to kill the president or anything. She’s not like a real threat. So I guess they psyched her down there. And then I think it was like a year later when I got to work, I was told somebody’s waiting for me. So I go over to where the civilians wait to talk to the cops. And there she is. And she thanked me. She’s on meds. And she understood that she was having visions or whatever was going on in her life and that she was on meds now. And she straightened herself out and she like wanted to thank me. And I was like, you know, you’re welcome. No problem. I’m glad that you got yourself healed. But that was a, that was an interesting time. And I think it was, you know, I think it kind of got out like, you know, Mons, which was the name that the guys called me at work. It was my maiden name.

[24:00]Mons is a little nuts. She gets along with the EDPs. So if you have an EDP job, send her over because the crazy recognizes the crazy and they, you know, they’ll, they’ll get along. And I’m like, yeah, man, whatever. whatever, you know, nobody got hurt. That’s the name of the game. So yeah.

[24:18]Speaking of crazy and crazy jobs, you talked about you were a street narcotics unit. I, I never really worked street narcotics, but that’s a crazy deal. Larry hit those streets and make those street buys and everything. But how was that? I enjoyed it. We had a team, it was five guys and the sergeant. So it was, you know, we were a very tight unit. We worked very close. And back then marijuana was legal. That was illegal in New York city. It’s legal now, but it was illegal. And I mean, for anybody who, I get a lot of people who are like, why are you locking people up for weed? It’s just a social thing, whatever. But from the experiences that I had, weed is always tied to some type of criminal act, whether it be gun possession, bigger, more, more powerful drugs that are, you know, felony drugs like heroin and crack and Coke. And it’s always tied to criminal activity. It’s not the innocent, you know, like hippie love and peace drug that people try and make it out to be. So the object of the game then was to get the drug dealers off of the streets to, you know, clean up the streets. We don’t want to see open deals and we don’t want to see open use. So I had a job one time, you know, and we would drive around in like unmarked van and an unmarked car.

[25:36]And we would, we would drive around and kind of just look and see what we found. And then sometimes we would target dealers and, you know, try and pick off the buyers and stuff. So one time it was like, you know, I worked six at night to two in the morning then. And so we’re driving around and we see this car. It was like a summer night. All the windows are down. And I mean, there was the cloud of smoke that was coming out of this car from the weed was like unbelievable. It was like, you know, it looked like somebody was barbecuing there. There was so much smoke.

[26:04]So and it’s clearly weed you could smell it as soon as you pull up so we we get there and, it’s like okay you know uh what what do we got going on guys how’s everything going you know just just verbally talking them down what’s up you guys are smoking weed no big deal you know like we’re just we’re just gonna you know it is it’s a desk appearance ticket we’re just gonna have to bring in you know cut you loose no big deal just we need you to step out of the car so So we always grab the driver first tactically because then at least the car can’t move. Right. Get the keys. Yeah. Like you got, you got to get the guy who can like run you over out of the car first. So, so we always remove the driver first. So we, we go to open the car door for him and he just grabs onto the door frame and he’s, it’s a tug of war for opening the door. So my partner’s in front of me and he’s trying to open the door and he’s a pretty strong dude. And I’m trying to like squeeze my hand in there so that, you know, I can just push the frame open and my boss is reaching over us trying to fight. And we’re in a tug of war for this stupid door. Cause he doesn’t want to open it. And I’m like, in my head, I’m thinking this is it’s weed. Like, it’s not like a felony. You’re not going to be going to jail. This is ridiculous. You’re going to go to the precinct and be released in a couple of hours. And that’s it. And he’s fighting. And the three of the girls in the car are just sitting there and they’re just like, you know, just smoking away as like, you know, cause it’s like, and in my head, it’s like, yeah, go ahead. I mean, you’re, we already got you for it. So whatever.

[27:27]So, um, so there’s like razors in the door handle. So he starts reaching for the razor. So my partner’s like, yo, he’s got bleeds. So now it’s like getting a little hairy. Cause I’m like, he’s going to start like slashing us. And that always gets messy with blood everywhere.

[27:40]

Stories of Emotionally Disturbed Persons

[27:41]So instead of doing that, when my partner yelled at, he got bleeds, he starts yelling.

[27:49]And sure enough, from across the street, out comes Mama in, you know, her pink fluffy slippers and her bathrobe and her hair curlers with the shower cap on. And she just runs across the street. Why are you beating up on my boy? Why are you beating on him? The police is violating.

[28:04]You know, and going through the whole normal tirade of, you know, how we’re violating people’s, you know, civil rights and all sort of nonsense. And I’m like, toots, he’s smoking weed. Like, calm down, back off, whatever. So we ended up, you know, getting them out of the car and he was still wrestling around with us. So I sat there and I said, bro, if you had just gone along and just put your hands up and been handcuffed, you would have been released from the precinct and you would have had the girls with you and you would have continued on your night and, you know, bought more weed and smoke some more. I’m like, but instead you decide to fight with us. You go grabbing bleeds. You know, you fought with us after we were trying to cuff you. Now you’re going to go for like resisting, which is like, now you got to go to the booking. So you like screwed yourself and you’re calling for mommy big mistake dude girls are not they’re not coming back you know and it’s like what are you doing so it was fun you know like the the pickup callers were always interesting like that and uh we we set up a couple of times on we had a a spot where it was a very organized drug deal where they had like hats for the guys who were actually having the weed and the steerer would take the money and he was a block away and he would text the seller so that if you went to go buy, you’d go and give your money to this guy. He would text the dealer, okay, he’s good for a dime or he’s good for, you know, a half ounce or whatever.

[29:23]And then you would walk over to the dealer and he would just give you the weed. So, and you know, sometimes they kept the stash for themselves or sometimes they kept it stashed like, you know, in a car on top of the tire or, you know, in the phone booth because they used to have the paid phone booths or whatever. So So sometimes he had it near him, but it was smart because then, you know, you’re either going to lose the weed or the money, usually never both, you know, in their minds. So we, we set up and it was, it was a summertime and we needed somebody to go on the roof of the supermarket to kind of call out the shots and see what was going on. And I’m like, all right, I’ll go up there. I’m going to get nice tan. It’s going to be, you know, nice and peaceful up there, you know, not realizing the roof was going to be 120 degrees in the sun and I was going to be just baking up there. I kind of forgot about those details that are kind of important. But so, you know, I’m up there and I’m calling out the shots and, you know, you kind of like, okay, this guy’s going to buy, this is what he’s wearing and you wait for him to kind of walk way off the set before my guys go and grab him. Cause you want to give the dealer a heads up, but in order to prove that he’s dealing, we have to have the products that he sold to show that he’s actually dealing weed and not like oregano or something. So we did that a couple of times and we had a couple of buyers. And so I’m like, okay, we’re good to take down the dealer. So my boss gives the go ahead for the takedown. So I’m watching from the roof.

[30:43]And I see my guys pull up and they go, you know, up to the dealer and the dealer sees them. And I’m like, oh, I saw the twitch. He’s going to run. He’s going. And sure enough, boom, he takes off, runs across the street, hops a fence and I lose them because there’s trees and stuff. So I’m, you know, I’m calling out like he’s in the yards, you know, go block over. He might be running through the yard. A little while later, my, my guys on my team come out with him and he’s limping a little bit or whatever, but nothing crazy. So I go back to the precinct and my boss is like, yeah, your, your boy is a, cause it was my arrest.

[31:13]So he’s like, he’s, he’s refusing medical attention. And I’m like, okay, whatever. I go into the cells and it was a guy that I had known, you know, he’s a well-known drug dealer. I’m like, what’s up, bro? And I see him standing there and I see the bone pushing against the skin of his leg. And I’m like, yo, your, your leg is broken, dude. You gotta go to the hospital. And he’s like, no miss. I’m okay. Just send me right through the bookings. and I was like, wow, this guy is like, he doesn’t care. He’s just going to deal with a broken leg. Like how much pain this guy must’ve been in. I told him, dude, you’re not going to make it through EMS and central booking. Cause once you bring the perps to central booking, which is where they hold them until their arraigns, they have to see EMS. And if EMS says they’re sick or something’s wrong with them, they go to the hospital, but they don’t like doing that because they know it delays. It pushes them back in line. They don’t get back into the line for arraignment until they get back from the hospital. So he didn’t want to go to the hospital. I said, listen, bro, you got to go to the hospital. I’ll bang out your paperwork. I’ll get your fingerprinted or whatever, but you got to go. And…

[32:15]I gave him, I gave him a lot of credit for that. I, he, he didn’t lie and say the cops beat him up. He, he hopped the fence and landed on a motorcycle and broke his own leg.

[32:23]So instead of being like, yo, cops beat me up. Look, they broke my leg. I’m suing for a hundred million.

[32:29]He was like, I, I, I hopped the fence. I landed on a motorcycle. It happens. And, uh, you know, he took it and he was even taking the pain. So I saw him after that. He always walked with like a cane or a limb, but I appreciated and gave him respect because at least he wasn’t a total scumbag you know really it is what it is yeah working the streets like that uh those street dealers and and into that thing man i tell you what it there’s action action action constant you know chasing people and trying to duke on them trying to catch them dirty and they’re trying to keep you from catching them dirty it’s it just there’s some wild ass stories we were we were working crack dealers and there’s like one on every other third corner so my guys just got the van you remind me the guy’s got the van and and we’d like somebody sit back and watch or somebody actually one of the narcs would go by and make it by of a rock 25 rock and then he radio and then we’d radio the guys in the van and in order not alert everybody else the van would start driving by kind of slowly and there was somebody two guys inside the sliding door and they’d pull pull up next to this guy. And he’s like, you know, thinking he’s going to make another sale. They’d open that door, reach out and snatch him, pull him in, slam the door and take off again. So we kept that going for about two hours. They didn’t, they, their, their dealers just kept disappearing.

[33:55]That’s almost like kidnapping right there. They don’t know what’s going on. It’s like, hold on a second. I am not dealing crack, man. Those dealers are going missing dancing like crazy over there. So you talked about, uh, working intelligence at the street level. So I, and I know that a lot of, when I was a young policeman, we had nothing like this at all. You know, you were just each individual beat cop, if you will, that you were, I was responsible to find out who was who in my district. Some people did that and some people didn’t because you had to get out of your car and go meet people and talk to people in order to find out, you know, who was, who was doing the crime and who was just, you know, styling and profiling, hanging on the street corners. And so So what was that like for New York? You had like an organized setup to do that. Yeah, it was, it kind of, the program kind of grew on its own and was really highly successful. So when I first went into the unit, it was me and my boss. It was just the two of us. So we were responsible for basically any time a prisoner came into the precinct, we would debrief them. You know, the detective squad would have their job of like, you know, if they, you know, confessions or if they knew anything about other stuff. But we were always interested in who’s got guns, who’s selling drugs. And, you know, if they know anything about the shootings or homicides or anything like that.

[35:19]So we would work jointly with the squad a lot of the time, but it was mostly the goal was to to sign up informants. So if, you know, they were willing to work, which a lot of people actually are, which was very helpful because sometimes the only way you’re going to get into some of these groups is with an informant. And it’s just the fact of the matter. And it’s like, you know, I would tell people, like, I don’t live in your neighborhood, but I’m sitting here trying to make your neighborhood safer so that, you know, your grandma can walk to the grocery store and not be robbed. And, you know, like, I know you know stuff.

[35:54]Information helps. You don’t know what can help us. Let us know. And, you know, so I would sign these guys up and we would work with them and create cases and do, you know, controlled buys of narcotics or gun sites and gun buys and stuff and ends up with search warrants. That was the goal, get a search warrant and get the guns and get the drugs and lock up the guy and build a good enough case where they would, you know, get jail time for their crimes. So it was a lot of fun because it was like you were kind of hiding in plain sight. You know, we had like a rental car and we’d go out and like even sometimes the cops that I worked with wouldn’t even see us set up on stuff. You know, we’d like we’d be watching or like our informant would be going somewhere to go do a buy. And like always happens, there’s just like a 911 call at the same location for something totally different. And you’re sitting there like, not right now, not right now. And I’m like, oh, gosh, this is going to – we got to like pull him – all right, pull the informant back.

[36:53]We got to wait for the cops to go because I don’t want the cops to lock up my informant when they just did a drug buy or something, you know. It’s like – so those things always happen. But it was a lot of fun. It was just me and my boss. We would go out there. We would do what we had to do. And we got a lot of guns and a lot of drugs off the street. It was a really successful program. And we worked with other FIOs or field intelligence officers from.

[37:16]Surrounding precincts and throughout the entire city so it was a it was a very it was very successful now did you have a liaison with the uh narcotics people that as you maybe develop somebody and then you could kind of work on up the chain did you get into that much or, atf or whoever you know you really had somebody who’s dealing a lot of guns did you liaison with other units like that yeah um i mean working as a cop which i’m sure you know you kind of you know when you’re on patrol you work with these guys and everybody kind of graduates to other units eventually some people stay on patrol because you know patrol’s awesome it’s a lot of fun and it works for people with steady hours and stuff yeah um but a lot of the time these guys would go into other units so i ended up working and it’s good because you have a rapport with these people already in these other units so we worked with uh narcotics a lot with guys that i worked with on patrol they went to narcotics so we worked with them jointly on cases uh we worked with the ATF and like the organized crime division of the NYPD on a bunch of cases on, you know, people selling guns and stuff.

[38:24]It was, it was good because it was, you know, you collaborated with these other units and you learn new tricks of the trade. Sometimes you taught them new tricks of the trade. And I mean, even there was one time we had some information that there was like some methamphetamine coming in from overseas.

[38:42]So we contacted JFK and we’re like, listen, we got a tip. This is what’s up. So they’re like, all right, come on down. And, you know, we’ll set up on this guy and we’ll grab when he comes off the plane. So NYPD doesn’t really have technical jurisdiction in that area. We kind of have to rely on the port authority police to go do their thing and like Homeland Security guys. So we go down there and it’s nice because you’re kind of like, it’s not you in charge, right? You’re just sitting back, you gave them the information, you know, you’re kind of, you’re, you’re doing surveillance is basically your only job. Keep an eye on this guy and make sure you don’t lose them. And of course our luck is a national geographic was doing some TV show, like, you know, uh, caught abroad or, um, smuggle smuggling abroad or something like that. There was a TV show. So we get there and I’m like, you’ve got to be kidding me. Like, I don’t want this on TV, but I guess it had been a slow week for them. And like the, the National Geographic guys were like, this is great. We got to get this on film and put it on TV. And my boss and I are like, this is, you know, we try and avoid the TV cameras. Like, you know, we don’t want our guy to get killed here.

[39:45]So, uh, you know, that, that threw a definite wrench in the operation, but the, it was going to be put on TV, like so far down the road that it wouldn’t have mattered or whatever. So we ended up, you know, grabbing that guy and he had like, I don’t know, 4,500 pills on him or something. And, you know, that was, that was fun. So you do work with other units and I guess because we all have, especially back then, we all had the same goal. So it wasn’t like.

[40:12]It wasn’t like we were working to get the accolades we weren’t working to get the medals and the recognition and anything if anything we didn’t want the recognition i don’t want my name on you know the the chief of department’s desk for any reason good or bad i want to be unknown, um but so you didn’t you didn’t work for things to get the awards and the medals and you know the promotions or whatever you kind of just did it because it was the right thing to do and who knows how many lives this is going to save and stopping people from od’ing and stuff.

[40:42]Especially when Fentanyl came out, you know, it was like, we gotta, we gotta really step this up and get this stuff off the streets because it’s going to kill a lot of people. So it was, it was a blast. I mean, even sometimes not to, I’m like going on and on here, but it’s just bringing up memories of like one time we were, we were going to pick up an informant, my boss and I to go do a buy. So I’m driving and we have a rental car we use like rental cars so it has no light package it’s got no no police nothing it just looks like a normal rental car I’m in a fishbowl rental car yeah that’s what I come a slick car so we always called a slick car we’d buy for our unit and the other undercover units they just buy use rental cars and each to each two guys had a rental or had a car assigned to them so yeah yeah maybe have a radio and a handy talk that was it yeah Yeah, that’s all you had was your radio that you brought with you. Like the car had no equipment, you know, it wasn’t, that’s, but it worked because nobody, nobody saw you, even though the windows weren’t even tinted. They just, it looks like a regular car. So, you know, I’m driving down the street and I come to like a four way stop and I look to my left and I just see this car flying.

[41:51]And I’m like, he’s not going to stop at that stop sign. And I’m looking at him and the driver, you know, most people drive in a like, like this, this guy is like up looking around, you know, like I can almost see the whites of his eyes. His eyes are so big and he’s flying and he blows right through the stop sign. And I said to my boss, I go, cause you know, he was on the phone checking his emails and stuff. I said, yo bro, he something’s up. He just did something. I don’t know what it is, but he did something wrong. And as I’m saying that my radio comes over the, the sector comes over the radio and they’re They’re like, yeah, we have a GLA, a stolen car. And he starts, you know, going over with the information.

[42:32]So I come over and I’m like, you know, FIO to the sector direct. I go, you got the plate on that car? And now, you know, I turn and I’m following him, right? And he gives the plate and I’m right behind the car. I’m like, yep, that’s him. So I put it over, then I’m following this car. That’s now a fresh steal, right? They just stole the car. So this guy doesn’t make me, but there weren’t a lot of cars on the road. So I’m kind of trying to follow. He had slowed down now that he was like further away from the scene. So I’m trying to follow him at like a half a block away, not letting him know that I’m following him. But I know eventually he’s going to make me because there’s no other cars on the road at this time. I’m like, you got to be kidding me. So he makes a couple of turns and then I’m like, all right, he’s made me. I said to my boss, I go, he’s going to bail. So I’m driving as I’m putting over, you know, westbound on this, eastbound on this, northbound on this, waiting for like, where are my sectors so that they can pull this guy over? You know, it’s like they’re trying to catch up to where I am. So he turns a corner. He guns it, turns another corner. And I see the cars stopped on the side of the road, driver door open, perps in the wind. I just see the tail of him go running through somebody’s backyard. So I slam on the brakes.

[43:40]I leave my car like sort of in the middle of the street next to the perp’s car. There’s nobody else in the car. So my boss goes running into the backyard. But I’m like, I’m not hopping all those fences. And I can hear because it was wintertime.

[43:56]

Navigating the Streets: Drug Enforcement

[43:53]I can hear him breaking branches as he’s going through the yard. So I’m like, I’m going to just head him off. So I go running in front of the houses as I’m hearing him hopping fences. I’m breaking the branches. And I’m putting over the addresses that the house that he’s behind or whatever. And he just he keeps going. I mean, these guys, you know, they’re gazelles. When they’re going, they are gone. They have the speed of cheetahs. I never caught anybody in my life. Never caught anybody in my life.

[44:21]Unless they break a bone. Yeah. It’s like, you’re just not going to catch them. You know, and of course I’m not prepared for like a foot pursuit. You know, I was going out on a bike. I’m lucky I had a vest on because usually I wouldn’t even, you know, I’d have it in the back of the car. But I just, for some reason, I think because it was cold, I just put an extra layer on. But so luckily I had that. But I was like, you know, I’m in like boots. I’m not in like running sneakers. You know, I’m like, this is just, I’m not set up for this.

[44:45]So I’m running down the block. I get to the end of the block and I hear him hop the last fence and I don’t hear anything now, but I hear the rest of the guys, the sirens and stuff are going to where my car I had left at a block previous. So I go over the radio. I set up a perimeter so that we have the whole block surrounded. Okay. And I kind of just turn the radio very low and I like kind of crouch down because I’m like, I know he’s in this yard. Right. So he hops the fence and I come out from the bushes and I just draw down on him. And I’m like, do not effing move. Stay right there. Get on the ground right now. And he just looks at me and I’m looking at him and I’m like, get on the ground, get on the ground. And he’s like, no. And he turns around and he hops the fence. And I’m like, son of a gun, man. You gotta be kidding me. I had him. I should have just tackled him. But, you know, I mean, I don’t know. Whatever. Hindsight 2020. I’m thinking he might have a weapon. You know, I’m by myself over here. Nobody knows where I’m at. And I’m a girl. I’m not as strong as he is. It’s just not, you know, you can do whatever moves you want, but it’s not hard to be overpowered. So I’m like, so he goes hopping back. So I put over the radio like he’s coming back to you guys because now I can hear, you know, my guys coming this way from the branches breaking. And then my boss comes over and he’s like, we got him. You know, I got him. I got him in the backyard. yard, you know, whatever. And I’m like, no, man, I sent him back to you. I had him like.

[46:08]So I was all aggravated about that. But then I get back to my car and my door that I had left open when I got into this foot pursuit was pushed the wrong way. So now it was like parallel to the front of the car, the motor, like it just totally got pushed. And I’m like, who hit my door? So one of the other cops comes over to me and he’s like, yo, bro, I’m sorry I hit your door. And I’m like, Like, this road is literally four car lengths wide. You had like an entire lane to go around my car, but you had to hit my door. I’m like, this is a rental car. It’s not like a peasy vehicle. Like, now we’re going to have to pay to fix it. Now I have to go to accident retraining, which is two days off the street. I’m like, you got to be kidding me right now. So yeah, I go to accident retraining and I’m like, yeah, I’m here because somebody else hit my car because I left my door open in hot pursuit. But this is my situation. No fun. But, and then I didn’t even take the collar because one of the other guys was like, you know, do you mind if I take this? And back then we weren’t, you know, I didn’t need to make arrests then. And I had so many already. I’m like, yeah, dude, you know, knock yourself out. You can have it. So I didn’t even, I didn’t even get the collar. I said, which is an arrest. It was like a lose all the way around. Yeah. Well, one thing about working intelligence, like you said, you just want to stay in the background, pull some string, get some shit done and move on to The next thing it keeps the report right now.

[47:32]Yeah, I don’t want to have to be responsible. I mean, not to, I feel like I’m rambling on with stories here, but every time you talk, it reminds me like I, we had a job because I did warrants, right? So I would do my own self-initiated search warrants, but then if patrol needed a search warrant for something, I would also assist them with it, especially because we had a lot of new guys and I would like to help them out. You know, like when I was a rookie, all the old timers helped me out. So I felt it was my responsibility to do the same with the new guys. So my boss and I are driving around doing recon for a bunch of cases that we had. And we hear like, you know, barricaded EDP with a gun in a house, right? Like hostage crisis, whatever. So I’m thinking to myself, well, they’re going to get him out. If he’s got a gun, they’re going to need a warrant. So let’s just go over there because they’re going to need us anyway. Anyway, so we take a ride over there. By the time we get there, the cops have the street totally taped off on both sides. You know, there’s crowds at either corner.

[48:26]The ESU tack truck, the big black one, you know, like the heavy duty like army tank one is in the middle of the street. You know, I can see the guys tacking up and I’m like, this is great. I don’t have to do a thing. I’m just going to hang back here behind the police lines and just kind of like watch because, you know, my job was going to be after all of the excitement kind of ended. So I’m sitting over there and my boss goes and sees a cop that he knows from another unit. So he goes over and talks to him. So I go over to like a bunch of civilians that are on the corner and I’m like, hey, guys, what’s going on? And, you know, I’m in plain clothes. We worked in, you know, jeans and a T-shirt was our uniform of the day. So they can see I’m a cop, though, because, you know, I have my vest on and my shield is, you know, on my on my belt and stuff. So I’m like, all right, what’s going on? And they’re like, well, you know, uh, our dad is, uh, is in the house and, uh, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, he’s, he’s got a gun and all this other stuff. And I’m like, your dad, I’m like, all right. I’m like, is anybody on the phone with your dad right now? Like, is your dad talking to anybody? And they’re like, no. And I’m like, oh, okay.

[49:28]Somebody, somebody missed a step here. I don’t know what happened, but I got here late. But so I said, can you do me a favor and call up your old man and let’s get him on the horn here. They call him up and he answers. And I’m like, hello, sir. You know, this is Detective Bartoldus from the NYPD. I hear you’re having a bad day. What’s going on in there? So now I’m like kind of involved, right? So as he’s talking to me, I said to the family, where is his house? Where’s your house? So they point. And I assume they point to this house across the street. So I said, OK. So I go underneath the police tape and I start walking. And my boss is like, Mons, where are you going? And I’m like, I got the guy on the phone. I’m going to go over there. And he just like rolls his eyes and starts laughing at me because he’s like, you can’t even, this is something you don’t even need to get involved in. And you’re still somehow involved. So I go walking down the block and, you know, I’m talking to him or whatever. And I’m like, well, you know, I go, I hate talking to you on the phone. Like, I like to talk to people face to face. Do you want to like come out here and just come and talk to me and, you know, whatever, like, I want to try and help you out here. This seems like a problem we can solve together. And he’s like, you know, all right, you know, I’ll try and come out. So now I’m, I’m halfway way down the block and I’m standing in front of where the ESU, you know, army tank truck is and I’m facing what I think is his house.

[50:41]And I hear my boss yelling, Mons, Mons. And I look at my boss and I’m like, I got it. We’re good. You know, I’m giving a thumbs up. I got it. And then I hear my name being called at the other end of the block. And I see my anti-crime guys at the end of the block. They’re like, Mons, Mons. And I’m like, yo, I’m good. I’m like, I got it. What’s up? You know, I’m like oblivious. I’m still talking to this guy on the phone.

[51:01]And then I hear somebody behind me yelling, Mons, Mons, look out. And I turn around and it’s my buddy who was now in ESU at the door of the barricaded EDP with the gun, which I had my back to the entire time. So here I am walking into this really serious scene, talking to the guy. And I had my back to the target location where like, I was a perfect target at this guy. I want to take a shot at me. And everybody’s yelling at me to tell me like, take cover. And I’m just like, yo, I’m good. I got this. We’re good. And they’re like, are you nuts? And I’m like, yes, I am. You know this about me already, but it’s okay. So, you know, the ESU captain like pops his head up from behind the truck and he’s He’s like, detective, come over here. You’re not safe where you’re standing. And I’m like, yeah, I see that now. Sorry about that. So I ended up talking to the guy. I said, listen, come on out. Let’s, you know, let’s talk this out or whatever. So I got him to come out and, you know, we got him in. And he was just, you know, he was an older gentleman. And I guess him and his wife just didn’t have a good day. And, you know, he just, he was at the end of his rope. So we were able to get out of that situation, you know, without any problems. But boy, did I take some serious shot busting on that one. I can’t even imagine what that would be. You’re supposed to be the intel guy. You’re the intel guy. You don’t know what house you’re supposed to be watching. I don’t know, man. Oh, yeah. Well, as they say, all’s well that ends well. Yeah.

[52:26]But that’s why being a cop is awesome. You never know what’s going to happen. You never know what the day is going to bring.

[52:32]

Understanding Anti-Crime Operations

[52:32]One last question. You mentioned anti-crime. And I’ve seen that term used in books and heard that term, but I never really knew exactly what that meant. What is an anti-crime squad at the NYPD?

[52:46]Um, it’s the goal is to prevent crime before it happens. So you go out in unmarked cars and plain clothes and you just kind of drive around and watch people and try and get the jump on people, grab the guns, stop the robberies from happening. Or if it’s already happened, you know, go find the part and, uh, and grab them. Okay. These are the guys that maybe go out, act as decoys, maybe like act like you’re drunk and falling down. You got a billfolder laying beside you. And then you got a little surveillance team watching for somebody to come up and try to take your money. Yeah. I mean, we, you have to get special permission to do that. We, I mean, I did, we did prostitution operations. So I would dress up as like a prostitute and do that kind of a thing. But in anti-crime, we didn’t really, we didn’t really have decoys set up. We didn’t kind of like put the bait out there and wait for somebody to jump]]> false Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, Gary interviews former NYPD officer Marique Bartoldus, who shares her 20-year journey in law enforcement. Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, Gary interviews former NYPD officer Marique Bartoldus, who shares her 20-year journey in law enforcement. Marique’s book is Twenty and Out: A Compilation of Chaos experienced while serving 20 years in the New York City Police Department. Marique shares exciting life stories on the gritty streets with the NYPD in this well-written book. We discuss her experiences across various divisions, including patrol and SNU or Street Narcotics Unit, and the crazy work of an anit-crime cop in New York City. She explains and highlights the unpredictable realities of street police work. Marique shares gripping stories of high-stress encounters, the importance of quick thinking, and the camaraderie among officers. We also explore the impact of evolving crime trends, including fentanyl, and the personal toll of a career dedicated to community safety. Click here to get a copy of the book.  Support the Podcast Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here! Transcript [0:00]Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I have a show today with a officer from the New York Police Department. We’re going to tell some New York Police Department stories. You guys know that I spent 25 years on the Kansas City Police Department. Well, Marique Bartolda spent 20 years on the New York City Police Department. She’s got some great stories. So welcome, Marique. Hey, how’s it going? Thanks so much for having me. Great. I’m really glad to have you on. I think I’m looking forward to our mutual friend, Vic Ferrari says that you have some good stories. And so we’re going to hear some good stories today. I’m sure of that. Now the book guys, the book guys is 20 and out. It’s a compilation of chaos experience while serving 20 years in New York city police department. Here’s a review. I must say that the author was descriptive enough to set the scene of each story. I love that she She explained everything, which made you feel like you were right there with her. I couldn’t put it down and love that each chapter was a job she went to or encountered. Great job, Marique. So that’s, you know, a great review. And you got like all five star reviews, I believe. https://blubrry.com/kc_crime/137574944/cork-civella-bonus-stories/ https://ganglandwire.com/?p=9439 Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective Thu, 26 Sep 2024 05:00:40 -0400 Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. Gary remembered a few more Cork stories so watch this to hear about Cork’s sex life and his gun buying gone wrong.Support the Podcast Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwireClick here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here!

Transcript [0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City police detective in the intelligence unit. You know, we just did Cork Civella, Carl Civella, and I left a couple of stories out that were I thought were pretty good. And plus, I was involved in one and some members of the unit were involved in the other. So anyhow, let me tell you those stories is a little bonus for episode. And, you know, I could have gone back and tried to insert these in, but that’s kind of a pain. So I just did another little short podcast here. You know, back in 1981, we had a couple of guys, Harold Nichols and Randy Collins were out driving around, you know, doing their thing, you know, looking for mob guys, going to the city market, going to the trap, the social club and some of the other usual haunts. Maybe if they had a business that, you know, they hung out at and then maybe you’d pick up on them and you’d follow them to see where they went. You know, if you find them going to a spot that you never heard of before, you know, that’s how we caught, got those phones on a Tuffy DeLuna calling Las Vegas is following Tuffyand finally get him going in this hotel. [1:05]Then you catch him going there again and somebody runs inside and you see him on the phone. Like, bam, you got it. That’s how it works guys. And so these guys were out cruising around, not thinking about anything, not doing anything. They were downtown. I remember they were downtown Kansas city, a lot of traffic back then. And 1981 or 80, I believe, yes, 1980, it was in the spring. And so they saw Quark Civella with a woman by the name of Rita Armillio. And they were, I don’t know, looking for a parking spot. And they thought, well, you know, let’s just pull over and, you know, see where they go. And they finally settled in a parking spot. and they both went into a store that sold guns and and so they documented that and and at the time cork and another guy named paul barcelona they kind of about the same age they were contemporaries they were friends and they both had a big head of white hair although barcelona’s i think was real and corks was a wig he had this huge big head of white hair gray gray white hair but it was a wig and he was a dapper. Have you ever seen that picture of him in that checkered sport coat and that white wig? He’s a very, very dapper dude. [2:24]So he and Rita go in there and they run up and kind of peek in the window and they’re looking at handguns and so they don’t want to burn the deal. They just back off and then they follow them and they follow them over to Rita’s apartment and they both go inside. [2:40]So, you know, you write that up, send it over to the Bureau. Bureau goes to the U.S. Attorney, and the U.S. Attorney said, okay, we’ll put them in front of a grand jury. So they get Ms. Armillio. Of course, they know Cork’s not going to say anything. They get Ms. Armillio to come, and she testifies that she wasn’t there that day. Says, no, he wasn’t with me. me i he he there was another guy named Paul Varselona that was with me you know i did go into that store you know we did look at guns i did buy one because they you know found the records by then that she bought a 38 caliber handgun but she said i did not ask mr Civella to get go with me to get that weapon i know that he’s not supposed to be anywhere near guns or around guns and i i know he’s got better sense he would not have gone if i’d asked him to and you know i just wanted that gun then they call Civella and he says no they call Varcelona and he says no cork says i wasn’t there cork actually wouldn’t refuse to testify and in in the end then they charged her with perjury for saying that Paul Varselona was there because they got the policemen nichols and collins to testify without a doubt without a doubt in their their mind that was Cork Civella and not Paul Varselona. [4:06]Bam, perjury. So they charged her with perjury and they ended up giving her like, I don’t know, like six months and two year probation, some kind of a fine for impeding and hampering a grand jury investigation of whether Cork Civella unlawfully possessed a firearm. [4:24] Cork’s Encounter with the Law [4:24]So that’s one little story about Cork. And here’s another one that would involve me, actually. Again, I was out like those guys, only it was nighttime. I was out cruising. I was out cruising around by myself, and I happened to see Cork. And he had this, at the time, it was a Salmon Lincoln Continental, a Mark. You know, he loved those Marks. He had ones with like the, looked like a spare tire in the trunk. And he got a he had a salmon one colored one then and he got a lime green one after that i think i mentioned that last week or in the other podcast the other show and yeah i see cork and he’s over in the north what we call the north side uh just outside of the north end or little Italy and he’s headed east on independence avenue so i just follow him behind him there’s no other cars on the street but you know i haven’t been following him for a long time and so i just drift along behind Behind him, I can see him a couple of blocks up in front, and he pulls into this joint called the Country and Western Playhouse. It’s owned by a mob guy named Sal Manzo, and it’s a real well-known mafia hangout. But it was a big club, Country and Western Playhouse. They had country and western music. They had a band, and they always, when they had a band, they had dancing, and they, you know, it was hopping. It was rocking and rolling. And so I let him go on in and, you know, I kind of sit outside a little bit, check the parking lot, see who all’s inside, if I recognize any cars. [5:52]And finally I park and I go in, sit down at the bar and order a drink and kind of let, you know, you turn around and look around and people up on the dance floor. And I see a large party over in the corner. [6:06]Kind of a special little secluded corner. And there’s Cork sitting in the middle of really a bunch of young people. I didn’t know any of them. There’s one young gal that was sitting next to him and he was like chatting up pretty good. And then she was actually, she was probably, he was probably 60, 65 at the time. And, uh, uh, you know, much younger than I am now, but he seemed like an old man to me because I was probably in my thirties, early thirties. And, and this girl was probably probably in her middle twenties. She was attractive and they were chatting up and then pretty soon they get up on the dance floor and they dance. This old guy kind of shuffles around a little bit. It was kind of humorous to watch. And then there’s a guy sitting next to me and I feel his eyes. He’s just staring at me. Finally, I turn, how you doing, dude? You know, what’s going on? What’s up? You know, what’s going on? You know, some pleasantry. And he’s a boy. He said, I’m glad you started talking. I said, what do you mean? I thought you’re a guy that cut me. So I’m like trying to watch court and make sure he He doesn’t head out. And if anybody else comes over and meet with him and talk to this guy and calm him down. And he said, I said, no, man, I don’t have a knife. I don’t carry a knife. It wasn’t me. Yeah, I know. After I heard you talking. So we start chatting and this is some grizzled old dude that I said, what do you do for a living? I said, I hunt night crawlers or like big ass worms that people use as fish bait. [7:27]And he looked like he hunted night crawlers for a living. and thank God that he realized that I wasn’t the guy that cut him because that sucker might have cut me. And, you know, during those days, you know, like a deal like that, he usually would not take a gun everywhere I went, going to a bar like that. You know, don’t take a gun. There’s no use in it. I’m not going to do anything. Nobody’s going to, you know, either just a normal bar room brawl or something, you know, they might do something there, but you don’t need a gun for that, especially back then. I guess today you would. But I keep watching Cork and chatting this guy up and pretty soon he and this girl is, it’s getting kind of closer around one o’clock and closing time was one 30 and they get up to leave. And, and so I make my amends with this guy. So I do, I got to go. It’s been nice talking to you. [8:15]He was like my best friend by the end of that night, follow Cork out, follow the girl leaves, Cork leaves. He follows her and she pulls up in the apartment just a few blocks away, way really they both go inside and you know i can see a light come on and so i can go find out who you know what apartment number it is and later on and then find a and and get to tag off her car so i can figure out who this is and i don’t even remember who she was now but it’s just you know another little night in the life of cork Civella and there’s actually there’s one more we were watching i’ve told this story i told it in my movie brothers against brothers and i’ve told it But before, I won’t belabor you with too much, but they had this war going on between the Speros and the Civellas. [9:03] The War Between the Speros and Civellas [9:04]And Carl Spero had been wounded and made into a paraplegic, probably by a toughie, with a shotgun at a shootout or a shooting that happened at the Virginia Tavern at Admiral in Virginia. So we are now, myself, Harold Nichols, and I think Bobby Arnold was there. And so we’re watching Carl Spero. Our job is to watch him and make sure nobody kills him. [9:32]And we did that for quite a while so he’s at the virginia tavern he just sitting in there by himself he’s got his cadillac out and back with his license plate that has s-p-e-r-o spiro on he like he was right in their face all the time sitting in there by himself uh in the middle of the afternoon hardly nobody you know a few people came and went so we’re just sitting back watching smoking and joking and and we see joe ragusa drive by then he disappears and we find out later that he went to a phone and he called cork and he tells cork he says cork he said uh he’s there all by himself you know nobody around and cork says you know what did you see any agents around he said no i didn’t see any agents at all was a g around no there’s no g you know i looked all around which he really didn’t he just drove by a couple of times but he didn’t drive up by us he didn’t easily seen us going ganged up in a parking lot cork says you know if you don’t see them they’re probably there then you know back off but he didn’t back off they went and got toughy and and another guy who couldn’t we couldn’t see who it was and they came up and they proud drove around and around as we moved in you can’t really like just let that go you can’t just sit back and wait there run in and shoot somebody and then run back out maybe kind of have to try to interrupt it in some manner it’s a dicey situation so we drive in closer and they spot us and they take off at a high rate of speed actually followed me for a little bit and took off. [11:01]At a high rate of speed when they got up next to me and glanced over and they. [11:05]Saw me and they you know i’m in this this kind of down the hills neighborhood. [11:08]And you know i mean you know i’m a 30 something white guy reasonably fit and all that i mean i just probably had cop written all over me we never like got all raggedy and had long hair and beards for the most part. [11:22] Closing Thoughts and Resources [11:23]Anyhow, so that’s a few more stories about corks of L. I forgot to put in there. So thanks a lot, guys. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. [11:31]Don’t forget to, if you’ve got a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, get that hotline number off the VA website. And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, if you’re in the service, go to the VA. But if not, check out Angelo Ruggiano, a former Gambino guy. [11:48]He has a website and he has a hotline number on that i believe at least he used to and i like to ride motorcycles so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there and if you get on my facebook, gangland wire podcast and and we’ll make a lot of comments have a lot of interesting pictures and interesting uh interactions and the same way with my youtube channel get on that and and we and really read the comments a lot of them are a lot of fun a lot of times people get in little arguments but i never let that go too far homie don’t play that we do not go down those paths of people fighting with each other you know this is this is just for fun and if you have a different opinion about the mafia you know take it take it to the streets man or if you want to fight about it call each other names otherwise you can just simply state your position somebody else will state theirs for a fact i had one pretty interesting this last week a whole long thing about the jfk assassination at chucky nicoletti based on a comment on that show that i put on that i really thought was interesting a lot several interesting, comments on that one so there’s a good one to look at so we’re always here and provide you with mafia entertainment and keep coming back guys thanks a lot.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwireClick here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

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Transcript [0:00]Hey, all you wiretappers out there. I’m back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, sergeant at the end. I want to tell you about Carl Cork Civella. I get a lot of guys commenting, hey, they want to know more about Kansas City. And I’ve done a little bit, and I’ve got some old stuff on Nick Civella, but it’s like several years old, and it’s not even on YouTube, I don’t think. And I don’t even know if you can find it on the audio app. I need to go get that out and re-edit it and put it up. But I’ve never really [0:37] The Civella Brothers’ Origins [0:35]done Cork. And Cork is an interesting guy. Carl Cork Civella, born in 1910. [0:41]Their father, he and Nick Civella, who is older brother, will become the mob bosses of Kansas City. And Nick will be more the major domo, if you will, the main mob boss. But Cork was right in there with him, as you’re going to find out. Now it’s Cork as i was told not corking he he’s named cork because he pops off i’ll give you a pretty good example of that he sometimes acts without thinking they were the sons of a Sicilian immigrant in Kansas City as you might well imagine they grew up in what we call the north end or Little Italy now this area is anchored by the holy rosary catholic church at 9 11 Missouri street uh it’s like these big church and the holy rosary church has always brought immigrants in and helped them learn English and get jobs they still do that to this day uh the don bosco center uh when the Vietnamese first started coming over after the war uh they came to the holy rosary church and the Don Bosco center where they learned English and they started moving in to little Italy i mean I mean, they were Catholic for the most part, and they took over a lot of Little Italy as this area changed. And, you know, the area looks like kind of like New York to me. It doesn’t look like anything else in Kansas City. It has this real big city look to it. [2:06]These boys, Nick and Carl Civella, and they took the same path as a lot of immigrant children and a lot of the mob bosses and mob people I’ve talked about in every city in the United States. Their father actually was a pushcart peddler, I believe, and small businesses. Because mainly newly arrived immigrants that didn’t speak English couldn’t really get jobs in the United States. So they had to figure out, you know, start a restaurant or a push card, sell fruit on the street, whatever they could do, had to start their own business for the most part. And so their father had a small business and the boys took the same path as a lot of immigrant children. And like I said, all these mob guys I’ve talked about before, they left school early and they formed a small gang. Bang uh one of the things they got into was narcotics it got into narcotics too but first they got into tire theft that was a big thing they were tire thieves and and there was a several mob guys that had outlets out there so they could steal the tires go out into the suburbs if you will over into downtown uh and steal tires and bring them back and sell them through these uh black hand at the time associated outlets their father supposedly was victimized by the black hand which will maybe explain why this little gang led by Nick and Cork got into robbing some mafia-protected gangs. [3:35]Cork did take a bust. He took a pinch and an arrest, and I don’t think he got a conviction for possession of heroin in the 1930s. You know, the mob was, was getting heroin out of, uh, Cuba to, uh, Tampa up to Kansas city. And we had a regular trade going. [3:58] From Tire Theft to Armed Robbery [3:54]They kind of got out of it later on in life, but, but he did take a pinch for that. Now the Sabella gang will graduate from tire theft to armed robbery. And that’s when they started getting in trouble, you know, a lucrative place to rob that isn’t going to complain much. You don’t have to worry about the cops or gambling games. There’s gambling games all around. Now, some of them protected, some of them aren’t. And that’s where they first got in trouble was robbing some protected gambling games because Nick was always his own guy. He was never going to buckle down, buckle under to the old Mustache Pete’s. [4:30]They tried to actually recruit his gang to do stuff for them. But again, he was his own guy. He always was. He was smarter than the average bear in this world. and he always remained smarter than the average bear in this world. Finally, in 1940, somebody gunned down a Civella gang member named Jake Maroon. [4:52]Now, years later, his son or grandson, Bobby Maroon, will become the caretaker of the trap or the social club. But gunned down, Jake Maroon in an alley right behind the Northview Social Club or the trap at Fifth and Troops, which is in Little Italy. Nick will flee to Chicago at the time. Corky will just lay low. Corky, I shouldn’t call him Corky. You might get mad at me. Cork will just lay low. Somehow, a peace deal got brokered. Nick was able to come back, and they were able to come back to Little Italy, but everybody didn’t really agree to this peace deal. I think there was a guy named Big Jim Ballesteri who didn’t agree to it. I believe he was the one. We go through the war. As most mob histories are really incomplete during the war because a lot of guys took off and went to war, were drafted, and everything was really in disarray during the war. After the war, January 1946, a guy who was a long-time member of the Civella gang named Joe Buggy Ange was gunned down down in Little Italy at, I believe, 8th and Lydia, just east of Little Italy a little bit. A few days later, just a few days later, eight days later, I believe, Nick Civella and a Jackson County deputy sheriff named Cuccia. [6:12]We’re sitting in Nick Zabella’s car in the parking lot of a liquor store just a few blocks south of Little Italy at 15th Street. Little Italy really stops about 7th Street. And two gunmen pull up in a car. They jump out. One’s got a shotgun. One’s got an actual machine gun. And they start filling that car full of lead. Well, Nick is sitting in the passenger seat, and the deputy sheriff has got in the driver’s seat for whatever reason. They kill the deputy. Nick rolls out and takes off running, and he goes back to Chicago. You know, during these times, he really established good connections in Chicago. They seem to like him up there. They say Cherry Nose Joey was kind of his mentor. Others will say when he comes back from Chicago this next time and Chicago actually brokers the deal. The story goes that Tony Accardo talked to the new boss in Kansas City in the late 40s, Tony Gizzo, and paved the way for Nick to come back. We know he came back in 1948 because he was arrested for gambling. Pretty soon, it’s noticed that Nick is now Tony Gizzo’s driver. [7:22] Nick’s Rise in the Mob [7:18]So whatever, you know, however this worked out, nobody knows for sure. He comes back a reasonably important guy because he’s now the driver for the boss. [7:29]And it’s really Tony Gizzo will die in 1953. They’ll have the murder of the two Charlies. Charlie Bonagio was kind of the boss. He was a politician slash boss. Gizzo was more of a gambler and a boss. He dies in 1953. Banaggio’s gone, and it’s believed that probably that’s when Nick Civella, a pretty young guy, started moving on in. By 1957, Nick Civella, and there’s an old Prohibition era Sicilian mobster named Joe Filardo. [8:02]Who never really wanted to be the boss, but had been kind of on the ruling council, if you will, of Tano Lococo and Joe Filardo and a couple others who lived on into older age. Anyhow, Joe Filardo and Nick Civella are on a train on their way to the the Appalachian convention in upstate New York at Barbara’s place and the police catch them and supposedly nick’s belly said what are you doing he said well we’re looking for girls some people think that Florida was taking nick to the Appalachian meeting to introduce him as a new boss of kansas city i know there’s another guy he’s kind of an expert on this Bill Owsley is a retired FBI agent who was boss of the one squad for a long time and was the main agent that worked on the mob in Kansas City for his whole career, basically. He has a story that maybe Sam Giancana knew Nick Civella from his days in Chicago. [9:00]Giancana wanted some more influence for Out West, and he was going to propose that Nick Civella get a seat on the commission along with Chicago. Now, I don’t know. A lot of people would argue with that. And a lot of people like to say that Chicago’s, you know, they would never share anything like that. But I don’t know. You never know. He’s smart. He expands his family’s, his crime family’s influence in the politics. He meets uh Roy Lee Williams who’s a local teamster boss and then who will go on to be you know he eventually will just before he dies become the international president uh he meets him on a jackson county committee to decide on who runs for office and who doesn’t so nick his brother cork we’re talking about court cork stays at his side but as an enforcer cork is not the kind of guy that you can put on this kind of a commission. He’s not that guy. He’s the guy you want for the street. He never really took on the official role of underboss or consigliere. He was always referred to as a brother. [10:06]Eventually he’ll be known. You could call him the street boss, I would say, because he always spoke for Nick and he carried out Nick’s directions and people, when he spoke, they thought they were speaking for Nick. He was speaking for Nick. And some of these early things is we had a couple of mob soldiers named Felix Farina and Tiger Cardarella. They were charged with the attempted murder of a government witness in 1960. [10:35] Cork’s Role as Street Boss [10:32]They needed an alibi. So Cork’s the guy that goes out on the streets. See, Nick was never the guy that went out and talked to people directly that weren’t, you know, like made guys or right next to him. He goes to the, he hits the streets. He finds a gambler that owes money, and he tells him he’ll forgive $5,000 in gambling debts for the guy if he’ll give the two hitmen an alibi, and he does that. Another thing he did, and this was 1960 and 1959, the mob-dominated Teamsters, Local 774, made a move to take over the Kansas City Fire Department and take away the firemen from the International Association of Firefighters. The IAFF union president was a real feisty battalion captain named Stanton Gladden, and he resisted. You know, but politics was all infused in the fire department, especially back then. Politically appointed fire chief offered a promotion to Stanton Gladden if he would. [11:36]Support moving the IAFF out and the team sure saying, well, he was the president of the IAFF and he was not going to do that. He tried to get another lower ranking fireman and offered him a promotion to help with this. And Stanton Gladden learned about this and he exposed it to the media and it’s all in the newspapers. Now Cork has given the job to intercede. He offers Stanton and gladden the job of fire chief and he said the current chief will become known as the director of the fire department ef gladden will drop his resistance to the teamsters move gladden again refuses and over the next few months a mob controlled politician will offer gladden another promotion within the fire department if he’ll back off a little bit he won’t do it and finally somebody put a bomb in his car and he was severely injured uh out of that bomb but the teamsters never took over the IAFF or the Kansas City Fire Department. You know, another thing tells you a little bit about Cork. In 1960, we had a grand jury in Kansas City, and Nick and Cork were both waiting in the hallway, and there’s a lot of newsmen down at the other end of the hallway, and somebody snapped a photo, and Nick berated him. You know, hey, leave us alone. You know, we’re just businessmen. Cork threatened him. [12:52]He actually threatened him, and then he exposed himself. He shook his dick at him. and got arrested for indecent exposure. That was Cork. Explosive and impulsive at the same time. During this time, the official underboss was Thomas Highway Simone. He died in 1968. And again, like I said, Cork was not named the underboss. He was always the same as Nick, but on the street. He was the street boss. [13:17]He always spoke for him on the street. See, Nick Civella was not a street guy who was out in the joints. I never saw him out in a joint. You hardly ever saw him out in just a few places. Cork was out every night in the joints. He was running around to different businesses. He was down at the city market every day at DeFeo’s or hung around that particular area where people could find him. I know a guy whose father-in-law was a bondsman and politically connected in Kansas City, Kansas. And he told me that his father-in-law came over about once a week, about at least once a week, just to see Cork and talk to him. I asked him, I said, do you think Cork ran everything, you know, street stuff in KCK? And he said, yeah, he probably did. Not so much in Missouri, but in KCK, he definitely did. Because there was other members but the uh the willy Cammisano had a lot of uh stolen properties uh fencing outlets going and and different had a crew going here that were really good burglars and thieves he had to have his action i think kck was strictly for court and we’ll see a little more evidence of that later on nick. [14:28]He might make a sporadic visit to the market, but didn’t hang around down. There was not a regular place. He did go to his lawyer’s office regularly and he used that space and he discussed business with Tuffy and made and received telephone calls out of the lawyer’s office. You know, I noticed he, I don’t remember seeing court down there and I don’t remember any of the wiretaps or the bugs mentioned in the Cork was there. And there was mainly, this was during the Las Vegas casino time. So a Cork was not, he was kind of involved in that, but, but not. Near as much as Tuffy and Nick were the ones that were really involved in the Las Vegas casino business and skimming from casinos and making those decisions [15:11] Cork’s Impulsive Nature [15:07]and dealing with the people in Las Vegas and in Chicago, too. Cork did maintain close ties with corrupt politicians and law enforcement and KCK, like I said. He will attempt to organize and control several Kansas side strip clubs. [15:22]There’s one guy named Vance Anderson had a pretty successful club over there called the Red Apple. And one time Cork had a couple, he had these two career criminals, Mike Ruffalo and Gene Shepard working for him. He told them to take a stick of dynamite and put it under Anderson’s Cadillac and detonate it out in the parking lot of the Red Apple. And later on, he went over to see Anderson. He said, you know, you got some problems, these young guys, you know, I can, I can protect, I can help you out here, you know, but you know, you got to bring me in here. And he wanted a piece of the clubs when he wanted. it you know and what’s interesting i noticed that over the next year or so anderson started making some moves to to partner up and buy other kansas side strip clubs so you know none of that ever really came out you know kind of an unusual situation with cork out of that he’s at the red apple he started dating a young stripper and she would i remember her she was beautiful she and he was like you know he was old at the time he was probably in his 60s you know i’m like 78, but he seemed old. He had this white wig he wore all the time, and he was a real dapper dresser, if you’ve seen any of the pictures on the internet. [16:26]And he always drove a Lincoln Continental. He had a salmon-colored one for a long time, and he traded it for a kind of lime green Lincoln Continental. He didn’t have the black or the white or the gray. He had salmon-colored, and then he had green, lime green. Anyhow, he dated this Antoinette Lanfranca, who worked at the Red Apple. Some people say she was a manager over there some people say she was a stripper i i don’t know i remember over there and i remember following around a little bit whenever because she eventually she started dating another mobster named carl spiro who will become in a full-fledged war with him carl spiro and his brothers and car cork and nick Civella and tuffy de luna and the Civella family So go figure it out. Another thing about Cork, he had moved in on a gambler named Al Brandemeyer, which was interesting. I ran into this guy. He said his name was Brandemeyer recently. And I said, what’s your name? [17:24]Father your grandfather uh have a meat market oh yeah yeah you know i said well what was the deal oh he was a big gambler and and you know a lot of stories about grandpa al but he didn’t really tell me too much but he had a you know like fresh meat distributors they got you know bought meat on the hook and had it butchered and they butchered it in there and supplied restaurants and and other their small stores and things like that and it pretty soon uh he lost a lot of money in gambling and he was he was a bookie too with him uh it became the brandemeyer meat company became the b and c mint company or the brandemeyer and Civella meat company Corky was a salesman he’d make the rounds of the restaurants as kind of a cover job and you know i know he was once overheard on a bug they tried to get a bug on him he was complaining about the business and he told other salesmen get out to all the goombas joints and he named off a couple of periphery uh guys who were italian and uh he said they’ll buy from us another story about cork as he was talking there was a new newly developed entertainment district called the river key it was right next to city market that’s a whole nother story on that get my movie gangland wire you’ll get that whole story but there’s a young restaurant owner named david bonadonna or freddie bonadonna his His dad was David Bonadonna, who was probably a made guy, a professional criminal. [18:50]A low-ranking soldier in a crew for one of the other made guys, Willie Comisano. Cork was in Freddie’s joint. He put a new joint in this River Key area, this newly developed entertainment district. And Corky was running down, ragging on him, saying, you’re stupid. You had a good joint down on the boulevard. He had a nice place down in Southwest Boulevard. You’re stupid to move down here. [19:19]And, you know, Freddie says, well, you know, whatever. Well, within a year, that place is immensely successful. The River Key was hopping. It was the place to be. And this young guy, Freddie Bonadonna, sees Cork comes in to sell him some more meat because he’s got a restaurant. And he said well cork he says you know we’re doing okay he said uh i don’t think you really knew what you were talking about of course yeah how much you making freddie probably a mistake he said oh about 10 grand a month now he wasn’t making that 10 grand a month but he said oh about 10 grand a month he wasn’t making that kind of money but so value believed it and he wanted in on the action but he couldn’t really move in on freddie because freddie’s father david was with With another guy named Willie Camisano, that will go spin off into another deal. [20:07] Cork’s Business Ventures [20:08]Camisano wants a piece of Freddie’s action, and he ends up killing David. Like I said, that’s a whole other story about the River Key and the Camisanos. I have to do Willie Camisano one of these days. Cork had another plan. Here’s a longtime mobster named Paul Scola, Pauly the Pig. The Scolas all had the moniker of the pig. The first one was Sammy Scola or Sammy Hogg, and he was killed in the I did the story about the murder of Anton Ferris when the sheriff of Jackson County interrupted this hit that was going down and arrested Mad Dog. Charlie Mad Dog Gargata right in the act of killing this guy. And Sammy Scola, Pauly’s grandpa, was driving a car and the sheriff shot and killed him right away. As soon as he pulled up, he jumped out and he shot the dude sitting, he was a wheel man, shot him sitting behind the car. I know his great grandson. He is still not happy about the cops shooting the great grandpa, Sammy Hogg. Anyhow, Pauly, Thank you. Start coming in to Freddy’s and buddying up to Freddy and said, you know, I want to start a restaurant down here. [21:25]And they both kind of had, Freddy has thinking about expanding. He had his eyes set on a place about the end of the block. He was like third in Delaware and down at fourth in Delaware. Freddy kind of had his eyes set on this other place because he could put another joint down there. And this guy knew it was open and he was wanting to put it down there. He’s hanging out down there. And Freddy’s dad, this is before he got killed. He encourages Freddy to help Scola. you know hey help this guy out paulie ends up getting that lease first and and he opens up a restaurant bar and he copies directly bonadonna’s menu and takes several key employees and pretty goes oh i see what that was all about now Cork Civella becomes a regular down to Scola’s place which means you know Scola’s with cork uh and several other bobs are like guy named johnny green amaro who was cork neighbor up in the neighborhood and nick Civella’s neighbor who was hanging out he was a main guy and a professional criminal and in his own right the name of the joint delaware daddies uh you know a little story about delaware daddies and this is like i said this i tell the story because this has to be cork’s joint it turns into a strip club of course you know and then cork likes those strip clubs you know so he can make money out of them river keys lost its popularity the the families aren’t coming down the young couples the regular Regular people aren’t coming down and there’s some strip clubs opening up. So he turns it into a strip club and, and he, he gets his used car manager. [22:52]I think the, I won’t say what the guy’s name is because I’m not real sure. [22:56]Anyhow, he’s a used car guy and he becomes the manager and he gets a local biker gang who he knew from his old used car gig where he used to be a salesman at. He gets a local biker gang to provide the strippers. I remember going in there and they’re all gagged up over the corner and galley get up and strip. And then she’d go back and sit down with the stripper. This is before they did the lap dances and all that. And these girls started stripping down to nothing. And this was totally verboten or forbidden at the time. Word gets around and a line forms and we hear about it. So I got the job. I get to go down there and I stand in line and it’s about 15 minutes down the line. And, you know, the manager’s there, and he’s talking to everybody, and he’s not taking even a dollar a coverage charge. He’d take it even a buck each. He would have made $1,000 a night, I think, because people were coming and going all night long. What he did was each person he came through, he asked, are you with law enforcement? [23:58] The Rise of Strip Clubs [23:54]Like, you know, what the, well, WTF, you know. No, I work for the city. Well, what do you do? I’m in pollution control. Oh, okay. So go on then. They did strip totally. They even had a couple that would simulate sex late at night. Oh, it was wild. It was crazy. I remember this one night, this guy in the crowd, they’re all hooting and hollering, pushing up around the stage, watching these people. [24:19]Act like they’re getting it on this one guy says man you didn’t even get it hard this dude they’re getting done he’s putting his clothes on he said man he said you get up here see what you can do that guy shut up then rated to join a few days later arrested this manager and several strippers and you know for some reason they never even reopened they just let it go after that they kind of reopened but then and this never took off again they didn’t have the same panache i guess and it didn’t last very much longer i think they’d made their money well this is during the middle 1970s nick has gone back to prison from an old gambling conviction he’s also gotten sick with cancer so he’s not really you know he’s still running things and you can hear him in the prison, they’ve got some wiretaps some bugs he’s still like sending messages out next going out or courts going up there and kind of you know running things by him and and we see court regularly at the trap of this city market and uh you know to the casual observer cork is now the boss but nick is still the boss trust me nick is still the boss well al brandemeier and bnc meat companies they’ve changed the mohawk meat company to take the Civella day by there so people won’t get nervous about doing business with them now we go into some whole another deal this really gets wild in kansas in the city to my put a bomb on the back door of the trap or the social club, just to send a message. [25:43]There’s a guy named Carl Spero. His oldest brother has been killed, probably by the Civellas. They had to approve it. They had to approve of Nick Spero getting killed. Carl’s been in the penitentiary. See my brother, my movie, Brothers Against Brothers, for more on that. Carl Spero sends a guy named Leonard Crago, who was a bad, bad, bad man, to rob the Mohawk Meat Company and intimidate Al Brandenbaier, which he does. He puts him in the trunk of his car and he fires several rounds in there and says, tell Elnick Civella to A-Rab’s back in town. He was the A-Rab. And everybody knew by now who the A-Rab was. He was with the Spiros. Shortly after that, somebody kidnaps a Spiro associate named Johnny Brocato. He’s tortured and his body’s found. The contents of his stomach are still frozen. Meat market frozen. You know, I don’t know. Civella family member named Johnny Green Amaro. I mentioned him before, was hanging out down there at the Delaware Daddy’s. He’s gunned down his home, which is only a block from Cork and Nick’s house. It was a slap in the face of the Civellas. It was just getting wild. [26:49]A young thief who was a friend of Carl Spiro’s and a friend of Fetty Bonadonna’s, he’s bragging that he’s the one that did it, and they kill Sonny Bowen a few days later. End up killing his partner, a guy that’s kind of his regular fall partner, rap partner, rides with him all the time, Gary T. Parker. They suspect Freddie’s been part of it because his father’s been killed because Freddy wouldn’t agree with some other things. Like I said, you need to watch that Gangland Wire movie and it’ll tell you a lot more about that. Freddy takes off to witness protection. Cork kind of tries to draw Carl Spiro in and pacify him, but he’s still out for blood. [27:32]Another thing Cork did during this time, he oversaw a scam of government money. I bet Nick put this together and then he’s in penitentiary when this really is going down. There was a government program called CETA. I don’t remember what it stood for, but it’s supposed to help people get jobs. We had a bunch of CETA employees with the police department. They hired a bunch of parking control officers. They always civilianized the parking control people, write parking tickets and hire CETA employees for that because the government gave us money to hire them and some other civilian jobs. So Cork Civella set up something called the Columbus Park, which is what the Little Italy area is formerly called. The Columbus Park Safety and Energy Project. And they basically did nothing. And he got this guy, the Gene Shepard, to kind of set it up and hire all his friends and relatives. And they basically did nothing. He hired people as security consultants, clerks, secretaries, school counselors. And of course, Cork got a kickback from everything. [28:34]Was during this time the fbi put their microphone in the bill of caprina pick up cork and toughy linda talking about las vegas and and one thing this court tells toughy tells cork and kind of gives you something about his nixon penitentiary and tells you about courts you know his influence here he he says cork you got to give the guy an answer right now we got to go find the phone so they go and find a phone and then we start following toughy and find their secret phone and put Taps on in. Really opens up that whole casino skimming investigation. [29:08] Cork’s Influence on the Streets [29:09]But in the meantime, Tuffy is working with Nick really in a way on his own, but Nick’s gotten back out of the penitentiary about this time and working with him on the casino skimming and Cork’s still running everything on the streets. He’s the street boss. He’s taped reporting to Nick about the ongoing Spiro problem. Him he tells nick that he has a friend that’s all carl spiro coming up the villa capri which is kind of the Civella hangout bar late at night she saw carl spiro coming up there peeking in the window see who was in there he says well we’ve got we’ve got to do something and Cork’s complaining we got guys that aren’t doing anything you know they got to get off their butts and go do something You know, they’re just sitting around doing nothing. And next of all, you know, we’ve got some guys and named some old guys. And, and they talk about hitting Spero at the red apple strip club, which I mentioned before Anderson’s place. Cause he knows he goes over there. Cause Carl Spero has since taken up with Antoinette Lang, Franka, who was Cork’s old girlfriend. [30:16]Small town here small town folks he said you know he said we got to be cautious nick counsels him to be cautious there’s cops everywhere he almost got caught one time we never could figure out what that was cork agrees and he speculates the difference some different guys that might be able to get next to carl spiro names off some guys one of them was like an ex-cop that i do i remember him early on he didn’t last very long there’s an informant that surfaced court tells Nick, I got guys out looking for him. And then they go back to Carl Spero and Carl’s living out in the country. And Cork says, you know, one of our guys, Willie Cammisano Jr., he’s a big hunter and he’s a good shot. He said, get a telescope rifle and shoot Spiro at his home, which is out in the country. And so they’re talking about, you know, sneaking up on the house. And Nick says, oh, you know, none of our guys, they can’t run across country like that. And so, but Cork is the guy that’s going to be out putting this together. St. Valentine’s Day, 1979, we raid all Cork and Nick and Tuffy’s houses and take down the casino case. There’s a couple more attempts to kill Carl Spiro during this time. And the third one finally is successful in 1984. [31:37] The Legacy of Cork Civella [31:32]Cork is convicted of racketeering in a casino case and he is, he will die in prison. Cork was a bully. I had a source, a guy I know that’s been in that life, around that life, his whole life, and grew up over in Little Italy. And he told me a story about Cork. He said in the 1960s, he was at a mob joint, Melcher, Mel’s Pompeii Room out on Main. He was at Mel’s Pompeii Room. He had a date. Cork comes in, sits down at the table without any invitation. He starts flirting with a girl like the guy wasn’t even there. The guys he’s kind of a little guy of course cork ain’t the biggest guy in the world as far as you know fisticuffs and cork says hey hold up man she’s with me cork gave him a look and he said don’t you know who i am guy said yeah i know but get the fuck out of here and cork just laughed and kind of went to the bar cork was an impulsive blowhard no doubt about it but he was totally trusted by his brother and he was feared and respected on the streets if you’re gonna do business on the streets you know you had some respect and some fear of next about our cork Civella he always listened to his older brother nick though always listened to him as he would calm him down and he never went against him he always took him into consideration if he had to make a decision. [32:52]So that’s kind of the long, he got a 10 to 30 year sentence in 1984 and he dies down in Texas in the federal prison down there. He had a kid, he’s had one child, Anthony or Tony Ripe, who will go on to be the boss after Nick dies and Cork goes to prison and Tony Ripe gets back out. Tony Ripe has a bunch of kids. A lot of people in town will say they know Nick Civella’s grandson. Well, it’s not. It’s his grandnephew. Nick Civella did not have children. Cork had one child, Anthony. He married Tuffy Luna’s sister, and then he had several children, and none of them really followed the family plan in the mob. [33:37]So, guys, that’s the story of Carl Cork Civella. I hope all you guys have been asking about Kansas City stories. Well, there’s another one. I’ll make you happy, and I’ve got more. I just have to get back to them. There’s so many stories, you know, and so many stories in so little time, I guess. [33:53]Just talked to a guy on the phone this morning talking about Joe Petrosino, but he wants to talk about the very first mob movie about the Black Hand in 1910, I believe, which was inspired by a case that Joe Petrosino worked on the Black Hand and the influence of the Mafia in movies over the years. So I thought that would be an interesting topic. So I look forward to that. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. motorcycles watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there if you have a problem ptsd and you’ve been in the service go to the va website get that hotline number if you have a problem drugs or alcohol go see anthony rugiano he’s a gambino man and uh now in uh in that witness protection he’s out here living on his own i don’t know what the story is with that i had him on my show once but i don’t think i asked him anyway he seemed to be operating okay and he’s a drug and alcohol called counselor he has a hotline i believe on his website or his youtube channel don’t forget to like and subscribe don’t forget to tell your friends about the show and maybe share it on your social media you know more people we get the better i like it and you know i got some books and and a movie at least i got one book i’m working on another one uh i got a couple movies. [35:10]Uh out there that are for rent for like a buck 99 gangland wire brothers against brothers the sabella spiro war and my book about the skimming from las vegas and don’t forget if you get the kindle version i have the actual wiretaps link to the book you can listen to so i guess that’s all i got to sell other than myself and and i really appreciate all the comments you make on my youtube and my gangland wire podcast page and i’ve gotten to know a lot of you through that And I really like doing this, and let’s just keep doing it for as long as we can. Thanks, guys.

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Transcript [0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio. This is like a little extra, as you’ll notice, you got this soon. We’re experimenting with trying to get my new logo, this part of this logo here on the top of the email that comes out if you’re a subscriber to Gangland Wire website, which if you’re not, you need to be a subscriber. [0:19]Although I say you get a free book or a link to get a free book that I knocked out here a few years ago, and I need to change that book up a little bit. It a lot of people have gotten it be that as it may i’ve got to put out the keep experimenting putting out blog shots or blog pieces or a podcast and and i think we’ve got it fixed now so when this comes out if you go to the if you’re subscriber and you go to the email you’ll see a different picture you’ll see my new logo always had that old logo that i had for several years that had the wave sign and the green wave sign and the red gangland wire and i paid a guy to come up with this new logo. And, and, you know, and then I never could figure out how to get it up. Finally, my wife finally sat down. I convinced her to go into the back end and figure it out. And it took her about three hours to figure it out. You’d think it’d be easier than that, but it wasn’t. So I thought I’d do a little separate podcast here for you, just for fun. A story that I had always wondered about when I was younger was Mr. Las Vegas, Wayne Newton. I I don’t know if you know who Wayne Newton is. Most of you probably do. I saw his show once. I was out in Las Vegas and saw his show. He was getting older then. He’s probably, shoot, he’s older than me. [1:33]But he’s had a lot of work done, and he obviously was wearing a girdle or something. He looked pretty slim and trim for his age and what I know about him. But he put on a hell of a show in Vegas. I mean, he is the consummate showman. I always had heard that Wayne Newton somehow was hooked up to the mob, but yet not really, or the mob, you know, being a Las Vegas entertainer like that, you got to have, you got to somehow get along with the mob back in the 70s and 80s. Now, since then, you don’t have to. I started researching, and I found that he once got himself hooked up with a New York mobster, not a Chicago guy. You would have thought it would have been Tony Splatro. This is a New York mobster named Guido Penosi. There’s not a lot known about Guido’s earlier years, other than he was convicted of murder as a juvenile. [2:25]1971, Guido Penosi was convicted of tax evasion for not paying income taxes for several years during the 60s. But and he was a cousin to a capo in the Gambino family family named Frank Piccolo. I don’t know who Frank Piccolo was, and he didn’t really come into modern times. He was a cousin to this Capo in the Gambino family. During the 1960s, Guido Panossi had met Wayne Newton when Newton was performing at the Copacabana Club in New York City, which was well-known to be mob-connected. I think it was originally owned by Frank Costello. I think that was a club that they used in Goodfellas where they came back, you know, they let them in in front of everybody and gave them a special table up front. Kind of his, you know, this is living the high life of a mobster in New York City. You know, they were friends. They were really good friends. They say that, well, this was from court records, actually, when I researched it. Wayne Newton’s office calendar had Guido Penosi’s birthday marked on it. You know, I mean, I don’t keep anybody’s birthday marked on my calendar. And one time, Newton spent almost a whole month with Penosi down in Florida. [3:32]Penosi intended the wedding of Newton’s brother. He’s got a brother named Jerry Newton, which I’d never heard of. One time, Wayne Newton flew to Los Angeles in 1976. He flew to Los Angeles with a whole band and performed for Penosi’s son free of charge. So let’s just say they were close friends. Wayne Newton always claimed he didn’t know anything about Penosi’s mafia connections. Infections a newsman once asked Wayne Newton about his friend he said the only thing i can tell you i met him at the Copacabana several years ago i thought he was just a fan he stayed in how we’ve stayed in contact i liked the guy guido penosi’s cousin is a guy named frank lewis piccolo or piccolo i’m not sure how you pronounce that uh we’ll say piccolo he was a he was a capo in the Gambino crime family but up in the Bridgeport Connecticut faction piccolo was a big guy stood stood six foot tall, weighed 200 pounds, had black curly hair, like, you know, always wanted to be six foot two and weighed 250 pounds, had a full head of black curly hair. [4:32]As most of us do, his whole family lived up in Bridgeport. He was connected to the Gambinos in, faxing up in Bridgeport. In 1980, this Frank Piccolo tried to blackmail money from Wayne Newton. Newton had been trying to disengage himself from a financial investment in a Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada tabloid newspaper, and that had some partners in it. And the partners were threatening Las Vegas police. He went to the cops out there and then they couldn’t stop these threats, whatever they were. I couldn’t really find out much more about it. It’s not that important. Anyhow, I just was being threatened. [5:06]And he turned to Guido Penosi his old buddy, who then Penosi, you know, how these mob guys do. Well, here’s a guy that can help you. So Penosi referred Wayne Newton to Gambino guy from Bridgeport, Connecticut, named Piccolo. And he then came out to Las Vegas and used his influence and stopped these threats right in their tracks. [5:27]Well, as usual with any mob guy, if you’re going to take something like that from a mob guy, you know, as a godfather said, you know, maybe someday you can do me a service. So, you know, of course, someday, you know, Wayne Newton can do Mr. Piccolo a service. And eventually he came back around to a business advisor, Wayne Newton, and he wanted him to purchase life insurance for a singer named Lola Falana from a particular insurance agent, which meant that Piccolo was getting a little piece of this action, whatever it was. Because Piccolo also told some associates in New York he was going to become a silent partner with Wayne Newton and they were going to purchase the Aladdin Hotel and Casino which became the Planet Hollywood Hotel and casino FBI got in on this and they ended up bugging Wayne newton and they got him on some conversations with these guys and and on june the 12th 1981 piccolo and Penosi were were indicted in Connecticut on conspiring to extort money and other valuable rights from Wayne Newton and this Lola Falana. Lola Falana was a famous singer back in the day, kind of Wayne Newton’s ilk. Now, Frank Piccolo will die before he actually goes to trial. And that September 19th, 1981, somebody shot and killed Frank Piccolo in a telephone booth in Bridgeport, Connecticut, right down the street. [6:55]Now, later on, it will come out that Gambino boss, Paul Castellano, had him killed. He had been trying to encroach on the Genovese’s crime families, control of rackets in Connecticut. [7:09]And Genovese and the Gambino family already had some really lucrative contracts. And if you know these construction rackets in New York City, they were together like the Windows case and some different cases like that and the Concrete Club and all that. And so when Piccolo was trying to horn in on some Genovese family business in Connecticut, Paul Castellano just gave him up and ordered his murder. So that’s a little story about Wayne Newton, famous singer in Las Vegas, a consummate showman. Never forget when he came out, it was like Elvis Presley’s show. And I never actually saw it in person, but I’ve seen clips of it. But has this special, you know, uh, dramatic music. And then he kind of appears to coming down some like escalator, like came down the gold escalator, if you will. But he came down the, uh, the escalator, uh, was transported down. It was like bigger than life. And, and he did put on a show. [8:10] Wayne Newton and the Mob [8:07]He really put on a heck of a show. He worked his butt off. So that’s the story of Wayne Newton, Las Vegas, and his connections to the mob. And, and this is just a little special episode that I can put out to see if If you, if you got an email, if you’re a subscriber and you get the email, then there’s, you might notice that new logo of a back of a guy sitting, uh, like he’s listening to a wiretap or something, uh, instead of the old waveform and just gangland wire. So let me know. [8:36]I appreciate everything you guys do for me and everything. All you guys had listened in and you guys had like, and share it. And I’ll tell you what that Joe Massino, when I did last month or a couple of three weeks ago. I need to spend that much work on them more often because, boy, it really did gangbuster. A lot of guys really liked that and obviously liked and shared it. So it went through the roof as far as likes and subscribes and all that and views or whatever, however you do that. [9:05] Support and Community Updates [9:05]And so keep supporting me. I really appreciate it. And I’ll keep putting out this mob content and we’ll continue to have fun with all this. Don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles and don’t like working on my website’s back end. That shit is hard, man. I hate doing that. Thank God. Thank you, Janice Colt, for taking care of me on that and for not charging me any money, but it keeps coming back. I like to ride motorcycles, and I know if you have a problem with PTSD, if you’ve been in service. As you know, go to that VA website. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, get hold of our friend, uh, former Gambino. And I see maybe he wasn’t really a made guy. He was, he was a prospect as they say in the motorcycle gang. Uh, he was a proposed member of Gambino family. Uh, it was a legacy. His dad was a made guy, Pat Andy. [9:54]And he has a website that, uh, he does his show on and he has a hotline number and he’s a drug and alcohol counselor for a regular living. I don’t know if he’s still doing that, if he’s making enough money off his appearances and his website or his YouTube channel yet. He doesn’t have to keep working. I don’t know. [10:13]If I didn’t have my pension coming in, I’d be working. Go in my Gangland Wire podcast group and like that and join that. We have a lot of great conversations and I got my YouTube channel and I got stuff for sale out there. If you want to go into my website and go on the the, uh, donate page. You don’t have to donate, but I got some of my stuff for sale. And I, you can also got always have links in the show notes to my, [10:42] Upcoming Books and Projects [10:38]uh, uh, movies that are for rent on amazon.com. I’m working on coming up with a series of books. I’ve got the first one pretty well done on the Chicago outfit. I’ve just taken selected stories from old podcast, download the transcripts, ran that through chat GPT kind of makes sense out of it. And then rewrote of that into stories and so each chapter is a different story that i thought was interesting from my podcast and so we look for those coming out of me i’ll probably gonna do another special one trying to get people to really go and buy a whole bunch of them at one time they’ll be inexpensive they’re gonna be short books with separate chapters and it’ll be pretty inexpensive and so i’ll do one on new york probably next i gotta do one on kansas city and so i’m just to always coming up with something to, to sell or to entertain and educate people. It’s, you know, that’s what it’s all about is entertaining people in an edge or educating people in entertaining matters. So thanks a lot guys.

Support the Podcast Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwireClick here to “buy me a cup of coffee”

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here!

Transcript [0:00] Introduction [0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there and back here in the studio of Gangland Wire, as you can see, this is retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Sergeant and Detective Gary Jenkins. We have a great story today. The son of an FBI agent who was one of the early first agents that was assigned to the FBI’s top hoodlum squad and worked on Carlo Gambino and talked to Joe Vellacci and some really great stories. He’s going to have a book coming out called Untold Tales from the FBI Top Hoodlum Squad. Welcome, Gary Clemente. Good to see you, Gary. Another Gary. Yeah, really. You know, there was a lot of us named Gary in the early 1950s. Did you notice that? I think so. I think we were all named after Gary Cooper. That was why. I asked my mother once. She said, I don’t know. We just couldn’t think of anything else. But I think that’s what it was because nobody names their kid Gary now. There you go. There you go. I’m Italian myself, and Gary’s not a common Italian name. I know. I know. I was surprised when I saw your first name. [1:09]Anyhow, Gary, it’s a pleasure to meet you, and I look forward to this interview. I read a little bit about you. I don’t remember how I found out about you on Facebook or I don’t know. I’ve got so many feelers out there for people that have books or have knowledge about the mob that I forget where it came from. But anyhow, I got a hold of you and you graciously agreed to come on the podcast in order to tell the guys about your book and about your father’s experiences. And I looked them up and and he was an early guy in the top hoodlum squad, wasn’t he? He sure was, Gary. He started off in the Bureau in 1950, and his career spanned from 1950 to 19. Just an interesting side note, at that time, there was a little bit of discrimination in the world at that time with Italians. And he was told after he became an attorney, my father was, that by a cousin of his, my father had expressed to him that, hey, you know, I’ve always been interested in being a part of the FBI. His cousin said to him, forget it, Pete. They don’t take Italians. [2:17]Well, my father did not like that at all. So he marched out of the FBI office. Before you knew it, He was sitting across the desk from another agent being interviewed for a position, and he noticed that the agent’s name was John Garibaldi or whatever Italian name it was at that time. Well, that answered the question about whether they were going to take Italians or not. [2:41]So from 1950 to 1976, that was the span of my father’s career. The early part of his career was based in Quincy, Illinois. Then he went to Cleveland. [2:56] Early Career Discrimination [2:52]Then he was transferred to New York. And he was born and raised in Brooklyn. So his parents, his Sicilian-born parents, were very appreciative of that. My dad’s early career, very interestingly, was involved with doing security background checks for people applying for sensitive government positions. And the federal government at that time was really interested whether you were a member of the Communist Party USA or the Socialist Workers Party, believe it or not, which they don’t do that now. Now, and I asked my dad, fast forward, very short, later on when he was in his late 80s, I said, hey, Pop, those people that you used to investigate and arrest that were part of the Communist Party or, say, the Socialist Workers Party, that were trying to worm their way into the government, those people are now in the deepest reaches of our bureaucracies or Congress or Supreme Court and the White House. He said, absolutely. [4:01]So that’s how much things have changed over the years, Gary. [4:09] The Appalachian Mob Conclave [4:05]So the early part of his career was involved with security background checks. Then a seminal event happened. [4:14]It was the Appalachian Mob Conclave, where all of the top mob leaders were having a meeting in Appalachian, New York, a small town in upstate New York. I’m sure that you’ve talked about this already a little bit, and it’s a famous story. But after the mob conclave happened, my father heard about it, and the FBI was talking about this disastrous meeting. Meeting among all these mobsters these men were running across the field because there was a road block set up on the edge of the edge of the property of joe barbara and they got panicked these were the top mob bosses that were running across the field stepping in cow pies throwing their wallets out left and right trying to evade the police and much of their identification was rounded up. People like Carlo Gambino were there. Mario Lansky was there as well, too. Mario Lansky was not a made mob guy with the Italian mob, but he worked with them. He was there, too. [5:22]And what happened was they should not have arrested or incarcerated any of these people, which they haven’t. They actually detained them. But word got back to the Bureau. All of this This information got back to the Bureau. My father heard about it. The Bureau was starting to implement something called the Top Hoodlum Program that Hoover was beginning to formulate. [5:48]My father wanted to be a part of this. He put in for a transfer out of the security detail into the Top Hoodlum squad that was being developed in New York. And that’s how he became a part of all of that. Interesting. Now, you know, we have never said your father’s full name. It’s Peter C. Clemente, correct? Peter Charles Clemente. That’s correct. Correct. And so he was a member of the Top Hoodlum Squad, which was, I remember in Kansas City, I have a friend who was an agent that came to Kansas City. He’s Italian from New York City, and he speaks Sicilian. He grew up with Sicilian grandparents, and he was a member of the Top Hoodlum Squad in Kansas City immediately, and because they knew they needed these guys who were Sicilian speakers. [6:37]Exactly, exactly. The fact that my father could speak and understand Sicilian, like your friend, was very, very important at that time because many of these individuals were either from Sicily or mainland Italy. Many of these guys were from the Naples area. They had connections with a group called Camorra. The Camorra and the Sicilians really did like each other. They were pretty much rivals. They would have heated problems with one another. But they worked together nonetheless when it came down to this. Money, yeah. Came down to the money, the moolah, yes. That’s right. All those old regional differences just fall away. Al Capone was a Neapolitan, but he had plenty of Sicilians working with him. Exactly. He needed those people working with him to get on their good side. [7:29] Working with the Mafia [7:30]Interesting. So now your father, he starts working the mob, the mafia. There’s one really great story that’s going to be in your book. It’s mainly what your book is going to be about. It’s the first of a series, guys. So start watching for this series. But there’s a story about your father and Carlo Gambino early on in both their careers, really. Can you tell us that story? [7:55]Well, after my father became a part of the Top Hoodlum Squad in New York, He was the first one ever that the FBI asked him to do summary reports about an individual named Carlo Gambino, as well as Meyer Lansky. So he was the first one ever to put on paper into the government circles about who Carlo Gambino was, his life, his history, where he was born, all of this, to put this on record. So he was the first one to do that. As part of the top hoodlum squad, he had the idea while doing the summary report about Carlo Gambino. He said, you know what, I would like to pay this individual a visit. I would like to meet him face to face. That was his idea. It wasn’t brought down from the supervisors. So one day, Gary, he went out to Brooklyn, New York. He waited outside of Gambino’s home about a half a block away. It was a brownstone in Brooklyn. He waited for Gambino to come out of his house. He saw him give his wife, Kate Gambino, a kiss goodbye. Now, Kate Gambino happened to be Caldwell’s first cousin. [9:20]Oh, yeah. Interestingly enough. And Kate’s brother was Paul Castellano, who was a very, very highly connected Gambino lieutenant at the time, who eventually became a head of the Gambino crime family after Gambino died peacefully in his bed. Not in a prison cell but in his bed so my my father waited for him to come down the steps after giving kate a kiss goodbye he comes up the the street he’s alone he doesn’t have any body cars wow that’s interesting why doesn’t he have any body cars well he doesn’t need any body cars He is the unofficial boss of bosses of all five Mafia families. I say unofficial, Gary, because at that time, he was never officially named the boss of bosses. Previous to that, several decades ago, when there was the big Mafia war that happened between many of the families, one of the mob bosses was named the boss of bosses officially by the other families. [10:32]But Carlo was never officially named, but he was called the boss of the boss because he had that much power. His family was that big, over 200 members, which was considerable at that time. So he comes up the street. My father waits for him. He has no bodyguards. [10:53]He says to him, Mr. Gambino, my name is Peter Clemente. I’m with the FBI. Yeah, I’d like to ask you a few questions if I could. [11:04]Gambino is pretty surprised because nobody’s ever done this to him. And he has a very, very hot-like face. He has these very beady eyes. My father has always described him in his book as having the eyes of an eagle, of a bird of prey. And he had this very, very distinctive, some people called it a banana nose. [11:29]But it was like the beak of an eagle or a bird of prey. And my father showing him his identification, his badge, his credentials, he looks up slowly from the credentials into his eyes. And my father could see this is not chopped liver. This is not a guy with a banana nose. You don’t mess around with this guy. Now, my father had a lot of experience in the Bureau at that time. Nothing dissuaded him from interviewing Gambino. This is something he wanted to do. He was an experienced agent at that time, early 30s. He knew what he was doing. Gambino immediately says to him, what is it you want from me? [12:15] First Encounter with Carlo Gambino [12:15]Well my father said well I’d like to ask you a few questions about an associate of yours that you’ve been doing business with and what happened with your associations with him and Gambino immediately says I can’t I forgot to mention this is important the whole time. [12:35]He was speaking Sicilian to Gambino the whole time. Good. That’s great. Yeah. And Gambino was not used to that in any way, shape, or form. And Gambino said, I see that you’re one of us. You speak Sicilian. You’re one of us. Why are you bothering me? What is it you want from me? He says, well, as I mentioned, I would like to ask you some questions about your association with your business partner. He said, well, I’ve got nothing to tell you. I’m an honest businessman. I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m an honest businessman. [13:13]And he actually told my father, you should be ashamed of yourself. You are a spiro, S-P-I-R-O, spiro in Italian. In Sicilian, that’s police spy, which is the worst thing you could be, a police spy. You are nothing but a spiro. You should be ashamed of yourself. My father has looked at him and said, my father is not somebody to be trifled with at all. He said, I should be offended? I should be offended. Well, sir, you are the one that should be offended. You have disgraced the Italian-American people of this country, the hardworking Italian-American people that have come over here honestly and legally, like my mother and my father. You have disgraced all of us with the illegal events that you have put yourself through and your crime family through. You’re the one that should be ashamed. A shame. Well, you know, did not like that at all. Says something about. [14:17]Not very nice in Italian that doesn’t mean I want you to come over and have, you know, a dinner with me. Something like, ma pan di me, F you. And it’s just, you know, he wheeled around. I’ve heard that. That’s right. We all know what it means. I don’t have to get explicit about it. He wheels around to his car. A couple of his bodyguards were in the car at the time. They opened the door. They’re looking at my father like they wish they could beat the hell out of my father. [14:47]Gambino drives off and that was the end of his face-to-face interview now here’s the interesting part about it why did he do this Gary? why? [14:59]Does he think that Gambino is going to arrest Gambino? What’s the reason for him having a face-to-face interview? Well I purposely left that out to explain that my father told me son there were two things there were two reasons why I wanted to have a face-to-face with him. Number one, I wanted to see if he was easily rattled or not. I wanted to profile him. I wanted to understand his personality, how he reacted to questions. Was he ruffled easily? Was he calm? How did he respond to my questions? And number two, the most important part was I wanted to hear his voice. [15:44]I said, why did you want to hear his voice, Dad? He says, well, if we ever recorded him, if we had him on tape and I listened to him, I could identify him. As the man behind the voice in whatever recordings that we had of him. So that was the purpose of that. [16:02] Undercover Wiretapping in Florida [16:02]Yeah, interesting. Yeah. And that kind of brings up the next story about the time that he did hear his voice over a wire, so to speak. It’s a great story. And I guess my first question with that is, it was down in Florida. So did your father get transferred to Florida or did he go down there because Gambino was down there? Well, the face-to-face meeting with Gambino wasn’t Brooklyn. That was in 1957 or 1958, to be exact about it. Two was when they had my father go down to the Golden Gate Motel. They called it a motel hotel. Yeah. And it was a very unassuming place. It wasn’t a fancy, fancy place. Gambino was the type of individual he did not like to attract attention, unlike John Gotti. He maintained a low profile. So he went to sort of a middle class hotel. Now, the Bureau knew that he was going to be there. My father knew he was going to be there. And they sent my father down from New York to Miami Beach, along with another agent. There was a local agent, and the two of them went to wiretap Gambino. Gambino had left his room at one point during his stay there. He was there for six weeks. [17:25]This was a six-week wiretapping event. And while Gambino had left the room at one point, he was there with his wife, Kate, too. The FBI sound team got into the room and placed wiretaps into, you remember what they were, Gary, they’re called A-blocks. The A-blocks were a small two-by-two block that were placed on the floorboards where the phone wires were connected. This is what they used back then. They had small microphones that they put in the A-block. There was one A-block that they did that with. [18:04]That’s how they picked up the sound. On the other side of the wall happened to be my father and another agent from the Miami office. And they were wiretapping with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, round and round and round, the conversations that Gambino had with his lieutenants and his associates that visited him during the course of six weeks. Wow, that was quite an early wiretap or early hidden microphone. And it sounded like it was hardwired, which is a lot better. The wireless just did not work very well back then. The hardwired worked a lot better. and they tied it into that phone line. So was he then, then they ran that directly into the hotel room next door. So they had a direct connection. And so they had real-time information, not record it and listen to it later. Is that what I hear you saying? [19:02]Exactly. That’s exactly true. Now there are some interesting, very interesting stories. Yeah, that’s my next question. Yeah. What was going on? Why was he down there? Was he down there to connect with somebody in Florida. And I don’t think we said exactly what city this motel was in. Was it Miami or was it Tampa? This is Miami Beach. Okay. So why was he down there? Why was Carlo down there? 62. Well, it was never revealed exactly why he was there. For six weeks, I’m sure the part of it was to to get away from the the colder weather in new york but this was in march this was in march of 1962 so it was colder up in new york many of the mob guys came down to came down to florida you know because now as you know gary miami was an open mob city it was not it did not have a mob family. The closest mob city was Tampa. It was Santos Traficante that ran the Tampa outfit there. But Miami was deemed to be an open city. You could not operate there unless you had permission from the powers that be. [20:17]With the commission and the Tampa guys to do business down there. There were a lot of mobsters that lived there, guys like Eddie Coco, Joe Bruno, so on and so forth. Many of them lived down there and had homes there. It was never determined exactly why Gambino was there, but it was to conduct mob business throughout his six weeks, to have some, to relax, enjoy the time with his wife there too, and to conduct business as well. Well, two of the guys that visited him mostly was Tommy Greco, a.k.a. Tommy Palmer, along with Jimmy Palmazano. Those were two of his lieutenants. And the interesting story was that one day, the three of them came back from being outside in Miami Beach, and they were being followed too closely, too closely by a couple of FBI agents with cameras. [21:17]They saw the cameras and they got a little bit too close to them they were taking pictures, Tommy Greco, Tommy Palmer and Jimmy Parmizzano were extremely they were infuriated they come back into the room I want you to envision this this is like a movie on one side of the wall you have these mobsters on the other side of the wall FBI agents listening to them they come back into the room and they’re furious and what do you think they’re talking about they’re talking about those SOPs out there the FBI guys my father’s listening to this the FBI guys those FBI guys were following us they’re taking pictures of us blah blah blah F words this and the FBI should die in hell and all their mothers should rot so on and so forth and Gambino was trying to calm them down a little bit. And long story short, while this is happening, one of them said, it was Tommy. Tommy said, you know, they could be anywhere. Down the street, they’re following. They could be in the next room for all we know. Cut to the other side of the wall. My father’s listening to this. He’s on the headphones. [22:33]And my father says to his partner, Frank, Frank, I think they’re on to us. They mentioned something about the FBI following them. My father said, why are they following? they’re blowing our cover my father was getting angry he’s telling Frank his partner they’re on to us and Frank is a little bit he’s very nervous about this he gets very nervous my father’s more calm about this Frank is a little more anxious about this and he hears that what are you talking about what are they saying my father has to listen to most of the conversation Gary because they speak Sicilian most of the time time. Frank doesn’t know Sicilian, so my father asked him to listen. He had to get out of the headphones most of the time. He says, they’re out to us. The FBI is out there following too close. Why are these idiots doing this? They’re blowing our cover. Frank eventually, over time. [23:37]He’s trying to convince my father, maybe we should cut this short. We should cut the feed. And we should cut the operation. My father said, no, we don’t need to be doing that. Because my father’s hearing on the other side of the wall, Tommy and Jimmy getting so upset, they’re moving furniture, trying to find a bug. Yeah. They’re looking in the lab. They were looking under the bed. All of a sudden, Tommy said, he picks up something, holds it up. He said, it was a used condom. He was all like, what’s the place? He said, don’t. [24:17]Carlo eventually calms him down. He’s a true leader. He starts telling them some funny stories. Calm down. Look, I don’t like it any more than you do, but they’ve got a job. We’ve got a job sort of attitude. So he calmed them down. [24:39]Eventually, everybody went back to New York. Gambino and his luteus go back to New York. My father goes back to New York as well, too, wraps up the operation. But that is more or less a lot of it in a nutshell. [25:00] Joe Valachi Interview [24:54]If you want to read more of the details, you can catch it in my book coming out soon. That sounds great. Sounds great. You know, one more thing, just a quick little story about his, the, the deal with Joe Valachi when they brought him in Joe Valachi spoke to say, and he was to say, and, and they, your father was going to be the guy that interviewed him. But what happened? Tell us one last little quick story about that, which will be in your book. What are your books? Also, I don’t know which one you’re going to have a series of books of these untold tales. So tell us that story. Well, when Valachi was ready to talk, sing like a bird, he was in the Atlanta penitentiary at that time. [25:40]Vito Genovese was his boss, the boss of his family. And for some reason, Vito felt that Joe was not being honorable and loyal to him. And Valachi was placed in Atlanta the Atlanta pen for drug related charges, Genovese was also in the pen at the same time Vito was, Joe was getting very very paranoid because he thought that Vito was going to whack him in prison to the point where Joe accidentally killed somebody else thinking that he was going to be the killer of him, so he kills this guy well he got nervous to the point after that, That he told the authorities that if they’re going to whack me, I might as well talk. I might as well sing. So they immediately got him out of there. They knew how important this was. They brought him up to Monmouth, New Jersey, which was an army base. Monmouth, New Jersey. They sequestered him there. [26:48]He was going to talk to the FBI, ready to sing like a bird. And they were going to have my father talk with him. And Joe was not trusting of the FBI at all and wasn’t trusting of any Sicilians at all in any way, shape, or form. He found out that my father was a Sicilian-speaking Asian, and I didn’t want to speak to any Sicilians. I didn’t trust them. I don’t want to talk. Maybe they’re going to have me whacked. So they had a nice Irish-sounding Asian named Jim Flynn. Lynn. Good night. They brought him in. And what happened, Gary, was they brought Jim in to speak with Valachi. He would, over the course of many days, would get information from him. Valachi would give Jim information about the mob, the hierarchy of the mob. [27:46]We didn’t understand a lot of that at the time. It wasn’t official, official. show. Yeah, we knew there was a boss and underboss and all of that, but, Here was the nuts and bolts of it. There’s a boss, there’s an underboss, there’s a conciliarity, an advisor, there were the lieutenants, the button men, all of that. We hear that from Valachi, which is important. He’s using Italian-sounding terms like capo regime, capo di decina. The head of regime, a lieutenant, he would bring these Italian terms back to Jim. Jim would bring it back to my father. My father would decipher and translate these things, write all of it down. And that’s how we more or less understood the hierarchy of the mafia, how we work in all the terms of what they meant as well, too. So it was a good working relationship between Jim Flynn and my father at that time. Really? Peter C. Clemente was a hugely important agent in that whole developing the top hoodlum squad and investigation of the five families, especially. I can’t even imagine how much he brought to that investigation. It’s just, he’s never really been recognized as much as he ought to be, I don’t think. Do you? [29:09]I agree. Joe Pistone, who portrayed himself as Donnie Brasco, he’s a true hero. Joe Pistone is, as well as my father. My father preceded him. So my father and the other agents at that time, not just my father, but many, many, many, many other agents at that time, laid the groundwork for eventually destroying the Mafia. Which really happened around 1980, 1989. This is after the chaos of Gadi. So the mob was really pretty much neutralized at that time. It was people like my father, people like Joper Stone, later on that laid the groundwork for destroying the mob. And we, you know, Gary, we don’t, I remember being young and receiving the information that my father had about the mafia, something called the mafia. [30:04] Legacy of Peter C. Clemente [30:05]And I understood it to be very dangerous. It was very dangerous. These were ruthless people. [30:14]We depict them as being romantic now. Because, you see, these Italians, these passionate Italians, they know how to tell a story and they’re very likable, but they were very, very, very ruthless people. You did not want to cross them. They would kill you in a heartbeat if you said or did the wrong things or crossed their paths in a way that you should not. So, yes, my father was a hero, definitely an American hero that should be learned about as a part of American history. Truly, truly, truly was. I admired men like that. I worked with some of them when I first went in the intelligence unit. And, you know, they just, wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have known anything. Think they were the ones that that built you know the knowledge base because they had no knowledge when your father started in the 60s in kansas city the local police had no knowledge didn’t pay attention the fbi had no knowledge about who these guys were just had rumors but had no knowledge so these guys got in and they built that knowledge base that then allowed the future investigations all the way up to the commission case in the end and and the family secrets in in Chicago, otherwise those cases had never happened. [31:33]Exactly, exactly. Well, you know, the FBI and the local police at that time were my father was a part of all of that. And you remember this too during your career. Those people at that time, Gary, they were salt of the earth people. My father’s generation was a part of the greatest generation. These were World War II guys. I met these agents. They were solid as a rock. They were people that you really, really enjoyed being around. Family, they were family men. They had good careers. [32:09]Wives, children. The 1950s, nothing was better at that time. Now, there are many stories I could tell you about the agents that did have problems. You know, they were human beings just like everybody else. There were people that were, as you know too, you’re working. Other law enforcement people, maybe they drank too much. Maybe they had problems with seeing too many women. That’s part and parcel of being human beings. But for the most part, the FBI and law enforcement back there, they were salt of the earth people, dedicated people. It has changed. We don’t want to get into too much of that right now. But I think you and I believe that much of it has changed. change as far as the integrity and the core values of what. [32:58]What what they have now as opposed to before yeah it’s just i don’t know it’s just different now i i don’t know it’s it is different for sure so gary clemente untold tales from the fbi top hoodlum squad i really appreciate you coming on the show and telling about your father peter c clemente who was you know no doubt an american hero and an unsung american hero but guys you get this book, you’re going to read about this unsung American hero and really the good solid basis for organized crime and why it was important to investigate them and the early guys, [33:39] Closing Remarks [33:37]the problems they had and the great exciting stories. You can make two or three movies out of all this. I think, Gary, you say you’ve been a screenwriter. Maybe we’ll get a screenplay out of some of these stories, your father. [33:49]There’s definitely some stories I could tell you. All right. Guys, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. And if you are out there on those streets, watch out for motorcycles. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to that VA website and get that hotline number. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, which goes along with PTSD many times, our friend, former Gambino soldier, Anthony Ruggiano, is a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida now. And he has a hotline on his website. So that’s, if you go into get rehab with Anthony Ruggiano, give me a call. I want, I’m going to put you on the show. Tell me all about it. You probably won’t, but anyhow, don’t forget like, and subscribe and keep coming back. Hit the podcast. Facebook group up. Got a lot of good people that put on stuff on that. A lot of good mob conversations and we’re on Facebook and the Apple app. Give me a review. So thanks a lot guys. And thanks a lot. Gary Clemente.

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Transcript [0:00] Introduction to Gangland Wire [0:00]Hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. You know, I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective turned podcaster. And this has been fun, guys. This is so much fun. And I’ve gotten to know some great people doing this over the last several years. And one of them is Michael Vecchione. Welcome, Michael. [0:22]Thank you very much, Gary. I appreciate you having me back on. I love talking to you and talking to your audience. You know, it’s interesting, like Michael and I kind of speak the same language in many ways, because he was a prosecutor in the Brooklyn. He was a, you were the chief of the Brooklyn Rackets division, correct? That’s, that’s correct. Yeah. I had before that I was chief of the Homicide Bureau as well. And so I kind of had my hand in, in almost everything that went on in the DA’s office when I was, when I was there. So it was a very interesting experience. I got to tell I can imagine, you know, Michael knows where all the bodies are buried in Brooklyn, political and really, you know, it’s interesting you say that because the guy we’re going to talk about the gas pipe castle, when I spoke to him, gave me some locations for bodies. And, but we’ll get into that when we, when I tell you the story. Really? Let’s talk just a little bit about Michael and his books. First of all, guys, we’ve got a self-talk Mary, you know, and, and you’ll be interested in these books. He was on here before with Luigi the Zip, Homicide is My Business, and that was a big seller, at least for me, and I think it was for Michael, too. And he interviewed this guy who was a Sicilian who did a bunch of hits here who just liked Michael, if I remember right. That was a great show, Michael. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was. Luigi was a character that I will never forget, I have to tell you. [1:49]Uh, I’ll have links to all these and to Amazon and the show notes guys at, we had crooked Brooklyn. We talked, I think we talked about that one and we had, uh, did we do murder on the bridge? I can’t remember what was, we did the one about, uh, people were getting killed in a hospital. [2:07]Oh, that was Behind the Murder Curtain. Oh, okay. Behind the Murder Curtain. Behind the Murder Curtain. Yeah. And Murder on the Bridge, it was a case that I did. And it’s actually part of the novel series that I’m now working on. I made it into a, I fictionalized it. But it started out as, it was a young woman who was walking the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn for exercise. And she was set upon one Sunday morning by a junkie who wound up killing her after she She didn’t have any money that he wanted money and she didn’t have any. He killed her and made it seem as if it was a sex crime and then went back later that night and burnt her body to beyond recognition. [2:47]So it was a very, very important case to the district attorney when I got it because it involved a community that had a lot of votes in it. You know, the Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn is huge. Huge and this young lady was the victim of this guy that that i called and if you don’t mind i could just tell you a little a little bit when i tried the case and i summed up the case was so horrific and what he did to this young woman that all was left on the on the bridge where she was found was a shoe and her bra clasp and and the only way that we identified her was through dental records. It was just horrific. [3:28]And when I summed up, I essentially told the jury that it was as if the devil [3:36] Fallen Angel Novel Series [3:33]had come to Brooklyn and committed this crime. And that gave me an idea, but later on in my life, and I’m in the midst of it now, of a crime novel series, which I call Fallen Angel. And the premise is that the devil does come to Brooklyn and he is behind and instigating horrific crimes that need to be taken to, the perpetrators need to be brought to justice. And the government forms this committee, this group, to concentrate on bringing the devil and his minions to justice. And they hire a prosecutor. And the prosecutor happens to be the retired district attorney, the head of the rackets division in the DA’s office. So the books of Fallen Angel, book one and two are now on Amazon. [4:25]And I’ve just turned in book three. It’ll be out in the fall. So I think that your listeners and your viewers will really like it, will really enjoy it. Because all of the cases, all of the crimes in the book that is part of a novel, but all of them actually happened. And I handled every single one of them when I was in a DA’s office. So that’s the spin. And it’s been very, very well received. I sold book one to Hollywood. And I’m hanging on now waiting to hear. year. We have a pilot written. And so anyway, that’s a little bit about what I’m doing at the moment and now talking to you. All right. And what we’re going to talk about is your other book that you did with a retired New York City detective, Tommy Dades, called Friends of the Family. Right, right. We’re going to not so much talk about the two, what we call mafia cops, I believe, Coppa and what was the other guy’s name? Eppolito. Eppolito, yeah. He was the one that was in and Goodfellas, I believe. Those were a couple of characters to us for sure. But we’re going to talk about Gaspipe Casso, who was their kind of control, would you say? [5:31]Well, yeah, he controlled them. He actually called them his crystal ball because when he needed information about informants or needed something taken care of by them going into the police computer and getting information, he had an intermediary who he would go to and that intermediary would go to the mafia cops and they would provide the information they’d give them the information about who was who the rats were who the informants were and and then on at least one occasion they actually did a murder on his behalf so so those two guys were were quite a quite a pair i mean it was and they’re both by by the way, now deceased. So we can talk about them. [6:15]Well, they were both in jail when they did get deceased, weren’t they? Yep. Yep. They did life. They got life in prison. They both died in jail. And it was, as my boss, the district attorney called it when we had our press conference, it was the most horrific case of corruption in the history of the New York City Police Department. And it was, it was. I would say in the history of the United States, it was It was the most horrific case of corruption by law enforcement, for sure. I don’t know any worse. Gas pipe was right in the center. But, you know, Gary, I got to tell you, before they went to work for gas pipe, they were working for someone in the Gambino family. Oh, really? And there was a falling out. The Gambinos did something to, I think it was the cousin of Eppolito. And when that happened, he said that he’s not going to do anything for them anymore. And gas pipe was looking for someone like them, somebody he could turn, someone he could lean on. And the intermediary that he went to was a guy named Bert Kaplan, who had been the intermediary between the mafia cops and the Gambinos. [7:21]And, and, and he talked gas pipe into getting these guys on board. And, and it was a marriage made in hell, not in heaven, in hell. So really, yeah. And, and which brings us to Anthony gas pipe, Casso, a, a bad, bad dude. It started out in the Lucchese family, spent his entire career in the Lucchese family. I can’t remember. I was, he, how high did he get? Of course he had his own. He was the under boss. Okay. He was a concierge. He was all the under boss. And, and at the time that he and his, and the boss guy by the name of Al D’Arco went out on the land because they got word through the mafia cops and through their network that, that gas pipe was, and, and D’Arco were on a list to be arrested. They took off. So, yeah, he was an underboss, but he was a vicious, vicious guy, so bad that the federal prosecutors, when they arrested him and turned him and he became a witness, they called him Lucifer. That’s how bad a guy he was. That was their nickname for him. Really? Yeah. The feds, of course, turn him because they’ve always got the big stick, but he reached out to you or you reached out to him. I’m not sure. Tell us about that. You ended up talking to him after he went, after he turned. [8:39] Need for Inside Information [8:39]So in the midst of the mafia cops, I knew we needed someone on the inside. We had some information, tangential information. Things were going along very well in the investigation. But I knew that if I was going to take the case to trial, and what we were concentrating on, Gary, was one murder that they were involved in. And I have to give you a little bit of the background as to why this particular guy was a target of gas pipes. [9:11]Back when Paul Castellano was the head of the Gambino family, Castellano replaced Carlo Gambino as the boss of the family. And as you probably know, because you know the history of these guys as well as I do and probably better, Castellano was assassinated on the street in front of a steak restaurant in Manhattan, orchestrated by John Gotti and Sammy Gravano. The whole point of the plot was for Gotti to take over and become the boss of the Gambino family. [9:49]So they did that. They set up the hit and Castellano was killed along with his driver, but it was an unsanctioned hit. It was not sanctioned by the other family bosses. And that kind of set off both Gas Pipe and Vincent the Chin Gigante, who was the head of the Genovese family. [10:14] Assassination Attempt on John Gotti [10:09]And they decided that John Gotti had to be killed because of what he did. So gas pipe recruits gas pipe knew that every sunday god he would go to a particular social club in brooklyn for whatever i guess to collect money to meet with people in the family that kind of thing and so he recruited a believe it or not a musician a musician a munitions expert a bomb expert that he knew who was in the army and was a bomb maker. And he was also a wise guy. [10:47]So the plan was for this bomb maker to make a bomb, sort of like an IED, a flat kind of bomb. And the plan was for the bomb maker to meet in this spot in Brooklyn on a Sunday morning. and he gas pipe was going to walk and did walk past the car. [11:10]That was going to be the car that they were going to blow up because Gotti arrived and left in a car. So he tells me the story about how he was walking down the street, paper bag with what looked to be groceries and Italian bread sticking out and things of that nature. Like, you know, Sunday morning and I’m shopping and that kind of thing. And as he gets to the car, he bends down and he puts the IED under the car. So now it’s all set. He takes off, goes around the corner and waits. The bomb maker who was going to set the bomb off is across a double side a double it was a two-way street so it was a long distance between where he was and where the car was so instead and he was going to set the bomb off with a um with a remote device so instead of doing it from across the street where his car was this moron takes his car makes a u-turn and pulls up next to the car where these two guys get in and one of them he believes is Gotti and the other is his driver, Frankie DiCicco. And he gets, pulls up next to the car, sets it off and blows the car up. Now the idiot was right next to it and his car was badly damaged. He takes off and as it turns out, Gotti was not in the car. Gotti did not go that day. It was someone else. [12:33]That sets off a chain of events. Gotti now finds out that Gas Pipe and Vincent de Chin, Giganti, were behind this plot to kill him. [12:45]And since Giganti was a little bit more protected than I guess he felt Gas Pipe was, his plot was to kill Gas Pipe in revenge for attempting to kill him. And the gas pipe one day is driving his car in Brooklyn, of course, stops at a light and a car pulls up next to him. Four guys are in the car. He looks over, doesn’t think anything of it, and all four of them open fire and shoot gas pipe and then take off. [13:16]Gas pipe doesn’t die. He’s injured. He’s injured very badly. He makes his way out of his car, crawls on the street to a Chinese restaurant that was right near the area, goes down to the basement of the Chinese restaurant and waits and calls someone to come and get him. And they get him, bring him to some doctor, and he gets taken care of. Now, gas pipe now makes it his life’s work to find out who those four guys were in that car and who was behind the assassination attempt. And he finds out. He finds out. How does he find out? Well, the mafia cops help him find out who it was who was in the car. [14:01] Mistaken Identity Hit [14:01]Now, one of the names was a guy named nicky guido in that car one of the people in the car gas pipe goes to the mafia cops they now he wants to find out where nicky guido lives because he’s not he doesn’t recognize the name doesn’t know it and epilito i’m sorry caracapa who was still who was working in i guess the organized crime section of major case squad in the nypd had access to all of this these records and he puts it the name nikki guido gives a kind of a description and an area where he thinks he came from and he comes up with a name comes up with an address and it’s in south brooklyn which would be where they thought that this guy lived and they tell gas pipe gas pipe arranges for this guy Nicky Guido to be hit and it’s Christmas morning and, Nicky Guido is out on the street in front of his house with his uncle showing off. [15:09]To his uncle his brand new car and a car comes up the block and stops while guido is in the car with his uncle and guido recognizes or sees that they have taken guns at it and now aiming to the car and he jumps on to his uncle to protect them they open fire and nikki guido is is killed saved his uncle. They take off. Turns out it was the wrong Nicky Guido. It wasn’t the guy who was in the car who shot at gas pipe. When the real Nicky Guido finds out what happened, he takes off and goes to California. He’s later found in California. So gas pipe, so that’s one mess. That was a miss. He still didn’t gab the names of all the others, although he ultimately gets That’s the mall. And he fought. One of the names is a guy by the name of Jimmy Heidel. Heidel was kind of a hanger on a guy that was a, an associate of the, of the Gambino family lived of course, and he lived in Staten Island, but he hung out in Brooklyn and gas pipe. [16:19]It was the order to the mafia cops, find this kid and find out what he knows, and ultimately, we’re going to kill him. So they find out where they go to his home, where he lived with his mother in Staten Island, the mafia cops. And they ring the bell, but before they get to the door, they see a guy who looks like Jimmy Heidel. It turns out it was his brother, Frankie Heidel. They accost them on the street. [16:52]And they say to Frankie, you’re coming with us, Frankie. He says, no, no, you’re looking for my brother. I’m not Jimmy, I’m Frankie. They say, okay, and they leave. They go to the mother now. I’m sorry, Frankie goes into his home and tells his mother what just happened. She goes out onto the street and they’re still sitting there. And she goes up to the car and confronts them. What are you doing what do you want with my kids that kind of thing and she sees both and they say it’s police business ma’am you know stay out of it we’re looking for so frankie had told him had told the the mafia cops where he thought his brother might be over in brooklyn and and they had a connection over there and they found out that he was in i think it was either a pool hall or bowling alley i forgot now what’s important about that is that years later mrs heidel first of all, she reports all of this stuff to the FBI, to the police, etc. [17:55] Hunt for Jimmy Heidel [17:50]Nothing happens after her son disappears, Jimmy. And what happened is Jimmy is in Brooklyn and they find out where he is. And I think, as I said before, I think it was a bowling alley. And he comes out of the bowling alley and they grab him, the two cops, and they tell him, come with us. [18:11]He doesn’t know what the hell is up. He just thinks that, you know, he’s being arrested. It’s another bullshit arrest on his part and gets in the car. They don’t drive to any precinct. They drive to a location in Brooklyn to a parking lot behind what used to be a Toys R Us, big Toys R Us store. [18:29]And there in that parking lot, they transfer him from there to gas pipes guys. And the gas pipes guys drive him to a house not that far away, down to the basement. Where gas pipe is waiting for him and gas pipe tortures tortures the the hell out of him, he gives up all of the names in the car who were in the car and then gas pipe kills him that’s what happens now i mrs heidel by the way never found out until later on where what happened to to jimmy And Frankie Heidel, her other son, was also murdered by a different group for a different reason. [19:18]And Tommy Dage, the detective who worked on the mafia cops case with me, was assigned to that homicide. And he got to know Mrs. Heidel. And the case broke for us when she decided, finally decided to tell Tommy about the visit in Staten Island by the mafia cops looking for her son. And so we were going to investigate, and we had enough, I believe, to at least open an investigation into the death of Jimmy Heidel. And that’s how we were going to go after the mafia cops, going after this murder case, which carried 25 to life, by the way, Gary, if I convicted him. So the investigation goes on, our investigation goes on, and I get to the point where I say to Tommy, we need somebody else. We need someone on the inside. [20:11]We knew Kaplan was involved, but Kaplan at that point wasn’t talking. He had turned down helping the feds, even though they offered him a deal. He was in jail, by the way, for narcotics violations. So I said, where are we going to go? So it dawned on me one day, I said, let me give it a shot. Maybe gas pipe will talk to me. So I reach out to his lawyer. And I find out the gas pipe is in Brooklyn of all places now in jail. He’s waiting to testify in a federal case, not for the prosecution, but for the defense. So I call the U S attorney’s office. And I speak to a U S attorney and say, listen, you guys have him here. You produce them in case he’s needed as a witness. I want to go talk to him, but the federal jail Dale won’t let a local prosecutor in. I need your okay to go in and do it. [21:06]I thought that this was a ground ball. Know what they told me? No, we’re not helping you. We’re not helping you. So I say, come on. And I’m working on him. And I’m working on him. In the meantime, I’m speaking to the lawyer. Because I’m thinking that ultimately I’m going to convince the feds to let me go in to see him. And I do convince the feds at some point to let me go in. So now I’m waiting for the lawyer to give me an answer. Is your guy going to talk to me? I told him I would give him a letter that he cooperated for whatever that was worth. The guy was doing 17 life sentences. [21:41]So the lawyer finally gets back to me and he says, my guy, I’ll let you talk [21:48] Immunity Request for Gaspipe [21:47]to my guy, but here’s what I want. I want immunity for the Jimmy Heidel murder. I said, well, it’s a state case. You’ve got the immunity. The guy’s doing 17 life sentences. I’m not going to go after him for Jimmy Heidel. I said, no problem. problem he goes well that’s not it not all i want the feds to give me immunity because they could fashion some kind of as he said bullshit charge for the jimmy i delving i said okay i’ll call the feds now i haven’t spoken to them about this yet uh you know about the immunity stuff yet until but they did say that they would have somebody go with me to the jail when i talked to him but of course gas pipe wouldn’t talk to me unless they gave him immunity once again gary they said to me No, we’re not giving him immunity. I said, are you going to really prosecute this guy? You’ve already got him for 17 lives. How much more time can the guy get? Gary, it was not that. That was not the reason. You know why they wouldn’t allow me to go in to talk to him or why they wouldn’t give me the deal? [22:51]Because he had written a letter after they convicted John Gotti. Gas Pipe had written a letter saying that Sammy Gravano, who was the main witness in the case, was a liar. Lied about this, lied about that. They were concerned that if they gave Gas Pipe a deal, that somehow his claims about Gravano lying in the Gotti case would be used by an attorney to try to overturn the Gotti conviction. Because they had convicted Gotti by that point. They said, no, they’re not giving me. And they didn’t. They were very hard and fast. So I go back to the lawyer and I tell him, I can give you the immunity in state court, but I can’t do what I can’t do. You know, I can’t give you a federal immunity because they are not willing to give it to us. Let me talk to him. You got nothing to lose. The answer was no. [23:47]So I never got to talk to gas pipe. Gas pipe would have been my witness with all the rest of the things I had in the Heidel case. [23:57]Anyway, to make a very, very long story short, the feds steal the case from [24:03] Frustrations with Federal Handling [24:01]us. They make a RICO case out of the whole thing. And it still sits. Every time I talk about it, my stomach starts to churn because the feds really, to use a Brooklyn term, really fucked me, Gary. They had no interest in allowing us to do this, to do this case, particularly when we made it and started it. After that, after the case sat for 10 years, the boxes with this case and it sat for 10 years in a federal courthouse or the U.S. attorney’s office never touched it. They never had any interest in doing it. In fact, when we started the case, they said to me, go ahead, knock yourself out. We don’t give a shit. It’s an old case. You know, you’re never going to make this. And then when we made it, when we started to make it, now suddenly, oh boy, now we can get this mafia cops business. And believe it or not, they took all the credit in the world for the case. Wound up convicting them. [24:57]The first time the case was set aside, by the way, because it was a bogus kind of theory that they used that was then reversed on appeal and the conviction stood. So Pointwood gas pipe was something that always bothered me. I didn’t understand why this guy who was so willing to talk to the feds when they turned them wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even have me visit. He didn’t have to commit to anything. Let me just talk to you and see if I can convince you. I couldn’t figure that out. I do get the answer and I get the answer from gas pipe and I’ll get to that. [25:36] FBI Agent on Colombo Payroll [25:33]So I go on, the feds steal the case, they go on, do it. And I begin a case involving an FBI agent, a retired FBI agent who was on the Colombo family payroll, who was providing information to the Colombos through a capo named Scarpa, Greg Scarpa. And Scarpa was providing the FBI agent with information about his fellow mafiosi. And it was a again a marriage made in hell quite frankly and so i’m involved in this investigation. [26:10]And part of the investigation involves i’m sorry a major part of the investigation involves greg scarpa who’s now dead at that time but his son gregory scarpa was alive and in, ad max in colorado he was doing life in not life he was doing something less than life but he was doing it in Colorado, the Ad Max in Florence, Colorado, the most secure prison in the United States. And I send word through his lawyer that we want to talk to him, tell him that I will give whatever letter they want in terms of cooperation. And his lawyer was very cooperative, a woman, a female lawyer, forgot her name. And I get a takeout order from the feds to take out Scarpa and Gregory Scarpa, bring him to New York and have him sit with us as we go through this investigation against this FBI agent, because he was intimately involved with everything his father did, everything. He knew the FBI agent, knew exactly what he had been doing, everything that we needed to make a case. So I brought him in and literally when he walked into my conference room, the first day the detectives had him and brought him in to me. [27:25]He said, I introduced myself and he says, he says, ah, hi, you’re Mike Vecchione. I said, yep. He said, before I forget, gas pipe wants you to go see him. He said, gas pipe? What’s going on? He said, gas pipe is my neighbor down in, he had to sell next to Gregory Scarpa in Ad Max. I said, really? What’s he want to talk to me about? He said, I don’t know. He just knew I was coming to see you. And he told me that when you’re done with me, he wants to see, he wants to see you. I said, okay. So I go, we, we do our case. We do the case involving the FBI agent and it’s over. and I make an appointment to go down to visit Gas Pipe. He gave me permission. His lawyer gave me permission. Very strange that the [28:23] Visiting Gas Pipe in Butner, North Carolina [28:19]lawyer would allow me at this point to go see him, but he did. He was in Butner, North Carolina in a prison hospital. [28:29]So two detectives and myself took a trip down to North Carolina. Minor, we go into the prison and the prison authorities had arranged for us to have a room alone. And the detective and myself and one of the correction officers were standing in the room and we’re waiting for another correction officer to bring gas pipe to the room. And then suddenly there he is. He walks in. Guys introduced themselves. And then I introduced myself and he goes, you don’t have to, I know who you are. He says to me, A lot of guys in here have your picture on dart boards that they’re throwing darts at because of what you’ve done. I said, what have I done? Done what? My job. He started to chuckle. You know, that’s. So I said to him, did you read the book? Meeting friends and family. He said, yeah, I did. I said, so? He goes, about 95, 96% accurate. He said, I’ll take it. So we bring him in and and i say okay so here we are what do you want to talk to me about. [29:35]So what he was interested in, Gary, was he was looking to find some way for us to go to the federal judge, a federal judge, and tell him how cooperative he was in solving old, unsolved homicides that he and the Lucchese’s were involved in. He was hoping that um you know that that somehow by miracle by miracle i said. [30:07]Anthony you’re doing 17 life sentences what is what am i going to do for you he goes you never know i i really would appreciate you doing it plus he says you know i’m i’ve been in here i i’m i’m having it was like he was trying to tell me that he had some kind of an epiphany you know His whole life has now changed and he wanted to help us. And I said, okay, well, I’ll hear what you have to say. I said, but first of all, you’re going to tell me about the mafia cops case. So we talk and he tells me about how he hooked up with them through Burt Kaplan, why he wanted them on his payroll, what they did for him. Everything that i knew gary he corroborated and told me was you know gave me the imprimatur so to speak the mafia imprimatur yeah that was that was that’s what happened so i asked him i said listen why is it that you didn’t tell me this when i wanted to talk to you years ago when we We were doing the case. He said, Mike, the way I found out that you wanted to talk to me was I read it in your book. [31:21]My lawyer never told me that you were looking to have me come in and talk to you in the DA’s office. He said, if I had known that, I would have been there. I would have gone. I would have come in and talked to you. It was like, I couldn’t go back. You know, the lawyer unfortunately has passed away and I couldn’t, I really couldn’t do anything to scream at the guy like, you son of a bitch. You know, how did you, how could you do that to me? And, but he said, yep. So I told, so he tells me the whole story and you know, Gary, I got to say that he was, we were pretty accurate. We were pretty, we were very accurate. He admitted to the screw up with, with Nikki Guido and, and told me all about Burt Kaplan, the guy that was his intermediary. He gave me the whole story and told me all about his life growing up and how he started with on the street, little street gang, and then ultimately wound up becoming, he wasn’t a Lucchese to begin with. I think he was in a Gambino family first. And then there was a swap, sort of like a baseball swap between him and someone else. There was a problem and wanted a Gambino’s with him. And so he moved over to the Lucchese family. And the one thing that I did find out is he mentioned how he was really upset. [32:43]By people calling him gas pipe. He hated that name. He hated it. And I found out. I said, well, how did you get it? Where did it come from? [32:54]He said, people tell me that my father, his father was a wise guy as well, was a collector, a guy who would go around collecting money that was owed to the wise guys. And he broke off one day, a guy was giving him a hard time, and he broke off the tailpipe of a car. And he beat the hell out of the guy with the tailpipe of the car. And his father was not called gas pipe. But when Anthony, his son, started to come up in the mafia world, they attributed, they He said, that’s so-and-so’s son, and they started to call him gas pipe. But he told me he hated it because I think that at some point, I was going to toss, call him that, gas or something of that nature. And it was like, no, you don’t call me that. My name is Anthony. And the other thing is that a lot of people call him Queso. They were always calling him Anthony Queso, cops in particular. He said, my name is Queso. so. So please call me by my correct name. And that’s what we did. So we spent, the first time we were there, we spent about two hours or more talking to him. And he gave me, he started out, told me what he wanted. He wanted my help. He wanted me to write a letter to the federal. [34:19]I don’t know, parole authority, federal judge, to somehow keep it on record that he had helped. And I said, okay, I have no problem doing that, but you got to tell me what you’re going to give me. I need something. I can’t just write a letter if you don’t give me anything. So he starts out by telling me about a particular murder that occurred, and he was the one who actually did it. And he gave me this information about what it was. And I got to tell you, Gary, Larry, I don’t remember exactly the facts of the case and it’s not important because what he, what he said, I said, okay, so where, first of all, it’s only you telling me this. I can’t put you on the stand and expect the jury to buy just you, what your background. I said, you got to give me something more. For instance, where’s the gun? What’d you do with the gun? He said, I’ll tell you. I dropped it into Sheepshead Bay. [35:09] Searching for the Gun in Sheepshead Bay [35:10]So are you familiar with what Sheepshead Bay is? Sheepshead Bay is a body of water that’s off the Atlantic Ocean in Southern Brooklyn. And it feeds, it’s a bay, a big one, and it has boats on it, pleasure boats, et cetera. And it feeds into the Atlantic. He said, I drove to Sheepshead Bay. He gave me the street. He gave me the spot. He said, I dropped the gun into Sheepshead Bay right there. I said, well, that will help. He said, if you get that gun, you can compare it to the bullets, et cetera, et cetera. I said, okay, I’ll do that. i said that’s one what’s what else you got so now he tells me about another hit that he does and i said so what’d you do with the body this time he says well we went down to carol gardens which is an area where i actually i was living at the time and and on this particular street he gave me the name of the street there was a sort of a little storefront kind of warehouse kind of thing and we dug up the floor, buried the body in the floor or in the wall. I don’t remember exactly. And then covered it up and that’s where the body is. I said, you think it’s still there? He says, yeah, nobody went to get it. Nobody even knows this, except I’m telling you. But that’s where I put the body. I said, okay. I said, you got other information? He gives me other information. Who else was involved? Where it happened? You know, that kind of stuff. [36:32]So anyway, I’m going to skip ahead. So we, when we went home, I took two detectives, it was very right near the office where this location was. And we go down to this spot onto the street and I look and I say, oh no, I said, this now was the storeroom for one of the best Italian restaurants on Court Street was the name of the street. It’s a very, very, very well-attended, well-liked, delicious food. In the back was their storeroom for where they would keep their supplies. [37:10]Mozzarella and tomato sauce and all this other stuff. We go in and we find the spot. We knew because he gave us that kind of details, the way the body was. It was completely renovated, completely bricked over. over everything. I said to the detective, we can’t take this apart. George, George Taro was his name. I said, George, what are we going to do? We’re going to go in this guy and ask the guy in the restaurant to allow us to, and you know how much it’s going to cost us to try to find this body? We’re never going to be able to find it. So we abandoned it. So what we did was we went to the NYPD and asked them if they would allow us to use the scuba team to go to Sheepshead Bay to search for the gun. At least maybe we can make a case with, make that case. Gary, three days of diving into Sheepshead Bay by the scuba team. [38:08]I mean, it was years, 10, 15 years. You know where that gun probably is down now in the middle of the earth, you know, it sinks in, they never, never found it. So I can tell you one other, one thing that kind of jogged my memory about breaking up the back of the restaurant, when they killed Jimmy Heidel, they killed him after gas pipe tortured him. He killed him in the basement of a home that was owned by one of the Lucchese soldiers. So we knew exactly where or what the home was. We knew exactly where they had done it in the basement. We found all of this information out. [38:57] Searching for Evidence in the Lucchese Soldier’s Home [38:49]And we sent, we said, I sent guys to the home now to see, we’re going to do this case. If we can find even remnants of blood down there, then it corroborates the story that we were getting from our, our informants, the witnesses that we had who were going to tell us all about this. So we get a search warrant for the house. Okay. Go down there, and we serve the search warrant on the owner. The owner now is no longer the Luke Hazy guy. It’s some family that owns the place now, but they said, sure, you can go down and look. It’s no problem, and if you need to, you can search around to do whatever you have to do. So I get a call. [39:36]Detective calls me and said, actually, it was Tommy Dates. Tommy says, Mike, this place is entirely mirrored. Whoever bought the house after or maybe before put mirrors up all around the walls of the house. The floor was all covered with brand new flooring. He said, we never are going to be able to find any blood here. But we took some samples of some things that looked like blood from the floor and from the wall. And the medical examiner took it. Never turned out to be enough to find out what we did. And then finally, at the end, when I spoke to Gaspar, at the end of the interview, I said to him, listen, before I leave, you’re going to tell me what you did with Jimmy Heidel’s body because Mrs. Heidel deserves to know. He says, yeah, no problem. She says, I’m cooperating. I’m cooperating. I’m no problem. So he tells me that after they killed Heidel, they needed to dump the body. In an area of South Brooklyn, it’s now called Georgetown, believe it or not, they were building this entire new development of homes, blocks and blocks of homes. And they were digging up the earth to get ready to lay down the foundation. [41:06]And they knew one of the bulldozer operators. Gas pipe tells me, yeah, we knew the guy. And we asked them, we bring the body. We asked them if he would allow us to bring it in there because he was going to, because suddenly he could bury it with the bulldozers. And then the next day, he said, the next day they were going to cement and build the foundation. So the body was dumped. Bulldozer dumped the dirt. Next day, this enormous housing development began to be built with the concrete, and that’s where Jimmy Heidel’s body is. Now, I told, we went home, and I told Mrs. Heidel, she was at least grateful for finding out where her son was. She’d never be able to find his body, but that’s where it was. And that was as a result of gas pipe telling me, you know, telling me what he did. [41:57]So we we did the investigation to the best we could and we we didn’t come up with anything with gas for gas pipe but we went back down to talk to him again and said told him what the result was and he started giving us other information it was another case involving a an informant and and it was he he it was very difficult gary to to to make cases based on just Just the shreds of information that he was giving us, you know, better than I do. You can’t make cases unless you start to get some concrete information. I remember this happened here and it was this guy. And we’re talking about cases that are 15, 16, 20 years old. There was no way that we were able to do it. So I told him, I promised him, I said, listen, I will, I will, if you want me to, I will send a letter to tell a judge and give it to your lawyer that you did cooperate. You did attempt to help us solve these unsolved cases, as many as we had. I forgot how many he ultimately gave us. [43:01]But I can’t promise you anything. I can’t go to the feds and say, you need to do something to help this guy. And I can’t make a case. Anthony, I just can’t make a case. So believe it or not, He kind of understood he was upset, but not to the point of, you know, giving me a hard time. He just said, I tried, you know, I tried. And, you know, it wasn’t that long after that. [43:27]A few years after that, that he ultimately passed away from, he, from, he had, he had prostate cancer and that’s what he ultimately passed away. But, um, it was a, it was two, there were two meetings chock full of information. I mean, getting the whole, uh, attempt on Gotti’s life, the whole story, um, about that. We actually sent detectives to the garage where the, the bomb maker had driven his car after he, after he did the bomb. There was gas pipe said, you know, that car was never moved. It might be still there. He couldn’t pinpoint the actual garage that they drew, drove it to, but we were, you know, at least I would have loved to have at least tried to make a case against the bomb maker because he was still alive and he, he just died now too. But at the time he was alive and I could have, I could have made a case against her and he, you know, it, it, but I never, we could never find the car. The problem was that his information was old and difficult to track down. But he opened up like a, you know, he sang like a canary. [44:38] Analyzing Gas Pipe’s Demeanor [44:39]I have to ask, Michael, about his demeanor. What was your impression, just your kind of gut impression of him, his aura, if you will? Yeah, he was very calm. [44:52]Very collected, very polite talk, you know, with the, with the very heavy Dick Brooklyn accent, but, but not a madman, not the madman that the feds used to call the, you know, the call Lucifer. Yeah. He was a guy that, you know, he had a story to tell and things to say, and he, you know, and he did. And his, his demeanor was, was very calm. And quite frankly, if you didn’t know what he was and who he was, you would say, yeah, Very polite, nice guy, you know, and with 30 plus, 35 murders under his belt, but maybe more. So, but that was it. That was, there was nothing overt about the guy as far as, you know, giving you a hint that who, of who he was. He seemed to settle in. He was settled into prison life and, and, and actually, I think he probably enjoyed the two hours that we were together, got him out of whatever he was. And, you know, it was, it was interesting, an interesting kind of a situation. So, yeah, they say guys will, will try to do anything when he’s out there in Ad Max in Florence, Colorado, which is bad. It’s a, it’s a lonely existence in order to get out and, you know, mingling around with other prisoners as you’re then transferred and then take his handcuffs off and go into a room and get a cup of coffee with people that are, you know, not, you know, just have a certain amount of freedom. [46:15] Communicating Through the Sink: Scarpa and Gas Pipe’s Connection [46:15]Absolutely. there’s one none i mean it’s an hour out it’s some other cell where you get to walk around you know yeah let me tell you one other thing and it’s interesting he was when he was a neighbor to to scarpa i asked both of them and i corroborate i asked scarpa and i corroborated it with with with gas pipe i said to scarpa how did you hey how did he tell you you know well do you are you because they don’t mingle they’re not because they’re both in segregation he goes you got to to understand he was next to me in the cell next to me and what we used to do was we would take a toilet paper roll when it was finished the paper was and you put it to the in the sink that is all the sinks are all connected and you blow out whatever water is in there and if you talk into the toilet paper roll and the other guy has his toilet paper roll and he has his ear to to his, he can understand what we’re, what we’re saying. He can, he can hear me. And I asked later on, I asked Casso the same thing. And he told me exactly the same story. He said, yeah, we talked through the sink. And, um, and that was, you know, that was, that was it. That’s how we, that’s how they would get messages to, to each other and discuss what’s going on and how things are. And that’s how we told him you’re going to see Vecchione. You got to tell him that he’s got to come back. So that’s my, that’s, that’s my, my, my adventures with, with gas pipe. [47:41] The Kansas City True Crime Writer Connection [47:41]You just never know what’s going to happen. I have a guy actually, he’s a true crime writer in Kansas city. He’s mainly, he’s, he’s got a full-time job as a park ranger out West, but he’s originally from Kansas city and wrote a book about Kansas city. And he was checking on some people who are camping illegally at one of the national [48:01] Gas Pipe’s Surprisingly Calm and Polite Demeanor [48:00]forest where he was working. And it was greg scarpa jr’s granddaughter i believe okay yeah yeah he’s got he has he has a bunch of granddaughters a bunch of grandkids i don’t know how many granddaughters he has yeah frank asker you know i said are you any kin to him because he’s he’s on my podcast group and listens to me and everything and yeah he stays up on this he said oh yeah that was my grandfather father i mean my my year with uh yeah i had scarpa with me for a year during the time that i needed him and what was working with him that was another whole interesting situation about him and and what is how his father treated him and things of that nature another for another podcast okay all right we’ll do that that would be it would be good you spent a lot of personal time with him oh yeah oh yeah that’s hard to find that kind of uh firsthand that’s why i ask you the aura of gas pipe castle So, because you look at his picture, his mugshot and he does look a little bit like the devil and that’s his tough guy. [49:01]No, make no bone. I make no, you know, I don’t say that he wasn’t, he was, he gave off the idea that he was polite, but you knew that you shouldn’t mess with him. That would be, that would be the way I would characterize it. Interesting. Yeah. It’s always interesting that these guys talk as if you and I are talking about golf or something and talking about killing people or hiding bodies and doing something with the body. It’s just like they’re, they’re distance personally, they’re distanced from that a little bit. They don’t really affect them. [49:30]Absolutely. Crazy. All right. Well, Michael, that’s your own. I really appreciate you coming on and telling this story and guys, don’t forget to look down in the show notes for links to his books. He’s got several of them and they’re good books. And if you didn’t read Luigi, the zip, that’s a, that’s a really interesting story. Unknown mob story of New York city. I think, you know, everything about New York city mafia, read that one. You’re going to find out a lot more and their relationship. To Sicilians already. Also, that’s another interesting thing is that relationship to Sicilians. I interviewed a guy from Sicily that was connected to the Bonanno family for a while. And he, it was right to me. It was interesting because he talked, he told the story of somebody that nobody knew anything about. He wasn’t really even that much of a criminal. He was a bookie and did a lot of things with them. And it’s just, you get this different idea about what, what that life inside that family is like day to day. And Luigi the Zip, he did that. Luigi was in it, boy. That’s for sure. [50:35]All right. Thank you, Gary. I really appreciate the time and thank you for the, for the ads, for my books. I really hope that your listeners and readers, I’m sorry. And your, your viewers will, will go to them. I think that they’ll, they’ll enjoy them. All right. Thank you, Michael. [50:54] Reflections on Michael Vecchione’s Contribution to Fighting Organized Crime [50:51]Have a good one. All right. Talk to you later. Well, guys, that was great. Great. I really like Michael Baccione. I really hope we’ll do some more with him and I hope he continues to do more and he has greatest success because he spent his time in the trenches in the Brooklyn Rackets Division. You know, you can imagine what that life was like. And he had some long, hard days as anybody that gets into this fight knows, because it’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you’re going to do anything to help prosecute or to prosecute organized crime or the mob because they’re out there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles. [51:27]I don’t investigate organized crime anymore. I just research it. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to that VA website. I’ve got, if you’re on YouTube, I’ve got the screen grab of the website on the screen. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, which goes hand in hand with PTSD, be sure and check out Anthony Ruggiano. He has his own website. He’s got a hotline number on that. And he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. So that would be cool. Have him be your drug and alcohol counselor. Don’t forget to like and subscribe, you know, punch that button down below. And if you’re on YouTube, so you’ll subscribe and you can subscribe on the Apple podcast app. Also give me a review. If you think about it, it’s hard to figure out how to do. I know that I love your comments on my YouTube channel, particularly. I really love your comments on that. I interact with a lot of people on that. Plus my gangland wire podcast, Facebook group, and it’s a private group. Now it’s got 60,000 people on it and we get a lot of great stuff on there a lot of great pictures a lot of good conversation from people who are in the know live the life or live in the neighborhoods of the life and if you can’t figure out how to get to it through facebook get hold of me and we’ll get you invited to it for sure you just got to be on facebook and like and subscribe like i said and don’t forget keep coming back i got a new podcast every week and quite often i’ll have a bonus episode in between. So thanks a lot guys.