Gangland Wire

In this special short episode of Gangland Wire, Gary Jenkins presents a wild and largely forgotten chapter from Bob Cooley’s life—the former Chicago Outfit fixer, gambler, and lawyer whose career straddled the worlds of organized crime, corruption, and courtroom drama. Fresh off a long-form interview with Cooley, Gary pulls out a standalone story that feels almost too strange to be true: Cooley's first real legal case, involving the infamous Chicago martial arts cult figure Count Dante, self-proclaimed “Deadliest Man Alive.” The episode revisits 1970s Chicago, when Count Dante ran multiple dojos across the city and cultivated a fearsome public image. A rivalry with a competing martial arts school—the Green Dragon Dojo—boiled over into violence when Dante and his followers stormed the school armed with medieval-style weapons. The confrontation ended with one man dead, and Dante charged with murder. At the time, Bob Cooley wasn't even officially a lawyer yet—he had just taken the bar exam and was still working as a Chicago police officer. Despite that, Count Dante tracked him down, hired him on the spot, and insisted Cooley would be his attorney. What followed was a surreal two-year relationship involving Chicago nightlife, the Playboy Club and Mansion, mob figures, bar fights, and mounting public attention. When the case finally went to trial, the courtroom devolved into chaos as rival martial artists from both sides reenacted the violence with shouting, threats, and theatrical testimony. The judge, fed up with the spectacle, dismissed the case outright—instantly launching Bob Cooley's reputation as a lawyer who had “beaten” a murder charge. Get Bob Cooley’s book When Corruption Was King. 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” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. [0:00] Hey guys, this is a little shorty, uh, part of the long interview I did with Bob Cooley, former Chicago outfit, mob fixer, lawyer, uh, general man about town gambler been in, uh, not in witness protection, but he has been off the radar for several years and in hiding. He recently came back and he got hold of me and he wanted to come on the podcast. And you know, I’ve done one story about him, part of his story. This is another part of his story that’s kind of separate from everything else. It’s about a guy by the name of Count Dante. Now, he was kind of well-known in Chicago at the time back in the 70s. You’ll see some images of him in the show. He liked Bob. He got hold of Bob, and he wanted him to defend him. And Bob wasn’t even out of law school yet, but he wanted him to defend him. He had got in an argument with something called the Green Dragon Dojo. He had a dojo, and he had a whole bunch of dojos around town. [1:04] And he was pretty successful, but he built himself as a deadliest man alive. And this other dojo, they said something bad about him or something. I don’t know exactly how it started. So he took a crew of his and went over to the Green Dragon Dojo and kicked in the front door and went in. they had a big battle and they had maces and spears and, and a huge big fight. And somebody ends up getting killed in this fight. So they charged the count with murder and end up going to trial. Uh, Bob’s got, he’ll talk a little bit about it and, and, and his relationship with the count. They became good friends and he did a lot of stuff with the count over two years. It’s, uh, he didn’t say a lot, but, uh, enough to let you know that he and the count were, were pals for a while. In the end, Bob defends him. He’s just out of law school. It was first case, really first client, I think maybe. And they go to trial and, and both the prosecution puts on all their. [2:03] Prosecution witnesses, which are people of this Green Dragon dojo. And then Bob puts on the count and some of his people. And by the time they get done screaming and yelling and almost replaying this whole fight in the courtroom, the judge is so fed up with the whole thing that he just dismisses the whole case. And of course, when the count, he goes around telling everybody how Bob Cooley helped him beat a murder case. And from then on, you know, that’s the start of his reputation as a lawyer so it’s a it’s a hell of a story i’ll tell you that right now it’s a it’s a heck of a story so i’m in the police station now i’m in in fact after that that’s when i got involved out there with all the mobsters and the rest of them in the 18th district when i wasn’t able to work i was i was working undercover out there with them because it was something to do and uh. [2:58] I’m in the police station. I get a call to come into the police station because I’m in law school. I had just taken the bar. I had just taken the bar, and I knew I passed it. I just did. I never had a problem with anything. I knew that it was just a matter of when I’d be practicing law. I get a call to come into the police station. And when I come in there, there was this silly looking guy with a cape, with one of those, a C-tooth mesh outfit with a cape on and using blue eyes and with what I call the Dante beard. And he says, you’re Bob Foley? Yeah. Yeah. He says, you know, can I talk to you? [3:46] Can I talk to you? And I said, he says, John Began told me that, you know, this is where you’re working now. He said, I’d like to talk to you. He said, I have a little problem. And we go upstairs. His little problem was it was front page news in the papers. And I didn’t notice it or realize it. He was involved. He was charged with murder because he had been involved in that situation up there at the Green Dragon. He had broken in there, and they had killed, and his friend Jim Concevic had gotten killed. But anyhow, he said, and I’m charged with murder. He says, and I want to hire you. I says, you want to hire me? I says, I’m not a lawyer yet. He says to me, I’ve been following you. I’ve been, he says, I’ve noticed, I’ve known who you were for a long time, he said, and I’ve really been anxious to maybe get to, you know, I didn’t know where you were or whatever happened to you, he said, but he said, he said, I knew you at Mount Carmel, he said, you were a wrestler, he said, I was a wrestler too, he said, I was a wrestler too, and I didn’t remember his name, because it was John Kean at the time, I didn’t, I didn’t remember him, you know, for anything. He says, I haven’t passed the bar yet. He says, but John, sure you are, and I’m sure you will. [5:16] And if you don’t pass the bar, I want you to find me somebody. He says, because John tells me, you know all kinds of people. You have a lot of connections, which I did. I had been friendly with a lot of judges and a lot of other people who had known me for a number of years as a policeman and whatever. And when I first started practicing, even before I started practicing, a lot of these were friends of mine at the time. But anyhow, he says, so he gives me $5,000, and he says, and he said to me, if you don’t, he said, I said, well, then here’s what you can do. I said, and he had one of the big-name lawyers in Chicago. I think his name was Conley. He was one of the top lawyers in the city. Just tell him, tell him, continue. You don’t want to, because the case was set for trial. It was supposed to go to trial in a couple of weeks. Oh, yeah. I says, tell him you want to get it continued. Yeah. No way. This is front page. This is front page. Newspaper. Yeah. [6:26] The deadliest man in the world. And it was, you know, when they broke into this place and constipated a spear put through him, the count had pulled the guy’s eye out or whatever. This is at this Green Dragon. It was like a Green Dragon. It was a restaurant. No, no, no. The Green Dragon was a school. It was a Kung Fu school. Oh. In the Kung Fu school, they teach you how to use weapons, maces and swords and daggers. The Count had a number of skulls, but they were skulls just to teach you how to fight with your hands and teach you how to do it, you know, not with weapons, just by your hands. They broke the count. [7:12] The place itself had like one of those real thick wooden doors. I don’t know how he did it, but he broke it off the hinges when he went in there, and he came in with like four people. There were four people and himself, Joey Casello, Konsevic, and I forgot the other two guys’ names. But they broke in there. When they broke in there, one of the guys came at the count with one of those maces, those big ball things that you throw around. And the count took his eye out. He blocked it, took his eye out. Wow. In Konsevic, they threw a spear through him. They first hit him with a, and they put a spear right through him. What was this all about? What was the deal? What had happened was the count, the count got a call from the guy, the guy who owned it. They were competitors. The count had all kinds of these schools. And the other guy from the other school, the count had about six schools all throughout the city. [8:17] The other guy that owned that called the count and called him a pussy. He called him because he was upset because a lot of his students were going to the count. And he calls up there and basically said, you’re nothing but a pussy or something like that. Whatever he said, I don’t know what it was. But the count told him, you motherfucker, I’ll see you. And with six of his guys he went over there and broke in the door during one of the classes, and that’s when this quick fight broke off but when Tonsavik got stabbed he ran about a block away and that’s when he fell over for dead, so anyhow so you got a continuance I assume you got a continuance so then what happened at trial was this one of your early fixes you got put in for this dude. [9:13] Well as i said i’m i’m not even practicing yet i just said i just get them i i had taken the bar already and the results were going to be coming out the results are going to be coming out real soon because it had been about maybe two months or three months since i had taken them and uh and i told them i said well i said if or he said let me too if you can’t if you don’t pass the bar I’d still like you to find me Find me a good lawyer or whatever Because I have, you know, John has all kinds of faith in you And I’ll have all kinds of faith in you, And I won’t. [9:53] And that same night, in fact, the same night, we go out together. He wants to go out. He wants to take me out to dinner over at the Playboy, and he wants to take me over into the mansion and take me to the mansion with him. And why not? You know, so anyhow, we go out that night, the very first night we go out and went to the Playboy Club itself. We had dinner, and we went over to the mansion, and he introduced me to Hugh Hefner and some of those people there. He tells me this is going to be my lawyer, he says, this is going to be my new lawyer. He’s a policeman in that district yeah, I’m there in 18 at the time I’m there in 18 at the time. They all probably thought he was crazy too a lot of people thought he was crazy when he indicated I’m continuing to make a case until I, until i get him but anyhow uh now during that same period he’s calling me all the time he wants to go out with me and and he’s going out we’re getting we’re getting into two or three different fights in different areas he was after you know i think he was looking to start fights with people, and and he’s telling the people now everybody uh. [11:15] I’m one of the toughest people he’s ever met. This is what he’s telling everybody. Here’s the deadliest man alive, and he’s telling these people that. Yeah, be careful what that guy would claim. [11:30] Including, you know, with all these people, with all these people that I’m involved with now, Marco D’Amico and Ricky Borelli and all these mobsters. And I took him one time over to the club and introduced him so he could say hello to these people. [11:53] What happened at trial? Yeah. Oh, I’m not guilty. Okay. It was about maybe about two weeks later when I got the results, I passed the bar. Yeah. Now the lawyers were going to be sworn in, and it was going to be two or three weeks afterwards. My father knew a judge in Springfield. And my father, we took a train ride down to Springfield, and I got sworn in the next day. The judge in Springfield swore me in. So now I’m a lawyer. Now I’m a lawyer. And so I go and I file my appearance right away. Right away on him. The same day, I quit the police department. I resigned. I resigned from the police department. In fact, I had already had four or five other cases already lined up before I even got on. before I even got off the job. And we went to trial. We went to public sites. Now we’ve got a new lawyer. [13:05] A new lawyer. Bob Cooley. Who the hell is he? I mean, a lot of people knew me in the court system because— But not like that. Well, not just—yeah, because I was involved in all kinds of trials. I had made all kinds of arrests, and I knew a lot of these people. Thanks a lot for listening and keep coming back. I keep putting something out all the time. Thanks guys.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, Gary Jenkins sits down with Bob Cooley, the once–well-connected Chicago lawyer who lived at the center of the city's most notorious corruption machine. After years out of the public eye, Cooley recently resurfaced to revisit his explosive memoir, When Corruption Was King—and this conversation offers a rare, firsthand look at how organized crime, politics, and the court system intersected in Chicago for decades. Cooley traces his journey from growing up in a police family to serving as a Chicago police officer and ultimately becoming a criminal defense attorney whose real job was quietly fixing cases for the Chicago Outfit. His deep understanding of the judicial system made him indispensable to mob-connected power brokers like Pat Marcy, a political fixer with direct access to judges, prosecutors, and court clerks. Inside the Chicago Corruption Machine Cooley explains how verdicts were bought, cases were steered, and justice was manipulated—what insiders called the “Chicago Method.” He describes his relationships with key figures in organized crime, including gambling bosses like Marco D'Amico and violent enforcers such as Harry Aleman and Tony Spilotro, painting a chilling picture of life inside a world where loyalty was enforced by fear.   As his role deepened, so did the psychological toll. Cooley recounts living under constant threat, including a contract placed on his life after he refused to betray a fellow associate—an event that forced him to confront the cost of the life he was leading. Turning Point: Becoming a Federal Witness The episode covers Cooley's pivotal decision in 1986 to cooperate with federal authorities, a move that helped dismantle powerful corruption networks through FBI Operation Gambat. Cooley breaks down how political connections—not just street-level violence—allowed the Outfit to operate with near-total impunity for so long.   Along the way, Cooley reflects on the moral reckoning that led him to turn on the system that had enriched and protected him, framing his story as one not just of crime and betrayal, but of reckoning and redemption. What Listeners Will Hear How Bob Cooley became the Outfit's go-to case fixer The role of Pat Marcy and political corruption in Chicago courts Firsthand stories involving Marco D'Amico, Harry Aleman, and Tony Spilotro The emotional and psychological strain of living among violent criminals The decision to cooperate and the impact of Operation Gambat Why Cooley believes Chicago's corruption endured for generations Why This Episode Matters Bob Cooley is one of the few people who saw the Chicago Outfit from inside the courtroom and the back rooms of power. His story reveals how deeply organized crime embedded itself into the institutions meant to uphold the law—and what it cost those who tried to escape it.   This episode sets the stage for a deeper follow-up conversation, where Gary and Cooley will continue unpacking the most dangerous and revealing moments of his life. Resources   Book: When Corruption Was King by Bob Cooley 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” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. 0:03 Prelude to Bob Cooley’s Story 1:57 Bob Cooley’s Background 5:24 The Chicago Outfit Connection 8:24 The Turning Point 15:20 The Rise of a Mob Lawyer 23:54 A Life of Crime and Consequences 26:03 The Incident at the Police Station 50:27 The Count and His Influence 1:19:51 The Murder of a Friend 1:35:26 Contracts and Betrayal 1:40:36 Conclusion and Future Stories Transcript [0:00] Well, hey guys, this is a little prelude to my next story. Bob Cooley was a Chicago lawyer and an outfit associate who had been in, who has been in hiding for many years. I contacted him about six or seven years ago when I first started a podcast, I was able to get a phone number on him and, and got him on the phone. He was, I think it was out in the desert in Las Vegas area at the time. And at the time he was trying to sell his book when corruption was king to a movie producer And he really didn’t want to overexpose himself, and they didn’t really want him to do anything. And eventually, COVID hit, and the movie production was canceled. And it was just all over. There were several movie productions were canceled during COVID, if I remember right. A couple people who I have interviewed and had a movie deal going. Well, Bob recently remembered me, and he contacted me. He just called me out of the clear blue, and he wanted to revive his book and his story. He’s been, you know, way out of the limelight for a long time. And so I thought, well, I always wanted to interview this guy because he’s got a real insider’s knowledge to Chicago Outfit, the one that very few people have. [1:08] You know, here’s what he knows about. And he provides valuable insight into the inner workings of the Outfit. And I don’t mean, you know, scheming up how to kill people and how to do robberies and burglars and all that. But the Chicago court system and Chicago politics, that’s a, that’s a, the, the mob, a mafia family can’t exist unless they have connections into the political system and especially the court system. Otherwise, what good are they? You know, I mean, they, they just take your money where they give you back. They can’t protect you from anybody. [1:42] So I need to give you a little more of the backstory before we go on to the actual interview with Bob, because he kind of rambles a little bit and goes off and comes back and drops [1:54] names that we don’t have time to go into explanation. So here’s a little bit of what he talked about. He went from being, as I said before, Chicago Outfit’s trusted fixer in the court system, and he eventually became the government star witness against them. He’s born, he’s about my age. He was born in 1943. He was an Irish-American police family and came from the Chicago South side. He was a cop himself for a short period of time, but he was going to law school while he was a policeman. And once he started practicing law, he moved right into criminal law and into first ward politics and the judicial world downtown. [2:36] And that’s where the outfit and the old democratic machine intersected. He was in a restaurant called Counselor’s Row, which was right down. Bob had an office downtown. Well, he’s inside that system, and he uses his insider’s knowledge to fix cases. Once an outfit started noticing him that he could fix a case if he wanted to, he immediately became connected to the first ward power broker and outfit political conduit, a guy named Pat Marcy. Pat Marcy knew all the judges He knew all the court clerks And all the police officers And Bob was getting to know him too During this time But Bob was a guy who was out in He was a lawyer And he was working inside the court system Marcy was just a downtown fixer. [3:22] But Bob got to where he could guarantee acquittals or light sentences for whoever came to him with the right amount of money, whether it be a mobster or a bookmaker or a juice loan guy or a crap politician, whoever it was, Bob could fix the case. [3:36] One of the main guys tied to his work he was kind of attached to a crew everybody’s owned by somebody he was attached to the Elmwood Park crew and Marco D’Amico who was under John DeFranco and I can’t remember who was before DeFranco, was kind of his boss and he was a gambling boss and Bob was a huge gambler I mean a huge gambler and Bob will help fix cases for some notorious people Really, one of the most important stories that we’ll go into in the second episode of this is Harry the Hook Aleman. And he also helped fix the case for Tony Spolatro and several others. He’s always paid him in cash. And he lived large. As you’ll see, he lived large. And he moved comfortably between mobsters and politicians and judges. And he was one of the insiders back in the 70s, 60s or 70s mainly. He was an insider. But by the 80s, he’s burned out. He’s disgusted with himself. He sees some things that he doesn’t like. They put a contract out on him once because he wouldn’t give somebody up as an informant, and he tipped one of his clients off that he was going to come out that he was an informant, and the guy was able to escape, I believe. Well, I have to go back and listen to my own story. [4:53] Finally in 1986 he walked unannounced they didn’t have a case on him and he walked unannounced in the U.S. Courthouse and offered himself up to take down this whole Pat Marcy and the whole mobster political clique in Chicago and he wore a wire for FBI an operation called Operation Gambat which is a gambling attorney because he was a huge gambler [5:17] huge huge gambler and they did a sweeping probe and indicted tons of people over this. So let’s go ahead and listen to Robert Cooley. [5:31] Uh, he, he, like I said, he’s a little bit rambling and a little bit hard to follow sometimes, but some of these names and, and, uh, and in the first episode, we’ll really talk about his history and, uh, where he came from and how he came up. He’ll mention somebody called the count and I’ll do that whole count story and a whole nother thing. So when he talks about the count, just disregard that it’ll be a short or something. And I got to tell that count story. It’s an interesting story. Uh, he, he gets involved with the only own, uh, association, uh, and, uh, and the, uh, Chinese Tong gang in, uh, Chicago and Chicago’s Chinatown. Uh, some of the other people he’ll talk about are Marco D’Amico, as I said, and D’Amico’s top aide, Rick Glantini, uh, another, uh, connected guy and worked for the city of Chicago is Robert Abinati. He was a truck driver. [6:25] He was also related to D’Amico and D’Amico’s cousin, former Chicago police officer Ricky Borelli. Those are some of the names that he’ll mention in this. So let’s settle back and listen to Bob Cooley. Hey, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in studio gangland wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. And, you know, we we deal with the mob here once a week, sometimes twice a week on the podcast. And I have a special guest that hadn’t been heard from for a while. And, you know, to be honest, guys, I’ve kind of gotten away from the outfit. I’ve been doing a lot of New York stuff and Springfield, Massachusetts and all around the country. And I kind of got away from Chicago. And we’re going back to Chicago today. And I’m honored that Bob Cooley got hold of me. Now, you may not know who Bob Cooley was, but Bob Cooley was a guy. He was a mob lawyer in Chicago, and he really probably, he heard him as much as anybody’s ever heard him, and he did it all of his own accord. He was more like an undercover agent that just wasn’t officially designated an FBI agent rather than an informant. But anyhow, welcome, Bob. [7:37] Hello. Nice meeting you. Nice to meet you. And I’ve talked to you before. And you were busy before a few years ago. And you were getting ready to make some movies and stuff. And then COVID hit and a lot of that fell through. And that happened to several people I’ve talked to. You got a lot in common with me. I was a Kansas City policeman. And I ended up becoming a lawyer after I left the police department. And you were a Chicago copper. And then you left the police department a little bit earlier than I did and became a lawyer. And, and Bob, you’re from a Chicago police family, if I remember right. Is that correct? Oh, police, absolute police background, the whole family. Yes. Yeah. Your grandfather, your grandfather was killed in the line of duty. Is that right? [8:25] Both of my grandfathers were killed in the line of duty. Wow. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I eventually did what I did. I was very, very close with my dad. Yeah, and your dad was a copper. [8:38] He was a policeman, yeah. And in fact, you use that term. I, for many, many years, wouldn’t use that word. It just aggravated me when people would use the word copper. To me, it would show disrespect. Oh, really? I said to us in Kansas City, that’s what we call each other, you know, among coppers. Oh, I know. I know. But I know. But, you know, I just, for whatever reason, one of the things that aggravated me the most, in fact, when I was being cross-examined by this piece of shit, Eddie Jensen, the one I wrote about in my book that was, you know, getting a lot of people killed and whatever. And he made some comment about my father. and I got furious and I had to, you know, my father was unbelievably honest as a policeman. [9:29] Everybody loved him because they didn’t have to share, uh, you know, but he was a detective. He had been written up many times in true and magazines and these magazines for making arrests. He was involved in the cartage detail. He was involved in all kinds of other things, but honest as the day is long. And, and, um, but, uh, again, the, uh, my father’s father was, uh, was a policeman and he was killed by a member of the Capone gang. And, uh, and when he was killed, after he was killed. [10:05] The, uh, well, after he got shot, he got shot during a robbery after he got shot, he was in the hospital for a while. And then he went, then he went back home. He went back home to his, uh, you know, to his house, uh, cause he had seven kids. He had a big family too. And, uh, stayed with his, you know, with his wife and, and, and eventually died. And when he died they had a very mediocre funeral for him. They had a bigger, much bigger funeral when Al Capone’s brother died. But during that time when I was a kid when I was about 13, 12, 13 years old, I worked among other places at a grocery store where I delivered to my grandmother. My grandmother lived in South Park which later became Mark Luther King Drive. She lived a very, very meager life because she basically had nothing. [11:09] What they gave them for the, at that time, what they gave them for the police department was a portion of the husband’s salary when they died, whatever. It was never a big deal like it is now, you know, like it is now when policemen get killed in the line of duty. and I’m thinking at the same time I’m thinking down the road, You know, about certain things from my past did come back to affect me. [11:38] Doing what I was doing, when I got involved, and I got involved absolutely with all these different people. My father hated these people. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t realize how much. I didn’t realize much when I was growing, you know, when I was growing up and whatever. And even when I was practicing law and when I opened up Pratt-Mose, I would have my father and mother come along with other people. And the place was all full of mobsters. I mean, we’re talking about, you know, a lot of Capone’s whole crew. A lot of the gunmen were still alive. In fact, the ones that ran the first award were all gunmen from Capone’s mob. And never said a word, never said a word about it. You know, he met my partner, Johnny Diaco, who was part of the mob, the senator, and whatever colitis could be. My dad, when my dad was dying. [12:38] When my dad was dying, he had what they didn’t call it, but it had to be Alzheimer’s because my dad was a unbelievably, he was a big, strong man, but he was never a fighter, sweet as could be to anybody and everybody. When he started getting bad, he started being mean to my mother and doing certain things. So we finally had to put him into a nursing home. When I went to see him in the nursing, and I had a close relationship with my dad because he saved my life many times when I was a kid. I was involved with stolen cars at school. I should have been thrown out of school. It was Mount Carmel, but he had been a Carmelite, almost a Carmelite priest. [13:25] And whatever, and that’s what kept me from being kicked out of school at Marquette when they were going to throw me out there because I was, again, involved in a lot of fights, and I also had an apartment that we had across the hall from the shorter hall where I was supposed to stay when I was a freshman, and we were throwing huge parties, and they wanted to throw me out of school. My dad came, my dad came and instead of throwing me out, they let me resign and whatever he had done so much, you know, for me. Yeah. [14:00] Now when I, when I meet, when I meet him up in the hospital, I, I came in the first time and it was about maybe 25 miles outside, you know, from where my office was downtown. And when I went in to see him, they had him strapped in a bed because apparently when he initially had two people in the room and when somebody would come in to try to talk to him and whatever, he would be nasty. And one time he punched one of the nurses who was, you know, because he was going in the bed and they wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t let him take him out. You know, I was furious and I had to go, I had to go through all that. And now, just before he died, it was about two or three days before he died, he didn’t recognize anybody except me. Didn’t recognize my mother. Didn’t recognize anybody. Yet when I would come into the room, son, that’s what he always called me, son, when I would come in. So he knew who I basically was. And he would even say, son, don’t let him do this to me when he had to go through or they took out something and he had to wear one. Of those, you know, those decatheters or whatever. Oh, yeah. [15:15] Just before he died, he said to me, he said, son, he said, those are the people that killed my father. He said, and his case was fixed. After, I had never known that. In fact, his father, Star, was there at 11th and State, and I would see it when everyone went in there. Star was up there on the board as if there’s a policeman or a policeman killed in the line of duty. When he told me that it really and I talked to my brother who knew all about all that that’s what happened, the gunman killed him on 22nd street when that happened the case went to trial and he was found not guilty apparently the case was fixed I tell you what talk about poetic justice there your grandson is now in that system of fixing cases. I can’t even imagine what you must have felt like when you learned that at that point in your life. Man, that would be a grief. That would be tough. That’s what eventually made me one day decide that I had to do something to put an end to all that was going on there. [16:25] I’m curious, what neighborhood did you grow up in? Neighborhood identity is pretty strong in Chicago. So what neighborhood do you claim? I grew up in the hood. First place I grew up, my first place when I was born, I was at 7428 South Vernon. Which is the south side, southeast side of the city. I was there until I was in sixth grade. That was St. Columbanus Parish. When I was in sixth grade, we had to move because that’s when they were doing all the blockbusting there in Chicago. That’s when the blacks were coming in. And when the blacks were coming in, and I truly recall, We’ve talked about this many times elsewhere. I remember knocking on the door and ringing the doorbell all hours of the day and night. A black family just moved in down the street. You’ve got to sell now. If you don’t, the values will all go down. And we would not move. My father’s philosophy, we wouldn’t move until somebody got killed in the area. Because he couldn’t afford it. He had nine kids. he’s an honest policeman making less than $5,000 a year. [17:45] Working two, three jobs so we could all survive when he finished up, When he finished up with, when we finally moved, we finally moved, he went to 7646 South Langley. That was, again, further south, further south, and the area was all white at that time. [18:09] We were there for like four years, and about maybe two or three years, and then the blacks started moving in again. The first one moved in, and it was the same pattern all over again. Yeah, same story in Kansas City and every other major city in the United States. They did that blockbusting and those real estate developers. Oh, yeah, blockbusters. They would call and tell you that the values wouldn’t go down. When I was 20, I joined the police department. Okay. That’s who paid my way through college and law school. All right. I joined the police department, and I became a policeman when I was 20. [18:49] As soon as I could. My father was in recruit processing and I became a policeman. During the riots, I had an excuse not to go. They thought I was working. I was in the bar meeting my pals before I went to work. That’s why I couldn’t go to school at that time. But anyhow, I took some time off. I took some time off to, you know, to study, uh, because, you know, I had all C’s in one D in my first, in my first semester. And if you didn’t have a B, if you didn’t have a C average, you couldn’t, you kicked out of school at the end of a quarter. This is law school. You’re going to law school while you’re still an active policeman. Oh yeah, sure. That’s okay. So you work full time and went to law school. You worked full-time and went to law school at the same time. When I was 20, I joined the police department. Okay. That’s who paid my way through college and law school. All right. I joined the police department, and I became a policeman when I was 20, as soon as I could. My father was in recruit processing, and I became a policeman. Yeah, yeah. But anyhow, I went to confession that night. [20:10] And when I went to confession, there was a girl, one of the few white people in the neighborhood, there was a girl who had gone before me into the confessional. And I knew the priest. I knew him because I used to go gambling with him. I knew the priest there at St. Felicis who heard the confessions. And this is the first time I had gone to confession with him even though I knew him. [20:36] And I wanted to get some help from the big guy upstairs. And anyhow, when I leave, I leave about maybe 10 minutes later, and she had been saying her grace, you know, when I left. And when I walked out, I saw she was right across the street from my house, and there’s an alley right there. And she was a bit away from it, and there were about maybe 13, 14, 15 kids. when I say kids, they were anywhere from the age of probably about 15, 16 to about 18, 19. And they’re dragging her. They’re trying to drag her into the alley. And when I see that, when I see that, I head over there. When I get over there, I have my gun out. I have the gun out. And, you know, what the hell is going on? And, you know, and I told her, I told her her car was parked over there. I told her, you know, get out of here. And I’ve got my gun. I’ve got my gun in my hand. And I don’t know what I’m going to do now in terms of doing anything because I’m not going to shoot them. They’re standing there looking at me. And after a little while, I hear sirens going on. [22:00] The Barton family lived across the street in an apartment building, and they saw what was going on. They saw me out there. It was about probably about seven o’clock at night. It was early at night and they put a call in 10-1 and call in 10-1. Assist the officer. Is that a assist the officer? It’s 1031. Police been in trouble. Yeah. And the squad’s from everywhere. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So you can hear, you can hear them coming. And now one of them says to me, and I know they’re pretty close. One of them says to me, you know, put away your gun and we’ll see how tough you are. And I did. [22:42] Because you know they’re close. And I’m busy fighting with a couple of them. And they start running and I grab onto two of them. I’m holding onto them. I could only hold two. I couldn’t hold anymore. And the next thing I know, I wake up in the hospital about four days later. Wow. What had happened was they pushed me. Somebody, there was another one behind who pushed me right in front of a squad car coming down the street. Oh, shit. Yeah, man. And the car ran completely over me. They pulled me off from under the, just under the back wheels, I was told were right next to, were onto me, blood all over the place. Everybody thought I was dead. Right. Because my brothers, my one brother who was a police kid that, you know, heard all the noise and the family came in. I tried to prostrate my house and they all thought I was dead. But anyhow, I wake up in the hospital about three days later. When I wake up in the hospital, I’m like. [23:54] Every bone of my body was broken. I’m up there like a mummy. And the mayor came to see me. All kinds of people came to see me. They made me into an even bigger star in my neighborhood. The Count lives down the street and is seeing all this stuff about me and whatever. Jumping quickly to another thing, which got me furious. Willie Grimes was the cop that was driving this quad. He was a racist. We had some blacks in the job. He was a total racist. When my brother and when some others were doing their best to try to find these people, he was protecting them. Some of them, if they caught, he was protecting them. [24:48] I was off the job for like nine months when I came back to work. I never came to the hospital to see me. I mean, everybody came. Every day, my hospital went. Because one of the nurses that I was dating, in fact, she was one of those killed. That’s when Richard Speck wound up killing her and some of the others at the same time. It was at the South Chicago Hospital. Holy darn. What they did for me, I had buckets in my womb with ice. We were bringing beer and pizzas and whatever. Every day was like a party in there. When I finally came back to work, it was 11 o’clock at night. I worked out in South Chicago, and I’m sitting in the parking lot, and the media is there. The media, they had all kinds of cameras there. Robert Cooley’s coming back to work after like nine months. They wouldn’t let me go back. [25:51] I’m walking by the squads. And Willie was a big guy. He was probably about 220, a big one of these big muscle builders and all that nonsense. [26:04] He’s sitting in the first car. The cars are all lined up because when we would change, when we would change at like 11 30 uh you know the cars would all be waiting we jumped into the cars and off we go as i’m walking by the car i hear aren’t you afraid to walk in front of my car. [26:26] I look over and he had a distinctive voice i walk over to the car and i reach in and i start punching them, and I’m trying to drag them out of the car. The cameras, the cameras are, you know, they’re all basically inside. They’re all inside. You know, as you walk in there, they’re all inside there. When I do, I eventually walk up there. But the other police came, and they dragged me. They dragged me away, and they brought me in, and whatever. We got transferred out the next day out of the district. And the first policeman I meet is Rick, Rick Dorelli, who’s connected with, who’s a monster. He’s connected with them. And, and he’s the one who told me, he said to me, you know, we played cards and he realized I was a gambler, but I had never dealt with bookmakers. And he said, he says, yeah, you want to make some money? You want to make some easy money? Well, yeah, sure. You know, uh, you know, and thinking that’s, you know, working security or something like that, like I had done back in Chicago, you know, like I had done on the south side. And he said, I want you to make some bets for me with somebody who said. [27:43] And I remember him using the term. He said, I want you to be my face. He said, and I want you to make some bets for me. He said, and he said, and if you, if you’ll do it, I’ll give you a hundred dollars a week just to make the bets for me. And then, you know, and then meet with these people and pay these people off. And I said, sure. You know, I said, you know, why? He says, because I can’t play with these. people he said i’m connected with him he said and i’m not allowed to gamble myself he said but he told me he said i’ve got a couple people i take bets from i’ve got my own side deal going so i want you to do it i want you to do it and i’ll give i’ll give you to them as a customer, and you’re gonna be a customer and he’s and he tells people now that i got this other police He’s in law school. He comes from a real wealthy family, and he’s looking for a place to bet. He’s in Gambia. He’s looking for a place to bet. [28:47] So I call this number, and I talk to this guy. He gives me a number. When you bet, you call, and you do this, and you do that. And I’m going to get $100 at the end of the week. Now, I’m making $5,200 a year, and they’re taking money out of my chest. I’m going to double my salary. I’m going to double my salary immediately. Why wouldn’t you do it? That’s fantastic money at the time. So I start doing it. And the first week I’m doing it, it was baseball season. [29:19] And I’m making these bets. He’s betting $500 a game on a number of games. And he’s winning some, he’s losing some. But now, when I’m checking my numbers with the guy there, he owes, at the end of the week, he owes $3,500. [29:38] And now, it’s getting bigger and bigger, he’s losing. I’m getting worried. What have I got myself into? Yeah, because it’s not him losing, it’s you losing to the bookie. That’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking, holy, holy, Christopher, I’m thinking. But, you know, I’ve already jumped off the building. So anyhow. I’d be thinking, you better come up with a jack, dude. It’s time to pay up, man. Anyhow, so when I come to work the next day, I’m supposed to meet this guy at one of the clubs out there in the western suburbs. [30:21] I’m supposed to meet the bookmaker out there. And Ricky meets me that morning, and he gives me the money. It’s like $3,400, and here’s $100 for you. Bingo. That’s great. So, okay. When I go to make the payment to him, it’s a nightclub, and I got some money in my pocket. Somebody, one of the guys, some guy walks up. I’m sitting at the bar and, you know, I hear you’re a copper. I said, pardon me? He says, I hear you’re a copper. He was a big guy. Yeah. I hear you’re a copper. Because at that time, I still only weighed maybe like, well, maybe 60, 65 pounds. I mean, I was in fantastic shape, but I wasn’t real big. And I said, I’m a policeman. I don’t like policemen. I said, go fuck yourself. or something like that. And before he could do anything, I labeled him. That was my first of about a half a dozen fights in those different bars out there. [31:32] And the fights only lasted a few minutes because I would knock the person down. And if the person was real big, at times I’d get on top and just keep pounding before they could do anything. So I started with a reputation with those people at that time now as I’m, going through my world with these people oh no let’s stay with that one area now after the second week he loses again, this time not as much but he loses again and I’m thinking wow, He’s betting, and I’m contacted by a couple of people there. Yeah. Because these are all bookmakers there, and they see me paying off. So I’m going to be, listen, if you want another place to play, and I say, well, yeah. So my thought is, with baseball, it’s a game where you’re laying a price, laying 160, laying 170, laying 180. So if you lose $500, if you lose, you pay $850, and if you win, you only get $500. [32:52] I’ve got a couple of people now, and they’ve got different lines. And what I can do now is I check with their lines. I check with Ricky’s guy and see what his line is. And I start moving his money elsewhere where I’ve got a 30, 40, sometimes 50 cent difference in the price. So I’d set it up where no matter what, I’m going to make some money, No matter what happens, I’ll make some money. But what I’m also doing is I’m making my own bets in there that will be covered. And as I start early winning, maybe for that week I win maybe $1,000, $1,500. And then as I meet other people and I’m making payments, within about four or five months, I’ve got 10 different bookmakers I’m dealing with. Who I’m dealing with. And it’s become like a business. I’m getting all the business from him, 500 a game, whatever. And I’ve got other people that are betting, you know, are betting big, who are betting through me. And I’m making all kinds of money at that time. [34:14] But anyhow, now I mentioned a number of people, A number of people are, I’ve been with a number of people that got killed after dinner. One of the first ones was Tony Borsellino, a bookmaker. Tony was connected with the Northside people, with DeVarco, the one they called DeVarco. And we had gone to a we had gone to a I knew he was a hit man, we had gone to a basketball game over at DePaul because he had become a good friend of mine he liked hanging with me, because I was because at that time now I’m representing the main madams in Chicago too and they loved being around me they liked going wherever I was going to go so I always had all kinds of We left the ladies around. And we went to the basketball game. Afterwards, we went to a restaurant, a steakhouse on Chicago Avenue. [35:26] Gee, why can’t I think of a name right now? We went to a steakhouse, and we had dinner. And when we finished up, it came over there. And when we finished up, I’d been there probably half a dozen times with him. And he was there with his girlfriend. We had dinner and about, I’d say it was maybe 10, 30, 11 o’clock, he says, you know, Bob, can you do me a favor? What’s that? Can you drop her off? He said, I have to go meet some friends. I have to go meet some friends of ours. And, you know, okay, sure, Tony, not a problem. And, you know, I took her home. [36:09] The next day I wake up, Tony Barcellino was found dead. They killed him. He was found with some bullets in the back of his head. They killed him. Holy Christopher. And that’s my first—I found that I had been killed before that. But, you know, wow, that was—, prior to that, when I was betting, there was i paid off a bookmaker a guy named uh ritten shirt, rittenger yeah john rittenger yeah yeah yeah he was a personal friend yeah was he a personal friend of yours yeah they offed him too well i in fact i he i was paying him i met him to pay him I owed him around $4,500, and I met him at Greco’s at my restaurant he wanted to meet me out there because he wanted to talk to me about something else he had a problem some kind of a problem I can’t remember what that was. [37:19] But he wanted to meet me at the restaurant so I met him at Greco’s, And I paid him the money. We talked for a while. And then he says, you know, I got to go. I got to go meet somebody. I got to go meet somebody else. I got to go straight now with somebody else. And he said, I’ll give you a call. He said, I’ll give you a call later. He said, because, you know, I want to talk to you about a problem that I have. He says, I want to talk to you about a problem that I have. I said, okay, sure. He goes to a pizza place. Up there in the Taylor Street area. That’s where he met Butchie and Harry. In fact, at the time, I knew both of them. Yeah, guys, that’s Butch Petrucelli and Harry Alem and a couple of really well-known mob outfit hitmen. Yeah, and they’re the ones that kill them. I’m thinking afterwards, I mean, But, you know, I wish I hadn’t, I wish I hadn’t, you know, I wish I could save him. I just gave him. Man, you’re cold, man. [38:34] You could have walked with that money. That’s what I’m saying. So now, another situation. Let me cut in here a minute, guys. As I remember this Reitlinger hit, Joe Ferriola was a crew boss, and he was trying to line up all the bookies, as he called it. He wanted to line them up like Al Capone lined up all the speaks, that all the bookies had to fall in line and kick something into the outfit, and Reitlinger wouldn’t do it. He refused to do it no matter. They kept coming to him and asking him his way. I understand that. Is that what you remember? I knew him very well. Yeah. He was not the boss. Oh, the Ferriola? Yeah, he wasn’t the boss, but he was kind of the, he had a crew. He was the boss of the Cicero crew. Right. I saw Joe all the time at the racetrack. In fact, I’m the one who, I’m the one, by the time when I started wearing a wire, I was bringing undercover agents over. I was responsible for all that family secret stuff that happened down the road. Oh, really? You set the stage for all that? I’m the one who put them all in jail. All of them. [39:52] So anyhow, we’re kind of getting ahead of ourselves. Reitlinger’s been killed. Joe Borelli or Ricky Borelli’s been killed. These guys are dropping around you, and you’re getting drawn into it deeper and deeper, it sounds to me like. Now, is this when you – what happens? How do you get drawn into this Chicago outfit even more and more as a bookie? Were you kicking up, too? Well, it started, it started, so many things happened that it just fell into place. It started, like I say, with building a reputation like I had. But the final situation in terms of with all the mobsters thinking that I’m not just a tough guy, I’m a bad guy. [40:35] When I get a call, when Joey Cosella, Joey Cosella was a big, tough Italian kid. And he was involved heavily in bookmaking, and we became real close friends. Joey and I became real close friends. He raised Dobermans, and he’s the one who had the lion over at the car dealership. I get a call from Joey. He says, you’ve got to come over. I said, what’s up? He says, some guys came in, and they’re going to kill the count. They want to kill the count. And I said, And I said, what? This is before the Pewter thing. I said, what do you mean? And so I drive over there, and he says, Sammy Annarino and Pete Cucci. And Pete Cucci came in here, and they came in with shotguns, and they were going to kill them. I said, this was Chicago at the time. It’s hard to believe, but this was Chicago. And I said, who are they? I didn’t know who they were. I said, who are they? I mean, I didn’t know them by name. It turns out I did know them, but I didn’t know them by name. They were people that were always in Greco’s, and everybody in Greco knew me because I’m the owner. [41:49] But anyhow, so I get a hold of Marco, and I said, Marco, and I told him what happened. I said, these guys, a couple of guys come in there looking for the talent. That are going to kill him because apparently he extorted somebody out of his business. And I said, who were they with? And he said, they were with Jimmy the bomber. They were with Jimmy Couture. [42:15] I said, oh, they’re for legit then? I said, yeah. I said, can you call? I said, call Jimmy. I knew who he was. He was at the restaurant all the time. He was at Threatfuls all the time with a lot of these other people. And I met him, but I had no interest in him. He didn’t seem like a very friendly sort of anyone. I could care less about him. I represented a lot of guys that worked for him, that were involved with problems, but never really had a conversation with him other than I. [42:53] I’m the owner. So I met with him. I wrote about that in the book. I met with them and got that straightened out where the count’s going to pay $25,000 and you’ll get a contract to the… He ripped off some guy out of a parlor, one of those massage parlors, not massage parlor, but one of those adult bookstores that were big money deals. Oh, yeah. So when I go to meet these guys, I’m told, go meet them and straighten this thing out. So I took Colin with me over to a motel right down the street from the racetrack, right down from the racetrack, and I met with him. I met with Pete Gucci. He was the boss of, you know, this sort of loop. When I get finished talking with him, I come back, and here’s the count and Sammy, and Sammy’s picking a fork with his finger and saying, you know, I rip out eyes with these. [43:56] And the count says, I rip out eyes with these. And I said, what the fuck is going on here? I said, Pete, I said, you know, get him the fuck out of here. And you all at the count said, what’s the matter with you? You know, these guys are going to kill him. And now the moment I get involved in it, he knows he’s not going to have a problem. You know, he’s pulling this nonsense. [44:23] So anyhow, this is how I meet Pete Gucci and Sammy Annarino. After a while, I stopped hanging around with the count because he was starting to go off the deep end. Yeah. Yeah. [44:39] And we were at a party, a bear party with, I remember Willie Holman was there, and they were mostly black, the black guys up there on the south side. And I had just met this girl a day or two before, and the count says, you know, let’s go up to a party, a bear’s party up there on Lakeshore Drive. If we go up there, we go to this party, it’s going to be about maybe 35, 40 people in there, one or two whites, other than the players. And other than that, we’re the only white people there. When we walk into the place, there’s a couple of guys out there with shotguns. It was in a motel. And you walk through like an area where you go in there, and there’s a couple of guys standing there with shotguns. We go in and we go upstairs and, hey, how are you? And we’re talking with people. And I go in one room. I’m in one room. [45:45] There were two rooms there. I’m in one room with a bunch of people and, you know, just talking and having a good old time. And the count was in the second room. And I hear Spade. He always called me Spade. Spade, Spade, you know. And I go in there, and he’s talking with Willie Holman. I remember it was one of them. He was the tackle, I think, with the Bears and a couple of others. And this whole room, all these black guys. And he goes, that’s Spade Cooley. He says, him and I will take on every one of you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we’re in a room, and he goes, that’s what he says. You know, him and I will take it on every one of you. And Willie did that. He calmed down. He’s telling him, calmed down. What the fuck? It was about a week or so after this. And because I had been out with the county, he’s calling me two or three times a week to go out. And we’re going, a lot of times it was these areas in the south side with a lot of blood. He liked being around Blacks. [47:00] That’s when I met Gail Sayers, and I met some of these others through him. But a lot of the parties and stuff were in the South Side out there, mostly Blacks and all. But we had gone someplace for dinner, and we’re heading back home. We’re heading back to my place, and we’re in his car. He had a brown Cadillac convertible. On the side of it, it had these, you know, the Count Dante press. And he always ran around. He ran around most of the time in these goofy, you know, these goofy outfits with capes and things like that. I’m driving and when we’re talking and I’m like distracted looking at him. And I’m waiting at a stoplight over there right off of Chicago Avenue. And as we’re there. [47:48] I barely touched the car in front of us, you know, as I’m drifting a little bit and barely touch it. There were four guys in the car and, you know, and the one guy jumps out first, one guy jumps out first and then second one, and they start screaming. And when the count gets out, the guy starts calling you, you faggot or something like that, you know, whatever. And as the other one gets out, I get out of the car. And the next thing I know, they jump back in the car, and they run through a red light, and they disappear. Somebody must have recognized them. One of the other people there must have realized who this is that they’re about to get into a little battle with. In fact, they ran the red light. They just ran the red light and disappeared. They come, no, no, no, no, no. And we go off to my apartment and I’m here with this girl, another girl I had just met a day or so before, because I was constantly meeting new people, uh, running around and, uh, we’re sitting on the couch. I’m sitting in the couch next to her and the count, the count was over there. And he suddenly says to her, he says, he says, this is one of the toughest people I’ve ever met. He said, and he says, tell her how tough you are. Tell her how tough you are. [49:10] I said, you know, I said, you know, you know, and he says, tell them how tough you are. And I said, John, you know, and he walks over, And he makes a motion like this towards me. And he barely touched my chin. But I thought he broke it. He then steps back and he goes, I got to cut this hand off. He says, you saved my life. He said, you saved my life. He said, the only two friends I’ve had in the world were my father and you. He says, I wasn’t even that crazy about my mother. That’s when I said then he goes and he stands and I’m looking at it now he stands up against the window I looked up on the 29th floor, he stands by the window he says get your gun he says and I want you to aim it at me, and say now before you pull the trigger and I’ll stop the bullet, I’ll stop the bullet this guy was nuts and I said I said, what? [50:28] He says, before you pull the trigger. [50:36] Tell me before you pull the trigger and I’ll stop the bullet. He wanted me to shoot him. He stopped the bullet. When I got him out of there, Now when he’s calling me, I’m busy. I’m busy. Once in a while, I’d meet him someplace. No more driving or whatever. That was smart. I hadn’t seen him in probably five or six months. And this is, again, after the situation when I had met with Anna Randall and Gooch and the others. I’m up in my office and I get a I get a call from the county, and he said and I hadn’t probably seen him even maybe in a month or two at all and he said, can I come over and talk to you and I was playing cards in fact I had card games up in my office and, we called him Commissioner. [51:41] O’Malley Ray O’Malley, he was the head of the police department at night. On midnights, he got there at 4 to 12. He started at 4 to 12 until midnights. He was the head of them. He was the commissioner. He was in charge of the whole department. He used to play cards up in my office. We had big card games up in my office. And when he’d come up there, we’d have the blue goose parked out in front. We’d have his bodyguard sitting out there by my door. When he was playing in the games. This went on for a couple of years. [52:15] I was at the office, but, you know, I’m at the office playing cards. [52:20] And I had a, it was a big suite. We had, you know, my office was a big office in this suite. We had about six other, you know, big, big suites in there. And so he comes over, he comes over to meet with me. And so I figure he’s in trouble. He’s arrested. He says, I’ve got a situation going. He says, well, you can get a million dollars. And he said, but if I tell you what it is, he says, and you’re in, he said, you got to be in. I’ll tell you what it is. I said, John, if I need money, I said, you get $2 million, then you can loan me if you want, but I don’t want to know what it is. I said, I just don’t want to know what it is. [52:59] It was about a week or two later. It was a pure later, basically. It was a pure later caper. Yeah, guys, this was like the huge, huge. And the one he set it up with was Pete Gucci, the guy that was going to kill him. That was the one who set it up. I knew that. I thought I remembered that name from somewhere. I don’t remember. They ended up getting popped, but everybody got caught, and most of the money got returned. No, no. No bit that the outfit kept, I understand, if I remember right. What was the deal on that? There was more to it than that. Just before that happened, I go up, and Jerry Workman was another lawyer. Actually, he was attorney up in the office, post-rending bank. When I’m going up into the office, I see Pete Gucci there. This is probably a week or so after the situation with the count. Or maybe even a little bit longer than that. I said, Pete, what are you doing? I said, what are you doing here? Jerry Workston’s my lawyer. Oh, okay. [53:55] Okay. He said, I didn’t know you were off here. I said, yeah. I said, Jerry’s a good friend of mine. Okay. And as I’m walking away, he says, you tell your friend the count to stop calling me at two, three in the morning. He says, I got a wife and kids and whatever. And I said to him, I said, Pete, you got no business dealing. I don’t know what it is. I said, but you guys got no business dealing involved in anything. You got no business being involved with him. And I walked away. I see him and I see him as he’s leaving. I see him as he’s leaving and say goodbye to him. Jerry was going to be playing cards. [54:39] It was card night too. Jerry was going to be playing cards in my office because the people would come in usually about 9 o’clock, 9.30 is when the game would usually start. I talked with Jerry. He had been in there for a while. He was arrested a day or two later. The fbi comes in there because he had stashed about 35 000 in jerry’s couch oh really that was his bond money he got that was his bond money if he got to get bailed out to get him bailed out that was his bond money that was there that’s how bizarre so i got involved in so many situations like this but anyhow anyhow now sammy uh, So it’s about maybe a week or two later after this, when I’m in the car driving, I hear they robbed a purulator. The purulator was about a block and a half from my last police station. It was right down the street from the 18th district. That was the place that they robbed. And not long after that, word came out that supposedly a million dollars was dropped off in front of Jimmy the bomber, in front of his place. With Jimmy the bomber, both Sammy Ann Arino and Pete Gucci were under him. They were gunmen from his group. Now I get a call from, I get a count was never, you never heard the count’s name mentioned in there with anybody. [56:07] The guy from Boston, you know, who they indicated, you know, came in to set it up. The count knew him from Boston. The count had some schools in Boston. And this was one of his students. And that’s how he knew this guy from Boston that got caught trying to take a, trying to leave the country with, you know, with a couple thousand, a couple million dollars of the money. Yeah, I read that. It was going down to the Caribbean somewhere and they caught him. And Sammy Ann Arino didn’t get involved in that. He wasn’t involved in that because I think he was back in the prison at the time. [56:44] Now, when he’s out of prison, probably no more than about maybe three or four months after all that toilet stuff had died down, I get a call from Sam, and he wants me to represent him because he was arrested. What happened was he was shot in a car. He was in a car, and he had gotten shot. And when they shot him, he kicked out the window and somehow fought the guys off. When they found him there in the car and in his trunk, they found a hit kit. They said it was a hit kit. How could they know? It was a box that had core form in it, a ski mask, a ski mask, a gun, a gun with tape wrapped around it and the rest of it. Yeah. And he’s an extra time. Mask and tape or little bits of rope and shit like that. I’d say no. So he was charged with it, and he was charged with it in his case, and he had a case coming up. I met him the first time I met him. He came by my office, and he said, you know, and I said, no, that’s not a problem. And he says, but I’ve got to use Eddie Jensen, too. [57:52] And I said, I said, what do you mean? I said, you don’t need Eddie. And he says, I was told I have to use him. Jimmy Couture, his boy, he said, I have to use him. I know why, because Eddie lets these mobsters know whenever anybody’s an informant, or if he’s mad at somebody, he can tell him he’s an informant, they get killed. And so I said, you know, that piece of shit. I said, you know, I want nothing to do with him. I had some interesting run-ins with him before, and I said, I want nothing to do with that worthless piece of shit. You know, he’s a jagoff. And I said, you know, I says, no. He said, please. I said, no. I said, Sammy, you know, you don’t need me. He knows the judge like I know the judge, Sardini. I said, you know, you’re not going to have a problem in there. I get a call from him again, maybe four or five days after that. He’s out of my restaurant and he says, Bob, please. He said, You know, he says, please, can I meet you? He says, I got a problem. I go out to the meeting. And so I thought, there’s something new. I want you to represent me. I want you to represent me, you know, on the case. And I says, did you get rid of that fence? He says, no, I have to use him. But I says, look, I’m not going to, I want, no, Sammy, no, I’m not going to do it. He leaves the restaurant. He gets about a mile and a half away. He gets shotgunned and he gets killed. In fact, I read about that a couple of days ago. [59:22] I know it’s bullshit. They said he was leaving the restaurant. It was Marabelli’s. It was Marabelli’s Furniture Store. They said he was leaving the furniture store. What they did was they stopped traffic out there. They had people on the one side of the street, the other side of the street, and they followed, they chased him. When he got out of his car and was going to the furniture store, They blasted him with shotguns. They made sure he was killed this time. After that happened, it’s about maybe three or four days after that, I’m up in my office and I get a call. All right, when I come out, I always parked in front of City Hall. That was my parking spot. Mike and CM saved my spot. I parked there, or I parked in the bus stop, or in the mayor’s spot. Those were my spots. They saved it for me. I mean, that was it, for three, four, five years. That’s how it was. I didn’t want to wait in line in the parking lot. So my car is parked right in front of the parking lot. And as I go to get in my car, just fast, fast, so walking, because he was at 134 right down the street from my office and he parks like everybody else in the parking lot so he can wait 20 minutes to get his car. [1:00:40] And, and, and Bob, Bob, and, you know, and when I meet up with him, I’m both standing and we’re both standing right there in front of the, in front of the, uh, the parking lot. And he was a big guy. He weighed probably about 280, 290, maybe more. You know, mushy, mushy type, not in good shape at all. In fact, he walked with a gimp or whatever. And he says, you better be careful, he says. Jimmy Couture is furious. He heard what you’ve been saying about me. [1:01:17] You’ve been saying about me. and something’s liable to happen. And I went reserved. I grabbed him, and I threw him up on the wall, and I says, you motherfuckers. I said, my friends are killing your friends. [1:01:34] I said, my friends, because he represented a number of these groups, but I’m with the most powerful group of all. And when I say I’m with him, I’m with him day and night, not like him just as their lawyer. Most of them hated him, too, because most of them knew what he was doing. Yeah most of these and most of these guys hated him and i said you know but i and and i just like you’re kissing his pants and i don’t know if he crapped in his pants too and uh you know because i just turned around i left that same night jimmy katura winds up getting six in the back of the head maybe three miles from where that took place yeah he was uh some kind of trouble been going on for a while. He was a guy who was like in that cop shop racket, and he had been killing some people involved with that. He was kind of like out away from the main crew closer to downtown, is my understanding. Like, you were in who were you in? Who was I talking about? Jimmy Couture? Jimmy Couture, yeah. He was no, Jimmy Couture was Jimmy Couture, in fact, all these killers, we’ll try and stay with this a little bit first. Jimmy Couture was a boss and he had probably about maybe a dozen, maybe more in his crew and, He didn’t get the message, I’m sure. [1:03:01] Eddie Jensen firmly believes, obviously, because it’s the same day and same night when I tell him that my friends are killing your friends. [1:03:14] He’s telling everybody that I had him kill, I’m sure. Yeah, yeah. Because it was about another few days after that when I’m out in Evanston going to a courthouse. And there you had to park down the street because there was no parking lot. Here I hear Eddie, you know, stay. I’m going to say Bob, Bob. And when he gets up, he says, Bob, he says, when I told you, I think you misunderstood. When I told you it was Jimmy Cattrone. it was it was jimmy katron was a lawyer that you know worked in out of his office close friend of mine too he was a good friend of mine it was jimmy it was jimmy katron that you know not because he obviously thought he believed so he’s got all these mobsters too bosses and all the rest thinking that i was involved in that when i when i wasn’t uh when i was when i wasn’t actually But it’s so amazing, Gary. And that’s one of a dozen stories of the same sort. I met unbelievable people. I mean, we’re talking about in New Orleans. We’re talking about in Boston. Now, if you were to say, who were you with? Always somebody’s with somebody. Were you with any particular crew or any particular crew. [1:04:41] Buzz, were you totally independent? [1:04:46] Everybody knew me to be with the Elmwood Park crew. And that was Jackie Cerrone before Michael, I mean, before Johnny DeFranco. That was Jackie Cerrone. Okay. That was Giancana. That was Mo Giancana. Mo was moving at the clubhouse all the time. That was the major people. [1:05:13] And where was their clubhouse? What did they call their clubhouse? Was that the Survivors Clubhouse, or what was the name of their operation? Every group had one, sometimes more clubhouses. Right. That was where they would have card games in there. They’d have all kinds of other things going. the place was full of like in Marcos I call it Marcos but it was actually Jackie Sharon’s when I first got involved Jackie Sharon was the boss who became a good friend of mine, Jackie Sharon was the boss and Johnny DeFranco was, right under him and then a number of others as we go down, our group alone we had. [1:06:04] Minimum, I’d say, a thousand or more people in our group alone. And who knows how many others, because we had control of the sheriff’s office, of the police department, of the sheriff, of the attorney general. We had control of all that through the elections. We controlled all that. So you had 1,000 people. You’re talking about all these different people who we would maybe call associates. It would be in and out of our club all the time. Okay. Yeah. We’re talking a number of policemen, a number of policemen, a number of different politicians of all sorts that we had. I knew dozens of people with no-show jobs there. We had control of all the departments, streets and sanitation, of absolutely urbanizing. We controlled all the way up to the Supreme Court. What about the first ward, Pat Marcy, and the first ward now? Was your crew and Jackie Cerrone’s crew, did that fall into the first ward, or were they totally there? How did that relate, the Pat Marcy and the politicians? And I found out all this over a period of time. [1:07:28] Everything had changed right about the time I first got involved with these people. All these people you’ve read about, no one knows they were still alive. I met just about all of them when I got connected over there with the first word. A lot of the, we were talking about the gunmen themselves. All the Jackie not just Jackie but I’m talking about Milwaukee Phil Milwaukee Phil and all the rest of them they were over there at Councilors Row all the time because when they were to meet Pat Marcy, what they had there in the first war and, It just so happened, when I started in my office, it was with Alan Ackerman, who was at 100 North, where all their offices were upstairs. The first ward office was upstairs. [1:08:22] And below the office, two floors below, I found out on this when I got involved with them, we had an office. looked like it was a vacant office because the windows were all blackened out. That’s where he had all the meetings with people. When Arcado or Yupa, anybody else, any of the other people came in, this is where he met them. When the people from out of town came in, we’re talking about when, what do you think? [1:08:58] But when Alpha, when Fitzgerald, when all these people would come in, this is where they would have their meetings. Or these are the ones who would be out with us on these casino rides. When these people came in, this is where they would do the real talking because we’d go to different restaurants that weren’t bugged. If this office was checked every day, the one that they had down below, and nobody, nobody, their office was, I think it was on the 28th floor, the first ward office. You had the first ward office, and right next to it, you had the insurance office when everybody had to buy their insurance. Obviously at upper rates big office connected to the first ward office when the back there’s a door that goes right into into theirs but the people were told you never get off or you get off you get off at the office floor but then you you walk you you get off it and i’m sorry you get off it at the. [1:10:11] You don’t get off at the first ward office you get off at one of the other offices one of the other offices or the other floors and when you come in there, then you’ll be taken someplace else after that a double shop that’s where they would go and in fact when I had to talk to Petter Cary messages or whatever people like Marco couldn’t talk to Marcy. [1:10:41] Only a few people could. Only people at the very top level could. Marco, he was a major boss. He could not talk to Marco. If he needed, you know, whatever. Marco D’Amico. Marco was, you had, Marco was the one right under Johnny DeFonza. Yeah. Marco’s the one that was in charge. He was the one who was in charge of all the gambling. Not just in Chicago, but around all those areas in Cook County. We had not just Chicago. They were also the ones that were in charge of all the street tax, collecting all the street tax. That’s where the big, big money was also. Everybody paid. What happened was in the 70s, right as I got involved

In this gripping episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins sits down with Robert “Bob” Cooley, the Chicago lawyer whose extraordinary journey took him from deep inside the Outfit's criminal operations to becoming one of the federal government's most valuable witnesses against organized crime. Cooley pulls back the curtain on the hidden machinery of Chicago's underworld, describing how corruption, bribery, and violence shaped the Chicago Outfit's power in the 1970s and beyond. As a lawyer, gambler, and trusted insider, Cooley saw firsthand how mob influence tilted the scales of justice—often in open daylight. Inside the “Chicago Method” of Courtroom Corruption Cooley explains the notorious system of judicial bribery he once helped facilitate—what he calls the “Chicago Method.” He walks listeners through: How defense attorneys worked directly with Outfit associates to buy favorable rulings. The process of approaching and bribing judges. Why weak forensic standards of the era made witness discrediting the key mob strategy. His personal involvement in the infamous Harry Aleman murder case, where clear guilt was erased by corruption. Life in the Outfit: Gambling, Debt, and Mob Justice Cooley recounts his early days gambling with Chicago Outfit associates, including Marco D'Amico, Jackie Cerrone, and John DeFranzo. Notable stories include: The violent implications of unpaid gambling debts in mob circles. Tense interactions with bookmaker Hal Smith and the chaotic fallout of a bounced check involving mobster Eddie Corrado. How D'Amico often stepped in—sometimes with intimidation—to shield Cooley from harm. These stories reflect the daily volatility of life inside the Outfit, where money, fear, and loyalty intersect constantly. Bob Cooley has a great book titled When Corruption Was King where he goes into even greater detail and has many more stories from his life inside the Chicago Mob. 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” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. 0:06 Introduction to Bob Cooley 1:32 Life as an Outfit Gambler 2:00 My Relationship with Marco D’Amico 10:40 The Story of Hal Smith 11:05 A Dangerous Encounter 20:21 Meeting Sally D 22:23 A Contract on My Life 22:37 The Harry Alleman Case 34:47 Inside the Courtroom 51:08 The Verdict 52:26 Warning the Judge 53:49 The Case Against the Policewoman 58:36 Navigating the Legal Maze 1:08:14 The Outcome and Its Consequences 1:11:39 The Decision to Flip 1:24:38 A Father’s Influence 1:33:57 The Corruption Revealed 1:50:12 Political Connections 2:02:07 The Setup for Robbery 2:20:29 Consequences of Loyalty transcript [0:00] Hey, guys, my guest today is a former Chicago outfit associate named Robert Bob Cooley. He has a book out there titled When Corruption Was King. I highly recommend you get it if you want to look inside the Chicago outfit of the 1970s. Now, Bob’s going to tell us about his life as an outfit gambler, lawyer, and I use payoff to judges to get many, many not guilty verdicts. Now, I always call this the Chicago method. This happened for, I know, for Harry Ailman, a case we’re going to talk about, Tony Spolatro got one of these not-guilties. Now, the outfit member associate who is blessed to get this fix put in for him may be charged with a crime, even up to murder. And he gets a lawyer, a connected lawyer, and they’ll demand a bench trial. That means that only a judge makes the decision. A lawyer, like my guest, who worked with a political fixer named Pat Marcy. [0:53] They’ll work together and they’ll get a friendly judge assigned to that case and then they’ll bribe the judge. And all that judge needs is some kind of alibi witnesses and any kind of information to discredit any prosecution witnesses. Now, this is back in the olden days before you had all this DNA and all that kind of thing. So physical evidence was not really a part of it. Mainly, it was from witnesses. And they just have to discredit any prosecution witness. Then the judge can say, well, state hadn’t really proven their case beyond a reasonable doubt and issue a not guilty verdict and walk away. Now, our guest, Bob Cooley, is going to take us inside this world. [1:29] And it’s a world of beatings, murders, bribes, and other kinds of plots. He was a member of the Elmwood Park crew. He was a big gambler. He was a big loan shark. And he worked for a guy named Marco D’Amico, who was their gambling boss and loan shark in that crew. Among other bosses in this powerful crew were Jackie Cerrone, who will go on and become the underboss and eventually the boss for a short [1:55] period of time. and John no-nose DeFranzo, who will also go on to become the boss eventually. What was your relationship with Marco D’Amico? I talked about when I first came into the 18th district, when I came into work there, and they put me back in uniform, the first person I met was Rick Borelli. Rick Borelli, he was Marco’s cousin. [2:23] When I started gambling right away with Rick, within a couple of days, I’m being his face, and I’m calling and making bets. There was a restaurant across the street where every Wednesday and sometimes a couple days a week, I would meet with Ricky. And one of the first people he brought in there was Marco. Was Marco. And Marco would usually be with a person or two. And I thought they were just bookmakers. [2:55] And I started being friendly with him, meeting him there. Then I started having card games Up in my apartment And, Because now I’m making, in the very beginning, I’m making first $100 extra a week. And within a couple of weeks, I’m making $500, $600 extra a week. And within about a month, I’m making $1,000, sometimes more than that. So now I’m having card games, relatively big card games, because I’ve got a bankroll. I’ve got probably about $5,000, $6,000, which seemed like a lot of money to me. Initially uh and after a while that was a daily that was a daily deal but uh so we we started having card games up there and then we started socializing we started now he’d be at these nightclubs all the time when when i’d go to make my payoffs he was part of the main group there he was one of the call he was right he was right under jack right under at that time originally Jackie Cerrone, and then he was right under Johnny DeFranco. [4:07] But he was… And we became real good friends. We would double date and we spent a lot of time together. And we had these big card games. And that’s when I realized how powerful these people were. Because after one of the card games, there was somebody that was brought in, a guy named Corrado. I’m pretty sure his name was I can’t think of his first name, but Corrado was this person that somebody brought into the game. And after we finished playing cards, and I won all the time. I mean, I was a real good card player, and I wouldn’t drink. I’d supply liquor and food and everything, but I wouldn’t drink. And as the others drank, they were the same as at my office. After we finish up, this guy says, you want to play some? We can play maybe some gin. just human being. And he was there with another friend of his who just sat there and watched. So we played, not gin, but blackjack. We played and passed cards back and forth when you win. Then you’re the dealer and back and forth. And I lost, I think I lost about $4,000 or $13,000 to him. [5:26] I lost the cash that I had. I had cash about $5,000 or $6,000. And I gave him a check for the rest. You know, but everything I was doing was wrong, you know. Yeah, one of those nights. It’s in there. And it’s funny because you asked about Marco. [5:47] And I thought, you know, oh, well, and whatever. And I gave him a check. I said, no, it’s a good check. And it was. It was for my office. It was an office check that I gave him. And that next morning, I’m meeting with Ricky and with Marco at this restaurant across from the station before I go in and to work. And I said, son of a B. I said, you know, they had a bad night first ever. Marco wasn’t at that game, at that particular game. And what happened? I said, I blew about 12,000. Okay, but you? Wow. And I said, yeah, I said, one of the guys at the game played some, I played some blackjack with somebody. What was his name? Eddie, Eddie Corrado. Eddie Corrado. He said, that mother, he said, stop payment on the check. He said, stop payment on the check. He said, because it wasn’t nine o’clock. It was only like, you know, seven, you know, seven 30 or whatever. He said, and when he gets ahold of you, arrange to have him come to your house. Tell him you’ll have the money for him at your house. So that’s what I, that’s what I do. So I stopped payment on it probably about five after nine. I get a call from, from Mr. Corrado. You mother fucker. [7:17] I said, no, no. I said, there wasn’t enough money in the account. I said, I’m sorry. I said, all right, then I’ll be over. I said, no, no, no. I said, I’m in court right now. I said, I’m in court. I said, I’m going to be tied up all day. I’ll meet you at my place. I’ll meet you back there. Well, I’ll be there. You better have that. I want cash and you better have it. Okay. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m at home. Marco comes in. And he was there with Tony and Tony was there and Ricky was there. And Ricky was there. And they come over a little ahead of time and he comes in. I live on the 27th floor. The doorbell rings. Up he comes with some big mustache. [8:00] I open the door. You better have the fucking money and whatever. And I try to look nervous. I try to look real nervous. and when you walk into my apartment you walk in and you see the kitchen right in front of you and to the left to the left you’ve got an area away and you’ve got the the kitchen wall blocking what’s behind it over there and these three guys are standing marco and you are standing right there alongside of it and and when he walks in behind me, He sees Marco and all but shit in his pants. When he sees Marco, he goes, and Marco, you motherfucker. And, you know, oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was with you. He says, how much money you got me right now? And, you know, he says, pull your pockets out. He had about, he had about three or 4,000 with him. [9:02] And he says, you give him that. He says, you, he says, you, and he says, you give him that right now. And you apologize to him. Oh, and he says, he says, and I may give you a number. I want you to call. He says, we can put you to work. Apparently this guy had done the same thing to them a few years before and got the beating of his life somebody brought him into one of their card games, did he have a technique a cheating technique or had some marked cards no it was a card mechanic he could play games with cards they call him a mechanic and, in fact the guy was great at it because he had his own plane and everything else. But again, he had moved from Chicago and had just come back in the area. And they mounted. And so anyhow, he leaves. And he leaves then, and Marco took the money. Marco took the money. Marco took the money. Typical Bob guy, man. [10:19] And I says, what about the cash I lost to him? He says, well, you lost that. He says, you lost that. That’s when I realized how powerful. That’s when I realized how powerful that [10:35] he was part of the mob, not only a part of it, but one of the operational. Yeah, important part of it. That brings to mind another unbelievable situation that occurred. [10:49] The, uh, this is probably the, we’ll know the year by when it happened. There was a bookmaker named Hal Smith. Oh yeah. I remember that name. He got, tell us about Hal Smith. [11:05] Well, Hal Smith was a, he was a big guy too. A real, a real big guy. I met him on Rush street. He knew I was a gambler. He knew that I was a big gambler and I started gambling with him. Thank you. And I was with him probably for about maybe five or six months. And I’d win with him. I’d lose with him. And he would take big places. He would take $5,000 a game for me. And as they say, so the numbers were big. At the end of the week, we were sometimes $60,000, $70,000. [11:42] They were big numbers back and forth. And he was always good for the money. I was always good for the money. And one particular week, it was about $30,000. And I was waiting for money. Somebody else was supposed to give me even more than that. And the person put me off. And it was a good friend of mine. And I knew the money would be there. But a lot of times, these guys are going to collect it at a certain time. And then they’re expecting to give it to somebody else. Well, he was short. So I said, look, I don’t have it right now, but I’ll have it tomorrow, I said, because I’m meeting somebody. Well, okay, it better be there. [12:31] And look, it’ll be there, okay? Not a problem. So the next day, the person I’m supposed to get it from says, I’ll have it in a couple of hours. I don’t have it right now, but I’ll have it by late this afternoon. And I’m in my office when Hale Smith calls me and I said, I’ll have it a little bit later. And he slams the phone bell. I’m downstairs in Counselor’s Row. In fact, I’m meeting with Butchie and Harry. We’re in a booth talking about something. They had just sent me some business or whatever, but I’m talking about something. And George, the owner of the restaurant, comes over and he says, somebody is asking who you are and they want to talk to you. And they point out this guy. It was a guy I had seen before, because a lot of times at two in the morning, I would go down on West Street, and they had entertainment upstairs. And there was this big English guy. He was an English guy, as you could tell by his accent, a real loud guy. And when I walk up to talk to him, and he’s talking loud enough so people can hear him, and he says, you better have that. I’m here for it. You better have that. You better have that money. [13:51] Bob Hellsmith sent me, you get the money and you better have that money or there’s going to be a problem or whatever. And I said, well, the money will be there, but people can hear what this guy, this guy talking that shit. And he leaves. And he leaves. He’s going to call me back. And he leaves. I said, I’m busy right now. I says, give me a call back when I’m in the office and I’ll meet with you. So Butch, he goes, what was that all about? And I said, you know, it’s somebody I owe some money to. Well, who is he? Who is he with? I said, Harold Smith. And he said, who’s Harold Smith? You don’t pay him anything. He said, you don’t pay him anything. And he calls, when he calls back, he says, you will arrange to meet him. And I said, you know, I said, well, where? [14:44] And they knew where I lived. They’d been to my place at that time. I’m living in Newberry Plaza and they said, there’s a, there’s a Walgreens drugstore in Chicago Avenue. Tell him you’ll meet him there at Walgreens, and we’ll take it. And he says, and we’ll take it from there. When he does call me, I said, look, I said, I’ll meet you tomorrow morning for sure at Walgreens. I’ll have the cash. I said, I’ll have the cash, and I’ll have all of it. I said, but, you know, I’m tied up on some things. I said, I’ll go to my own bank when I’m finished here and whatever, and I’ll see you tomorrow morning for sure at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning. Okay. I sit down with them and they just said, I said, they said, go there and go meet them. And we’ll take care of it. The Walgreens is a store right in the corner of Michigan Avenue and Chicago Avenue, south side of the street. And it’s all windows. Huge windows here. Huge windows here. And a bus stop, a bus stop over here. When I get there, I park in the bus stop and I’m looking to my right and here he is sitting in a booth by himself, right by the window. And I look around and I don’t see anybody. I mean, with a lot of people, I don’t see Butchie. [16:06] Uh or red or anybody around but i i go in there anyhow and uh sit down and i uh sit down in the booth across from him and he’s eating breakfast he’s got some food in front of him and uh the girl comes by right away the girl comes by and i says you know just get me a coke and and he says have you got the money and i said yes and why i got i got a lot i got a lot of money in my pocket but not the, whatever it was he wanted, not the 27 or 28,000. There’s nobody there. And, uh, so we’re talking for no more than about two or three minutes. They had a telephone on the counter. I hear the phone ring and the waitress, the waitress is on the phone. And then she comes walking over and she says, it’s a call for you. And, and when I go get in the phone, I woke up and there’s a phone booth there. And here’s Butchie in the phone booth. And he’s there with a couple of other people. I hang the phone up. I walk over and I had my appointment booked. And I walk over and I just pick up the book. And as I’m walking out there, walking in, we pass each other. And so now when I get in my car and he’s looking at me in my car and right next to him is Butchie. And across from him was a red old male and Fat Herbie. [17:34] Herbie Blitzstein? Herbie Blitzstein? No, it wasn’t Herbie. This is another one. That’s one thing of Herbie. We called Herbie Fat. It was Fat Herbie. And the third guy is like sitting facing him. This is like, that weighs about 300 pounds. Oh, Sarno. Make Mike Sarno. Mike Sarno. That was it. And that’s, that’s, that’s who it was. You know, and I, I drive off, go to my office and go about my business. I get a call later that day from, uh, Hale Smith. Where’s my money? Where’s my money? I said, I gave it to your guy. You what? I gave it to him. I met him at nine o’clock this morning and I gave him the money. You did. And I said, yeah. Um, okay. And he hangs, and he hangs up. I don’t hear anything for a while. I never saw him again. I saw Hale a couple of times because he was always in one of the other restaurants. I lived in Newberry right across from there, but he never talked to me. I never talked to him, never said anything. It was about maybe it had to be a good couple of months later, When I read about Hale, Hale’s no longer with us. [18:52] That’s obviously how they found out about him. I never saw the other guy again. I’m hoping they didn’t kill him, but I’m assuming that’s what probably happened to him. In a public place like that, they probably just scared him off. He probably said, you know, I’m way over my head. I’m out of here. [19:15] They didn’t kill him in the public place he wouldn’t have been in the newspapers my little thought is like with the three guys they took him for a ride, I don’t know they just told him to leave town and he realized what it was and he did Hal didn’t get a chance to leave town Hal had other problems if I remember right I’d have to look it back up but he had other problems with the outfit what I found out later what they had done, was they had gotten one of their guys connected with him to find out who his customers were. In other words, one of the other people that he didn’t realize, that Hale didn’t realize was with them, they got him connected with them where he’s the one who’s doing his collecting and finding out who the customers were because they wanted to get all his customers as well as his money. It turns out he was He was a huge bookmaker for years. That’s what happened to him. And they just took his book. Yeah, I remember something about that story because I killed him in his house, I believe. Yeah, Sally D. [20:22] Sally D, yeah. Sally D was one. When I first met Sally D, he was with Marco’s Fruit, too. [20:30] He owned a pizza place up on the north side, north shore, and I broke him. I was betting with him and beating him week after week. And one of the last times I played with him, he couldn’t come up with the money. It took him an extra couple of weeks to get the cash to pay me. But we were real close friends with him. He’s a bizarre character because he was a totally low level at that time. Yeah. When he then connected up with the Cicero crew, with Rocky and Felice, with Rocky and those people, he became a boss with them. It turns out it was after they killed Al Smith. He was part of all that. That’s Salih De Laurentiis. He’s supposed to be a boss. He moved on up after the Family Secrets trial. He didn’t go down with that, I believe, and he kind of moved on up after that. I don’t know what happened to him. What was so funny about that, when he would come into the club, Marco’s club, Bobby Abinati. [21:42] Who was strictly a very low-level player, although we indicted him with the Gambia star. He’s the one who set up the robbery. Would that have been great if that would have gone through? He’s the one who set up that robbery in Wisconsin. He’d be making fun of Salihide all the time. [22:03] When Salihide would come in, he would make fun of him and joke about him and talk about what a loser he was. This is when he’s a boss of that crew. I mean, just a strange, I mean, nobody talked to bosses like that, especially when, when you’re, when you’re what they call Bobby, you know, what was Marco’s nickname for Bobby Knucklehead? [22:23] That was his nickname, Knucklehead. Pat Marcy, uh, contacted me about, you know, handling me in the only own case. [22:32] I couldn’t have been happier because that was a short time after they put a contract on me. So now i realized if they’re going to be making money you know they finally stopped because for good six seven months when i when i came back to chicago uh i was checking under my car every day in case there was a bomb i moved i moved from uh from a place that i own in the suburbs into an apartment complex so i wouldn’t be living on the first floor yeah it’d be impossible to somebody to break into my, you know, took them thrashing into my place. I changed my whole life around in that sense. [23:10] And when I drove everywhere I went, you know, I would go on the highway and then jump over. I would do all, I wanted to make absolutes. Even though nobody came around, I wasn’t taking any chances for a long period of time. And that was too when it cost me a fortune because that’s when I stopped dealing with the bookmakers because I wasn’t going to be in a position where I had to go meet somebody at any time to collect my money and whatever. [23:39] So what had happened, though, was somebody came to see me. And when I was practicing, there’s a lot of things I wouldn’t do. I set my own rules. I would not get involved. After the Harry Alleman case, I never got involved anymore myself fixing certain cases. But even prior to that, I wouldn’t fix certain cases. I wouldn’t get involved in certain cases, especially involving the police, because my father was such a terrific policeman, and I felt I was too in a lot of sentences. I loved the police. I disliked some of the crooked cops that I knew, but on the surface, I’d be friendly with them, etc. Harry Ailman was a prolific hitman for the Elmwood Park crew. He killed a teamster who wouldn’t help set up trucks for the outfit, a guy named Billy Logan. He was just a regular guy. He’s going to take us right into the meeting with the judge. He’ll take us into a counselor’s row restaurant where these cases were fixed. Now, Bob will give us a seat right at Pat Marcy’s table. Now, Pat Marcy was the first ward fixture, and he’s going to take us into the hallway with Pat Marcy where they made the payoffs. [24:57] Now, Bob, can you take us inside the famous Harry Aileman murder case? I know you fixed it. And tell us, you know, and I know there was a human toll that this took on that corrupt judge, Frank Wilson. Okay. The Harry Aileman case was, it was not long after I became partners with Johnny DeArco. I get a call from, I’m in Counselor’s Row at the restaurant. Whenever I was in there now, my spot was the first ward table. Nobody was allowed to sit there day or night. That was reserved for first ward connected people and only the top group of people. [25:40] I’m sitting there at the table and Johnny DeArco Sr. Tells me, you know, Pat wants to talk to you. About something. And I said, you know, sure. Not long afterwards, Pat comes downstairs. We go out. We go out in the hall because we never talk at the table. And he tells me, have you got somebody that can handle the Harry Alleman case? I had seen in the news, he was front page news. He was one of the main mob hitmen. He was partners with Butchie Petrucelli. But it was common knowledge that he was a hitman. He looked like one. He dressed like one. He acted like one. And whatever. And he was one. In fact, he was the one that used to go to New York. And I know he also went to Arizona to do some hits and whatever. He traveled around the country. I said to Pat, they thought the case was a mob hit on a team street. a teamster. I assumed that it was just that. It was people doing what they do. But I said to Pat, I said, well, get me the file. Get me the file. Let me see what the case looks like. Because I would never put a judge in a bad spot. That was my nature. [27:06] When I had cases, a lot of these judges were personal friends of mine. What I would do, if I wanted to have a case, if I wanted to fix a case to save all the time of having to go to a damn long trial, I would make sure that it was a case that was winnable, easily winnable. When I got the file, when I got the file from Pat, he got me the file the next day. The next morning, when he came in, he gave me the file. I looked at the file. It was a throw-out case. When I say throw-out case, absolutely a nothing case. [27:46] The records in the file showed that a car drove up down the street. Suddenly somebody with a shotgun blasted a guy named Billy Logan in front of his house and drove away. They were contacted by a neighbor, this guy, Bobby Lowe. Was it Bobby Lowe? Yeah, I’m pretty sure Bobby Lowe. Who indicated that he opened the door and let his dog run out. And when he looked, he saw somebody. He saw a car, and he gave a description of the car. And he saw somebody pull up, and he saw him shoot with a shotgun. And then he saw the person get out of the car and shoot him with a .45, and shoot him with a .45. And then the car sped away. That was pretty much the case. Some other people heard some noise, looked out, and saw a car driving away. A period of time after that, it had to be about a year or so after that, somebody was arrested driving to Pennsylvania to kill somebody. There was a guy who stopped. [29:16] Louie Almeida was his name. Louie Almeida was stopped in his car. He was on the way to Pennsylvania. And in front of his car, he had shotguns. And he winds up, when he gets arrested, he winds up telling the authorities that he can tell them about a mob murder back in Chicago and winds up cooperating with them. He indicates what happened. He indicated that, you know, he was asked to, you know, or he got involved in it. He got the car and whatever. They did this. They did that. And he pulled up alongside Billy and wound up shooting the victim as he came out of the house. [30:09] Now, I look at some other reports in there, some reports that were made out, new reports. They talk about the Louis Almeida. They talk about the witness that gave the first statement. and they said that they found, or he’s giving us a new statement now where he says he’s walking his dog. He hears a shotgun. His dog runs towards the car where the shooting was coming from. He saw Harry get out of the car and walk over and shoot him, walk over and shoot the victim, and he was looking at him, And then he jumped in the bushes and the car drove away. A complete new story. Yeah. A complete new story. And. I looked at the reports, and this is an easy winner. And so I told Pat, you know, I’ll take it. You know, I’m sure I can handle it. I said, I’m sure I can handle it, but, you know, I’ll let you know. [31:21] That’s when I contacted, I met my restaurant, Greco’s, and I had Frank Wilson there a lot. Well, I called Frank Wilson, invited him and his wife to come to the restaurant. I had done that many times before. When he gets there, I tell him, I have the case. You know, I told him I was contacted on this case, I said. And I said, it’s an easy winner, I said. And I explained to him what it was. I told him, you know, it’s the driver of the car who’s doing this to help himself. And this other guy, Bobby Lowe, that gave a complete new story from the original story that he gave. And I indicated, you know, can you handle the case? And he tells me, I can’t handle the case, he said, because I was SOJ’d. In Chicago, Illinois, they have a rule that makes it easy for people to fool around because for no reason at all you can ask to have a judge moved off the case. And you can name a second judge that you don’t want to handle the case. [32:34] Frank Wilson’s reputation was as such that the lawyer that turned out to be a judge later on, Tom Maloney, who had the case, named him in the SOJ. It was assigned to somebody else, and he indicated he wanted any other judge except Frank Wilson. Frank Wilson on the case. And this was Harry Aileman’s lawyer. Yeah. Okay. And who Tom Maloney, who then ends up being the judge years later. But yeah. Well, because we knew he was going to be a judge. Yeah. We knew ahead of time. I knew at that time. That’s what makes the story so unbelievably interesting. Yeah. Anyhow, he says, I can’t do it because… In Chicago, in Chicago, it’s supposed to keep it honest. I love this. To keep it honest. Yeah. To keep it honest, each judge is supposed to be picked by computer. [33:33] Same thing they’re doing to this day. Trump wondered why the same judge kept getting all his cases. Because they’re doing the same thing we did, some of us could do in Chicago. He was the chief judge in the area. he said to me, I don’t think I can get the case. I don’t think I can’t get the case. I said, I’ll get the case to you. I said, I’ll get, because I already, I, in fact, through Pat Marcy, anytime I wanted a case to go anywhere, I would contact Pat and I’d give him a thousand dollars and he would get me any judge I wanted. Uh, I said, well, I think I can. I said, I said, And I gave him $1,000. [34:16] I said, here, this is yours. And if I can’t get the case to you, you keep it. If I can’t get, I never said to him, will you fix it? Will you this or that? I mean, he understood what it was. I didn’t know how he would react to it. When I asked him, would you handle it? Were the words I used. I had never fixed anything with him before. [34:43] In case he was, you know, he would want to report it to somebody. I wasn’t worried because Frank had a reputation as being a big drinker. After I got the Harry Elliman file, Pat tells me, I’m going to have somebody come and talk to you. Who comes? And we meet in the first ward office, and then we go downstairs into the special room they had for conversations. It’s Mike Ficarro. He’s the head of the organized crime section. He’s the one who prosecutes all the criminals. He’s one of the many prosecutors in Chicago. That’s why there were over 1,000 mob murders and never a conviction from the time of Al Capone. Not a single conviction with over 1,000 mob murders because they controlled absolutely everything. He’s the boss. [35:35] I knew him. I didn’t like him. He had an attitude about him. You know, when I would see him at parties and when I’d see him at other places, and I’d walk by and say, hi, he just seemed coldish. [35:47] I found out later why. He was jealous of the relationship I had with all these people. [35:54] He says, I’ll help you any way I can, anything you need, whatever. So the prosecutors on the Harry Olliman case were our people. That’s who’s prosecuting the case anyhow. But they couldn’t get one of their judges apparently who would handle the case. So, but anyhow, uh, so, uh, when we, um, when we go, when we, when we go to trial, um. [36:25] Before to help me out, I told Pat, I’ll get somebody else to handle the case. I’ll have somebody else. I said, I won’t go in there. I won’t go in there because everybody knows I’m close to Frank, very close to Frank. I said, so I won’t go in there. I’ll get somebody. He says, no, no. He said, I’ll get somebody. And so he gets a guy named Frank Whalen, who I didn’t know at the time. He was a retired lawyer from Chicago. He was one of the mob lawyers. [37:00] He was one of the mob lawyers. And he lived in Florida. He lived in Miami. I think it was, no, Lauderdale. He lived in the Lauderdale area. He was practicing there. So I fly out. I fly out to meet him. I i do all the investigating in the case the i’m using an investigator that harry alleman got from me in fact he was the same investigator that got in trouble in in uh in in hollywood for what for a lot of stuff i can’t think of his name right now but he’s the one who got indicted in hollywood eventually for you know wiretapping people and whatever it was the same one. And he got me information on Bobby on this Bobby Lowe. He found out Bobby Lowe, Bobby Lowe was a drug addict. [37:59] When the FBI got a hold of him, Bobby Lowe was living out in the street because he had been fired from his first job. He had a job in some kind of an ice cream company where they made ice cream, and he got fired there for stealing. And then he had a job after that in a gas station, and he faked a robbery there. Apparently, what he did was he called the police and said he had been robbed. This is before they had cameras and all the rest of that stuff. He said he had been robbed. And somebody happened to have been in the gas station getting gas. It was a big place, apparently. [38:45] And when the police talked to him, he said, I didn’t see anything strange. He said, I saw the attendant walk out to the back about 10, 15 minutes ago. I saw him walk out to the back of the place and then come back in. And so they go out, and he had his car parked behind it, and they found the money that was supposed to have been stolen in the car. So not the best witness, in other words. Well, that’s an understatement, because that was why… That was why now he suddenly shows up, and they know all this. The FBI agents that obviously know all this, that’s their witness. That’s their case. To me, it’s an airtight, you know. Yeah. Anyhow, I developed the defense. I went back to see Frank a second time. I flew out to Florida a second time, gave him all this information. [39:48] I had talked to some other people to a number of people that were going to indicate that Harry played golf with them that day see how they remembered not golf but he was at a driving range with them with about five people they remember what they were three or four years three or four years before that what I also found out now, and I didn’t know and it changed my whole attitude on that this wasn’t a mob killing you, This guy that he killed was married to his, I think it was his cousin or some relation was married. I’m pretty sure it was to his cousin. She had told Harry, I got this from Butchie, Butchie Petrosselli, who had become a close friend of mine after I got involved with Harry’s case, his partner. And that was why he killed them, because apparently the sister, his sister-in-law, whatever she was, had told him, you know, when he was beating her up, she had said, well, my Harry Alameda won’t be happy about this. And he said, supposedly, he said, fuck that, Kenny. [41:02] And that’s why the shooting took place. Wow. This changed me. You know, I’m in the middle of it. There’s no getting out of it now. Yeah, they’ll turn it back. And by now, I’m running around all the time with Butch and Mary at night. I’m meeting them at dinner. They’re coming to one of my places where I have dinners all the time. You know, I’m becoming like close friends, close friends with both of them. Yeah. So anyhow, but anyhow, the lawyer that he got, Frank Whalen, who was supposed to be sharp, turned out like he was not in his, let’s just say he was not in his prime. [41:46] Charitable. And when he went in, you know, while the trial was going on, you know, while the trial was going on, I get a call from Frank. From Frank Wilson, because I told him, you don’t come back into the restaurant now. You don’t come back into the restaurant. I used his office as my office all the time, along with a bunch of other judges. I had a phone, but it cost about a dollar a minute to talk on my phone. I had to talk on my phone. So when I’d be at 26th Street in the courthouse, even though no lawyers are allowed back there in the chamber, so I’m back there sitting at his desk using the phone taking care of my own other business. I stopped going in there while the trial was going on. [42:35] So, anyhow, he calls me, and he wants to meet me at a restaurant over on Western Avenue. And, okay, he called me from one of the pay phones out there in front of the courthouse, and I go to meet him. What did he want? Was he complaining about the lawyer, Waylon? What was he complaining about, Waylon? and I was screwing it up. [42:59] When I meet him, I said, you know, he’s like, you know, he said, you know, we go into the bathroom and he and he said he’s all shooken up. He says, this is going to cost me my job. He said, he said, you know, they’re burying him. You’re burying him. You know, because I had given this information on the two witnesses. And he says, Frank Whalen, he said, isn’t doing a thing and cross-examining these people and whatever. [43:32] And he says, and he’s all upset. And I said, Frank, no, I’m shook up one of the few times in my life where it’s something I can’t handle. He had never told me, you know, I’ll fix the case, never. And I said to him, and I said, Frank, I said, if something goes wrong, I said, I’m sure they’re going to kill me, is what I said to him. Yeah. I said, if something goes wrong, I’m sure they’re going to kill me. And I left. I left the bathroom. Now, I have no idea what’s going on in his mind and whatever. Yeah. I see Pat the next day. And by something goes wrong in this case, you mean if he gets found guilty, that’d be what would go wrong and you would get killed. Is that that’s what you mean? Well, no question, because when I met, I didn’t go into that. I met with Harry Alleman. I get a call after I got involved in the case. A couple days later, I get a call from Markle. Meet me at one of the nightclubs where I was all the time at night with these people. [44:47] Above it, you’ve got a motel, a bunch of hotel rooms. I get a call from Markle. The reason everybody loved me and the mob, I never discussed what I was doing with anybody or any of the other dozens of mobsters I run with that I was involved in Harry’s case. Never said a word to anybody about any of this. That was my nature, and that’s why all these people love me. I never talked about one thing with anybody else or whatever. He says, I want to meet you. When I get over there, he says, let’s go upstairs. Somebody wants to talk to you. And we go upstairs, and there’s Harry Alleman. And Harry, how you doing? How are you? [45:27] And he says, listen, you’re sure about this? And I said, yeah. I said, I’m sure. And he said, well, if something goes wrong, you’re going to have a problem. Those were his words to me. You’re going to have a problem. And I said, you know, he says, because this judge, he says, this judge is a straight judge. And he said, Tom, you mean Tom Maloney. He says, and Tom wants to handle my case. And he tells me he’s going to be named a judge by the Supreme Court real soon. And he wants to handle and he wants to handle my case before he… Uh, you know, before he becomes a Supreme court, before he becomes a judge, I knew the moment he told me that I knew for sure that was the case because we control everything, including the Supreme court. I said, you know, I said, don’t, you know, don’t worry about it. I lied to him. And I said, uh, I said, yeah, the judge is going to, I said, yeah, he’s going to throw it out. He knows, I said, he knows what’ll happen if he doesn’t. That’s what I told Harry. I want to keep him happy. [46:34] I’m going to keep him happy probably for a few hours I’m a little nervous and then that’s all behind me like so many other problems I got in the middle of oh my god talking about walking a tightrope so now the lawyer came into Chicago he was in Chicago I met him when he came in he was staying at the Bismarck was at the Bismarck Hotel right around the corner from you know where Counselor’s Row was that’s where he was staying in the in the hotel right there by the first board office and there was a way to go in there without being seen and there was a, You go through another restaurant and you go through the alley and go up there. And I wouldn’t, I didn’t want to be seen walking into there because I know the FBI are probably, are probably watching and whatever. When he comes into town, they handle the case. So I go upstairs to see him. You know, I said, what the hell’s going on in court? He says, I’m going, it’s going great. It’s going great. I said, it’s going great. I just, you know, I just got a call last night. I had to go meet the judge. And he said, you’re not doing any cross-examining. Oh, I’m doing a great job. You know, I’m doing a great job. So after a few minutes of, I leave. Yeah. [47:52] That’s when I saw Pat Marcy, too. And I said, Pat, I said, the judge is upset about whatever’s going on. I said, maybe we should give him some more because I agreed to give him $10,000. And he said, you know, what a piece of work he is. You know, he said $10,000, and that’s all he’s going to get, not a nickel more or whatever. So now to say I’m nervous again is an ultra statement. The case, I walked over, and I wouldn’t go in the room, but I wanted to just be around that room for some reason. FBI agents all over the place. [48:30] FBI agents all over the place. And so now I’m at home and I’m packed. I’ve got my bags packed because if he finds it, I don’t know what he’s going to do. I’m worried he might find him guilty because of all that had happened. He, when the trial ended a given night, and the next day he was going to give the result. In fact, I didn’t go out and play that night. I was a little nervous, and I stayed home, and I packed up my bags. I packed up my bags, and about 9 o’clock, I got in the car, and I started driving. And by the time he gave the ruling, I was probably about 100, maybe 150 miles away. And I hear on the radio, you know, found him not guilty, found him not guilty. So I turn around. Hit the next exit, turn around and come back. I turn around. Northbound on I-55. [49:27] Probably a couple hours later, here I am parked in my parking spot. My parking spot was in front of my office, right across from City Hall. And I parked in the mayor’s spot when she wasn’t there. And drove probably to drive her crazy. But that was where I parked. That was my parking spot. We’d see my big car with the RJC license plates parked in the bus stop. And so here I am. I parked the car and I go in. I go in. [50:01] And I’m sure Pat told some people, probably not, but I’m sure they told all the mobsters, all the top mobsters, because these guys all wanted to meet me afterwards and get the restaurant. I go in to see them. We walked into the janitor’s closet. You walk out of Counselor’s Row. You go to the left. It goes into the 100 North Building. Now, you’ve got the elevators to the right. And behind that, you’ve got a closet where the janitors keep all their stuff. And you’ve got some stairs leading up to the, there was a, what do you call it? There was an office there where the commodities, big commodity exchange was right there. that there was a stairway leading up to where the offices were with some doors with bars and everything on it. And Pat is standing on those stairs, about two or three stairs. You know, I said, wow. I said, you know, everybody’s going nuts. And he goes, well, you know, you did a good job. And he gives me an envelope. He gives me an envelope. And, you know, I put the money in my pocket. [51:09] We said we had some more. We said a couple other words about, you know, this and that. And then I just go in there. I go back in the counselor’s. [51:21] Now, after the feds started getting indictments, did you try and warn the Aleman case judge, Frank Wilson? Why did you do that? And when I went to see Frank Wilson, I went to help him. I said, Frank, I said, look, I said, I was contacted by, I said, I was contacted by the, by the, by the FBI. They were investigating the Harry Aleman case. I said to him, I said, they, they feel the case was fixed. I said, when they come to see me, I said, you know, I said, I’m not going to talk to them. I said, I’m not going to talk to them. I’m going to take the fifth. And in your case, you can do the same thing. When they, if they come to talk to you, you just take the fifth amendment. If they give you immunity, I said, you know, then you, then you testify, but you tell them the truth. I said, don’t worry about me. Tell them the truth. This is how I talk to him. When I’m talking to him like that, it’s almost like he’s trying to run away from me. [52:27] We’re at a restaurant in a big complex. It was in one of those resorts in Arizona. He’s all but running away from me. I was trying to help him. What I said to him was, Frank, I said, the statute of limitations ran on all this. It’s been more than five years. There’s nothing they can do to you or to me, I said, because the statute ran. I said, so don’t lie to them. What the feds were concerned about, and I don’t know why, that he would deny ever fixing the case when it went through. I don’t know why they’re worried about that, but they were, and I didn’t want to see him get in trouble. [53:13] That’s why I went there to protect him. Hey, Bob, you were asked to represent an outfit associate or an outfit associate’s son who was accused of breaking the jaw of a Chicago policewoman. And you know, when a cop is injured in a fight with somebody, the cops follow that case. And I do not want to see any shenanigans going on. So, so tell us about how you walked that line. And I bet those cops were, were not happy with you in the end. Some people think this is a reason you flipped. Take us inside that case, will you? [53:45] And the reason I mentioned that it had a lot to do with what I eventually did. Now we’ll get back to what made me do what I was going to do. When I was practicing law now, and now I have been away from all this for years, I was out of town a lot because I’m representing the Chinese all around the country. I’m their main lawyer right now. [54:10] And I get a call from Lenny Colella. And he says, my son, he said, my son is in trouble. I want to come in and I want to talk to you about handling his case. This was a heater case, too. This was a front page case because he was charged with aggravated battery and attempted murder. Supposedly, he had beat up a policewoman and it was all over the place. He was a drug addict and whatever, supposedly he did all this. And when he came into the office with his dad, he was high. When I talked to him, he’s got his kid with him. And the kid is a smart aleck. As we’re talking, the kid, and I asked the kid, well, whatever. The kid was a smart aleck. And I just said to him, I said, Len, I can’t help you. I said, get him out of here. I want nothing to do with him. I said, I can’t help you. You didn’t take cases that were involved with cops anyhow, for the most part. No. I didn’t know what had happened in this case. I know what I saw in the paper. I didn’t know what the facts or anything were or whatever. I mean, if it turned out that if I felt when I talked to him that he had done it, whatever, I would not have taken the case anyhow. [55:26] I mean, I would not have. That’s why I say, too, that may be, too, why I was as quick and as rude as I was when he came in there and was acting and was a little bit high. I just wanted nothing to do with him, period. I said to his dad, his father said, you know, if I get him cleaned up, you know, I said, well, if you get him cleaned up, then we’ll talk again. I said, but I can’t help him, and I can’t help him. [55:54] And off he goes. the father re-contacted me about a week later. And he said, I had him in rehab and he straightened out and whatever. And he brought him back in and it was a new person. And when he told me the facts of the case, when he told me what happened, because he was a big, tough kid. He was a big, you know, he was a weightlifter, but he was a big, tough looking kid. [56:19] And it’s a little police woman. When he told me what happened, I believed him. Because I’ve been out in the street and whatever. And he says, you know, he told me what happened, that he had gotten stopped. He was out there talking to her. And when she said, you’re under arrest for DUI, he just walked. He says, I walked. I was going to get in my car and drive away. And she grabbed me and was pulling me or whatever. And I hear all these sirens coming. And within a few minutes, there’s all kinds of police. There’s about half a dozen police there. He says, and then they started jumping on me. He said, she was under me. He was all beaten up. He was all bloody and whatever. And she apparently had her jaw broken. And there’s no doubt in my mind when he’s telling me that, you know, when they were hit with his clubs or with this thing that they claimed he had without his fingerprints, it was a metal bar. Right, a slapper. A chunk of lead covered by leather. Everybody used to carry a slapper. How about you carry a slapper? They claimed, but there was no cloth on this. It was just the metal itself. Yeah, oh really? [57:45] Anyhow, that makes it interesting during the trial when they flat out lied. No, he had no blood. I got the hospital reports. They wouldn’t take him in the station because he was too badly beaten up. But anyhow, he also had two other charges. He had been involved in a fight in a bar. And he had been involved in another situation with the police. And he was charged with resisting arrest and battery on a policeman out in Cicero. So he had these three cases. So I gave the father a fee on handling, you know, the one, I was going to, I gave him a fee one case at a time. I said, you know, first thing we’ll do, I want to get rid of those other two cases. I’ll take them to juries, I said. [58:36] I’ll take them to juries because I wasn’t going to put them. I knew both the judges on those cases, but I wasn’t going to put them in a position on a case like that. I take the first case to trial. And I get him a not guilty. That was the fight in the bar. [58:54] That was out in one of the suburbs. That was out in, I’m not sure which suburb, in the northwest side. After we get that case over with, before that case, I get a call from Pat Marcy. Pat Marcy, I hadn’t seen him probably even for a couple months, but I hadn’t talked to him for quite a long period of time. And he says to me, you got a case that just came in. He said, we’re going to handle it. And I said, there’s no need, Pat. I said, I can win these cases. I said, there’s no need. I can win these cases. And he said, we’re going to handle this. The case is going to go to Judge Passarella, he said, and we’ll take care of it. I said, Pat, there’s no need to. I said, I can win these cases. I said, they’re all jury trials, but I know I can win them all. And he says, you do as you’re told. Pat had never talked to me like that before. [59:54] Powerful as he was and crazy as I am, And he never, you know, you never demand that I do anything or whatever. We had a different type relationship. And although I hadn’t broken away from them by now, it’s been years. I had broken away from them for about, you know, two, three years. And he says, you know, take the case to trial. I said, well, he’s got some other cases, too, and I’m going to take the one. And she says, I’ll take it to a jury, and I’ll win it. You’ll see how I win it. I take her to trial, and I get her not guilty. The second case was set for trial about a month after that. Not even, yeah, about a month or so after that. And during that time, a couple of times I’m in counselors, and Pat says, when are you going to take the case to trial? I said, well, Pat, you know, I won the one case. I got the other case on trial, and it was before Judge Stillo. He was a judge that we eventually indicted. [1:00:51] Stillo was very, very well connected to the first ward. He’s one of the old-time judges out in Maywood. And I told him, you know, when I came in there, he assumed I’d take it to trial and he’d throw it out. And I said, no, no, no, there’s no need to. I says, I’m going to take the jury on this one. Number one, I had stopped fixing things long before this. And, but he was, to make money, he was willing that he would have thrown the case out. It was a battery with a Cicero policeman. And I says, no, no, I’ll take it. I’ll take it to, you know, I’ll take the jury. I said, I don’t want to put you in that pursuit. Oh, don’t worry about me. I take that one to trial and I win that one too. Now Pat calls me, when the hell are you going to take the case to trial? And that’s the original case with the police woman. That’s the main one. The main one. Okay, go ahead. [1:01:44] When are you going to take it to trial? And I don’t want to take it to trial. In fact. I had talked to the prosecutor, and I said, look, I said, because he was charged with, he was charged with, you know, attempted murder and arrest. I said, if you’ll reduce it, the prosecutor was an idiot. He knew me, should have realized that, you know, that I never lose cases. Yeah. You know, but I want to work out something. He was a special prosecutor on it. He said, we’re not going to reduce it. We said, you know, if you want to work out a plea, we went five years, we went five to ten or whatever in the penitentiary. And I said, well, that’s not going to happen. I said, well, then we’ll just have to go to trial. So now, while I’m at Counselor’s Row, on one of my many occasions, because I was still having some card games over there at somebody else’s other lawyer’s office, because I had had big card games going on there for years. I’m sitting at the counselor’s row table, and Judge Passarella comes in. There’s just him and me there, and when he comes in, I say, Oh, you’re here to see Pat? [1:02:56] And he goes, Pat, who? No more conversation. Who the fuck? No more. The guy’s treating me like I’m some kind of a fool or whatever. And I developed an instant disliking to him. I had never seen him around that much or whatever before that. So now, after the second case, you’re going to go to, you know. So I talked to Lenny. When Lenny came in, Lenny came in with him when we were starting to get prepared for the case. And, oh, this is before this is before I talked to the prosecutor. And I said, Lenny, I said, I says, if I can get it reduced to a misdemeanor, to a misdemeanor. I said, you know, can we work with, you know, and work out a plea, let’s say, for maybe a month or two, you know, a month or two. Is that OK with you? Oh, sure. He says, oh, sure. [1:03:57] Now, this Lenny, this was the kid’s dad, your client’s dad. This is his dad. Now, explain who he was, who Lenny was. His dad was. What’s his last name? Yeah, Karela. Karela, okay. Lenny Karela, I’m pretty sure was his name. He owned a big bakery out there in Elmwood Park area. Okay. And he was friendly with all the mobsters. Okay, all right. I got you. For all I knew, he may have been a mobster himself, but I mean, he may have been because we had thousands of people that were connected. He was a connected guy. All right, go ahead. I’m sorry. And he said, oh, yeah, sure, no, not a problem because the papers are meant, they’re still, after a year, they’re still mentioning that case will be going to trial soon and every so often. [1:04:43] What I had also done, I tried to make contact with the policewoman, not with her, but I put the word out and I knew a lot of police and I got a hold of somebody that did know her. And I said, look, I said, no, the case is fixed if I want it. Yeah. But I don’t want it. Even though I know that, you know, that it’s all BS, you know, I said, look, I said, get a hold of her and get a hold of her lawyer and tell them if they want to file a lawsuit, you know, you know, we can, they can get themselves some money on it. Uh, you know, he’ll indicate, you know, he’ll, he’ll, he’ll indicate that, you know, he, he was guilty or whatever, but I wanted to get her some money. The word I get back is tell him that piece of shit, meaning me to drop dead, to drop dead. You know, we’re going to put this guy in prison and that’s where he should be too. When the case now, now when the case goes to trial. [1:05:48] The coppers lied like hell and talk about stupid. I’ve got the police reports there. When they took him into the police station, they wouldn’t take him. The station said take him to a hospital. He goes to the hospital and the reports, you know, bleeding here, bleeding there, and, you know, marks here, marks there. They beat the hell out of him. [1:06:10] You know, nobody touched him. You know, nobody touched him. Nobody touched him. Was he bleeding? No, no, he wasn’t. He wasn’t bleeding. Didn’t have any, you know, along with, you know, along with everything else. Flat out lied. How many policemen were there? There were two or three. There were about 10 by the time it’s over. But it’s an absolute throwout. Any fingerprints on that metal? Well, we had some fingerprints, but not his. And on and on it went. It’s a throwout case to start with. The courtroom now where the case was, was very interesting. You walk in there, and when you walk in there, there’s about 20 people that can sit. And then there’s, it’s the only courtroom in the building where you have a wall, a glass wall, all the way up, all the way up. Covering in the door, opens up and goes in there. You go in there. It’s a big courtroom. A bunch of benches now in there. You go to the left, and here’s the judge’s chambers. You come out of the chambers, and you walk up about four steps. And here the desk is on like a podium. And it’s not where all the others are, you know, where you look straight forward. It’s over on the side. It’s over, you know, to the left as you walk out of his chambers. [1:07:40] When the judge listens to the case he goes in there I’ll come up back with my ruling he comes out about 10 minutes later he walks up the steps, And now he turns off the microphone. Somebody turns off the microphone so the people in the back can’t hear anything. The ones inside there can, you know, can hear. The one back there can’t hear anything because it’s all enclosed. [1:08:11] That’s why they got the microphone back there. Somebody shut it off. He says, basically, I’m not guilty in a real strange voice. And all but runs off the all but run and don’t ask me why this is what he did all but runs off all but runs off into the into his chambers, you know he’s afraid all those cops out in the audience were going to come and charge the stand I guess and put a whack on him. [1:08:43] But think about it this is Chicago he’s with the bad guys but I’m just saying I don’t know why he did all that, but that’s what he did. And so now, as I come walking out with Mike, and they’re all in uniform, and most of them are in uniform, and then you’ve got the press and all kinds of cameras and whatever there. And as I come walking out along with him, some of these guys I know, and these jerk-offs are like calling me names and whatever. I go, I go see Pat. [1:09:23] And when I go back into Counselor’s Row now, he’s there at the table. And when I come in, it’s a repeat of the Harry Allerman thing. He walks out. He walks directly. And I’m following him, and he walks in. He goes back into the same janitor’s closet and stands on the same steps just above me, you know, talking to me. And I said to him I said this judge is going to have a problem, I said, he’s going to have a problem. I said, what if he says something? And he said to me, nobody would dare. He said, nobody would dare cooperate against us. They know what would happen. Or words to that effect. And don’t ask me why. So many other things had happened before this. But now I’m looking at him and I’m thinking, you know, somebody’s got to stop this craziness. All this stuff. I’m thinking that at the moment, but then I’m worried for some reason, I think he can read my mind. [1:10:34] Stupid as all of this seems, I’m afraid to think that anymore. I’m almost, you know, cause Pat’s such a powerful person and every sense I know, I know his power, but anyhow, so I leave. And like I say, 10, 15 minutes later, that’s all forgotten about. He paid me the rest of the money I was supposed to get from them. [1:10:56] Obviously, he wanted to do it because he was probably charging a lot of money. That’s why he didn’t want me to take things. He wanted to collect the money because while the case was going on too, he puts me in touch with the head of the probation department because he was able to help in some way. He knew some of the, you know, some of the, some of the policemen involved in the thing had been contacted too. Yeah. But they were contacted and they messed up by, you know, they messed up by lying about all that. Yeah. When there’s police reports saying, oh, no, but anyhow, that was that particular case. Tell us why you decided to flip. [1:11:38] These had been your friends. You knew you had explosive information. You knew as a lawyer, you knew what you had to say would send these people to prison for many, many years. if not life. It had to be hard. As other things happened, why did I commit the, Probably two or three other times things happened. But the most important thing was to think when my dad was dying, and I was very close to my dad. When my dad was dyi

Retired Kansas City, Missouri, Police Intelligence Unit Detective Gary Jenkins tells the story of the unsolved murder of James Ragen. Gary Jenkins digs into an old-school Chicago Outfit story pulled from a vintage newspaper clip by legendary columnist Drew Pearson. The article centers on James M. Ragen,” a key figure in the Continental Press and Racing Wire—and what happened when the Outfit decided it wanted total control of the race wire business. This is a gritty snapshot of how Chicago's underworld allegedly dominated legitimate businesses in the 1940s—bars, taverns, suppliers, and especially gambling infrastructure—then used violence and influence to keep it that way. Gary returned to Chicago Outfit history after spotting an old Drew Pearson column: “A Songbird Who Sang, Murdered.” Who James Ragen was: a major player in distributing horse racing results nationwide How race wire services powered mob-controlled bookmaking across U.S. cities The Outfit's push to muscle in with a competing racing wire—and the warning: don't compete with Chicago Mob-linked figure Mo Annenberg and the money behind race wire “tolls” and kickbacks.  Outfit names mentioned in the takeover fight, including “Greasy Thumb” Jake Guzik and others from the era. Pearson claimed that Ragen gave information about mob domination in Chicago to the U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark, and that resulted in his murder. The broad daylight attack: a fruit truck pulls alongside, and a machine gun ambush erupts at a stoplight, and James Ragen goes down in a hail of .45 bullets. The “stranger-than-fiction” twist: Ragen later dies, and an autopsy allegedly finds a tube of mercury in his stomach. Why the case remained murky: the coroner allegedly refused to pin it cleanly as murder (per Pearson's reporting) Gary frames it as a reminder of how deep the Outfit’s influence ran in city systems and politics. Memorable Moments Ragen/Reagan's fatalistic line (as told by Pearson): “If they want you, they're gonna get you.” The bizarre mercury detail and Gary asking listeners if they've ever heard anything like it Why This Story Matters This bonus episode connects the dots between information networks (race results), organized gambling, and the Outfit's approach to business: control the pipeline, control the profit—and crush anyone who won't move aside. Gary invites listeners to share any other “old but gold” Chicago Outfit stories or clippings worth covering in future bonus episodes—and reminds everyone to check out his books and films (search Gary Jenkins on Amazon or visit his website). 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” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript James Ragen race wire story Speaker: [00:00:00] Well, hey, all you wire tappers. Good to be back here in the studio. Gangland wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City, Missouri Police Detective, formerly of the Intelligence Unit. I spent 14 years there investigating organized crime in Kansas City. Best 14 years of my life. Speaker: I think sometimes you know, I’ve got this True Crime podcast and we focus on the mob and I haven’t. Been to Chicago for a little bit, it seemed like. And I was, I was looking through some stuff from the Chicago outfit Facebook page, and there’s a newspaper clip on the, the, the group that has newspaper clips on it that had an article by a man named Drew Pearson. Speaker: Now, drew Pearson was a real famous columnist back in the forties and fifties, and the title of it is A Songbird Who, mur, who Sang, murdered. Now he starts off talking about the singing of Joe Vce. I guess he, he wrote this article about the time Joe Vce had all the newspapers, Andre, and talked about the New York mob. Speaker: But he had [00:01:00] a guy who talked about the Chicago outfit. He said that, he feels, he said that he felt responsible for the death of this informant outta Chicago. So he dropped in, he said he dropped into the morgue of Chicago’s American newspaper to refresh his memory just about this guy and, and what he said. This guy was a man named James M. Reagan, who was a of the continental press and racing wire. He was machine gunned down from a fruit truck. In August 14th, 1946, Speaker: Reagan, before he died, had told him many things in, in 1946 four years before the Koff Commission and just before he got killed. Reagan told Drew Pearson about the Chicago Mob rule and gave him permission to take it to the Attorney General of the United States, Tom Clark. Now, Tom Clark is the same guy who [00:02:00] commuted the sentences of. Speaker: The four Chicago outfit bosses who were given tenure prison sentences for the Hollywood scandal for, for trying to extort money from Hollywood unions and Hollywood film companies. Now this story that he told was about hotels and taverns and nightclubs and restaurants, and he said they’re all dominated by the mob in Chicago. Speaker: He said to hire a bartender, to buy ice cubes or to launder. Roller towels. Those are the old towels that you used to pull down in the bathrooms. I don’t think they have ’em anymore. Speaker: And they take those towels out and send them off and they’d launder ’em and give you a freshman to buy any beer. To replenish your alcohol supply in a bar, you had to do business with the mob. The mob ruled a very large part of Chicago. He took this story back to Attorney General Clark, who authorized a dozen or so FBI men to check on Reagan’s facts. Speaker: Couple weeks later, they reported back and he said, this is all [00:03:00] true. They also reported that the control of the underworld reached in a very high places in Chicago and political places, and then Illinois too, also to Tom Clark, although nobody really knew that at the time and, and only indirectly. Some of these rules of the underworld in Chicago were on the surface, respected businessmen and, and politicians whose names were household words in Chicago. Speaker: Some of them had reformed, but they still controlled the mob. They, which means that they maybe didn’t go out and do mob stuff anymore, but they still were, had some control in the mob. In some respects, Reagan’s information was much more important than that at Joe Bachi, especially when it came to Chicago. Speaker: Achi didn’t know anything about Chicago, didn’t talk about Chicago, but the Justice Department in Washington had no jurisdiction at the time, which is kind of interesting. They had to pass a lot of special laws in order to bring the feds in or catch these guys on a, some kind of a interstate. Violation [00:04:00] now, they just didn’t wanna do it because they had interstate theft at that time. Speaker: There’s a lot of things they could do. Transportation, women across state lines for immoral purposes. They could use the interstate transportation of stolen autos. There was all kinds of stuff they could use, but, but they wouldn’t use it. Claim the state’s rights city of Chicago and state of Illinois responsible, not the FBI or the Justice Department now, ain’t, that’s something they claim they had no responsibility for all this crime going on in Chicago. Speaker: Lot different than it is today. The feds are trying to, to send the national Guard in and, and all the new federal police, a newly hired federal police , into Chicago to. Clean up Chicago. So back then they didn’t want anything to do with Chicago. Called drew Pearson back a little later, shortly after, and there was a leaky place up there in Washington. Speaker: He said the mob. Was wise to him. They were out to get him and he asked for FBI protection, the FBI did give him a bodyguard for a short period of time. But you know, it, that didn’t last. And Reagan [00:05:00] himself was not exactly a saint. He was, he was the the bar boss of the continental racing wire. And he, you know, he distributed raising results. Speaker: And there’s a huge amount of gambling in all the different cities that was ran by the mob. And the results came over this continental racing wire. Immediately you could have a race in, in upstate in Saratoga. And when that, that race was done, the results were sent back to Chicago and Kansas City and Baltimore, and, and Cleveland and all those states. Speaker: And he was involved with a mob associate named Mo Annenberg and distributing this news to RS all over the country. He actually had some minor altercations with this Mo Annenberg, who was definitely a mob associate when Annenberg wanted to increase the race wire tolls to some certain publications that that weren’t kicking back to the mob. Speaker: He wanted almost, he wanted to almost triple him from $200 a week to $500 a week. And his troubles really began because [00:06:00] Chicago Mob had started their own racing wire that was gonna compete with them. And, you know, you just don’t compete with the Chicago outfit on a business level. You just don’t compete with them. Speaker: A couple of names he said, Jaime Levin and greasy th. And greasy thumb, Jake Guzzi directed that battle to take over the race wire. The former Illinois State Senator involved Pat Burns. He was working for the mob acquired property over over, over the tracks where men with binoculars could flash the odds and the race results to offices, which then in turn sent ’em out over the wire to bookmakers all over the country. Speaker: And Reagan’s continental wire was already doing the same thing. And the take on this was fabulous for the mob and the mob demanded Reagan move over and let them have it all. You know, the mob, you just don’t, if they wanna move in, they’re gonna take it all. They’re always gonna take it all. Probably that’s what induced Reagan to talk to him. Speaker: Do Drew Pearson [00:07:00] opines and ’cause he had threats on his life even before this. And, and I think he thought maybe he could bring a lot of federal heat onto the mob in Chicago. That then would back them off from trying to take over the race wire business. You know, it’s you know, it’s a way to use the FBI or the police to take out competition really, is probably what it really comes down to, what it really was. Speaker: You know, drew Pearson says, you know, when a man calls you on the phone and tells you in detail about one time he found two gunmen laying outside his home, waiting for him to come out, and he tries to do something about it. And that’s when he called the FBI you know, and they said, manpower short, we got other problems to handle. Speaker: And. And Reagan kept calling Drew Pearson and kept calling saying, you know, my life’s in danger. And, and Drew Pearson, he was telling the truth. Reagan finally hired two bodyguards, what he should have done all on his own before a retired policeman named Walter Peltier and a truck driver named Marty Waltz. Speaker: The retired policeman might be okay, although that [00:08:00] would be suspect with a mob in Chicago. He just as soon turned him over for a little more money as guard him. I got a feeling. Two months after. Reagan talked to Drew Pearson. He was driving home about five 30 in the afternoon. A gray sedan with Indiana plates stopped in front of him in per Pershing Road and State Street. Speaker: The traffic light turned and the two bodyguards were following him in a close behind. They expected trouble, but not till they got home. And not in broad daylight on the streets of Chicago and downtown Chicago with all the traffic around. Well, a fruit truck, a light delivery truck with crates of fruit on it, and a tarponing across the top. Speaker: Pulled up alongside Reagan at this light. All of a sudden the Taron was pulled aside. This just like TV folks, machine gun stressed out and bam, bam, bam. I mean, they, they fired off round after round into Reagan’s car, light changed in the fruit truck, and the gray sedan moved on out. [00:09:00] Reagan was taken immediate to a hospital, and he was still alive, and he was kind of philosophical. Speaker: According to Drew Pearson. He says, well, I guess if they want you, they’re gonna get you. This was not the end of the story though. Re Reagan began to recover from the mods bullets. Three Chicago cops had sat in shifts outside his hospital room, one on each shift, and, and so, you know, they couldn’t finish the job in the hospital room, and Reagan got better and better. Speaker: But then finally on August 14th, this is about what, two months later, he dies. The autopsy showed that there was a tube of mercury had been placed inside his stomach enough to kill three men. Now, go figure. Have you ever heard of that? They placed it, I somehow they placed a tube of. Mercury in his stomach. Speaker: I guess he threw some of the wounds he had or something. They must have had a doctor involved. I’m not sure how that happened. That’s a, that’s a weird one there folks. That is something else. Any of you guys ever heard [00:10:00] anything more strange than that? Let me know. But put his tube of mercury in his stomach. Speaker: Crazy. The coroner ruled that he could not charge murder since he couldn’t say whether Reagan had died of gunshot wounds or of mercury poison. I think he’d charge murder either way. Well it sounded like the coroner was on the take too. You know, the outfit had Chicago wired in most of the political offices in 19 46, 47, 48. Speaker: Clear up to really up to the seventies, and the operation Graylord started knocking some of that out. They don’t know. They just don’t know whether some mobster came in there and or they bribed somebody. But more than likely, they bribed somebody to get that tube of mercury in his stomach. Death of James N. Speaker: Reagan remains one of Chicago’s 974 unsolved Gangland Slain since 1919, and that this was back in the fifties or so when this article was written. So that’s the end of James Reagan and the end of [00:11:00] his. Wire service, a continental press and racing wire in the total domination of Chicago, of the wire services, especially west of New York. Speaker: I mean Chicago. They wanted to rule everything west of New York and they did so. Anyhow. If you got any other old stories like that that are kind of interesting, let me know. I’m putting this up as a little bonus episode, and I really appreciate y’all tuning in. Don’t forget, I got books and movies out there to sell and go to my website or go to Amazon, just search for Gary Jenkins. Speaker: You might wanna take a look at the VA website. If you’re in, been in the service and you think you have a problem with PTSD or alcoholism or anything like that, if you have a problem with gambling via 8 1 800. Bets off or whatever. Your state has all the gambling casinos in the United States. Speaker: Whenever they get awarded a gambling license, they have to kick in so much money to provide services for people with problems with [00:12:00] gambling. They have problems with alcoholism straight you know, our friend Anthony Ruano, he’s got a website out there. Just go to his website and he’s, there’s a way to contact him on that. Speaker: I used, I sometimes say a number. I’m not sure if that number’s still any good. And I guess that’s all I got. Thanks a lot guys.

In this explosive episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins sits down with actor, entrepreneur, and mob insider Gianni “Johnny” Russo, best known for his unforgettable role as Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather. Russo pulls back the curtain on a lifetime of stories that stretch from Frank Costello and Joe Colombo to Las Vegas skimming, the Vatican Bank, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Hoffa, and even Pablo Escobar. Russo discusses his new book, Mafia Secrets: Untold Tales from the Hollywood Godfather, co-written with Michael Benson—an unfiltered account of power, violence, politics, and survival inside the criminal underworld and Hollywood royalty. This is not recycled mythology—this is Gianni Russo's personal version of history from the inside. Whether you believe every word or not, the stories are raw, violent, and utterly fascinating. This episode discusses: The Godfather, The Kennedy assassinations, Vegas skimming, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Hoffa, the Chicago Outfit, Pablo Escobar

In this episode of Gangland Wire, Gary Jenkins interviews bestselling author Mark Shaw about his explosive new research into the JFK and RFK assassinations — and the hidden role of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. Shaw breaks down newly uncovered FBI documents, including Marcello's alleged 1985 prison confession claiming involvement in JFK's murder. We explore Marcello's long-running war with Robert Kennedy, the suspicious death of journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, and significant inconsistencies in the official story of RFK's assassination. This conversation challenges the lone-gunman narrative and exposes how organized crime, politics, and government investigations may have collided to shape American history. Subscribe to get notified about new content. 0:10 The Kennedy Connection 21:37 Sirhan’s Background Uncovered 31:56 The Role of Marcello in Assassinations 44:54 The Quest for Justice

In this powerful episode of Gangland Wire, retired Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Tegan Broadwater, a former Fort Worth Police officer, musician, and undercover operative whose story reads like a movie script. Broadwater takes listeners on a riveting journey from his early years as a professional musician to his dramatic turn infiltrating one of America's most dangerous street gangs—the Crips. Drawing from his book Life in the Fishbowl, he details how music, culture, and human connection became unexpected tools for survival and success inside the underworld. Listeners will hear: How Tegan Broadwater transitioned from touring musician to undercover police officer, bringing creativity and adaptability to the streets. The story of his two-year infiltration into the Crips—posing as a South Texas drug dealer with the help of a trusted informant. His insights into gang hierarchy, loyalty, and manipulation, and how understanding culture was key to earning trust. The moral challenges of living undercover—forming friendships with men he would eventually arrest. The emotional impact of a major gang raid that ended with over 50 arrests, and how it changed his outlook on justice and humanity. His decision to donate proceeds from his book to the children of incarcerated parents aims to break the cycle of violence. He continues to share lessons on leadership, empathy, and cultural understanding through his private security firm and new podcast projects.   Broadwater's story isn't just about crime and undercover operations—it's about identity, compassion, and the human cost of violence. This episode offers a rare look at what it means to live behind a mask while still holding onto one's purpose.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins sits down with former FBI agent Séamus McElearney, author of Flipping Capo, for a deep dive into one of the most remarkable Mafia investigations and how he took down the DeCavalcante Family. McElearney recounts his unlikely path from the world of banking to the FBI, driven by a lifelong fascination with law enforcement. Despite being told he didn't have the “right background,” he pushed forward—eventually landing in New York's Organized Crime Squad C-10, where he investigated both the Bonanno and DeCavalcante crime families. He describes the rare and demanding experience of working two Mafia families at once, and the teamwork required to dismantle them from the inside out. As the conversation turns to his book, Flipping Capo, McElearney explains the years-long process of writing it and the rigorous FBI review needed to ensure no sensitive investigative techniques were revealed. He shares early memories of notorious boss Joe Massino, and the high-stakes surveillance and arrests that defined his career. A major focus of the episode is the arrest and flipping of Anthony Capo, a feared DeCavalcante soldier—and the first made member of that family ever to cooperate with the government. McElearney walks listeners through the tension of that operation, his calculated approach to treating Capo with respect, and the psychological tightrope that ultimately persuaded Capo to talk. That single decision triggered a domino effect of cooperation that helped bring down the New Jersey mob family many believe inspired The Sopranos. Gary and Séamus dive into the proffer process, cooperation agreements, and the behind-the-scenes strategies used to turn high-level mobsters. McElearney also draws comparisons between real mob figures and the fictional world of The Sopranos, revealing how much of the hit series was grounded in the actual cases he worked. The interview closes with McElearney's reflections on how organized crime continues to evolve. While today's mob may look different from the one he battled in the '90s, he stresses that the methods—and the money—still flow. His candid insights offer a rare look into the changing face of the American Mafia and the ongoing fight to contain it. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app. 2:26 Seamus’ FBI Journey 6:26 Inside the DeCavalcante Family 9:05 The Process of Flipping 10:27 Comparing Families 12:30 The First Cooperation 17:43 The Proffer Process 25:03 Protecting Cooperators 27:44 The Murder of Joseph Canigliaro 29:42 Life on Trial 30:28 The Real Sopranos 39:43 Leading the Columbo Squad 44:15 Major Arrests and Cases 50:57 Final Thoughts and Stories 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’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [0:00]Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. [0:07]Welcome to Gangland Wire [0:07]I have a former FBI agent as my guest today. And, you know, I love having these FBI agents on. I’ve had a lot of them on and I worked with a lot of the guys and they’re really good guy. Everyone I ever met and worked with was a really good guy. Now they got their deadhead just like we did. But these aggressive guys are the ones that write books and I’ve got one on today. Seamus McElherney. Welcome, Seamus. Thank you. It’s great to be here. All right. Well, an Irish name now working on the Italian mob, huh? How come you weren’t working on the Westie? So they were maybe gone by the time you came around. There’s no such thing. [0:47]Oh, yeah. You got your code. You Irish guys got your code, too. All right, Seamus, you got a book, Killing, or Killing, Flipping Capo. I want to see it back up over your shoulder there. Really interesting book, guys. He flipped a guy named Anthony Capo. And he really took down the real Sopranos, if you will. So Seamus, tell us a little about how you got started with the FBI, your early career. Okay. When I got out of school, I really didn’t know what to do. And I got into banking and I just decided that was really not for me. And I got lucky where I got to meet an FBI agent. and I was just so fascinated by the work. It seemed like every day was different. You know, one day you could meet a CEO and another day you could be doing surveillance. It just, the job just seemed really interesting. [1:38]Like fascinating to me. So I decided to try to become an agent. And I was constantly told, Shane, you should never become an agent. You didn’t have the background for it. And one, one, a motto in life to me is persistence beats resistance. And I was just determined to become an agent. And back then in the late 1990s, it was a long process and it took me close to two years to actually become an agent. And I was selected to go down to training and I was very fortunate to be selected to go down to training. Now it was your first office back up in New York and the, one of the organized crime squads, or did you go out into boonies and then come back? I actually was born and raised in New York, and I was fortunate to be selected to be sent back to New York. So my first squad, I was sent back to the city, back to 26 Federal Plaza, [2:26]Seamus’ FBI Journey [2:24]and I was assigned to a squad called C-10. And C-10 was an organized crime squad, which was responsible for the Bonanno family, and then later became the DeCavocanti family as well, which I can explain to you yeah yeah we’ll get we’ll get deep into that now now let’s let me ask you a little bit about the book tell the guys a little bit about the process of writing a book from your fbi experiences. [2:47]It’s a long process. First of all, I was contacted by someone who was interested [2:55]Writing a Book [2:53]in writing a book based upon my career. People had encouraged me to write a book because I had a very successful career. And when you work organized crime, it’s never just about you. It’s about the people that you work with, right? It’s definitely a team. It’s never just one person. I had great supervisors. I had great teammates. I had a great partner. And so I was approached to write a book. So then I had no idea. So there was an agent, a famous agent, an undercover agent named Jack Garcia. So I kind of really leaned on him to kind of learn how to write a book. And it’s a long process. You have to get an agent, the publisher, a co-author I had. And then when you finally have all that, and you do have the manuscript ready to be written, you have to send it down to the FBI. And that is a long process. The FBI, in this instance, probably took over a year for them to review the book because what they want to make sure is you’re not revealing any investigative techniques. Fortunately for me, a lot of the information that is in the book is public information because of all the trials that I did. Interesting. Yeah, it is. It is quite a I know it was quite a process. [4:00]Now, the banana squad, you work in a banana squad. You know, we know a little bit about the banana squad. [4:07]Was Joe Pacino the boss when you first came in? Yes, he was. And I actually had the pleasure of arresting Joe as well. Ah, interesting. I did a show on Joe. He’s a really interesting guy. I know my friend, who was at the banana squad, I think just before you were, and he talked a lot of, to me personally, he won’t go on the show, but he talked a lot about Joe Massino. He said, actually, saw him in the courtroom one time later on, he hadn’t seen him in several years. And, and Joe looked across the courtroom. He said, Doug, how are you doing? He said, Joe was that kind of guy. He was real personal. He was. [4:44]Yeah, so when I first got to the squad, the supervisor at the time was a gentleman named Jack Steubing, and he had the thought process to go after Joe and his money. So there was two accountants that were assigned to a squad at that time. It was Kimberly McCaffrey and Jeff Solette, and they were targeted to go after Joe and his money. And it was a very successful case. And when we arrested Joe, I think it was in January of 2003, I believe it was, I was assigned to be part of that arrest team. Interesting. You know, McCaffrey and Sled are going to be talking about that case out at the Mob Museum sometime in the near future. I can’t remember exactly when it is. And it was a hell of a case. I think it just happened, actually. Oh, did it? Okay. I actually just spoke to Jeff, so I think it just happened about a week or two ago. Okay. Yeah, I tried to get him to come on the show, and I think maybe he was committed to doing something else, and I didn’t keep after him. And I don’t like to pester people, you know. [5:44]And Fensell was the one that said, you got to get Jeff Sillett. You got to get Jeff Sillett. When I looked into that money angle of it, that was pretty interesting about how they were laundering their money through the parking lots and just millions. And when he gave up, like $10 million or something? I mean, it’s unbelievable. Yes. And that’s that’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book is because I don’t think the public or the press really put this together where that squad, C-10, is a very unique squad where we were dismantling the two families at the same time. Half the family was working the Bonanno family and half the family was working the Cavalcanti family. So it’s a very unique squad during that six or seven year time period where we were dismantling two families at the same time. [6:26]Inside the DeCavalcanti Family [6:26]Interesting and and that gets us into the dekavocante family i could always struggle with that name for some reason but that’s all right guys know i butcher these names all the time. [6:37]Forgive me guys anyhow so you ended up working on the dekavocante family down in new jersey now that you know that’s unusual how did that come about we got we got a new jersey branch of the fbi down there too, Yes, we do. So what happened was I went to training in February of 1998. The case actually starts in January of 1998, where an individual named Ralph Guarino was the mastermind behind this, but he had the idea of robbing the World Trade Center. So he had three people that actually tried to execute that plan. They did rob the World Trade Center, but when they came out, they took their mask off and they were identified by the cameras that were actually there. So those individuals were actually arrested pretty quickly. I think two were arrested that day. The third person, I think, fled to New Mexico and was found pretty quickly. Ralph was smart enough to know that he was going to be apprehended pretty quickly. So he reached out to an agent named George Hanna, a legendary agent within the office, and George was able to convince him to become a proactive witness, meaning he would make consensual recordings. That was in January of 1998. I think it was January 14th. [7:51]Approximately nine days later, there was a murder of an individual named Joseph Canigliaro. Who was a ruthless DeKalocanti associate assigned to a wheelchair. How he got in a wheelchair was back in the 70s, a DeKalocanti soldier and him went to go collect money from a loan shark victim. And the story goes that Jim Gallo, James Gallo, actually shot Joseph Canigliaro by accident and paralyzed him. No hard feelings. It was just the course of doing their business back then. But he was paralyzed from the 70s to the 90s. He was a ruthless individual. though. And the reason that they killed him is his crew around him had him killed. They actually killed him because he was such a ruthless person and who would extort people and just really was a bad person. There were stories that he would call people over to him in his wheelchair and shoot them. So a ruthless guy. And he was killed in, I think, January 23rd of 1998. [8:50]So that’s how this case starts. Ralph Guarino, as I said, became a proactive witness. When you have a proactive witness. You just don’t know where they’re going to go. What I mean by that is you would direct him through mob associates and many guys, and you’re trying to gather evidence on tape. [9:05]The Process of Flipping [9:06]Where Ralph Guarino led us was the Brooklyn faction of the DeCavalcanti family, namely Anthony Capo, Anthony Rotondo, Vincent Palermo. [9:17]Joseph Scalfani, a whole host of DeCavalcanti people that were located in Brooklyn. And that’s how we start to build this case. Now, granted, I was just in training at that time in February of 1998. I don’t get sent back to New York until May of 1998. And from May of 1998 until December of 1998, they put you through a rotation, meaning I go through the operations center, I go through surveillance, and then I finally get assigned to C-10 in December of 1998. At that point in time, Jeff and Kim are already on the squad, so they’re operating the case against Messino. I come to the squad, and the Decalvo Canty case has now started. So I’m assigned to the Decalvo Canty portion of the squad to work them. And as I said, that’s why we’re working two parallel cases at the time. One is against the Bananos, the other is against the Jersey family. And we operate, Ralph, proactively from January 1998 up until the first set of indictments, which was in December of 1999. So compare and contrast the Banano family structure and how they operated in [10:27]Comparing Families [10:24]a DeCavocante family structure and how they operate. Were they exactly the same or were there some differences? [10:31]They’re into the same types of the rackets that the Waldemar people are into, but I would say related to the Decalvo Canty family, since they’re based in Jersey, they really had a control of the unions out there. There was two unions that they basically controlled, Local 394, which was the labor union, and they also started their own union, which was the asbestos union, which was Local 1030. [10:53]And those were controlled by the Decalvo Canty family, so that was the bread and butter of the Decalvo Canty family. So, as I said, the first set, you know, we operated Ralph proactively for almost close to two years. And then in December of 1999, we executed our first set of arrests because there was whispers that Ralph, why wasn’t he arrested yet? Where he was the mastermind behind the World Trade Center being robbed, but he hasn’t been picked up yet. So there was whispers that he might be cooperating with the government. And for his safety, that’s why we took him off off the street and we executed our first round of arrest in December of 1999. [11:33]I’m a relatively new agent. I’d only been on the squad now for a year and we arrested 39 people that day. I get assigned to arrest Anthony Capo, who’s a soldier within the Decavacanti family based out of Staten Island. And I was really surprised by that because, as I said, I was just an agent for about a year. Usually when you’re a new agent, you’re assigned to the back, you know, like we are security. I was even surprised that I was going to be on a team. And I was fortunate enough to be the team leader, which is very surprising to me. And the case was out of the Southern District of New York. And in New York, just for the public, there is two districts. There’s a Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York. And the Eastern District of New York also had charges on Anthony Capo as well. So for my arrest team, I had members from the Eastern District of New York as well. There was a separate squad that was looking into Anthony Capo there. [12:30]The First Cooperation [12:27]So I got the ticket to arrest Anthony Capo in December of 1999. And that’s how this case starts. [12:33]Interesting. Now, nobody’s ever flipped out of the DeCavocante family before, I believe. It’s been a pretty tight family, really rigidly controlled by this Richie the Boot. I mean, he’s a fearsome, fearsome guy. I mean, you did not want to get crossways with him. And a smaller, tighter family, it seems to me like, than the New York families. That was right. Well, like up and up until that point, up until that point and unbeknownst to me that no made member in the DeKalbacanti family had ever cooperated with the government before. [13:08]So I had watched George Hanna, how he operated Ralph Guarino for those two years, and he always treated him with respect. And prior to going to arrest Anthony Capo, Anthony Capo had had a reputation of being an extremely violent person, hated by law enforcement and even hated by a lot of people within the mob. But I was going I wasn’t going to let that, you know, use that against him. I was going to treat him with respect regardless. Right. I didn’t know I didn’t know him. I never dealt with him before. And I would basically before I went to go arrest him, I was going to study everything about him, learn everything about him. And I was going to use the approach of treating him with respect and using some mind chess when I was going to arrest him. What I mean by that is I was going to learn everything charges about him, everything about his family. I wanted him to know that I knew him like the back of my hand from head to toe, the start of the book to the end of the book. [14:02]And when I went to arrest him, I remember when we went to his house, he wasn’t there. So all the planning that you do related to going into an arrest, the checks that you do, he’s at the house, you knock on his door, and guess what? He’s not there. So his wife basically tells us that he’s at his mom’s house. So then that throws all the planning out the window, and now we go to his mom’s house. And when I met him, you know, I saw that he had a relationship with his parents, which, you know, it gives me a different perspective from what I heard from him. Interesting. And that says something about him, that’s for sure. So everything that I heard of this violent person and hated person, the way he treated law enforcement, he wasn’t that way with me. [14:49]So when I get him in the car and I start to read him his rights and start to ask him questions, every question that I would ask him, I already had the answer to, like, your date of birth, social security number. And then he would invoke his right to counsel, and then you’re not allowed to ask him any more questions. So what I would do is I would let the mind game start then. And I would ask him, you know, tell him about the charges that he had at that point in time. He was only charged with a conspiracy to murder Charlie Maggiore, who was an acting panel boss of the Decalvo Canty family. At that time, that point in time, they had three panel bosses. It was Charlie Maggiore, Jimmy Palermo and Vincent Palermo. Vincent Palermo was known as the stronger personality and really known as the acting boss. And they wanted to kill Charlie Maggiore. So he was charged with that. conspiracy to murder. And he was also charged with, I believe, stock fraud or it was mail fraud that would lead to stock fraud. So when I would question him, I would tell him, since he already invoked his right to counsel, don’t say anything, just listen to me. For an example, I would say your plan was to murder Charles Majuri. Your plan was to ring his doorbell and shoot him right there with James Gallo, Joe Macella. But you guys didn’t do that because there was a cop on the block. So instead of just doing a ring and run, you guys were going to ring and shoot him, right? [16:17]And now you’ve got to think, I told him, don’t say anything. Just listen to what I just said, right? Because I can’t have him answer any questions. And this wasn’t a question. This was a statement. Yeah. So that gives him food for thought, because you got to think, how would I know that? He doesn’t know at that point in time, this is an indictment. How do I know that? He doesn’t know who the cooperator is. He doesn’t know who made a recording. So I’m just throwing this at him. And this is the first time he’s hearing this. So it’s got to make him think, like, what else does this agent know? And I did this with the other charges as well. And then I would just throw these little tidbits at him. And then I would speak to the driver. How are you doing this? just give him food for thought. And then we just developed a bond that day, just talking sports back and forth. He actually was a cowboy fan. I’m a Steeler fan. So we have that little intensity going back and forth about that. And then we just developed a bond that day. I think that was the first time that he had an interaction with law enforcement, where it was more of a respect thing, as opposed to someone yelling at him or being contentious with him. I don’t think he’s ever or experienced that before. [17:27]Also because of his delivery as well, right? You know, it works both ways where you can, he can have his delivery really angry and that could, you know, provoke law enforcement to be angry towards him too. [17:43]The Proffer Process [17:40]So I think that helped it that way that day. And then just throughout the whole day. And I think one of the things that I do talk about within the book is just explaining processes to people, which is generally, I haven’t seen that done in a book before about how pretrial works. So what is pretrial? How cooperation works? How trial works? So I think there’s a lot of tidbits within the book that kind of explain things like that. Even some crimes, too. Like everyone hears what loan sharking is. I go into detail as to what loan sharking is and how it really works, because it’s a very profitable way to make money. So we have our day together. And, you know, then I had to meet his stepfather. I think he had heard that I treated his stepfather with respect. And then approximately a week later, I get a call from his lawyer and I basically almost fell out of my chair when his lawyer said he wanted to cooperate. [18:37]I bet. And then, yeah. And, you know, keep in mind, I’ve only been on the job for a year and I immediately call the assistant who is a seasoned assistant. Maria Barton, what was her name? And she’s really concerned, like, what did I say? Right. So I told her in these situations, less is more. I just told her I was going to call you. That’s all I said. I didn’t say anything else. Didn’t promise anything at all. I said I was going to call you. So, you know, that started with the process and then you go through a proffer. So I explained what the proffer is and how that process works. Interesting. Yeah. A proffer, guys is is like a kind of agreement you know and you you have to be totally open and admit to every crime you ever did and and we’ll cover you but to a certain point the basis you’ll lie down the basics. [19:31]Right. So what, you know, what we kind of like call it is queen for a day, right? Where you come in, we can’t use your words against you unless you lie to us, right? If you were, if you were to lie to us and then go, go to trial and, you know, we could, if you were to take the stand, we could, we could use it against you. But as long as you come in and you tell us the truth and you tell us everything, all the crimes that you’ve done. And the beauty of the mob is when they do a crime, they never do a crime alone, right? They involve a lot of people within a crime. So that’s the beauty of that. So when we have our first proffer, you know, in time, you only have a short amount of time to actually speak about this because you can only be away from jail for a certain amount of time right before the bad guys start to realize that something might be up. Right. So he comes in. And even even before that, on his on his way back, when we’re taking him back to 26 Federal Plaza, one of the things that he tells us is and it makes sense when we went to his house, he wasn’t there. He was at his mom’s house in the car ride back. He throws a little shot at me and he goes, we knew you were coming. [20:33]Meaning that there was a leak. They got a leak. Yeah. Right. So then when we have the first proffer, he explains the leak to us. And it appears allegedly there was a court reporter within the Southern District that was feeding them information. So that’s not good. And then in the proffer, he tells us about two murders. So, and there might be the bodies, a body might be buried up in Phil Lamella, who was a DeCalvo County soldier, up in Marlboro, New York. So that’s the first thing that he tells us. So these are jewels to us, right? He tells us about a leak. He tells us about two murders. Bodies might be buried. So we have to huddle and we have to decide, is he telling us the truth or not? We all decide that he’s telling us the truth. The proper takes place with George Hanna, as I mentioned him before. Kenny McCabe, a legendary Southern District investigator, and me. And in these situations, again, I’m a new agent. Less is more. I don’t want to say something stupid. So I kind of keep my mouth shut, right? And just listen. So that went really well. And that kind of started this whole process. So now, as we said before, you have… No one cooperated in 100 plus years of this family. And now we have the first [21:49]A Spiral of Cooperation [21:48]made member to cooperate. And basically, Anthony starts a spiral effect of cooperation. [21:56]After he where he reported to in the family at that particular time, since he was such a violent person and hard to control within the family himself. Well, he reported to Vincent Palermo, who was the acting panel boss out of that panel that I talked about, but viewed as the acting boss because of his strong personality. So you have Anthony cooperating. He reports to the acting boss. So from our perspective, our perspective, that’s golden, right? Because now Vinny is going to have to make a decision. Is he going to cooperate or not? And then about three months later, guess what? Vinny decides to cooperate. So now we have a soldier and we have the acting boss who’s going to cooperate. So we go from no one in a hundred years to basically two people in three months. [22:45]Then we have an associate, Victor DiChiro, decides to cooperate. So we go and we arrest him. So now we have three people in four months. So we take all their information, and they have to plead guilty, and they get a cooperation agreement. I explain all that. And when you have a cooperation agreement, as I mentioned before, Anthony was initially arrested for conspiracy to murder, and I believe it was stock fraud. When he pleads guilty, he has to plead guilty to all his crimes that he committed throughout his entire life. Off the top of my head, I remember he pled guilty to two murders. [23:23]11 murder conspiracies, boatload of extortions, and basically every other crime you could think of. And then the same thing with Vinny and Victor. We take all their information, and then we have our next series of indictments. So the first series was 39 indictments. And then the second series of indictments is in October of 2000, October 19th, which we just we just passed the 25th anniversary of that. And that was known as the hierarchy arrest, where we arrested the official boss, John Riggi. We arrested the two other panel bosses, Charlie Maggiore and Jimmy Palermo. We arrested the consigliere, Steve Vitabli, a bunch of captains and soldiers. So that’s a significant arrest, right? So now, as you know, when you have an arrest, there’s trials, there’s plea negotiations. So now we arrested 39 people plus another 13. We’re already up to like 50 something like something people out of that arrest. We get a little shockwave in the sense is that there’s an associate named Frank Scarabino. Frank Scarabino comes forward one day and tells us that there’s a contract on Anthony Capo’s family and Anthony Capo. [24:43]And also, there’s a contract on law enforcement. They want to go back to the old Sicilian ways and basically send a message. So, you know, that’s basically a little bit of a jolt where now we have to try to move Capo’s family. [25:03]Protecting Cooperators [24:59]And Capo’s in prison. He’s defenseless. And I explain all that. People have this sense of you go into the witness security program, you get a whole new life and you’re off and having a great time. They don’t realize that there are prisons within the United States that you have to go to prison. So I can’t say where the prisons are, but I kind of explain that process of how the WITSEC program works, which is run by the marshals. So that’s in that’s in the book as well. Yeah, they have a whole prisons that are just for people in WITSEC. I heard about a guy that said he was in one out west somewhere. Yeah. So and, you know, for those prisons, it’s not like you have to prove yourself. They’re all doing the same time. So they’re basically just trying to do their time and try to get out and get into the next phase of the WoodSec program. So that was kind of a jolt, right? So now we have Frank Scarabino cooperate. So now we have another person. So it’s the list is just getting more and more now. You got to stop taking cooperators and start putting people in jail for the rest of their life, man. [26:03]So it got to after that, we had like two more people cooperate. So we went from having nobody to having seven people cooperate in this period. And it’s interesting. And I know we’re going to go back and forth, but we went from 100 years of having no one to having seven people during this three year period. And since that time period, no other members have cooperated since. So we’ve started the clock again. I think we’re at 25 years plus again since no one cooperated during that period. And I mentioned the murder that we started this case, Joseph Canigliaro. So he was the guy that was in the wheelchair. So as I said, they wanted to kill him because he just tortured his crew. We were able, one of the guys who was initially arrested as part of the December 1999 arrest, he sees everybody’s, he is deciding to cooperate with the government. So he decides to cooperate. His name is Tommy DeTora. So Tommy DeTora decides to cooperate. He’s out on bail. So since he’s out on bail, we decide, let’s make him make a consensual recording. And he makes one of the best consensual recordings the Bureau has ever made. He gets everyone involved in that murder together. [27:28]And they talk about the murder from A to Z. It’s a priceless consensual recording that we used at trial. And it just, you know, one of the things that does stick in my mind is the shooter was Marty Lewis, who got a life sentence. [27:44]The Murder of Joseph Canigliaro [27:45]Marty Lewis is describing when he shot him. And he’s like, I shot him like five or six times in his car. Right. And then Marty Lewis gets out of the car. Joseph Canigliaro drives away, gets to the top of the block in Brooklyn, puts a signal on, put a signal on. And drove the traffic laws, drives to Joseph Wrightson’s house. A guy who was part of the murder conspiracy honks his horn for Joseph Wrightson to come downstairs. So can you imagine Joseph Wrightson looking down the window seeing the guy that’s supposed to be dead right now and telling him to get in the car to go to the hospital with him? [28:32]Unfortunately, when they go to the hospital one of the things that does happen is joseph brightson has uh unfortunately an nyp detective cop who’s a cousin and involves him in this as well and the cop takes shells from the car and he becomes he gets locked up by us as well they all go to trial they get convicted and. [28:55]You know, we also arrested a Genevieve’s captain related to the leak. So in total, I think the numbers were 71 defendants were convicted, 11 murders were solved, seven trials transpired. You know, as everyone knows, you have the arrest, but then you have the trials, right? And I know that from December 2002 up until November of 2003 was the year that I was on trial. There was three trials that I had, and then there was another trial. There was two trials that one was a mistrial. Then we had another trial. So during that one year, we had a year of trials, and the biggest trial I had went on for two months. [29:42]Life on Trial [29:38]So I basically had a year of no life where it was just trials. And as you know yourself, when you have trial, it’s not just you just show up at trial. You have trial prep beforehand. And then when you’re actually on trial every day, it’s 20, it’s 24, seven, you have a trial, you have trial, then at night you have to prep a witness. So there’s just constant stuff throughout the day. Yeah, really? It’s a, it’s a long, boring process for you guys. [30:05]You know, these are like what we would say the real Sopranos, you know, the Sopranos, Tom Soprano, and that’s kind of based on this New Jersey family. I tell you, that Soprano, so much of it was ripped from real life. I don’t know. They interviewed you for details. They interviewed some agents and looked some court cases in order to write those scripts. I know that. And in particular, I think of the gay member that was killed. [30:28]The Real Sopranos [30:27]You know, you guys had that down there. So there’s a lot of references in your book or things in the book that the guys will say, oh, yeah, they did that in the Sopranos. Can you tell us about some of them? [30:37]Well, the thing that was great, especially for trial, is in March of 1999, the show starts in January of 1999. And we have a consensual recording in March where we have DeCavocanti members talking about the show and them saying, saying, this is you, this is you, and this is you, which was priceless for trial. Right. It’s like a jury’s going to hear that. And even during the trial, the judge had to give the jury instructions about the show to make sure that it wouldn’t sway their decision. Then if you watch the show, the first season, the official boss in the show dies of stomach cancer. In real life, that’s happened in real life. In June of 1997, Jake Amari was the acting boss of the Decaval Canty family. He dies of stomach cancer. So that’s a… [31:40]It’s a part of the show right there. Then I know everyone sees the strip club, right? Well, the acting boss, as I told you at the time, Vincent Palermo, he had a strip club in Queens, Wiggles. [31:53]So there’s a similarity there. Then they have the meat market that they go to, right, back and forth in the show. That’s a real meat market. I don’t want to say the name of the real meat market here, but there is a real type of meat market there. We discussed the union angle, the two unions that they have. So there’s so many scams related to the unions. There’s the no show job, right, where you don’t have to show up to work. There’s the no work job where you come, but you don’t have to do any work at all. [32:26]Back then, what it was called was they had union halls, right, where you actually had to show up early in the morning. There’d be a line of people, and you would show up. It was called the shape up. and you would wait online and hopefully that you would get work that day. Well, the DeCable Cante members, they wouldn’t show up early and wait online. They would show up whenever they want and they would cut the line and they would get work. So these were their types of unions that they had. Then, as you mentioned, there was the gay angle too. So on the DeCable Cante real side, there was a guy named John D’Amato. And John D’Amato basically made himself the acting boss when John Riggie went to jail in the early 1990s. John D’Amato was part, was very close to John Gotti. There was a murder. It’s probably the most indictable murder in mob history called the murder of Fred Weiss. John Gotti wanted Fred Weiss killed because John Gotti thought that Fred Weiss was cooperating with the government. all because Fred Weiss switched lawyers. [33:35]He was paranoid that Fred Weiss was cooperating. So it became a race to kill Fred Weiss. So you had two mob families trying to kill him, the Decalvo Canty family and the Gambino family. So in total, I think either 15 people at least have either pled guilty or have been convicted of that murder. That murder happened on 9-11-1989, a horrible day, right? So, where I’m going is that happened in 89. In 1990, 1991, John D’Amato becomes the acting boss of the family. So, now he’s the acting boss of the DeKalb Alcanti family. John D’Amato had a girlfriend. His girlfriend starts to tell Anthony Capo that John D’Amato is going to sex clubs with her and they’re having sex with men. So this is this is brought to Anthony Capo’s attention. And he has to tell his superiors that we have a gay acting boss representing our family. And in his eyes, this cannot happen. Right. So he brings it to Vincent Palermo, brings it to Rudy Ferron, and the superiors that this is what’s happening. And they decide that he has to be killed. Now, also what he was doing was, and you speak to Anthony Rotondo, who also cooperated with the government. [34:58]John DeMotta was also stealing money from the family. He was borrowing money from the other families, telling him that it was for the DeCalbacanti family, but it was really to cover his game of the gambling losses that he was incurring. So those are two things that he was doing. Right. He was he was if you ask Anthony Rotondo, he says he was killed because of the gambling that he was incurring the losses. And if he asks Anthony Capo, he was killed because it was looking bad for our family, for their family, that he was a gay acting boss. And at that time, it wasn’t acceptable. Times have changed. But back then, it wasn’t an acceptable thing. And that’s similar to the show. There’s a gay angle within the show as well. [35:41]The Gay Angle in the Mob [35:42]Interesting. It’s the real Sopranos. I remember I watched that show, even going back and watch some of them every once in a while. And I just think, wow, that’s real. So, so even though the director says no one was speaking to them, it’s kind of ironic that there are a lot of like similarities between the show and real life. Yeah. And especially down there in New Jersey and, and, and their connection to the Bonanno family or to a New York, the New York families. And then also, and then also within the show is, is, is the stock stood. There’s also stocks. Oh yeah, the stock fraud. Yeah. They did a boiler room or something. And they were pumping and dumping stocks and Tony was making money out of that. So, yeah, that’s I’d forget. And then from and in real life, Bill Abrama was like the wizard of Wall Street. [36:37]So interesting. Well, you’ve had quite, quite a career. What do you think about New York organized crime now that today, you know, we just had quack, quack, Ruggiero, Ruggiero’s son and some other guys that were connected to families indicted for gambling. He’s got my gambling fraud. I haven’t really studied it yet. It is like they had some rig gambling games, which is common. Like in Kansas city, when I was working this, they would have, they would bring in guys who would love to gamble and had money businessmen. And then they’d, they’d play them for sure. They would cheat them and take a bunch of money from them. This was much more sophisticated, but that’s a, that’s a story that’s been going on a long time. You think that Bob is on a comeback from that? Ha, ha, ha, ha. [37:24]The mob has been around for 125 years. They’re not going to go away. Okay. They get smarter and they adapt. And it’s like, I haven’t read the indictment from head to toe, but they’ve used some, you know, sophisticated investigative techniques just to kind of con people. So they’re getting better, right? So some of the techniques that they use when you hear, it’s like some of the things that I saw where the poker tables that they use, the tables that they use were able to see the card. So they use some pretty, you know, slick techniques, you know, and then like some of the glasses or the contact lenses. So, you know, they’re not going to go away. They’re just going to keep on trying to rebuild. That’s why you have to continue to put resources towards them. Yeah. I think what people don’t understand for these mob guys, it’s if they don’t get out and go into legitimate business selling real estate or something like that. It’s it’s a constant scam a constant hustle every day to figure out another way to make money because they don’t have a paycheck coming in and so they got to figure out a way to make money and they got to make it fast and they got to make it big and in a short period of time it’s just constant every day every time they walk by knew a drug addict one time as a professional burglar and he said every time he’s in recovery he said every time i’ll buy a pharmacy he said in my mind I’m figuring out how to take that pharmacy off. So that’s the way these mob guys are. [38:52]And sports betting has been a staple of theirs forever. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And the apps are getting into them a little bit, but I see what’s going on now. Also, we had these players, Trailblazers coach and a couple, three players, are now helping people rig the bets. And you go to the apps, and you bet a bunch of money on some guy who’s going to have a bad day. And then he just doesn’t show up to work. You end up being the supervisor of the Columbo squad, I see. Same as after that DeCavoconte case, and you spent all that time, you ended up getting promoted to a supervisor and you must’ve been good because they kept you right there in New York and gave you another mob squad. I know one agent here in Kansas City that was promoted and he kept the one squad here, as they called it. [39:43]Leading the Columbo Squad [39:40]And that was really unusual. Usually it’d be somebody in from out of town. So that says something about you. So tell us about your experiences doing that. [39:48]Well, after we did this case, which was about six years, I was requested to go down to run the Columbo squad. And at that time, I think the Columbo squad had eight supervisors in eight years. I really thought I was too young to be a supervisor because I only had six years on. So I was basically voluntold, I would say, to go down there. And guys, that is young. I want to tell you something. I’ve seen a lot of different Bob squad supervisors come through here in Kansas City. And and they were all you know like 20 year agents 15 18 year agents that came from somewhere else so yeah so you know again I thought I was just way too young to be a supervisor as I said I was just on the job for about six years and I was voluntold to go down there yeah and I said if I’m going to go down there there’s a couple of things just based upon what I saw a I’m not a yes man and two the squad needs some sort of stability so I went down there and I was able to stay there I was there from actually December of 2004 all the way up until June of 2013. [40:51]So we at that time when I first got there we really didn’t have a lot of cases going trying to go on so I was able to change the tactics right because I think juries had changed at that point in time where instead of having a historical witness just go on to stand and tell things, now we had shows out there, right? You had NCIS where the whole DNA-type stuff came in, so I had to change our approach, and proactive witnesses making consensual recordings were the way to go. And I think during a seven-year time period, our squad. [41:24]Did an amazing job. Now it went from C10. I went, the squad went down to, it became C38. And we made probably 1,800 recordings in a seven and a half year time period. So, which is an amazing amount of recordings. So, a lot of transcriptions too. A lot of transcriptions. And I, you know, a three-hour tape could take you a day to listen to because you’re just trying to find that little piece of information. Yeah. Because a lot of it is just talk, right? Yeah. So I think our first big case was in June of 2008. And we took down the acting boss, a bunch of captains. And that’s when things really started to take off. We had a violent soldier cooperate named Joseph Compatiello. And, you know, we talk about proffers. His first proffer, he comes in and he basically tells us that there are three bodies buried right next to each other. So the layman would think, OK, they’re right next to each other. They weren’t right next to each other they were about 1.1 miles apart from each other. [42:28]And you could be in your your room there and we’re trying to find a body it’s really hard to find so we were actually able to find two of the bodies one of the bodies was a guy named while Bill Cattullo he was the under boss of the Colombo family we found him in Formingdale Long Island he was behind a berm we were out there for about eight days and each day you know I’m getting pressure from my superiors. We’re going to find something because there’s a lot of press out there. There was another victim named Cormone Gargano who was buried. He was killed in 1994 and buried out there. Unfortunately, there was a new building built. [43:06]And we could not find him there, but he was initially killed at a body shop in Brooklyn, and they buried him in Brooklyn, and then they decided to dig him up and bring him out to Long Island. So we went back to the body shop. What the Colombo family used to do, though, is they used to kill you, bury you, and put lime on top of the body. What lime does is it kills the smell, but preserves the body. Oh, I didn’t realize that. I thought it was supposed to deteriorate the body too. I think most people bought that. So good information. So, so when we found wall of bill, basically from his, from his hips up were intact. Oh, And when related to Cormier Gargano, because they had killed him in the body shop and then dug him up and brought him out to Long Island. We went back to the shop and figuring, let’s see if we can actually see if there’s any parts of him there. And there actually were. And we’re able to get DNA and tie it back and confirm it was him. [44:15]Major Arrests and Cases [44:12]So that’s how that dismantling of the Colombo family started. And then just to fast forward a little bit in January 2011, we have I spearhead the largest FBI mob arrest where we arrested 127 people that day across the states and also went to Italy, too, to take down people. [44:32]And after that, the Bureau decides to reduce the resources dedicated to organized crime. And I then get the Bonanno family back. So C-10 merges back into my squad. And then I have the Bananos, the Columbos, and the Decafacanthes as well. So now I have all three families back. And I basically run that for another two years. And I guess my last official act as a supervisor is related to Goodfellas, where Jimmy Burke had buried a body in his basement. We saw a 43-year-old cold case murder where he killed an individual named Paul Katz, buried him in his basement. And when he went away for the point shaving, the Boston College point shaving case, well, he killed him in 1969, buried him in his basement. Then he goes to jail in the 80s. He gets fearful that the cops that he had on his payroll back in the 60s were going to talk. So he decides to have our witness at the time, Gaspar Valenti, who came forward back in the 80s, moved the body with Vincent S. Our son so they move the body but again they’re not professional so pieces are going to be back there so in 2013 we go back and we dig and we actually find pieces of paul cats and we tie that to dna to his son to his son and we confirm that it was him. [45:57]So that was my last official act as a supervisor. Talk about art, art, imitating life again, you know, in the Goodfellas, they dug up a body. In the Sopranos, they dug up a body. I think I saw another show where they dug up a body. One of them, they were like, man, this smells. [46:13]I mean, can you imagine that going back and having to dig up a body? And then, you know, and, you know, they’re just wearing t-shirts and jeans and maybe leather gloves. And they’d have to deal with all that stuff and put it in some kind of a bag can take it somewhere else oh my god you know i have a question while bill cutello that this guy was part of the the hit team that took him out do you remember anything about right i’m trying to remember i’ve read this story once he was kind of like more of a peacemaker and and if i remember right you remember what the deal was with him well back like what happens is in the early 1990s there’s a colombo war right you have the persicos versus the arena faction and one thing about the Colombos and the Persicos, they never forget. So in the early 1990s, while Bill Cotullo was on the arena side, and as I said, there was a war where approximately 13 people were killed. In the late 1990s, Ali Persico was going to be going to jail, and while Bill Cotullo thought that Ali was going to go to jail and that he would take over the family, Ali didn’t want that to happen. So basically while Vilcunzulo thought he was getting the keys to the kingdom and they were going to kill him. [47:28]And what they did is they lured him to Dino Saraceno’s house in Brooklyn and Dino Calabro lured him into the basement and shot him in the back of the head. And we had all these guys then decide to cooperate. As I said, Joe Caves was the first person to cooperate. Dino Calabro cooperated. [47:48]Sebi Saraceno cooperated. So we had a whole host of people cooperate and we were able to dismantle the Colombo family. And I’ve been extremely blessed to be part of teams that have dismantled three families, Bananos, the Columbos, and the D. Calacanti family. So, you know, as I said, and it’s never just one person. It’s always teammates, partners, and also other supervisors that I’ve had. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it does take a lot of people to take those down. When you’re writing books, you try to make sure everybody gets a little bit of credit. Yeah. And, you know, I think, you know, the thing that was that was, you know, crazy when related to the recovery of Wild Bill is we had our evidence response team out there. And, you know, the witness takes us out there to show us where he thinks the bodies are buried. And related to Wild Bill, it was in the back of a field. And he kept on saying it was behind a berm. So we took him back there and he showed us where he thought it was. So we had our evidence response team dig. And they basically dug us an Olympic-sized pool. [48:57]We could not find him. So there was two other sites that we were trying to look at because Richie Greaves was supposed to be next to the train tracks. And as I mentioned, Cormac Gargano was next to a building that had been replaced. So my squad, actually our squad, C-38, decides, Seamus, do you mind if we get some shovels? So I was like, sure. So there was, because we were just looking at each other at the time. So my team, Vincent D’Agostino, they’re pretty close by. He got some shovels and came back. And there was like six of us. And we just started digging ourselves. So we dug in one area, nothing. Then another agent basically said, let’s dig over here. [49:38]And sure enough, like talk about, you know, I always say hard work leads to good luck. We started digging and then we found the white stuff. We found the line and jackpot. It was while Bill, he was hogtied face down with his feet up. And as soon as I saw the white stuff and then I saw, you know, like his foot, then we stopped and I said, let me go get the professionals. I ran over, I drove over, and I got the team leader from ERT. She got in the car. And, you know, of course, she’s very excited. I was like, you know, we F.M. got him, you know. And so I drove her back over there. And that’s when you kind of contain the crime scene. And we were able to find him. But, you know, it was our squad that found him. And then, as I said before, then, you know, our squad decides to go back to the body shop. And we found remnants of Carmine Gargano there. So the squad just did an amazing job but really we basically found two bodies ourselves you know and i think in my career i’ve been extremely blessed to find five you know which is just crazy well that’s not something those accountants and lawyers and stuff were trained for you need to get those former cops out there on those shovels and digging for bodies. [50:57]Final Thoughts and Stories [50:57]Well interesting this this has really been fun seamus any any other stories you can think of You want to you want to just want to tell just busting to make sure people know that’s in this book. I tell you what, guys, this is an interesting book. It’s it’s, you know, as I said, those kinds of stories and the procedures and how FBI works. There’s there’s a lot of stories in there. I don’t want to give to give the book away. You know, there’s a lot of stories even. Yeah. You know, there’s an even during that year of trials. There’s plenty of stories there. There was a blackout that that year, too. So there’s a lot of stories related to that. You know, even even the trials, there’s a lot of things that came up at trial. So I don’t want to give to give those stories away. But I think it’s a good read. As I said, I think it’s one of the few books that actually explains things because, you know, I think the public hears these words, but they don’t know what these words mean. And I just think it’s important that they do know what it means, because there’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes, especially with the jury. Right. You know, the jury only sees what they see. There’s a lot of things that go on when the jury leaves the room between the government, the judge and also the defense attorney. So I try to bring to shed some light related to that as well. [52:13]Interesting. Well, Seamus McElherney. And the book is Flipping Capo. That’s Anthony Capo. The first guy to be flipped in the Cavalcante family ever, which led to a cascade of other mob guys flipping, didn’t it? [52:32]Sure did. Just like in a Bonanno family, you know, they start flipping there. And it just, I didn’t know where it was ever going to end. Finally, it ended. [52:41]It sure did. Well, I have to say, it’s been great to meet you. I wish you continued success. And this has been a lot of fun. All right. Yeah, it’s been great to have you on Seamus. Thanks a lot. 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. 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.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with author Jay Baer to explore the hidden, human side of organized crime's biggest names — Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, John Gotti, and Paul Castellano. Jay's book, Mob Life: The Private World of Capone, Lansky, Gotti, and Castellano, takes a unique look beyond the murders, rackets, and headlines to reveal how these mobsters actually lived — what they ate, how they dressed, their relationships with religion, and how they handled immense power and wealth. Listeners will hear: How Al Capone's family sold his spaghetti sauce recipe to Ragu — their first commercial product. Why Meyer Lansky, the most devout of the four, was denied the right to die in Israel by Prime Minister Golda Meir. The lavish lifestyle and fatal missteps of Paul Castellano, the “Howard Hughes of the Mafia.”   The contrast between Gotti's flamboyance and Lansky's low profile — and how each approach shaped their downfall. The staggering fortunes these men built — and how, in the end, they all lost it. Jay also shares his own lifelong fascination with organized crime, his career outside writing, and his upcoming project, How to Live Like a Gangster — No Prison Required, a look at mob values like loyalty, respect, and power through a modern lens. Gary and Jay swap mob history from New York to Kansas City, including a discussion of the real story behind scenes from Casino and Kansas City's own underworld power struggles. ON AMAZON Wayne said 5.0 out of 5 stars Great Facts on the Mob Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2021Format: Kindle If your looking for a good fast interesting read on the Mafia, this is the book for you. Full of information on mob types that most have no clue about. You can't lose with this book I believe.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Burt Gonzalez, a veteran officer from the Miami-Dade Police Department, for an unfiltered look inside one of the most violent and chaotic eras in American law enforcement history. Bert has published his story title The Real Greatest Show on Earth. With decades of experience spanning multiple divisions, Burt recounts the transformation of Dade County's police force—from Metro-Dade to Miami-Dade—and now back to an elected sheriff. He walks us through the gritty evolution of policing in South Florida, where the drug trade fueled daily violence and cartel wars left bodies in the streets. Burt shares firsthand stories from Miami's cocaine-crazed years, including a shocking drug bust that netted 208 kilos of cocaine and over a million dollars in cash, offering a vivid glimpse into the unpredictable and dangerous life of a street cop. Beyond the shootouts and seizures, we explore the human side of policing—the growing mental health crisis in Miami-Dade, the deadly unpredictability of domestic violence calls, and the emotional toll that constant exposure to trauma takes on officers. Burt emphasizes the importance of training, de-escalation, and support systems for those on the front lines. The conversation also previews Burt's upcoming show, Sergeant Maverick, a podcast where he'll tackle everything from police work and politics to financial advice for first responders—and even the decline of customer service in America. Join us for this candid, eye-opening conversation as Burt Gonzalez pulls back the curtain on the realities, dangers, and hard-earned lessons of Miami policing during the height of America's drug war. Click here to get the book, The Real Greatest Show on Earth 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' or 'Gangland Wire,' the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, welcome to the studio of Gangland Wire. I'm back here, and I have a fellow copper from down in Miami-Dade County, Florida, Burt Gonzalez. And, you know, I worked all the jobs on the police department, mainly spent my time in intelligence, so that's why I focus on organized crime. But I worked all the rest of the jobs, almost all of them. I never was a wheel man. But other than that, I think I did everything. And Burt's done a lot of things, too. So welcome, Bert. Thank you, Gary. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. And guys, you need to know, and we'll talk about this later, Bert has a book out there about his career and some great stories called The Real Greatest Show on Earth. And believe me, Bert, it is the real greatest show on Earth, isn't it? Well, that's why I named the book that. [0:49] I was thinking about what is it that we do and what do we call it out there ourselves, in the street, in the homes of our citizens and everything. And really, it's a circus. So that's where I came up with that. True circus. All right, now tell the guys a little bit about your department that you spent your time in and how you ended up going on that department and a little bit about the history of it and what it was like as you went over the years. So go ahead. So I was with Miami-Dade Police, formerly known as Metro-Dade Police, when I joined in 1983. And in the areas where my family moved here from New York and I followed a year later, the area was unincorporated Dade County at the time. It wasn't called Miami-Dade County yet. [1:40] And so the police of the jurisdiction was Metro Dade police. And our neighbor behind our house, Bob Johns, was a sergeant with Metro.

In this explosive episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins dives deep into one of the most complex and mysterious figures of the Cold War era—Ricardo “Monkey” Morales, a Cuban exile whose life intersected with the CIA, the anti-Castro underground, Las Vegas mobsters, and even the JFK assassination. Gary welcomes Rick Morales Jr., son of Monkey Morales, and author Sean Oliver, co-writer of the new book Monkey Morales: The True Story of a Mythic Cuban Exile Assassin, CIA Operative, FBI Informant, Smuggler, and Dad. Together, they unravel the incredible life of a man who was at once a patriot, a spy, and a killer. Rick recounts growing up in Miami's Little Havana, where his father's shadow loomed large—rumored to have ties to the JFK assassination and known for his secret missions across the world. From escaping Cuba as a disillusioned Castro loyalist to training as part of the CIA's Operation 40 assassination unit, Monkey Morales lived a life that reads like a spy thriller. Sean Oliver walks listeners through Monkey's covert missions in Africa's Congo, his deep ties to other operatives like Frank Sturgis and Barry Seal, and the secret wars that connected Cuban exiles, the CIA, and organized crime. The conversation also explores how Monkey became entangled with Lefty Rosenthal, the Chicago Outfit's Las Vegas gambling mastermind, and how his bomb-making skills were used in mob turf wars across Florida. The discussion culminates with Morales Jr.'s chilling memory of his father confessing he was in Dallas on the day President Kennedy was shot—and that he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald in a CIA training camp. Whether you believe Morales was a hero, a villain, or both, his story weaves through some of the darkest and most intriguing chapters of 20th-century American history.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins welcomes author Gregory Macalino, whose book “Little Pussy and Long Branch: Perfect Together” offers a deep dive into New Jersey's underworld and the life of one of its most notorious figures—Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo. Gregory begins by sharing his own story, growing up in Monmouth County amid the Italian-American enclaves where whispers of mob activity were part of daily life. His firsthand familiarity with the gambling, politics, and personalities that shaped the Jersey Shore inspired him to explore Russo's remarkable and brutal reign. Gary and Gregory trace Little Pussy Russo's rise from a small-time Newark street thief to a powerful player in the Genovese crime family, detailing how he infiltrated Long Branch's political and law enforcement circles to control the town for over twenty years. Gregory explains Russo's business acumen, his use of gambling and real estate ventures to mask criminal operations, and the dangerous rivalries that emerged with independent drug dealers who threatened his dominance. Listeners will hear how Little Pussy Russo's empire ultimately unraveled amid violence, betrayal, and federal pressure. Gregory recounts dramatic gangland episodes, family connections, and the eventual collapse of a criminal fiefdom that had once seemed untouchable. The conversation also touches on how Russo's world parallels modern portrayals of mob life—especially The Sopranos—revealing just how much real New Jersey mobsters influenced America's favorite mafia fiction. As the discussion closes, Gregory reflects on the lasting cultural footprint of men like Russo and what their stories teach us about power, corruption, and community identity. This is a must-listen for true crime fans, Mafia historians, and anyone fascinated by how organized crime once ruled the Jersey Shore. 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' or 'Gangland Wire,' the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. For those of you who don't know me, most of you do, I think, sometimes, a lot of repeat listeners out there, and I really appreciate all you guys that always come back and make comments on my YouTube channel and comment on my Gangland Wire podcast group page, and so I really appreciate all you. And for you guys that don't know me, I was with the Kansas City Police Department. I spent about 14 years in the intelligence unit. We worked the Sabella crime family here in Kansas city and a variety of other things like that, uh, retired and did a couple other things and find out my last retirement gig is I'm a podcaster. And then this has just been so much fun for me, guys. I really appreciate all your support. I'm getting to know all these authors all around the United States. There's not a place. If you're an intelligence, you like to have contacts where you can learn something or find out something or get something done. Well, there's not any city, I don't think, in the United States, I don't know somebody that's been on my podcast that I can call them up or email them and say, what about this or what about that?   [1:06] So it's really broadened my life and this made my life much richer. So anyhow, today, without further ado, we have Gregory Macalino. Gregory, welcome.   [1:17] Thank you. Great to be here, really, truly. Yeah, well, I really, as I told you when we were talking before, I really am pleased about getting you on the show and about your book that you wrote,

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Tim Richards, a former St. Louis intelligence officer and author of Crook's Kill and Cops Lie. Tim brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge from his years investigating the mob and navigating the thin line between law enforcement and organized crime. We dive deep into the history and dynamics of the St. Louis crime families and their ties—or lack thereof—to Kansas City and Chicago. Tim reveals how the St. Louis mob and the Syrian mob were into labor racketeering, ghost workers, and union control, profiting off federally funded projects. Click here to buy Crooks Kill and Cops Lie and to see all of Tim's books • Listeners will hear gritty stories about: • The interplay between Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago mob families. • The “Syrian” mafia's role in local unions, vengeance, and violence. • St. Louis mob figures like Paul Leisure, Mike Trupiano, and Jesse Stoneking. • An unforgettable encounter with Trupiano during a traffic stop. • The challenges police faced without legal wiretaps, relying instead on FBI intelligence. • The ripple effects of mob influence reach as far as Las Vegas gambling operations. From bloody reprisals to uneasy alliances, Tim shares not just history but lived experience—vivid accounts of hit jobs, betrayals, and the complexities of policing organized crime. As he reflects on how law enforcement strategies and technology have evolved, Tim leaves us with a powerful reminder of the mob's enduring mark on Midwestern history. If you want an insider's perspective on St. Louis mobsters and the Midwest underworld, you won't want to miss this one. Subscribe to get more stories every week. This is a must-listen for true crime fans, Mafia historians, and anyone fascinated by how organized crime once ruled the Jersey Shore. 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' or 'Gangland Wire,' the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. 0:03 Welcome to Gangland Wire 1:02 Exploring Kansas City and St. Louis Mob Ties 4:19 The Influence of the Chicago Mafia 8:56 The Aladdin Hotel and Skimming Operations 11:41 A Deep Dive into Paul Leisure's Fate 15:12 The Old Italian Mafia and Its Tactics 23:09 Changes in Policing and Mafia Control 24:54 Personal Stories from the Streets 27:43 The Rise and Fall of Jesse Stoneking 33:05 Reflections on Organized Crime and Histor [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio, Gangland Wire. I have another former intelligence unit detective, Tim Richards. Now, you know, and if you don't, I didn't introduce myself. I'm sorry, guys. Some of you all may be new listeners. I'm Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. Got this podcast, Gangland Wire. We deal with the mob. And I worked a mob in Kansas City, and Tim Richards worked in it in St. Louis, just across the state. So welcome, Tim. Thank you. Thank you, Gary. I'm really glad to have you. I was really glad to find this book. I've been working on a book myself. So I'm looking at your book, seeing how you did certain things and then going back to mine. And my story is a little bit different, I guess, but different, but the same. You know, we had very similar experiences, guys. When Tim and I first started talking on the phone, you know, it was like, oh, my God, that's like I was talking to another guy in the same unit, you know, because we had the same kind of experiences. [0:59] Some of them we'll talk about, some of them we won't talk about on here. But we're going to talk about the mafia primarily. And Tim,

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins pulls back the curtain on one of the FBI's most troubling scandals—the case of Joe Stabile, a corrupt FBI agent whose fall from grace revealed just how deep organized crime's influence could run. The story begins in November 1978, when Stabile pled guilty to corruption charges. But as Gary explains, that plea was only the tip of the iceberg. Behind it lay years of whispered rumors, shady deals, and quiet payoffs—stories that painted Stabile not as a straight-arrow G-man, but as a hustler working both sides of the law. Drawing on conversations with retired FBI agents who once worked alongside Stabile, Gary explores the tangled web of mob connections and compromised investigations. Listeners will hear how mobsters slipped him bribes to make gambling cases disappear, and how his background as a New York City cop may have set the stage for the choices that pulled him deeper into the mob's orbit. The episode also highlights the work of honest agents, such as Tony Villano, who began piecing together the truth about Stabile's corruption. Through case files, informant accounts, and law enforcement interviews, Gary demonstrates how the FBI struggled with a culture of silence that often protected its own—even when integrity was at stake. As the story unfolds, the lines between right and wrong blur, exposing systemic cracks inside federal law enforcement during a time when the Bureau was shifting its focus and fighting for credibility. Gary closes with reflections on the lasting impact of the Stabile case: what it meant for the FBI's war on organized crime, and how Stabile himself may have continued to live in the shadows after his conviction—a man caught between two worlds, crime and law enforcement, never fully belonging to either. This is a must-listen for true crime fans, Mafia historians, and anyone fascinated by how organized crime once ruled the Jersey Shore. 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' or 'Gangland Wire,' the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. 0:06 Introduction to Joe Stabile 1:19 The Corruption Unveiled 3:14 Breakfast with Retired Agents 5:59 The Connection to Organized Crime 9:06 Investigating Stabile's Allegations 14:18 The Gambler's Payoff 20:19 Confronting Stabile 21:39 The Aftermath of the Indictment 23:35 Stabile's New Life 25:39 Reflections on Undercover Operations [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence [0:04] Unit detective back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I welcome each and every one of you. I've got a story that it's really interesting how I found out about this. That's part of the story. Let's go back. Here's what I'm talking about. A corrupt FBI agent named Joe Stabile. That's S-T-A-B-I-L-E. November 1978. [0:26] It was a Monday and FBI agent Joe Stabile was pleading guilty in federal court to corruption charges. Now, you don't hear about this very much. I know a couple of three here in Kansas City over the years that got popped for doing something. A couple of them were involved in a stolen party or a stolen property ring. A couple of others were one of them was just running his mouth too much and he was drinking too much. I don't think they actually end up charging him anything, but he did run his run his mouth way too much. Joseph Beal only admitted in this guilty plea that he lied about some money transactions, but that's just a tip of the iceberg in this, folks. [1:03] The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District was sitting in the spectators that day,

This is a bonus episode that contains a sample from the new, exciting podcast Chinatown Sting. The Chinatown Sting is a gripping investigative show about a group of mothers who took down Manhattan Chinatown's drug kingpin, Machine Gun Johnny. Lidia Jean unravels an entire network of women who were roped into Johnny's criminal underworld and found themselves playing the ultimate high-stakes game. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Listen to a preview of The Chinatown Sting now and find it wherever you get podcasts. Binge the entire season, ad-free, with a Pushkin+ subscription—sign up on The Chinatown Sting Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, Gary Jenkins, a former KCPD Intelligence Detective, is joined by Lydia Jean Kott (LJ), a producer at Pushkin Industries, the company founded by Malcolm Gladwell. LJ brings us inside the making of Chinatown Sting, a gripping new podcast that uncovers the fascinating and little-known story of Chinese organized crime, China White heroin, and characters like Machinegun Johnny in New York's Chinatown during the 1980s. LJ explains how her interest in the case was sparked by a personal connection—her boyfriend's mother was a federal prosecutor involved in the original sting. That legendary case centered on heroin smuggled from Hong Kong into Chinatown, hidden in packages and distributed through a network of mahjong-playing mothers. What began with a flagged parcel at the post office unraveled into a high-stakes undercover investigation. We explore how law enforcement managed to penetrate this tight-knit immigrant community, the risks taken by prosecutors like Beryl Howell, and the difficult moral choices faced by those caught in the middle—including a woman forced to choose between betraying a friend or saving herself. LJ also delves into the history of Chinatowns in America, where family associations and Tongs—formed initially as mutual aid societies—became intertwined with the vice industry. She connects this legacy to gangs like the Flying Dragons and their ties back to organized crime in Hong Kong.   Our discussion is not just about drugs, gangs, and federal stings—it's about storytelling, community, and the pursuit of survival. LJ shares how she and her co-reporter pieced the story together over the course of years of interviews and archival research, giving voice to people often overlooked in the larger mob narrative.   If you're fascinated by organized crime, hidden histories, or the way law enforcement takes on international networks, Chinatown Sting is a podcast you won't want to miss. 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.  xx Gary Jenkins : [00:00:00] Hey, welcome all you wire tappers. 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. Gary Jenkins : I did a few other things in between, but this is the love of my life here, guys. And I was just talking with our guests that I don't do this for the money, but I do it for fun and, and it is a lot of fun and, and I can tell my guests today. Does it to earn a living, but she does it a lot for fun. She really is into it. Gary Jenkins : So it's Lydia Jean Kott, or we call her lj. Welcome. Lj, L.J. : thank you so much. I'm a huge fan of the show and it's an honor to get to be on it and to get to talk to you. Gary Jenkins : Well, cool. Thank you for that compliment. I really appreciate that. Kind of makes it worthwhile keeping coming back. I get those nice comments on my YouTube channel quite a little bit. Gary Jenkins : That kinda keeps me coming back when I get down a little bit. Anyhow first of all, you're. You're with something called Pushkin, P-U-S-H-K-I-N, which is a Malcolm Gladwell company. I think he started it and had [00:01:00] the first podcast early in the days. Mm-hmm. You know, I'm like one of the earliest I am the earliest Mafia podcast. Gary Jenkins : I think that ever first one had ever started, I believe long before. When did you start? Oh, . 2015, I believe. L.J. : Okay. Yeah. Early, early podcast days, Gary Jenkins : early podcast. I listened to Serial and I thought, man, I think I could do that and tell police stories. Gary Jenkins: Yeah.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Dan O'Sullivan from the new podcast The Outfit to discuss the incredible story of Ken Eto, known in Outfit circles as “Tokyo Joe.” Ken Eto was unique: the only Japanese American member of the Chicago Outfit, and the only man to survive being shot three times in the head. Eto was the Outfit's gambling kingpin on Chicago's North Side, controlling operations along Rush Street, policy wheels in Black neighborhoods, Chinese games in Chinatown, and the Puerto Rican “bolita” numbers racket. His empire generated millions of dollars each year, placing him among the highest-ranking members of the Outfit. But success had its price. In 1980, the FBI caught Eto in a sting, and his Outfit bosses grew nervous—especially since he had ties to a cocaine deal with the Genovese family. Invited to dinner by a mobster who had never broken bread with him before, Eto knew it was a setup. Two gunmen shot him three times in the head. Miraculously, he lived, and his survival changed the history of the Outfit. 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 [00:00:00] Hey, y'all, you wire tapers out there. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City. Missouri Police Intelligence unit detective with his own podcast. Now, believe it or not, I've been doing this for quite a while. Guys, if a lot of you guys have been following me for five, six years, you know, guys, you know, I was one of the first guys that did this podcast this kind of a podcast. And so I have with us today, one of the, maybe the most recent iteration of a Mafia podcast. I have Dan O'Sullivan welcome, Dan. Thank you, Gary. And I like you staking your territory, you know, like that I'm I'm a Johnny. Come lately. It's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm a og. You're the og. Exactly. I'm og. Yeah, right. I mean, I'm an associate. You're the godfather here, you know? And there you go. We gotta get the pecking order down. This is how. As was said to me by a historian, you know, the mob makes discipline in the military look like nothing, you know, so, yeah. However it [00:01:00] works, you know? Yeah. Well, yeah. That discipline is, and there's no appeal either, right? Yeah. So anyhow Dan and I, I think you're gonna have a partner in that. You're gonna have a podcast called The Outfit. Is that the name of it? That's right. The outfit got, which is, go ahead. You got it exactly right, Gary. Yeah. We me and my co-host, Alana Hope Levinson our new podcast, the outfits launching August 14th and just every week we're doing a different mob story that kind of explains something about, you know, America and, and you know, so whether it's how the milk wars in Chicago led to us having expiration dates on milk cartons, that's a crazy story to, you know. Who we're gonna talk about a little bit the history of Japanese Americans in the US or. Americans in Russia during the nineties and seeing that transition of democracy and the mob there. So we just we're having a lot of fun doing that. But it's great to be on your [00:02:00] show. I, I've loved your show for years, so really an honor to be here. Well, thank you so much. You know, I when I do a program here in the city, I usually started off with a comparison of, I want you people to remember all Italians are not criminals. Yeah. And, and what happened during.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins sits down with journalist and author Rich Gazarik to explore a little-known corner of mob history—one that ties the Pittsburgh Mafia to Fidel Castro, stolen guns, and even the Kennedy assassination. Rich's latest book, Gun Smuggling, Castro, and the Pittsburgh Mafia, shines a spotlight on Sam Mannarino, a Pittsburgh mob captain under boss John LaRocca, who hatched a wild plan in the early 1960s: supply Fidel Castro with hundreds of stolen weapons in hopes of carving out a piece of Cuba's casino action. The scheme included an audacious plot to rip off 300 rifles from a National Guard armory in Ohio—an operation that quickly unraveled into chaos. From there, the conversation broadens into the Pittsburgh mob's stranglehold on its city, including political corruption, bribery, and intimidation that reached into the mayor's office and the police department. Rich recounts how Mannarino and his crew maintained a façade of respectability while ruling through violence and fear, leaving a lasting mark on Pittsburgh's civic life. Drawing on decades of investigative journalism and declassified JFK assassination files, Rich also connects the dots between the Pittsburgh Mafia and broader mob influence in the 1960s. We discuss how figures like Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante emerged in congressional investigations, feeding speculation that the Mafia's reach extended into Dallas on November 22, 1963. This episode uncovers a forgotten piece of organized crime history where local corruption, mob ambition, and Cold War politics collided. If you want to understand how Pittsburgh's underworld tied into national events, you won't want to miss this deep dive with Rich Gazarik. And get his book Gun Smuggling, Castro, and the Pittsburgh Mafia here. 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 [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, this is Gary Jenkins, [0:02] retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. I'm here in the studio of Gangland Wire, and I have a story that is kind of topical right now because there's a movie being made about November 1963. And this isn't exactly about Kennedy assassination, but it's all around the Kennedy assassination. And it's about mob guys having connections down in Cuba and with Castro and out of Pittsburgh of all places. Now, go figure that. You know, I always think of Tropicante down in Tampa, and you've got Marcello down in New Orleans. You've got Ardo up in Chicago, and you always think of them, Giancana, having those connections. Well, there was a Pittsburgh guy named Sam Mannarino who had extensive connections down in Cuba. So welcome, Rich Gazarek. [0:51] Thank you, Gary. Appreciate it. Good to have you. Rich, tell the guys the name of your book. I don't have to. I'd have to lean over here and read it. It's a little bit long. So tell the guys the name of your book and a little bit about what it's about. It's called Gun Smuggling, Castro, and the Pittsburgh Mafia. And it was a faction of the Pittsburgh Mafia. [1:11] John LaRocco was the godfather of the Pittsburgh Mom. Sam Mannarino was one of his captains. And Mannarino and his brother Kelly had a casino in Cuba, San Suu Kyi, outside of Havana. And they didn't do very well with it and they eventually sold it. And at the time, Fulgincia Batista was getting a little bit greedy and he was on the...

In this gripping episode of Gangland Wire, retired intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with author Jonathan Dyer to explore one of the most complex and dangerous figures in Mafia history—Greg Scarpa, the Colombo family enforcer known as The Grim Reaper. Dyer, whose career spans military intelligence, law, and education, brings deep insight into Scarpa's remarkable—and chilling—dual role as both a ruthless mob killer and a prized FBI top echelon informant. Together, Gary and Jonathan unpack the moral ambiguities, betrayals, and calculated violence that defined Scarpa's career in the turbulent world of organized crime. Listeners will hear: How Scarpa balanced loyalty to the mob with his covert cooperation with the FBI.   The structured, almost corporate way his crew operated—and how he enforced discipline with fear and bloodshed. The darker corners of his personal life, including family ties, marriages, and the impact of his choices on his children. The violent episodes, such as the murder of Mary Bari, underscore his brutality and the Mafia's code of protection. From Cold War–era law enforcement collusion to the inner workings of New York's underworld, this episode reveals how Scarpa manipulated both sides of the law to maintain power. Jonathan Dyer's latest book, Greg Scarpa: Legendary Evil, offers the foundation for a conversation that will leave you questioning where law enforcement ends and organized crime begins. 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 Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of [0:03] Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, an entire Kansas City, Missouri police detective. Worked at the Organized Crime Unit or the Intelligence Unit for many years. And now I've got a podcast and we're all about the organized crime. As you guys know, all you regular guys and for new people, it's all about organized crime, particularly the Italian mafia in the United States. Now, I have an author here today, Jonathan Dyer. And Jonathan, I really am excited about having you on here because you have a different take about a much cussed and discussed subject or person, Gregory the Grim Reaper Scarpa. So welcome, Jonathan. Thanks, Gary. Thanks for having me. So tell the guys a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your background. Where'd you come from other than Marshall? We found out we have similar backgrounds, Marshall, Missouri, rural Missouri, farm life and Kansas City. So tell the guys a little bit about yourself. Well, in 1981, Gary, I joined the Army and spent about a year and a half in Monterey Defense Language Institute learning Russian. [1:10] After that, I went to Goodfellow Air Force Base for some cryptologic training. And then after that, I went to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade for some more training and then shipped overseas to Berlin for three years trying to keep tabs on the Soviet Army during the Cold War. After the Army, I entered law school at UC Davis in California. And after law school, I practiced law for about 10 years as a civil litigator. And then in 1999, I switched careers and became a teacher and taught government and U.S. History and criminal law and retired during the pandemic. And now I live in central Texas. Interesting. [1:52] This is off the subject a little bit, but I've always been curious about that language school.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, I sit down with Keith Grounsell, a veteran lawman whose career spanned patrol, specialized units, and high-stakes undercover work with the DEA. Keith takes us inside the hidden world of narcotics investigations, sharing stories that reveal both the danger and the human toll of living a double life. We talk about how Keith's upbringing as the son of a Marine pushed him toward public service, and how his path eventually led him into the shadowy world of drug traffickers. He recalls the adrenaline of undercover drug deals, the razor's-edge risks, and the constant challenge of protecting his cover while keeping his integrity as a cop intact. Keith also reflects on the strain this life put on his family and the psychological pressure of staying in character for months at a time. His advice to new officers is candid and practical—emphasizing the need for physical fitness, community ties, and strong mental health to survive the demands of the job. Our conversation widens to the broader impact of drug trafficking on crime and communities, and the need for law enforcement to adapt to ever-changing threats. Keith also shares his writing journey, a four-book series titled Narc's Tale, which chronicles his undercover assignments and the lessons he carried forward. This episode offers both gripping stories from the field and a rare inside look at the toll—and the nobility—of narcotics enforcement. 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 0:04 Welcome to Gangland Wire 1:07 Becoming a Police Officer 3:33 Life as an Undercover Agent 6:08 Tales from the Trenches 8:41 The Depths of Undercover Work 12:39 Surviving Dangerous Encounters 16:29 The Art of Blending In 21:06 The Challenges of Undercover Props 25:58 Navigating the Drug Underworld 28:14 Building Trust in Dangerous Situations 33:58 The High Stakes of Undercover Operations 36:58 Major Drug Busts in Kansas 42:08 Lessons from the Cartel 45:27 Advice for Young Law Enforcement 48:29 Writing and Reflection in Law Enforcement [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio at Gangland [0:02] Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. I am a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective, as most of you know, because I've got a lot of regular listeners. And those that don't know, that's who I am. And I have another copper here with me today. I've got Keith Grounsel. Keith, welcome. Hey, Gary. Thanks for having me on the show. I'll tell you what, Keith. I love talking to and interviewing, but then our conversations before and after talking to these other coppers that have worked around the country. It's always fun. We talk the same language, I've noticed. And that's around the world, too. I haven't worked internationally. We're a universal group of people that always collaborate together and get along in different environments. Yeah. And then we start telling stories and it really gets good. [0:49] That's right. But we can't record all those stories. So we don't want to record some. We don't want to record. All right, Keith. Now you became a cop, you know, where are you from originally? [1:04] And then what, what, what made you think that you wanted to be a police officer? Me, I wanted to be a cowboy. [1:10] And so that was a close job to being a cowboy. So how about you? Yes. It's kind of funny. My dad was a United States Marine, 22 years.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with veteran Chicago journalist Chuck Goudie, whose decades of reporting have made him one of Chicago's most respected voices on organized crime. A fan of the show asked for more Chicago stories—and this conversation delivers. 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. 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 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.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins dives deep into the life of James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke. Prompted by listener Paul Blackwood of Edinburgh, Gary explores Burke's world beyond the headlines of the Lufthansa heist. 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. 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 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,

Retired Intelligence Unit Detective Gary Jenkins interviews author Robert Webster, president of the Kenton County Historical Society, about his book, The Beverly Hills Supper Club – The Untold Story Behind Kentucky's Worst Tragedy. Webster revisits one of America's deadliest nightclub fires, unearthing the possible mafia ties, cover-ups, and shocking safety failures that shaped this haunting night. 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 To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  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,

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.

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,

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired intelligence detective Gary Jenkins exposes the brutal fall of one of the Mafia's most calculating figures—Louis “Bobby” Manna, the Genovese consigliere who wielded silent power until a single wiretap changed everything. 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. 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.  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,

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.

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.

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.

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 t...

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Tulsa homicide detective Mike Huff joins host Gary Jenkins to break down one of the most shocking mob hits in U.S. history. Det. Huff tells about the 1981 murder of businessman Roger Wheeler at Southern Hills Country Club and the investigation that ended in the arrest of Boston F.B.I. agent Paul Rico. You can learn more about this story by reading Mike's book, Killing My Father: The Inside Story of the Biggest FBI Corruption Scandal in History. 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 homicid...

In this episode of Gangland Wire, I pull back the veil on one of the most pivotal moments in John Gotti's rise through the ranks of the Gambino crime family—the 1973 murder of Jimmy McBratney. As a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, I bring a lawman's eye to the tangled web of revenge, power plays, and myth-making that surrounds this infamous hit. 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,

In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins sits down with author Daniel Zimmerman, whose investigative works dive deep into the dark corners of Boston's organized crime world. Zimmerman has written two gripping true crime books that reveal the raw and often tragic realities of life on the fringe of the Mafia. He recounts his research for his book, Shots in the Dark, which led him to an informal meeting with former New England boss Peter Limone. 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. 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] 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,

In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins welcomes Anthony Pesare, a retired Rhode Island State Police Intelligence officer turned crime novelist. Gary and Anthony dive into the notorious Providence neighborhood of Federal Hill, a hotbed of mob activity. Anthony offers first-hand stories of surveillance, navigating tight-knit communities, and the challenge of identifying criminals who blend seamlessly into everyday life. He based his recent true-crime novel, They Always Win, on the exploits of Frank “Bobo” Marrapese Jr., a member of the New England Mafia Family led by Raymond Patriarca in the Federal Hill neighborhood. Anthony also wrote Back in the Game in his series on Gino Peterson, a Rhode Island State trooper investigating organized crime. He recounts one of his most notable cases involving a coin shop owner named Stephen Saccoccia, who orchestrated a sophisticated multimillion-dollar money laundering scheme using “Smurfs” to move drug money back to Colombia. When a low-level Providence area mobster tried to move in and extract a tribute, Saccoccia made one phone call, and the guy backed off. It's a fascinating look into how organized crime adapts and evades detection. After retiring from law enforcement, Anthony served as a professor and dean at Roger Williams University before returning to police work as the Chief of Police in  Middletown, Rhode Island. These experiences further enriched his understanding of police culture—something he brings vividly to life in his fiction. His debut novel, They Always Win, features Detective Gino Peterson, a character shaped by Anthony's real-world insights. Through Gino, Anthony explores themes like addiction, loyalty, and psychological strain—pressures many officers face behind the badge. The novel includes storylines inspired by the murder of mob figure Richard “Dickey” Calley, with confidential informants and witness protection playing key roles in the investigation. Gary and Anthony's conversation blends crime history, insider law enforcement tales, and the craft of crime fiction. They reflect on the bonds between officers, the emotional toll of the job, and the blurred lines between fact and fiction when writing from experience. Don't miss this episode if you're fascinated by mob history, police intelligence work, or how real investigations can fuel gripping crime novels. 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, 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.

In this revealing episode of Gangland Wire, retired intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Dave Grosky, a man who spent over a decade inside federal prisons—and came out with a story unlike any other. From FCI Loretto to Morgantown to Milan, Dave's journey through the prison system introduced him to a cast of characters that included notorious organized crime figures—none more compelling than Chicago mobster Jerry Scalise. 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.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins takes listeners deep into a lesser-known corner of American mob history—Denver, Colorado. While most think of Denver as a gateway to the Rockies and a hub for skiing, few realize it also served as the long-standing stronghold of the Smaldone crime family. 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. 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 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,

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. 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 ...

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 e...

In this special episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins takes a deep dive into the life, career, and controversy surrounding Pete Rose, the legendary Major League Baseball icon who recently passed away at 83. Known as “Charlie Hustle,” Rose's name is forever etched in baseball history with franchise records in games played, hits, and runs scored—primarily during his storied tenure with the Cincinnati Reds. 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. 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, 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 r...

Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, Gary and retired FBI agent and mafia historian Bill Ouseley discuss the creation of the Kansas City Narcotics Syndicate, which emerged during the prohibition era as local mobsters adapted to the loss of revenue from bootlegging. The conversation explores how the organization capitalized on international trade routes—from Turkey to Sicily, France, Canada, and the U.S.—that were central to drug trafficking operations, including the infamous French Connection. Bill provides insights into the efforts led by Harry Anslinger, then-director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, to combat these syndicates. Despite Anslinger's tenacity, the Italian-Sicilian Mafia managed to turn narcotics into a lucrative enterprise. Kansas City played a significant role in this operation, with mob figures like Joe and Frank DeLuca orchestrating the drug trade as a formal, business-like entity. Tune in to learn about the federal crackdown, spearheaded by local narcotics agents, which ultimately disrupted this shadowy chapter of organized crime history. 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. 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,

In this episode of Gangland Wire, Gary Jenkins sits down with retired FBI agent and organized crime historian Bill Ouseley for a deep dive into the Mob's transition from bootlegging during Prohibition to dominating the narcotics trade. 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 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. 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,

In this compelling episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Kurt Calabrese, son of infamous Chicago Outfit enforcer Frank Calabrese Sr. Kurt opens up about what it was like growing up in the shadow of one of the most feared men in organized crime and living through the seismic fallout of the Family Secrets Trial. 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,

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, host Gary Jenkins interviews the prolific chronicler of the American Mafia, Jeffrey Sussman. Listeners will learn about Morris levy and the mafia's influence on the roots of the world's most important cultural influences, American Rock and Roll. 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.  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!

In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins interviews Chris Franzblau, author of The Last Mob Lawyer. Franzblau represented Meyer Lansky in his deportation hearing, he represented Genovese labor racketeers like Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano and Jerry Catena. He knew Jimmy Hoffa very well. Chris shares his remarkable career as a defense attorney for prominent figures in organized crime, offering a firsthand look at the legal battles that have shaped mob history in his book, The Last Mob Lawyer: True Stories from the Man Who Defended Some of the Biggest Names in Organized Crime. The conversation begins with Franzblau's background—his education at Duke University Law School, service in the Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps, and training in cryptography. He then details his transition from prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office to private practice, coinciding with the federal government's intensified pursuit of La Cosa Nostra under Attorney General Robert Kennedy. A twist of fate led him to represent high-profile mobsters when established defense attorneys left the scene, catapulting him into the world of organized crime defense. Franzblau shares captivating stories of his legal work with infamous figures like labor leader Jerry Catena and Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano. He sheds light on mob influence in unions and high-stakes power struggles, including the bitter feud between Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano and Jimmy Hoffa. He also discusses the FBI's controversial surveillance tactics, J. Edgar Hoover's wiretapping strategies, and how landmark legal battles helped expose the government's overreach in investigating organized crime. Adding to the intrigue, Franzblau touches on the mob's connections to Hollywood and celebrities, including Frank Sinatra's complex ties to the underworld. He also offers a compelling story surrounding Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance, hinting at new information that could reshape the narrative. Throughout the episode, Franzblau offers insight into the ethical dilemmas of defending mobsters, debunking the myths that attorneys are complicit in their clients' activities. He also weighs in on the handling of Teamsters' pension funds, contrasting transparency in his experience with the corruption seen in other cities. This episode is a must-listen for true crime enthusiasts, mafia history buffs, and legal minds alike. Don't miss Franzblau's inside stories and deep knowledge of mob history—Click here to grab a copy of The Last Mob Lawyer to dive even deeper into these gripping tales. 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! 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 pract...

Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this Gangland Wire Crime Stories episode, Gary Jenkins interviews Anthony Arillotta, author of South End Syndicate: How I Took Over the Genovese Springfield Crew. Arillotta shares his firsthand experiences within organized crime in Springfield, Massachusetts, offering a raw and authentic account of his rise through the ranks. Arillotta discusses the historical roots of the Springfield mob, tracing its ties to the Genovese family in New York. He provides insights into the city's Italian American community, the evolution of ethnic gangs, and how he was drawn into the criminal underworld despite his family's legitimate business background. From his early years in gambling and marijuana distribution to his close association with made member Al Bruno, Arillotta details the inner workings of the mob, including the delicate balance between financial success and violence. He sheds light on the mafia's induction ceremony, the betrayals, and the power struggles he faced. He discusses notorious figures like Freddie and Ty Geas and the murder of Whitey Bulger. Beyond the crime, Arillotta reflects on his post-mafia life, his current business ventures—including a wine brand called Pazzo—and his efforts in youth mentorship to steer others away from the path he once followed. Tune in for a gripping conversation that uncovers the realities of life inside the Genovese Springfield crew, the dangers of organized crime, and one man's journey from the underworld to redemption. Get a copy of Anthony's book click here on the title, South End Syndicate: How I Took Over the Genovese Springfield Crew. 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, 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.

In this bonus episode of Gangland Wire, I follow up on my interview with Mafia historian Anthony DeStefano to discuss New York City's organized crime more. One of the most significant topics Anthony and I covered was the Alto Nights social club. This was not only the title, but also the central character in the recent Mafia film written by Goodfellas scribe Nicholas Pileggi, who starred Robert De Niro in dual roles. Gary sets the record straight on two pivotal New York crime hangouts—the Ravenite Social Club and the Alto Knights Social Club—which the media frequently confuse. The Ravenite at 247 Mulberry, tied to Carlo Gambino, played a crucial role in his rise to power after Albert Anastasia's assassination. Meanwhile, the Alto Knights Social Club, at 86 Kenmarre, emerged from the old Cafe Royale, a well-known bookmaking hub, solidifying its place in Genovese family history. Only three blocks separated these clubs, but they were miles apart in Mafia history. 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 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. 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.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, I sit down with award-winning journalist and Mafia historian Anthony DeStefano to discuss New York City's organized crime. We discuss his meticulous research on New York's most infamous mobsters and how his background in newspaper journalism has shaped his storytelling. 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.

Gary interviews Mary Spicuzza, an investigative reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who discusses her personal connection to the Milwaukee organized crime landscape through her cousin, Augie Palmisano. Augie was killed in a car bombing in 1978, an event that had a significant impact on Mary's family, yet was rarely spoken of. Growing up, Mary's father instilled in her a cautionary respect for organized crime, advising her to avoid falling in with the "wrong crowd." However, this left her with limited understanding of Augie's life and tragic death until she delved into extensive investigative research. 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.   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 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.

Gary welcomes back Michael Benson, an author known for his insightful explorations of organized crime and Hollywood history. Benson has collaborated with Frank DiMatteo on several mob-related books, including The Cigar: Carmine Galante and Mafia Hitman, illustrating the intricate ties between criminal enterprises and key figures' personal stories. In Hollywood Moguls: The Lives and Times of Hollywood Film Pioneers Nicholas and Joseph Schenck, Michael documents stories of corruption and mob infiltration and reveals that Craig Reeves, Superman, was murdered and did not commit suicide. 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. Click here to buy Michael's book: Hollywood Moguls 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 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...

In this episode, Gary takes a deep dive into the ruthless life of Mad Sam DeStefano, one of the most brutal enforcers in organized crime history. A notorious loan shark tied to the Chicago Outfit, DeStefano's reputation for violence and torture made him a feared figure—even among his fellow mobsters. 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. 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 [0:03]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 State...

Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. The Mafia Cops: NYPD Corruption and Murder with Michael Connell. In this explosive episode of Gangland Wire, I uncover the shocking true story of two NYPD detectives who became hitmen for the Mafia. Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa weren't just dirty cops—they were fully embedded in the Lucchese crime family, leaking intelligence, setting up murders, and betraying the very system they swore to uphold. Joining me is Michael Connell, author of a gripping account of their crimes. We break down how these officers, once respected members of law enforcement, used their badges to serve the mob. Eppolito's deep family ties to organized crime and Caracappa's access to high-level police intelligence made them the perfect duo for Gaspipe Casso and the Lucchese family. Their corruption ran so deep that they not only provided inside information but also carried out Mafia-ordered executions—including the tragic killing of an innocent man due to a case of mistaken identity. We discuss how their downfall unfolded, from a shocking whistleblower to the relentless detective work that finally exposed them. We dive into the role of Betty Heidel, a grieving mother determined to find justice for her murdered son, and Detective Tommy Dades, who helped piece together the case that brought Eppolito and Caracappa to justice. This story concerns power, betrayal, and the dark intersection between law enforcement and organized crime. Don't miss this deep dive into one of NYPD's most astonishing corruption cases. Find Michael's book Blood on the Badge at this link. 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 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...